Scenes of Intimacy: Reading, Writing and Theorizing Contemporary Literature 9781441101822, 1441101829, 9781441185440, 1441185445

Citation preview

Scenes of Intimacy

Also Available from Bloomsbury Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Women’s Writing, Abigail Rine Reading Theories in Contemporary Fiction, Lisa McNally

Scenes of Intimacy Reading, Writing and Theorizing Contemporary Literature Edited by Jennifer Cooke

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

175 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10010 USA

www.bloomsbury.com First published 2013 © Jennifer Cooke and Contributors, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Jennifer Cooke has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-4411-8544-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Scenes of intimacy : reading, writing and theorizing contemporary literature / edited by Jennifer Cooke. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-4411-0726-8 (hardcover) -- ISBN 978-1-4411-8544-0 (ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-44110182-2 (ebook) 1. Intimacy (Psychology) in literature. 2. Literature, Modern--20th century-History and criticism. 3. Literature, Modern--21st century--History and criticism. I. Cooke, Jennifer, 1977PN56.I6445S34 2013 809’.93353--dc23 2012039255 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Contents Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors List of Figures Part 1: Intimate Scene-Setting 1

Making a Scene: Towards an Anatomy of Contemporary Literary Intimacies Jennifer Cooke

2

A New Literary Intimacy: An interview with Nicholas Royle Nicholas Royle and Jennifer Cooke

Part 2: Legacies, Love, Sex and Death: Scenes of Intimate Reading and Writing

vii ix xiii 1

3

23

35



Reading the Intimacies of Shame in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory Elina Valovirta

37

4

Citation and Intimacy in Janet Frame’s Autobiography Sylvie Gambaudo

55

5

Textual Intimacies: Letters, Journals, Poetry – Ghost Writing Telegraph Cottage Felicity Allen and Simon Smith

73

6

Poetry and Intimacy: The Engagements of Keston Sutherland Aaron Deveson

95

7

Talking About Love in Raymond Carver Catherine Humble

3

115

vi Contents

8

Rebecca Brown, Intimate: A Literary Response to Stereotypes about Gender and Lesbian Sexuality Lies Xhonneux

135

Impersonal Intimacies: Echoes of Bataille in Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach Jill Marsden

153

10 ‘Dear Osama’: Impersonal Intimacy and the Problem of Mothering in Chris Cleave’s Incendiary Reina van der Wiel

171

11 Breast Cancer Autopathography: The Laws of the Body and the Body of the Law Helen Thomas

191

Index

211

9

Acknowledgments Grateful thanks are due to Daphne Todd for permission to reprint a photograph of her incredible painting, Last Portrait of my Mother. Thanks are also due to the Wellcome Library for permission to reproduce images from their library collection. As the editor, I would like to thank my contributors for all their work, especially those whose chapters have been through several versions in the process of bringing this collection to publication. Sarah Dillon commented upon an early proposal for this project and her recommendations were invaluable in bringing the book into the shape it is now. Julian Wolfreys is due thanks for early advice on the project. I additionally want to thank Elizabeth Brunton and Nicholas Fitzroy-Dale for reading and commenting upon drafts of the introduction. I am also grateful for the support of the Department of English and Drama at Loughborough University, who gave me the space and administrative support to organize a conference in September 2010 on the topic of writing intimacy, which enabled me to meet many of the contributors to this volume.

Notes on Contributors Felicity Allen is an artist, writer and educator. Her current work includes a dialogic portraits series in prose and watercolour. As guest scholar at the Getty Research Institute (2011–12) she reviewed Nahnou-Together, a social art project with artists and young people from Amman, Damascus and London between 2004 and 2010. Two books came out in 2011: Education (MIT/Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art) and Your Sketchbook Your Self (Tate). She has been involved in gallery education for the last two decades, most recently leading the education department at Tate Britain (2003–10). www.felicityallen.co.uk Jennifer Cooke is Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. She is the author of Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory and Film (Palgrave 2009) and has published articles on modernism, psychoanalysis, contemporary poetics, and Hélène Cixous. She is currently writing a monograph about intimacy, affect and innovative writing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and is editor of a special issue of Textual Practice entitled Challenging Intimacies: Legacies of Psychoanalysis (2013). Aaron Deveson is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU). He has published articles and book chapters on David Constantine and Hölderlin, Denise Riley, Edwin Denby, and Frank O’Hara; two more book chapters, one on Charles Tomlinson and the other on Peter Riley, are forthcoming. Apart from post-romantic and late modernist poetry, his academic interests include theories of translation and literature about time. He is currently funded by the National Science Council of Taiwan to carry out research on the work of James Schuyler. Sylvie Gambaudo is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Durham University. She has written on feminism, theories of subjectivity, sexual difference, and child development and is the author of Kristeva, Psychoanalysis and Culture (Ashgate 2007). Her current research focuses on the writings of Janet Frame, the work of Julia Kristeva and on melancholic experience. Sylvie Gambaudo is the Deputy Director of the Research Centre for Sex, Gender and Sexualities.

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Catherine Humble is Research Associate in the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London. She has organized numerous conferences and published and presented several papers on American suburban realism and psychoanalysis. In her work as a book critic, she has published articles for the TLS, the Observer and the Telegraph. She is Executive Editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Jill Marsden is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and English at the University of Bolton. She is the author of After Nietzsche: Notes Towards a Philosophy of Ecstasy (Palgrave 2002) and a number of articles on thinkers such as Deleuze, Freud, Bataille and on aesthetics and continental philosophy more generally. Nicholas Royle is Professor in English at the University of Sussex. His most recent publications are  Veering: A Theory of Literature (Edinburgh University Press 2011) and  In Memory of Jacques Derrida  (Edinburgh University Press 2009). Other books include  An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory,  4th  edn  (Pearson, 2009) with Andrew Bennett;  How to Read Shakespeare  (Granta 2005); Jacques Derrida  (Routledge, 2003); and The Uncanny  (Manchester University Press 2003). His first novel,  Quilt,  was published in 2010 by Myriad Editions. Simon Smith is a poet, and has published four full-length collections of poetry; the latest book is London Bridge (Salt 2010). His third collection, Mercury, was long-listed for the Whitbread Prize in 2006. He has written essays and reviews for Poetry Review and PN Review, and translates poetry from Latin and French. He is presently completing a translation of the Latin poet Catullus, and lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Kent. Helen Thomas is Principal Lecturer at University College Falmouth. Her publications include Romanticism and Slave Narratives (Cambridge University Press 2000); Caryl Phillips (Northcote Press 2006); The Nose Book: Representations of the Nose in Art and Literature (Middlesex University Press 2000), as well as a forthcoming chapter on British slave narratives in a volume by Oxford University Press. She is currently researching the dynamics between law, literature and medicine. Elina Valovirta is a Post-Doctoral Scholar at the Turku Insitute for Advanced Studies and the Department of English, University of Turku in Finland. She is



Notes on Contributors

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the co-editor of Seeking the Self – Encountering the Other. Diasporic Narrative and the Ethics of Representation (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008) and has published a number of articles on gender studies and postcolonial literature. She is currently working on transcultural affective encounters in literature and media. Reina van der Wiel is a visiting lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of the forthcoming Twentieth-Century Literature and Aesthetics of Trauma: Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson (Palgrave 2014), and has also published on Jeanette Winterson and Frida Kahlo. Her current research focuses on intimacy, solitude, and a ‘poethics’ of care in twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry, philosophy and psychoanalysis. Lies Xhonneux is a Ph.D. candidate at the American Studies research unit of the University of Antwerp, Belgium. She is currently putting the final touches to her doctoral dissertation on multiple identifications in the writings of Rebecca Brown, and has previously published on the coming-out novel as well as on the intertextual relationship between Rebecca Brown and Samuel Beckett, and on Brown’s minimalism.

List of Figures Figure 11.1. Last Portrait of My Mother, Daphne Todd (2010). Figure 11.2. Mastectomy and Relevant Surgical Instruments, Lorenz Heister (1748). Wellcome Library, London. Figure 11.3. Latent or Occult Breast Cancer, Lorenz Heister (1748). Wellcome Library, London. Figure 11.4. Elizabeth Hopkins of Oxford, Showing Breast With Cancer which was Removed by Sir William Read, engraving by M. Burghers (c. 1700). Wellcome Library, London. Figure 11.5. Science’s Fight Against Cancer, Richard Tennant Cooper (1912). Wellcome Library, London. Figure 11.6. Human Breast Cancer Cells Dividing, Dr David Becker. Wellcome Library, London.

191 196 196

197 197 198

Part One

Intimate Scene-Setting

1

Making a Scene: Towards an Anatomy of Contemporary Literary Intimacies Jennifer Cooke

Loughborough University

This book discusses literary representations of intimate acts and intimate relationalities, placing them in productive communication with contemporary theory and demonstrating how these two ways of writing about intimacy can challenge, illuminate and enrich one another. ‘Literary intimacy’ sounds as though it might be a delicately veiled euphemism for sex scenes, yet, while some of the following essays are concerned with sexual encounters, others turn to the representation of non-sexual intimacies such as familial relationships or particular states, like death, illness or grief, which bring us into intimate contact with strangers or alter the shape and experience of our existing intimacies. Analysing acts, states and relationships is one route for understanding the nature of contemporary literary intimacies; with this comes attention to the social and historical significance of which acts and relationalities are represented and why, especially those which are newer to literature or the public sphere more generally. Another route taken by the essays that follow is to examine the techniques by which authors write intimacy: this includes considerations of personal genres, such as letters, emails, love poetry or journals, as well as analyses of specific literary techniques that create textual intimacy, including fragmentation, citation, apostrophe, voice and style. In other words, the essays here attend not just to what is said about intimacy and its acts in literature, but also to how it is said. In turn, representations of intimacy and the literary techniques of intimate writing can produce intimate reading encounters. Thus literary texts can portray intimacy by describing it; employ techniques that create or enhance the intimacy represented; or they can engage their readers intimately by deliberately prompting emotional responses. Sometimes such inter-textual and extra-textual intimacies

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occur simultaneously. The textual affects invited by intimate structures and representations have recently been the focus of contemporary theorizing, and all of the essays here draw upon, extend or question thinking in this domain. Broadly speaking, these are the grounds that Scenes of Intimacy occupies and the spaces for theorization which it opens up.

Speech and silence surrounding intimacy Contemporary literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is consanguineous with a larger Western cultural tendency to loosen the implicit rules that have policed a firm separation between the public and the private domains. It sometimes seems, in fact, that nowadays everything is seen and everything discussed: the face of a newly executed dictator circulates around social media sites before government officials are even aware of his death; reality TV shows document the medical treatment of teenage STDs in oozing close-ups; the non-famous as well as celebrities discuss their drug addictions or sex lives on TV chat shows or recount the horrors of their abuse as children in magazine columns. Public discourses generally remain recognizably conventional and conservative: when discussion is ‘open’, it tends to be within the confessional mode (Foucault 1990; Foucault 2003: 167–263), which is governed by a morality seeking to reward and (re)establish normative behaviour. This is complemented by more privately practised strategies of what Eva Illouz has called a contemporary Western ‘therapeutic ethos’ (Illouz 2007: 71), which encourages emotional self- (and couple)-management, segues neatly into market relations, and is most readily exhibited in the burgeoning self-help book market and the discourses they shape and inform in popular culture. Generally speaking, popular public discourses seek to rationalize, simplify, categorize and ‘manage’ complex emotions and intimacies, often within a moral paradigm which stresses responsibility to oneself and communication with others. While this may initially sound a boon, critics have stressed how such an approach can lead to relational calcification, where intimacy adheres to set but stultifying patterns (Vogler 2000: 85), or how the logic of cost-benefit analysis and hyperrationality which saturates the market can also saturate our private lives and the choices made within it, restricting the potential for intimacy (Illouz 2007: 114), especially configurations of intimacy which do not fit within the pre-classified and prescribed models, such as the heteronormative couple. Unsurprisingly, despite the appearance of public volubility on matters of intimacy and the advocacy of emotional management, and in contrast to the



Making a Scene: Towards an Anatomy of Contemporary Literary Intimacies

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speed of information travelling across the web and airwaves, certain examples of contemporary literature are engaging with what still often remains unspoken in many arenas: the intimacies we find deeply uncomfortable, sometimes chaotic, and that we prefer not to articulate or perhaps even to think about too closely or too frequently. Intimacies about which it is difficult or unusual to talk can be the result of a variety of factors: the lack of an existing embedded language to articulate certain non-normative intimate configurations; the reminder we do not wish to have that some of us will suffer painful and protracted deaths; the fact that for most individuals, topics like abuse or impotence are hard to broach privately and perhaps even harder to name publicly, as is paradoxically testified to by the ‘exceptions’ who ensure that televisual revelations of intimate details remain compelling voyeurism. Literature has brought certain silenced and liminal practices, experiences and relationships into greater visibility, as indeed have some strains of theory, particularly postcolonial, feminist and queer approaches. Some of the difficult questions confronted by the literature written about in the essays collected here include: What happens if a highly anticipated sexual encounter engenders shame, disgust and recrimination, rather than the expected happiness and fulfilment? What if an African-born mother wishes to regularly insert her fingers into her daughter’s vagina to see if she is still a virgin, even though her daughter, raised in America, finds this unacceptable? How to describe the harm of lesbian violence and abuse when the paradigms for understanding those acts are primarily masculine? How does a diagnosis of schizophrenia alter one’s sense of self and one’s perception by others, and what happens when it is retracted years later? Or, how do you react if your wife is slowly dying of cancer and as she does so, her personality changes, moving further and further from the person you recognize? These examples also show how contemporary literature is questioning and challenging a variety of cultural and social assumptions, i.e. that sex between consensual lovers happily increases the intimacy between them; that specific cultural practices should necessarily be respected; that women are not physically violent towards one another; that it is the illness which alters us, not the diagnosis; and that we can unchangingly love our partners right through their painful illnesses and up to the end. These territories are fraught and often involve readers revisiting some of their most intimate presumptions. The contemporary literature discussed in these essays presents scenes of intimacy which can be distinctly distressing, raising wider questions about identity, sexuality, cultural practices, love, illness and death, and the texts discussed challenge the constructions of normality which underpin our characterizations of acceptable relationships and behaviours.

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Silences surrounding certain intimacies are driven partly by our legacies of politesse, many with a lingering moral and class flavour, and partly by whom we define as familiar and whom a stranger: talk of intimacy, it is often assumed, is best conducted with those who are our intimates. Such social conventions and proscriptions mask a deep-seated aversion for admitting our embodiment and a reluctance to acknowledge how our emotional states are often chaotic, confused and ambivalent: it is not just sex that is hemmed in with unspoken rules about when and where it is an appropriate topic of discussion. The same mores pertain to other acts which attest to our bodily nature, such as descriptions of illness, bodily functions, or passionate physical reactions to emotions. While they might appear on our television screens in colourful high-definition intensity, they are reassuringly distant; contrastingly, in our everyday lives and interactions with others we are carefully aware with whom talk of intimacies can be broached and shared. Intimacy is relational and thus traverses the whole spectrum of our experiences with others, from the mundane to the ecstatic, the painful to the frustrating, from the humorous to the baffling; the following chapters demonstrate such a range.1

The scenes of representation The title of this volume, Scenes of Intimacy: Reading, Writing and Theorizing Contemporary Literature, stresses the ‘represented’ nature of the intimacies discussed. Borrowing the language of the theatrical play, the title expresses the importance of the spatial and the temporal, as much to our lived experience of intimacy as to how it plays out upon the page. Our intimacies are so often facilitated – negatively and positively – by the spaces we inhabit and frequent, the home and the workplace being the most universal, with leisure and public spaces also being formative. Intimacies are contextual so they fall under the mark of generic nomenclature – one is a lover, a mother, an abuser or a son – yet simultaneously they are textured by the singular experience that one person has of another. They do not happen in blank space. Thus ‘scenes’, with its multiplicity and reference to the theatrical, encourages us not to ignore the physical spaces that are the dramatic settings for our intimacies, settings which are liable to change and to replace one another as much as to become routine backdrops or secretive screens. Alongside considering the spatial dynamics of intimacy, the intimacies between people – as well as between texts and people – have a temporal dimension captured by ‘scenes’ since they are usually of episodic



Making a Scene: Towards an Anatomy of Contemporary Literary Intimacies

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intensity. There are sex scenes or scenes of dying, scenes of violence, abuse or confrontation, and scenes of love, joy or reconciliation, but it is unusual for these to be the sole scene in a literary work, although they are often pivotally important. Some of these scenes, such as those of love and reconciliation, have familiar ‘scripts’ – phrases and behaviours which are expected or, conversely, ruled out in certain situations – and yet, more often than not, literature reflects the fact that our intimate relationships with others are more messy and incoherent, more unanticipated and unscripted, than the ways we are expected to react to them. Using ‘scenes’ to conceptualize the reading encounter stresses that it is an event with a diverse potential for dramatic affects upon a reader who is embodied rather than just a structural receptor: a text can shame us, disgust us, shock us or move us and such reactions are not merely abstract. We may blush, cry, grimace or smile in reaction to what we read, as the body becomes the stage upon which our emotional responses play themselves out. It is even the case that different types of reading are productive of different textual intimacies. Academically attentive close reading is one form of intimate engagement with a text. In addition to this, Scenes of Intimacy includes a literary text created from cut-ups of canonical love sonnets entwined with personal journal entries and framed within a theoretical contextualization, and an interview scene, wherein the power of literature is explored in conversation with literary theorist and novelist Nicholas Royle. Of further direct relevance to our title is Jacques Derrida’s careful extrapolation of the ‘scene of writing’ within Sigmund Freud’s modelling of the psyche. In ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, Derrida demonstrates how the metaphor of writing had governed Freud’s evolving descriptions of systems to describe the psyche well before he came across and adopted the process of inscription, erasure and retention represented by the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’ – a child’s toy on which writing can be inscribed upon an upper celluloid sheet and then eradicated by lifting that sheet away from a lower papery one resting, in turn, upon a waxy bottom surface that permanently retains the imprint left by the stylus. Freud’s enthusiasm for how this captures the way the psyche retains representations and memories at a deeper level while keeping surface perception clear for new impressions reflects the fact that this is both a spatial and a temporal model, as Derrida notes: Temporality as spacing will be not only the horizontal discontinuity of a chain of signs, but writing as the interruption and restoration of contact between the various depths of the psychical levels: the remarkably heterogeneous temporal fabric of psychical work itself. (Derrida 1972: 111)

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In order to make the psyche legible, Freud metaphorizes our subjectivity as the product of writing, composed of perception’s passed-on inscriptions. This means that the ‘scene’ of writing, as Derrida following Freud understands it, displaces the ‘classical’ subject of writing if, Derrida notes, ‘we mean by that some sovereign solitude of the author’ (1972: 113). Instead, ‘the “subject” of writing is a system of relations between strata: of the Mystic Pad, of the psyche, of society, of the world’ (1972: 113). Derrida’s argument in this essay – and in others where he has continually challenged the philosophical valuing of speech over writing – underlines how crucial it is to investigate the way society represents itself in the written arts. As psychoanalysis has taught us, we are constituted and moulded by representation and thus the forms our own representations take require an acute sense of the complexity of the scene of writing, with both psyche and text constituted by representation at several levels.2 This volume contributes towards an understanding of our representations of intimacy and their social significance. The final sense of ‘scenes’ this book’s title wishes to conjure relates to contemporary theory. In a broad sense, many of our traditional intimacies within marriage or the family have been subject to ‘theory’ well before this became a category of academic thinking. From the Bible to early modern marriage pamphlets, from religious sermons through to legal writs, many intimacies have been described, defined, proscribed, limited and enforced over the centuries by moral doctrine, the law, and socio-cultural codes and customs. Much of the current theory relating to intimacy seeks to analyse the force of these categories and challenge or recalibrate their restrictions; as for instance, in the case of feminism’s critiques of patriarchy or queer theory’s of heteronormativity. Lauren Berlant has written recently of ‘the kinds of speculative work we call “theory”’ (2011: 21), and this, as I read it, affirms the role theory has had in raising questions about different present and future configurations of subjectivity and relationalities. The fact is that much twentieth-century theory, after the advent of psychoanalysis, is concerned with identity and thus too with how we live our intimacies and how we represent those identities to, or share them with, others. In other words, the examination of intimacy is an area which both literature and theory are drawn towards representing and discussing and, as this volume demonstrates, the scene of a meeting between the two is mutually illuminating. Both are capable of having a hand in shaping and challenging our understanding of the intimacies that we live.



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Intimate legacies The broad reach of the term ‘intimacy’ is indicated by the range of debates within a number of books recently dedicated to the topic. Anthony Giddens has argued for a distinct modern shift in relations between the genders towards more democratic and egalitarian types of partnership which he labels, not unproblematically, forms of ‘pure relationship’ in his book The Transformation of Intimacy (1992: 49–64). In 2000, Lauren Berlant edited a selection of essays, Intimacy, which discusses configurations of intimacy in a variety of national contexts and sexual scenes of desire. Three years later, Muriel Dimen’s Sexuality, Intimacy, Power brought together psychoanalytic, feminist and social theory to think about contemporary configurations of sexuality. In 2007, Eva Illouz argued for how emotional competence and a ‘standardiz[ation] [of] intimate relationships’ (2007: 112) have been conceived of as increasingly essential to selfhood and successful intimacy during the twentieth century and beyond in her book Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. A year later, theorist Leo Bersani and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips co-authored Intimacies, a slim polemic in favour of what they call ‘impersonal intimacy’ (2008: 27, 41–2), which they claim is a form of relationality not predicated upon personality or knowledge of another person but which is instead attentive to the moment of encounter. In one chapter Bersani and Phillips discuss the sexual practice of barebacking – unprotected sex – in queer subcultures, which is the topic of Tim Dean’s Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections of the Subculture of Barebacking (2009). Queer theory, indeed, has been centrally important in shaping debates surrounding what constitutes legitimate intimacies and how liminal and non-normative intimacies can negotiate the public sphere and broker different kinds of lived realities. Theorists working out of this tradition have consistently sought to examine intimacy not just as an affirmative experience but also as a set of social conventions and ideological constructions which exist – sometimes comfortably but often less so – within an assumed and thus privileged heteronormativity. The essays in Scenes of Intimacy draw upon work in this field by Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, Judith Butler, Candace Vogler and Jeffrey Weeks. A related strand of theory which has been central to the thinking of intimacy is the recent rise of transdisciplinary academic interest in affect. Naming the physiological response to an event or situation which then provokes a psychological rationalization that pins the reaction to identifiable feelings, affect has become an important tool for theorists to think about how the mind and the body work together in the production of emotions.3 Importantly, for many

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theorists, affective situations are social, and shared (Berlant 2011: 14; Brennan 2004: 1–9; Ahmed 2010: 39). Attending to the elements of texts which produce affective experiences is to consider reading as a ‘dynamic encounter’ (Liljeström and Paasonen 2010: 2). Literary critics have been keen to take up this interest in the emotions. For instance, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s revival of the work of the psychologist Silvan Tompkins in their edited reader of his works entitled Shame and Its Sisters (1995) was an early and influential text, followed later by Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling (2003); Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings (2005); Elspeth Probyn’s Blush: The Faces of Shame (2005); Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness (2010) and Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011), to name a few. Scenes of Intimacy seeks to add to this interest in literary emotions, attending also to the way texts are constructed so as to solicit specific readerly reactions. In her introduction to The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, Patricia Ticineto Clough traces the encounter between psychoanalysis and critical theory as one essential to the development of the kinds of terrain – the body, queer theory, trauma, identity and memory – currently discussed within affect studies (Clough 2007: 4–7). In his forward to the same collection, Michael Hardt suggests that the interest in affect developed out of work on the body, mainly indebted to feminism, and the exploration of emotions, which he sees as a predominant concern in queer theory (Hardt 2007: ix).4 This theoretical legacy, from psychoanalysis and queer theory through to ‘the turn to affect’, is the first strand of theoretical development which Scenes of Intimacy draws from and which is central to the thinking of intimacy in contemporary theory. The second strand, no less indebted to psychoanalysis perhaps, but with a different focus in relation to the way it is deployed by the essayists here, is the attention to textuality in the more philosophically inflected discussions by a series of French theorists who include Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Derrida. The impact of these thinkers, who have shaped poststructuralist and deconstructive theory, is testified to in Scenes of Intimacy by the interview with Royle, which makes reference to Derrida’s work when discussing anthropocentrism, the animal, spectrality and ‘the literary turn’ (Royle 2011: 92–118). A further three of this book’s chapters specifically draw upon the ideas proffered by work in this area in relation to fragmentation, silence, lyricism, love and death; another brings questions of textuality alongside theoretical concepts developed by the French thinker Jacques Lacan. Many queer theorists and those writing about affect have also been greatly influenced by the way French theorists have attended to language, to the relationship between the reader and the text, and to the sense that literature is



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far more than a form of entertainment; as Derrida writes, ‘Literature “is” the place or experience of this “trouble” we also have with the essence of language, with truth and with essence…’ (Derrida 1992: 48). As Scenes of Intimacy shows, across a range of literary genres and by drawing upon the theoretical strands just adumbrated, our intimacies are intricately tied to questions of essence, truth, and to language, with its frustrating limitations and, at the same time, its fertile creative possibilities. Scenes of Intimacy is specifically concerned with the intimacies represented and created in contemporary literature. Historically, the contemporary boldness with which previously unspeakable or difficult intimacies are now being dealt in literature owes its licence to do so to the taboo-breaking of an earlier era.5 During the modernist period, intimate sexual acts began to be represented with far greater frankness than ever before witnessed within the pages of literary fiction written in English. Perhaps the most memorable scenes of sex in this period were first in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and then D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). Ever since the initial publication of those texts there has been a concomitant rise in the explicit nature of the sexual intimacy represented in literature as well as a greater breadth in terms of the range of intimate acts and relational configurations included. A watershed moment in the UK came with publisher Penguin’s triumph in the censorship case over Lawrence’s novel in 1960; in the USA, the work of American 1950s writers such as William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg went even further in terms of explicitness than Lawrence and, like his texts, theirs too faced censorship while simultaneously gaining cultish and irreversible notoriety. After the Beat generation and then the 1960s, it was not just the avant-garde and the counterculture who were being more open about sexuality in their work: as the twentieth century wore on, mainstream literature tackled underage sex, BDSM, incest, rape, and same-sex fellatio, to name a few sexual acts, on top of the by-then frequent representation of vanilla practices. Outside fiction, changes were afoot too in Europe, with alterations to legislation previously outlawing same-sex relationships and certain sexual acts reflecting the prevailing sense of greater tolerance for sexual diversity which, in general terms, was the product of the later part of the twentieth century. Against this broad backdrop play out the scenes of intimacy the present collection highlights. As a result of the relaxation of literary censorship and shifts in public perceptions of intimacies, all the literary texts examined in Scenes of Intimacy inevitably participate in the broader contemporary trend for discussions of intimacy to have now permeated the public domain, even if, as discussed

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earlier, such public discourses, as opposed to literary representations, remain couched in a moralistic or normative register, occlude certain topics or present only a very restricted picture of them. Literature’s variety of genres makes it an especially versatile medium for exploring different dimensions of intimacy: the novel allows for generous characterization and scene-setting; the short story is able to capture the specificity of a particular moment or encounter; and poetry, with its possibilities for lyrical expression, fragmentation, condensation and syntactical complexity, provides an assortment of technical possibilities for the representation and creation of intimacies. The ways we write and the forms in which we choose to write about our most intimate states – such as love or mourning – are capable of altering our conceptions of them. The inception of the novel arguably marks a historically clear moment when the individual becomes a significant enough category to deserve an art form of his or her own, one which, in its earliest examples, followed the ‘life’ of its central protagonist and thus too their relationships with intimate others, even if the details of such intimacies were often euphemized, inexplicit, or, as the Victorian period took hold, entirely absent. Scenes of Intimacy includes essays covering the genres of love poetry, autobiography, the short story, the novel, the epistle and even the ‘autothanapathographies’ – autobiographical narratives prompted by illness and recounting the effects and affects of dying.

Writing intimacy: a scene of mourning Although it happens to us all, there is nothing normal about death, as various discussions in this volume acknowledge. In order to provide an example of the kind of intimate writing featured in the following pages and the analyses that can result, I want to turn briefly to a poetic rendering of a scene of mourning which employs literary techniques to create an intimate reading experience, allowing the reader access to the grief of the poet and, in an innovative manner, to some universal elements of losing a loved one. Sophie Robinson’s poetry book, simply named a (2009), contains an opening sequence of short poems assembled under part one and entitled ‘Interior’. The whole collection carries a dedication, ‘For Aerin Davidson, 1985–2007, With Love’ (Robinson 2009: unpag.), which indicates a tragically young loss of life and helps contextualize the book’s title: ‘a’ is for Aerin and also perhaps for the start of a plosive gasp or cry of shock or mourning. ‘Interiors’ comes with an epigraph from Frank O’Hara:



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the eagerness of objects to be what we are afraid to do cannot help but move us. (Robinson 2009: unpag.)

What follows is a series of mostly objects as the titles of the short poems which comprise ‘Interior’. The pages of poetry are interspersed with six black and white photographs of close-up details, some where the object is clearly identifiable and others where the scene is distorted and defamiliarized by the closeness of the camera to the object. The first four poems take objects of clothing for their titles: GREY STRIPE TOP W/OUT SLEEVES cut off & out it move alone to the last it cry with gunk. BLACK AND WHITE STRIPE TOP W/SLEEVES To really smile to forestall existence to grow and birth to shake and be loud to take refuge. BLACK CROCHET KNIT TOP Fates hidden in the wind, being oneself, singing w/ impact choking & devouring. BLACK SHORT-SLEEVED TOP W/BOW Denim recognises itself in the night living in the wilderness living under chaos living as the opposite of fashion w/a quiet heart. (Robinson 2009: unpag.)

These poems clearly take their cue from the object titles Gertrude Stein uses in Tender Buttons and yet they differ markedly because instead of highlighting the disconnection between word and object, they instead create intimacy through reminding us that when someone dies, their objects and belongings become evocative remnants, their sudden uselessness conjuring the lost loved one through familiarity and the resurgence of memories. The very everyday nature of these pieces of scattered clothing communicates the small but personal preferences of their absent wearer: her evident liking for stripes and dark colours; her taste for fashion details such as bows and crochet. Robinson’s reduction of ‘with’ and ‘without’ to ‘w/’ and ‘w/out’ emphasizes the loss felt, so that the small poems become an evolving comment upon the death of the wearer. The brutality of the forward slash undercuts the ‘with’ that it follows:

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there is no ‘with’ in these opening lines that does not carry the mark of this figurative foreshortening of being-with, not even the possession of a quiet heart. Poetry has long been used for elegy, and yet that does not guarantee intimacy, only commemoration. Here, Robinson has brought the intimacy of her loss into the poem by using unusual syntactical techniques and by formally re-presenting as a poetic inventory that which is left behind after death, including the reaction of the one who remains. The first and only line of the first poem gives us the embodied messy grief, producing ‘gunk’, of the one ‘cut off & out’ – a resonant phrase because it wavers between describing the dead and the living – and also a flavour of the detachment of death which makes of ‘me’ or ‘you’ an ‘it’, and an ‘it’ which has not quite yet caught up enough grammatically to have the ‘it’ of object-hood reflected in the correct verb agreements. This is dense and beautifully communicative poetry, creating a sense of the scene of loss through its dissonance, dislocation, and its anatomy of the objects and memories that remain: these clothes, the reader is made pressingly aware, will no longer be filled with the real and breathing human body of the one who died. This intimate writing is a sharing of an experience of the loved and lost other in a way which maintains the singularity of the one lost and simultaneously reiterates the universality of the feelings death provokes and the problematic relationship we have with the affect-soaked belongings of the deceased, which do not leave the scene when their owner does. ‘Interior’ does not shy from death but neither does it wallow in it; the writing insists on the importance of the living and their practices of memorialization, even while the last word of the poem, reflecting the emptiness of the room in which the poem is set, is ‘NOTHING’ (Robinson 2009: unpag.). Grief, the poems tell us, is individual, but remembering the dead is of necessity a shared activity; it needs others for us to tell, even if they are anonymous poetry readers. Such poetry is an important testament to the human desire to commemorate and has a function beyond that of Robinson’s own grief. The problem with overwhelming experiences such as death is that they touch the ineffable, leaving us often speechless or caught within the recycled phrases and clichés which surface to talk about ‘a tragic loss of young life’ or ‘one snatched from us before her time’. Robinson’s skill as a poet therefore has a quasi-community function in these poems, even if they were written only to articulate and give a shape to her own personal grief: their publication enables them to also give voice and shape to the difficult experiences of others faced with the objects of their loved ones and the imprints they leave behind them. In this respect, then, the poem reveals also one of the potential roles of art in relation to intimacy and this is linked very



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precisely and tangibly to the ways in which this writing is constructed to evoke intimacy. Later, we learn from an essay at the back of the book that ‘Interior’ is based upon a particularly intimate scene: it presents the reader with details from Aerin’s studio, which Robinson went to after the loss of her friend and filmed, cataloguing digitally what will later become the poem’s objects and atmosphere, the light, the clothes, and, touchingly, even the marks of her body Aerin had left behind: LIPSTICK MARK ON MUG Losses what we losses remember losses all over losses ourselves. FINGERPRINT MARK ON WINDOWSILL Did   you   feel   trapped. BLUE-TACK STAIN ON EGGSHELL WALL The movement of sky. LOOSE HAIRS ON MEDIUM BRISTLE HAIRBRUSH Tender & unstable. (Robinson 2009: unpag.)

The naked language of the inventory, sheering these titles of pronouns and articles, gives them the tone of the forensic analysis that accompanies a crime scene, underpinned and thus contrasted, here, with the lower-case and more personal writing below. This juxtaposition of language usage creates a jarring defamiliarization and yet, at the same time, the stripped-down factuality carries its own exposure of intimate actions, never to be repeated: here she sipped, here she touched, here she hung things and brushed her hair. This is the haunting scene of what the living body has left behind: its imprints and sheddings, its grease and its personal stamp. The affect inhering in these leftover objects for Robinson overspills the containment of the poetry and is available for the reader too, creating an acute sense of sadness and a potential to empathize with the loss being expressed through these everyday reminders and remainders. Most of us at one time or another will have the difficult task of entering the dwelling place of a loved one we have lost. These are the things that stick, and of which it is difficult to speak; the poem warns us that it is indeed possible to be undone by a mug or hairbrush or an object of everyday use now redundant and strangely intact despite the departure of its owner and user. There are ‘losses’ and ‘losses’ and ‘losses’ and new ‘losses’ at every turn as a function of the plenitude of objects in the room.

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For the mourner and the one charged with disposing of the effects of the dead, there is a practical need to interrupt the continuity of life that is intimated by these objects: they speak of regular, normal activities and these are erased as we clear up, sort though, empty, bin and recycle the objects which were used by our loved ones. Robinson has captured the moment before this necessary interruption and rearrangement of a room which feels still inhabited, as though the person has just left that mug or will return to that crumpled bed. The poems present their readers with the room and its objects as a slice of stasis before the scene is stripped of these personalized remainders. There are signs which are now uninterpretable, like fingerprints which might bespeak a feeling of entrapment, but the poet recognizes that questions need not carry their punctuation marks any longer, since there is no one left to answer. Here, then, is the intimacy of grief and how it works upon us: the literary techniques used are part of the way in which the text evokes our emotional response. The text, with all its physical white space reinforcing the sense of loss and absence, itemizes some of the crises that mourning and its inevitable necessities of disposal and memorialization will entail. Jacques Derrida has written of the unfaithfulness of mourning, or what Nicholas Royle glosses, in his essay ‘Forgetting Well’, as the ‘double-bind of mourning’ (Royle 2009: 139): the way that in a ‘successful’ form of mourning, Derrida describes how ‘I incorporate the one who has died, I assimilate him [sic] to myself, I reconcile myself with death, and consequently I deny death and the alterity of the dead other and of death as other’ (qtd. in Royle 2009: 139).6 Thus mourning is both necessary and impossible; to mourn successfully, as Derrida says, would be to ‘reduce or deny … death’ (qtd. in Royle 2009: 135). Literary elegy, which is, of course, what Robinson’s poem is, would therefore be one of the most unfaithful yet successful ways to mourn, taking the dead other into one’s poem and memorializing them, diluting the alterity of their death. Yet, in fact, Robinson’s poem manages to work its way as much as possible around this problematic double-bind that Derrida and Royle are discussing. The other remains other, outside the scene of mourning, absent from the scene of objects which have lost their owner and remain to point to her loss. In letting the objects, marks and leftovers speak, instead of speaking only of the dead, Robinson resists the assimilation – even to the art of poetry – which Derrida outlines for us as the risk of ‘successful’ mourning. Instead, the poem fails to conjure the dead friend in anything other than the traces of her absent presence, and remarks upon the lacunae individual objects signify. Of course, a poem is only one manifestation of mourning; the extent of mourning,



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as Derrida and Royle anatomize, is complex, shifting in intensity, and stretched over time in a way which cannot be captured in entirety by, or epitomized in, a poem. Nevertheless, through its confrontation with the absence of the loved one but the presence of the signs of their life, Robinson’s poem points the way to thinking through some of the paradoxically surviving traces of the other and their intimacy which we encounter in our scenes of their loss. It is what remains that points to what has disappeared.

Setting the scene In the pages to come, Scenes of Intimacy will continue thinking through the strange and unsettling intimacies of death. In the interview following this introduction, Nicholas Royle discusses his novel Quilt, which features a crisis precipitated by the death of the protagonist’s father; as is briefly apparent above, Royle has written poignantly about death, most notably in his book In Memory of Jacques Derrida (2009). The interview foreshadows many of the themes which inform the essays in the rest of Scenes of Intimacy: the dead who haunt us; the power of language; the limits of reason; the legacies of theory; and the relationship between the thinking that theory can do and that which literature does. The second section of the book, ‘Legacies, Love, Sex, and Death: Scenes of Intimate Writing and Reading’ begins with a family scene of intergenerational and postcolonial cultural tension. Elina Valovirta reads a novel pivoting around the legacy of an intrusive Haitian custom in the context of the migration of the family to America. The tensions between mother and daughter arise from an intimate practice, the point of which is for the mother to physically check the status of her daughter’s hymen. Valovirta draws upon affect theory, especially in relation to shame; she analyses how shame arises between the characters and also how it is positioned as available for readers to witness. The second essay remains with the scene of a daughter negotiating the legacy of her mother’s influence, but this time in conjunction with how to find a way to tell the self in an autobiography. Sylvie Gambaudo, drawing on the theoretical work of Judith Butler, tracks the literary techniques by which author Janet Frame develops an autobiographical self and voice through negotiating the stories others tell about her. Firstly, these are the familial tales her mother passes to her and, later in life, there is the diagnosis of schizophrenia delivered by doctors, raising important questions about how we are shaped by others’ narratives of us, especially when those narratives issue from places of parental and institutional power. The

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next essay keeps the figure of the mother and her legacy firmly in focus, but the scene alters to consider love. Simon Smith, a poet, and Felicity Allen, an artist, explore the poetic and the autobiographical in a co-authored piece of writing which merges Smith’s sonnet cut-ups and Allen’s contemporary and past journal entries. The conversation set up between these two different forms creates a new way of thinking about love, the lost mother, mourning and the influence that literature has in shaping our conceptions of emotional ecstasy and loving intimacy. In a contextualizing forward, Smith and Allen draw upon the work of Maurice Blanchot to highlight the importance of journal writing, its relation to forgetfulness and memory, and its attention to the everyday and seemingly insignificant. Their work demonstrates the power of creative and literary writing to raise and explore similar questions to theoretical prose. Aaron Deveson’s essay, while more traditional in form, reads the intimate lyricism that pulses alongside an acerbic capitalist critique in the poems of Keston Sutherland, keeping attentive to the technical elements of the poetry. Focusing on the way the poems construct possibilities for love, Deveson draws on the work of Roland Barthes. Catherine Humble’s chapter is equally interested in love and its expression, attending to how it is shaped and expressed by syntax, ellipses, fragmentation, revision and memory. The revelation that Raymond Carver’s editor Gordon Lish was responsible for many of the excisions which created the author’s infamously minimalist prose provides Humble with a point of comparison between Carver’s text before Lish’s intervention and how it had changed afterwards. She uses Lacan’s distinction between two distinct subjectivities in relation to signification to argue in favour of the unedited Carver prose as opening greater possibilities for intimacy. The book’s next three essays challenge conventional attitudes to sexual intimacy. Lies Xhonneux’s essay explores the lesbian short stories of Rebecca Brown and how they deliberately confront stereotypes of female behaviour as more nurturing and less violent than that of men. Xhonneux’s reading is attentive to Brown’s minimalist prose style and how it highlights the lack of language available for conceptualizing lesbian sexuality and experience, even in the twenty-first century. A similar inability for sex to be openly discussed is explored in Jill Marsden’s essay, which reads the failure of the sexual encounter on the wedding night of the couple in Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (2008). Marsden’s analysis of the scene which follows – a wild argument on the beach – draws upon the work of Georges Bataille to explore how this moment liberates man and wife from the constraints of how they are supposed to conduct their intimacy and allows them access to a different, more impersonal form of



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intimacy which is attentive to the moment as opposed to orientated expectantly towards a predictable future. A similar attention to impersonal intimacy and temporality is the topic of Reina van der Wiel’s essay. In a reading of Chris Cleaves’ novel Incendiary (2005), she discusses the theory of impersonal intimacy put forward by Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips in Intimacies (2008). The novel’s key dramatic event – a terrorist attack on a football stadium – leaves traumatized, grieving protagonists whose behaviours raise questions which van der Wiel uses to challenge some of the implications of Bersani and Phillips’s theory. The final essay in the collection deals with death even more intimately than van der Wiel’s essay: the literature Helen Thomas analyses is comprised of the excruciatingly intimate texts left behind by terminal cancer sufferers Audre Lorde, Ruth Picardie and Dorothea Lynch. Thomas examines cancerous death and the legal and ethical issues the texts raise, as well as the challenges they pose to our usual conceptions of subjectivity, in light of work on death by Jacques Derrida, Gillian Rose and others. Thematically, therefore, after the opening section’s first two chapters, Scenes of Intimacy moves from the family and its parental-child tensions, through representations of love, to those of sex, and finally to scenes of death. Many of the essays here examine how conventional configurations and expectations of intimacy disappoint and call for adjustment and improvisation. Scenes of Intimacy demonstrates that literature and theory contribute significantly to our considerations of how intimacy is constructed, how it is understood and practised, and how it is elicited by texts through the literary techniques they employ in order to challenge us, move us, or gain our empathy. We are shaped by our intimacies with others and by the way intimacy is culturally represented and discussed. By participating in and extending existing debates and analyses of our intimate practices and representations, Scenes of Intimacy also hopes to open new ways of conceiving our relationships with those around us.

Works cited Berlant, L. (2000) (ed.), Intimacy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —(2011), Cruel Optimism. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Bersani, L. and A. Phillips (2008), Intimacies. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Clough, P. T. (2007), ‘Introduction’ in P. T. Clough and J. Halley (eds), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1–33.

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Dean, T. (2009), Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections of the Subculture of Barebacking. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1972), ‘Freud and the scene of writing’. Translated from the French by J. Mehlman. Yale French Studies, 48, 74–117. —(1992), ‘ “This strange institution called literature”: an interview with Jacques Derrida’, in D. Attridge (ed.), Acts of Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 33–75. Derrida, J. and E. Roudinesco (2004), For What Tomorrow…A Dialogue. Translated from the French by J. Fort. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dimen, M. (2003), Sexuality, Intimacy, Power. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press. Foucault, M. (1990), The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, Vol. I. Translated from the French by R. Hurley. London: Penguin Books. —(2003), Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975. V. Marchetti and A. Salomoni (eds). Translated from the French by G. Burchell. New York: Picador. Giddens, A. (1992), The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Cambridge: Polity. Hardt, M. (2007), ‘Foreword: what affects are good for’, in P. T. Clough and J. Halley (eds), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham and London: Duke University Press, ix-xiii. Joyce, J. (1993), Ulysses. J. Johnson (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Koivunen, A. (2010), ‘An affective turn? Reimagining the subject of feminist theory’, in M. Liljeström and S. Paasonen (eds), Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences. London and New York: Routledge, 8–28. Lawrence, D. H. (2006), Lady Chatterley’s Lover. M. Squires (ed.). London: Penguin Books. Liljeström, M. and S. Paasonen (2010) (eds), Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences. London and New York: Routledge. Illouz, E. (2007), Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ngai, S. (2005), Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA. and London: Harvard University Press. Probyn, E. (2005), Blush: Faces of Shame. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Robinson, S. (2009), a. Berkeley, CA: Les Figues Press. Royle, N. (2009), In Memory of Jacques Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. —(2010), Quilt. Brighton: Myriad Editions. —(2011), Veering: A Theory of Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sedgwick, E. K. (2003), Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Sedgwick, E. K. and A. Frank (1995) (eds), Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Durham: Duke University Press. Stein, G. (1997), Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms. New York: Dover Publications. Vogler, C. (2000), ‘Sex and talk’, in L. Berlant (ed.), Intimacy. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 48–85.



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Notes 1 A possible exception is self-intimacy, although this arguably involves treating or experiencing the self or a part of it as other. 2 The end of Derrida’s essay allusively returns his readers to sexual scenes in Freud, reminding us too that representation is not devoid of repression and transgression. 3 Theorists differ in their use of the terms ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’, some using them interchangeably, others seeking to draw definite distinctions. For a useful summary of some of the most influential work on affect which delineates their different stances in relation to terminology, see Anu Koivunen’s chapter ‘An affective turn? Reimagining the subject of feminist theory’ (2010: 9–10). 4 While Hardt is correct in pointing to the importance of theorizing emotions in queer theory, there have also been a range of historical and sociological studies of emotions which are not necessarily directly indebted to either queer theory or psychoanalysis, although all of these discourses participate within the larger paradigm shift towards examinations of the emotions and the rise of interest in affect. 5 This was true of representations of violence and bodily acts too. My thanks to Elizabeth Brunton for highlighting this. 6 The quotes from Derrida were originally published in Jacques Derrida and Elizabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow…A Dialogue.

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A New Literary Intimacy: An Interview with Nicholas Royle Nicholas Royle

University of Sussex

Jennifer Cooke

Loughborough University

JC: At the end of your new book, Veering: A Theory of Literature (2011), you propose a very brief theory of nodism (Microsoft Word wants to change this to nudism!), whereby certain nodal words bring together, or nod in the direction of, a variety of entangling ideas and fertile connections (2011: 211). In another chapter of the book, you discuss Raymond Williams’s Keywords (1976) and suggest that in a different way you too have been, over the time of your writing, composing an idiomatic set of key or nodal words. ‘Veering’ is obviously one of the most recent of these. So too are ‘uncanny’ and ‘telepathy’ (to draw on a couple of titles of earlier books). Where does ‘veering’ come from, and what might your other ‘nodal’ words be, and some of the ideas they intersect with? NR: That’s a rich and complex question or cluster of questions that I can hardly hope to answer in the space of this interview. One of the reasons why ‘nodism’ is never going to catch on – with or without the additional embarrassment of Microsoft thinking it’s all about taking your clothes off – is because I’m not sure how to pronounce it. Actually, the question of nudity is not entirely foreign to the topic, as I hope the Appendix to Veering at least intimates, just as intimation is at once key to nodism and to the strange sorts of intimacy it broaches (2011: 210–13). I have never displayed an appendix before – but it seemed somehow apposite that Veering should expose such a thing. I will avoid a lengthy digression here concerning the classification of the body of a text as body-parts, from the pre-face to the head of the chapter (caput) to running heads to footnotes

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Scenes of Intimacy and beyond, and merely recall that ‘nodism is a kind of nudism that bears and bares both nod and node’ (2011: 211). The difficulty of steering between saying ‘nodism’ (as in nodal) and ‘nodism’ (as in a nod of the head) corresponds with Charles Dodgson’s point about the difficulty of keeping a perfect balance with a portmanteau – when you say ‘frumious’, is it ‘furious’ or ‘fuming’ that is foremost in your mind?1 Is it possible for them to frument equally? ‘Nodism’ (you see, I can’t say it) is intended as a sort of unpronounceable or untranslatable word that seeks to articulate, in a spirit of the nod as ‘yes’, the promise of a thinking that ties the literary work to the dream, in so many kinds of knot, net, node and nodal point. I am interested in elaborating a way of reading (Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Melville and many others) that is responsive to the strange resources of a single word, phrase or syllable. In the Appendix I also mention Empson, because I think he is one of the few critics actually to have tried to develop a critical discourse in this context. ‘Nod’, as I point out, is itself the title of a chapter of a little book I wrote a few years ago, called How to Read Shakespeare (2005). In that book I tried to sketch readings of seven plays by Shakespeare in terms of seven words: ‘witsnapper’, ‘phantasma’, ‘love-shaked’, ‘mutes’, ‘seel’, ‘safe’ and ‘nod’. The pertinence of nodism at this time (but of course it’s untimely – its very pronunciation is a contretemps) has to do also with what I believe is a new and perhaps unprecedented attention to interconnections – the sort of thing that, in rather different ways, is the subject of Maud Ellmann’s recent book about the nets of Modernism (it was Henry James, after all, who said that ‘Really … relations stop nowhere’ [qtd. in Ellman 2010: 1]) and Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought, on the subject of ‘the mesh’ (as Morton puts it: ‘the ecological crisis makes us aware of how interdependent everything is’ [2010: 30]). All of this, I would say, is part of a new thinking of intimacy. My focus in Veering is on the question of literature but this cannot be dissociated from everything else: as D. H. Lawrence says, the universe is veering. Nodism, then, or the art of veering as I try to elaborate it in the book, is not just a matter of trying to reckon in a quasi-formal manner with Derrida’s argument that nothing can be determined out of context but no context is saturable. A new humility is called for, I think, as regards how we conceive literature and literary criticism, a different experience of time and of the human. I believe there is a great deal still to learn from Freud about the ways in which dreams can illuminate the question of how we read literary works, and vice versa. It would be a misunderstanding of ‘nodism’ to see it as a kind of atomizing, whereby a certain word (‘telepathy’, ‘uncanny’, ‘nod’ etc.) might function as some kind of magic word or



A New Literary Intimacy: An Interview with Nicholas Royle as a keyword in Williams’s sense. The very hesitation of pronunciation (node-ism, nod-ism) is intended to mark the way a word is not itself or the way in which we might track or be driven by a bit of a word rather than an entire word. You might recall how Jacques Derrida begins his text called ‘Telepathy’, with an image of looking for a word or for a bit of a word, or being followed by a word or a bit of a word. It is a question here, also, of chance and the unforeseeable, and a thinking of language as non-instrumental. It’s not that you’re using words and you’re going to be a practising nodist: it’s rather about the nods or nodes that language gives. If the nod is a gift (don), the node is never simply done. Language uses its user just as much as, or perhaps more than, the user uses language. Language installs itself – there’s an uneasy, even uncanny intimacy there – language installs us in this or that situation or predicament. And language is not unified or unifying or something that we can appropriate: it is veering, with us or without us. This is also, I think, what fascinates me about literature and what nodism is aspiring to evoke and affirm. JC: While you were speaking I was reminded of perhaps the craziest section of Quilt, your novel, where the unnamed male protagonist has compiled a strange dictionary of words, all of which have the echo of the word ‘ray’ in them or contain letters from which ‘ray’ can be spelled. This project is mad. His obsession has touched so many words, has brought so many unrelated words into connection with each other through that one link, that there is a contagious possibility for the reader to have a making-insane reading experience. It’s obviously difficult to read that section of the book because it is a list, but it is a list which is also compelling – you have to read it, you want to read it out loud as well because of the echo of the words – and so you are trapped, wanting to get away from the list and wanting to read it, and all of this is spun out from one echoing word, ‘ray’, which runs through all the others. I started to realize that there would be many words you could find in echo chambers of other words. It suddenly seemed obvious that if you wanted to you could destroy yourself doing this. It struck me as a particularly interesting moment in the novel, but also it is related to this idea that language exceeds us. The character is trying to do something instrumental with language, something seemingly rational, and yet the insanity of such a project becomes manifest as he’s doing it, as we’re reading it. NR: The irony that the word ‘ray’ is anagrammatically contained in the word ‘dictionary’ would be a starting point for that sense of madness. In the novel it is re-named as a ‘dictionaray’. Some people miss that slightly quirky, neologistic formulation but the idea of the ‘dictionaray’ is, I

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suppose, mostly impelled by the logic of the death of the father and trying to think about the way in which this is linked to the undoing of authority, reason, logic itself. I think the unnamed protagonist, as you call him – I’m not sure about that use of ‘protagonist’… JC: I couldn’t use ‘narrator’… NR: One of the things I was trying to do in Quilt was to listen to voices that were not necessarily self-possessed or concretized in the way that might ordinarily be associated with the figure of a protagonist. I hesitate over ‘character’, in fact, as much as ‘narrator’ or ‘protagonist’ – this man, let’s say, who as you point out has no name (and anonymity is a crucial part of the text, I think), this man experiences the death of his father and really it is the end of the world. It is an apocalyptic moment that is experienced as a changing of the light. It’s something, I think, closely akin to Maurice Blanchot’s image of the madness of the day, the day the light goes mad. The light changes when the father dies; the light in the room but also the light of the world changes and, with it, all the sorts of links between light and truth, light and reason, light and sense. Something like a dissolution of reason is effected in this death. And that’s one of the ways in which the ray emerges in the novel. But – as I was saying apropos of nodism a few moments ago – the experience of time here is not straightforward. What is the time of writing? What is the time of the ray? These questions are conjoined with that of the time of the death of the father. The novel is thus attempting, I hope in novel ways, to explore the logic of deferred sense or deferred meaning as well. There is a correspondence here, perhaps, with what Freud says in the preface to the second edition of the Interpretation of Dreams, in 1908, in which he confesses or testifies to an experience of deferred effects, deferred meaning: ‘this book has … a significance’, he says, ‘which I only grasped after I completed it. It was … my reaction to my father’s death [in 1896] – that is to say, to the most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man’s life’ (Freud 1953–73: vol. 4, xxvi). This is a very revealing as well as moving remark that comes to alter our reading, for example, of Freud’s account of the Oedipus complex in the Interpretation of Dreams. As I have suggested elsewhere, it might in fact be more accurate and indeed more productive to call it ‘the Hamlet complex’, because it is really a reading of Hamlet that he’s outlining in this book. Freud says that Hamlet was written shortly after Shakespeare lost his father and that the play is therefore in a sense Shakespeare’s reaction to his father’s death (though it is now generally reckoned that the death of Shakespeare’s father, in 1601, did not predate the writing of Hamlet). The preface to the second edition, then, produces



A New Literary Intimacy: An Interview with Nicholas Royle this retroactive or retrolexic force of reading: it’s difficult not to connect his reading of Hamlet with the death of his own father, and to see the claim he is making about John Shakespeare as a projection that is really to do with Freud’s relation to his own father. When does a father die? That is the question that goes right through the Interpretation of Dreams and through all questions about psychoanalysis, all questions about desire and meaning in general. Quilt is clearly also about the idea that a father dead can be more powerful than a father alive and again that is something which Freud vividly dramatized for us, in Totem and Taboo. In these respects Quilt is about something dangerous, frightening, absolutely dispossessing. But then, in another sense, it has to with the idea that the father is never fully present: there is always something ghostly about a father. And ghosts don’t have to be frightening … You asked where the word ‘veering’ comes from. Sorry: that’s a little bit of ‘deferral’ in action … JC: I did. NR: ‘Veering’ is a word I love, as may be evident. I think I must first have encountered it on the shipping forecast, probably as a teenager with the radio, in the bed under the covers, listening to it late at night, when I should have been asleep. Hearing this word ‘veering’, not knowing what it meant really, it had, and still has in my memory, a strange intrigue and beauty. But that’s to go back a long way. More recently, the idea of writing a book about veering was triggered, I suppose, by an invitation to talk about ‘contemporary writing environments’ at a conference at Brunel in 2004. In my preliminary work on the lecture I was led to these little three letters, the ‘v-i-r’ in the middle of the ‘environment’, which comes from the French virer, to turn or to veer. The word sprang out at me then, as if in a magic trick: veering. ‘Veering’ is there in the word ‘environment’, and yet curiously it is not something that people talk about. The general sense of the word ‘environment’ is that it is to do with the human: the environment environs and what it environs is the human. Veering, for me, is an attempt to question and disturb that sort of thinking. The book seeks to argue that we can’t say what an environment is – or what is meant by ‘the environment’ – without first reckoning with veering. The book is concerned, then, with tracing and provoking new kinds of thinking about environments and environmentalism. JC: In a related vein, I want to ask you about animals, especially about the strange animals which move through your work: the inscrutable rays of Quilt; the queer and ancient turtle, emblem of Veering (in that quite incredible photograph on the front cover of the book); the secretive, busy

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Scenes of Intimacy mole who has surfaced in other work of yours. What’s the significance of these creatures to you personally, and perhaps creatively? The way you draw on these animals is that they have behaviours (burrowing or veering, for instance) which we can learn from; that we are slow to relearn what they know and do instinctively. It occurs to me just now that Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, which you discuss in Veering, are full of animals which are not instrumental, i.e. they are there on their own merit, not as a human prosthesis or metaphor. When, for example, in the game of croquet in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), the Queen uses a flamingo as a mallet and a hedgehog as a ball it is outrageous, and strikes the reader with its injustice. NR: I like your suggestion that animal behaviour is something we can learn from or relearn from, and you are right about this sense of the Alice books making us aware of the kind of outrageousness of using animals. Of course, the Alice books are also quite treacherous, in a sense, because they entail such a powerful kind of engagement with linguistic surface or with the kind of apparitional quality of words. Carroll’s work has much to tell us about the disturbing and in many ways disabling capacities of language to name. When we have that quip, ‘We called him Tortoise because he taught us’ (Carroll 1931: 114), it’s not just funny – it is also suggesting something very peculiar about the nature of language and how it works. In contrast to that kind of humour, I think, there is a sort of awfulness, the gravity and authority of what is at stake in that very classical or traditional, ancient narrative of man, in Genesis, naming the animals, one by one. Naming is perhaps the first gesture of appropriation, a kind of violence, which I think the Alice books foreground and open up to be thought about anew. I’m not sure I have an account that I could give about my interest in animals in a general way. We’re all animals and perhaps Derrida is right when he suggests, early on in the book The Animal that Therefore I Am (2008), that philosophy and philosophers have largely ignored or disavowed the question of the nonhuman animal and that it is to poetry that we need to turn in order to think about this – about the distinction between the human and the nonhuman animal and also the kinds of strange affinity, continuity, similarity or kinship. It is often poets, then, whose writing seems most hospitable to such thinking. It might be a mosquito in the poetry of D. H. Lawrence, a bat in Emily Dickinson, a spider in Francis Ponge or a cuttlefish in Les Murray.2 Poetry and thinking about the nonhuman animal seem very much bound up with one another. Indeed, the notion of what makes a novel ‘poetic’ might be explored in interesting ways from this perspective: immediately coming to mind here would be the



A New Literary Intimacy: An Interview with Nicholas Royle novels of D. H. Lawrence or Elizabeth Bowen, for instance, or indeed P. G. Wodehouse. I don’t think it is by chance that Derrida should have alighted on the hedgehog as a way of trying to think about what this thing is that we call poetry (Derrida 1995: 288–99). And with the notion of the singularity of the animal, whether it’s a cat or indeed a snail, despite all the massive and profound differences and so forth, there is a consistent, persistent kind of question about the ways in which an animal figures as other. I became especially preoccupied with the mole when I was invited to speak at Cerisy in 1997, at the conference where Derrida delivered what later came to be published as The Animal That Therefore I Am, but my interest in what is now referred to as ‘the animal question’ inevitably goes back further. There is, for me at least, an important molluscous trail leading from Telepathy and Literature (1990), with its readings of Wordsworth and Virginia Woolf in particular, through to the molluscs of Maggie O’Sullivan and Les Murray in After Derrida (1995). When I was working on ‘Mole’ in 1997 (Royle 2003: 241–54), Kafka’s texts were very important to me. Kafka is one of the most poetic prose writers concerned with trying to think about the nonhuman animal and trying to explore the strange trails or pathways between the nonhuman and the human animal. I remember, after writing ‘Mole’, I turned to what I thought would be a completely different project, a little book about E. M. Forster, which Isobel Armstrong had asked me to write. And more or less the first thing I discovered was that Forster, when he was a student at Cambridge, was known to Lytton Strachey and others as ‘la Taupe’, the Mole. So I couldn’t get away from the figure of this burrowing creature. (It resurfaces again, of course, in Veering.) JC: Do you know why they called him that? NR: I think it was because they were never sure where he was going to turn up; and then, I guess, Forster had a rather furtive and burrowing nature. When you look at photographs of him, can’t you sometimes sense that he is still trying to get out (perhaps against his better judgment), or is being forced out, into the light? Like so many who write (including myself), he was very short-sighted. Not ‘blind as a mole’, of course – as Thomas Browne pointed out as long ago as 1646, moles can see. Since you mention these two things together, perhaps I could also just note the shift between burrowing (Kafka’s ‘The Burrow’ [2012: 153–82] really is for me the most powerful account and analysis of what is, so problematically, called ‘creative writing’) and veering. At the heart of the Veering book is the veering animal. The idea of veering for me, part of its allure, has to do with the sense that it is clearly not something peculiar to humans. This ‘veering’

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Scenes of Intimacy between or away from species is part of an attempt to question and unsettle the anthropocentric motifs or assumptions which underlie so much of our thinking about literature and culture and, of course, our thinking about the environment. When I was writing that book I kept coming across different instances of veering animals. Some of the earliest uses of ‘veer’ (in a non-nautical context) are of horses. George Eliot, for example, writes about horses veering. But there are all sorts of different animals – wolves, deer, seagulls, turtles, tortoises, an entire menagerie of veering creatures. I think lurking rather slimily in a footnote of the book there is even a reference to slugs (2011: 207). And of course rays veer. In Quilt I suppress all reference to that word, except (ironically perhaps) on one occasion where the bereaved son talks of ‘veering about on the net’ (2010: 113). So to return for a moment to the subject of your first question, I’d just add, if I may, that what you call ‘keywords’ can also be missing words, ‘ghost words’, words lost or drifting away in translation. I remember that, when I was writing the little book on Shakespeare, the last thing I wanted to do was talk about anything ‘uncanny’: the word doesn’t raise its ugly head anywhere in that project. ‘Strange’, of course, is an important word for Shakespeare – that’s something else. JC: I wanted to think about veering and morality, which isn’t tackled directly in the book. Veering implies that there is a route and then there is the veering route, which would intersect inevitably with ideas of the ‘right’ way or the ‘proper’ way to do something, with its attendant implicit morality, whereas veering would be a way of … not necessarily being immoral but … of being improper, perhaps. NR: Hélène Cixous says somewhere, and possibly I quote it in the book, that ‘language wants to be straight’, and this goes back to that conception of the Father with a capital ‘F’ and Logos, sense, meaning and reason, and so on, and certainly Veering is concerned with queerness, with what is not straight, what goes off, what is not predictable. In many contexts, in the media, in politics, and in everyday speech, ‘veering’ has a pejorative sense: to veer is bad, veering is something that you shouldn’t do. There is a brief discussion in the book of the case of Ronald Reagan and US policy on Lebanon and the Middle East – veering between one policy and another and as a result doing nothing or in fact doing worse than nothing, in other words making things even worse by veering. A book could be written, a deconstructive analysis of the figure of ‘veering’ in the Middle East, as a way of exposing the terrible incompetence (but no doubt also, in other respects, the grotesque calculatedness) of successive Israeli governments,



A New Literary Intimacy: An Interview with Nicholas Royle in collaboration with the US (and also the UK), in ensuring that, as far as possible, year after year after year, nothing changes for the Palestinians or, rather, things only get gradually worse. My interest in veering is risky in that I am trying to think this figure differently. My concern is with veering away from the pejorative sense of veering as wavering, as not being able to make up your mind and therefore as a sign or form of weakness or irresponsibility. What fascinates me, in particular, is the relationship between veering and grace, veering and dignity, veering and justice. I try to elaborate on the importance of otherness, on what is strange, surprising or dispossessing in the experience of veering, on how an attention to otherness – especially insofar as this entails a deconstructive thinking of anthropocentrism – might orient a new understanding of veering. In this manner veering in order to avoid, for example, might be something that one does, not in order to avoid a responsibility, but indeed to confront it or to make it different, to change the perspective on a question or on a problem. JC: Veering escapes binaries, it seems to me. NR: That is, I think, partly what gives it special value and force. Especially in its present participle form, veering is, as it were, by definition unfinished, a turning and non-closure, a movement that doesn’t carry with it any clear indication of where it is going or even why it is going. And linked to this there is, I think, the question of an aesthetics of veering. One can veer well or one can veer badly. Lawrence, for example, at one moment in Women in Love, describes Birkin as ‘veer[ing] clumsily’ (qtd. in Royle 2011: 197). But veering often, it seems to me, is a beautiful figure, a beautiful movement. Even that ‘veer[ing] clumsily’ in Lawrence (if you read it closely, in context) is bound up with a certain force of attraction: it has already turned into something else. Veering, as I try to explore it in the book, is not generally something that is juddering, disordered or the product of some kind of panic. Rather, it has this sort of strange sense of control, whether we attribute it to so-called self-control or to loss of control, still some kind of strange signature is going on. There’s something about veering, to my mind, that is closely bound up with giving over to the other, or opening up to otherness, a certain kind of affirmation of the other. And the question of pleasure is inscribed here too: there is no jouissance without veering. JC: Quilt identifies itself in its ‘Afterword’ as reality literature. This is defined in Veering as literature ‘written from the most real experience imaginable’ (2011: 76). What is the relation of ‘reality literature’ to autobiography, for instance, or auto-fiction (a term I’ve always personally disliked)?

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Scenes of Intimacy What is its relationship to literature as we traditionally understand it, to literature ‘proper’ (or improper)? I wondered to what extent all literature is infected by ‘the most real experiences’ of its authors: what is so specific about reality literature, as you call it? Is it related in any sense to the move within certain contemporary texts – those written by yourself as well as by Derrida, Cixous and others such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, for example – to draw upon real experience to shape and inform theoretical thinking? NR: ‘The most real experience imaginable’ is, of course, a slightly mischievous formulation: you have to imagine this ‘real’. ‘Reality literature’ is not a pleasant phrase, but it has possibly some modest, limited value as a provocation. I was interested and a little bit surprised to discover on internet searches that this juxtaposition between ‘reality’ and ‘literature’ doesn’t or didn’t exist. Whereas we have ‘reality TV’, we have no notion of ‘reality literature’. So the Afterword to Quilt ventures ‘reality literature’ as a sort of critical monstrosity, an ugly, oxymoronic, Janus-faced phrase that might, nonetheless, help draw into focus some of the things that have been happening in literature and in theory over the last forty or fifty years. It is notable in this context that the term ‘reality television’ dates back to the late 1970s: I suspect this can be viewed in relation to things going on in this period with the question of literature as well. At issue here is what I call the ‘literary turn’ (2011: 92–113). What has been happening to or with the name ‘literature’, in the last few decades especially, goes to the very heart of thinking about the non-literary. The idea of a certain fictiveness at the heart of law, the idea of a certain literarity or possibility of fiction at the heart of bearing witness, the sense of figural invention at the base of all theorizing, a more widespread apprehension of the interdependence of literature and democracy, an acknowledgement (particularly in the wake of Blanchot and Derrida) of literature as having no essence (and therefore, conversely, of being everywhere, if in a spectral fashion) – all of these things have contributed to a sort of tilting, to a new, more incisive critical appreciation of the strangeness of ‘the everyday’, the ‘real world’. Of course this is only to evoke a few of the innumerable factors involved – and leaves to one side the compelling issue of how rigorously or faithfully contemporary literary writing itself has participated in these shifts, or of the ways in which analysis of this literary turn might engage with so many other dimensions and disciplines (politics, economics, history, science and technology and so on). Another angle on all this is perhaps detectable through ‘the rise of the uncanny’ – a phenomenon or effect that is certainly not limited to literature, but has come to be of importance in such diverse fields as film theory, music, architecture, politics and environmentalism, even if it starts off from a reading of Freud’s essay of 1919, with a crucial emphasis



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on the question of literature. If we think about the uncanny as a ‘crisis of the proper’ or ‘crisis of the natural’, and conjoin that with a logic of spectrality, including perhaps first and foremost the sense that writing is what outlives you, your death is inscribed in the work (whether construed as ‘creative’ or ‘critical’), then we are moving towards a clearer realization of what the real is about. Finally, it would be necessary at least to say something about the question of language, once again, in all of this. Reality literature is about making trouble in and with language (there is, of course, a ray in ‘reality’). Reality literature has to be weird, i.e. wayward, veering. It would have to do with new, even unrecognizable kinds of realism. We have to stop conceiving language or writing as peculiar to the human. The ongoing deconstruction of anthropocentrism seems to me to be a key part of what I call reality literature. This would perhaps allow me to come back, finally, to the question of intimacy. Lacan comes up with the neologism ‘extimacy’ ( Lacan 1992: 129; Miller 1994: 74–87) in order to describe the strangeness of the foreign body, that which is within oneself which is not oneself, and I think that literary and critical writing, if they are to be of any enduring value or interest, have to be concerned with describing or opening up new ways of thinking about that intimacy. Lacan’s term is just one version. I think what I’m trying to do with ‘reality literature’, as with various other neologisms or formulations over the years, is to find other possibilities, different ways of exploring what might be called a new literary intimacy.

Works cited Bennett, A. and N. Royle (2009), Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, 4th edn. Harlow: Pearson Education. Carroll, L. (1931), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Boston: Branden Books. Originally published in 1861. —(1999), Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. New York: Dover Publications. Originally published in 1871. Derrida, J. (1995), ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’ Translated by Peggy Kamuf, in E. Weber (ed.) Points … Interviews, 1974–1994. London: Routledge, 288–99. —(2000), ‘Telepathy’. Translated from the French by Nicholas Royle in M. McQuillan (ed.), Deconstruction: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. —(2008), The Aminal that Therefore I Am. M-L. Mallet (ed.). Translated from the French by D. Wills. New York: Fordham University Press. Ellmann, M. (2010), The Nets of Modernism: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Sigmund Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Freud, S. (1953–73), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. Translated by James Strachey et al. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Kafka, F. (2012), A Hunger Artist and Other Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lacan, J. (1992), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960. Translated from the French by Dennis Porter. New York: Norton. Miller, J-A. (1994), ‘Extimité’, in M. Brachner (ed.), Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure and Society. New York: New York University Press, 74–87. Morton, T. (2010), The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Royle, N. (1990), Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. —(1995), After Derrida. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. —(1999), E. M. Forster. Writers and Their Work. Plymouth: British Council/Northcote House. —(2003), The Uncanny. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. —(2005), How to Read Shakespeare. London: Granta. —(2010), Quilt. Brighton: Myriad Editions. —(2011), Veering: A Theory of Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Shakespeare, W. (1997), ‘Hamlet’, in G. Blakemore Evans (ed.), The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd edn. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. Williams, R. (1988), Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana. Originally published in 1976.

Notes 1 ‘Frumious’ was invented by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll. It is used first in the poem ‘Jabberwocky’ which appears in L. Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1999: 10). It combines ‘furious’ and ‘fuming’. 2 These poems are discussed in the ‘Animals’ chapter of A. Bennett and N. Royle, Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, 151–9.

Part Two

Legacies, Love, Sex and Death: Scenes of Intimate Reading and Writing

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Reading the Intimacies of Shame in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory Elina Valovirta

University of Turku

Sexuality in Caribbean literature authored by women in particular is an ambivalent and contested terrain, where the strong link between sexuality and shame is well documented. For example, according to Denise de Caires Narain, since the 1980s Caribbean women’s writing has ‘increasingly recognized the ways in which female sexuality has been socially coded to signify limitation and shame’ (2002: 334, my italics). Concurrently, feminist scholarship on the literary tradition has taken sexuality into the centre of its scrutiny (see e.g. Narain 2002; Gourdine 2002; Weir-Soley 2009; Francis 2010; Smith (ed.) 2011). Writing of West Indian women’s fiction, Evelyn O’Callaghan (1998: 297) notes a similar circulation of shame in the sexual lives of the female characters that can be seen in Caribbean literature at large. While the context is configured differently, the strong link between female sexuality and shame can be seen in HaitianAmerican Edwidge Danticat’s first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), where women’s sexual violence towards other women in the form of a tradition named testing creates sexual shame in a similar way as racism in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye creates what Kathleen Woodward terms racial shame (2000: 224).1 Breath, Eyes, Memory relates the story of three generations of Haitian women who, in one way or another, must come to terms with their traumatizing pasts. The first-person narrator-protagonist, Sophie Caco, feels shame about her body and sexuality because of the Haitian tradition of mothers testing their daughters’ virginity by inserting a little finger in the girl’s vagina in order to ensure the hymen is intact (Danticat 1994: 123). Sophie spends her childhood with her mother’s sister, Tante Atie, in Haiti, and at the age of 12 is sent to the United States to live with her mother, Martine. For Sophie, her new life and growing up

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in New York means a struggle for integration into American society. She becomes fluent in English, succeeds in school and works hard for her education, but her mother is not as successful. Constantly haunted by nightmares of her rape by a Macoute – a soldier in the violent militia – as a young girl in Haiti, Martine has a living memory of the incident in her daughter, who was born of the rape, and who physically resembles no one in the Caco family. Paranoid about guarding Sophie’s chastity, she continues the rural Haitian women’s custom of testing. Unable to endure the humiliating procedure any longer, Sophie breaks her hymen with a mortar pestle and thus fails the next testing, causing her mother to throw Sophie out of their home to start an independent life. Donette A. Francis (2004: 77) examines five different scenes, or sites, of violence in Breath, Eyes, Memory in order to understand the ways in which violence can lead to subjectivity-formation. Of these five ‘scenes of subjection’ (Francis borrows this term from Saidiya Hartman), I discuss the affective consequences of the two most relevant ones for my purpose, entitled by Francis as ‘Testing – traumatic heirlooms’ (ibid.: 82) and ‘The pestle – confronting trauma’ (ibid.: 84). In the novel testing is a form of intimate sexual violence through which mothers seek to fulfil their responsibility for the sexual control of their daughters. Martine explains the practice of testing to her daughter, Sophie: ‘a mother is supposed to do that to her daughter until the daughter is married. It is her responsibility to keep her pure’ (Danticat 1994: 60–61). At the same time, testing produces differences between women by the affective power of shame. My discussion in this chapter deals with how we should read sexuality as imbued with negative affect in Danticat’s novel, particularly with the shame of sexual violence and abuse. As shame does not impress upon all readers in similar ways (cf. Ahmed 2004: 91), sexuality as a site of shame is also a site of differentiation. This also helps us to see differentiation within sexual shame; it is not a similar experience for all who feel it (Probyn 2005: x). Due to the subsequent complexity of shame, there is, therefore, an urgent need to understand shame in its many forms (Woodward 2000: 235). I argue that shame has a ‘cognitive edge’ (ibid.: 213) for the reader, to borrow Woodward’s term, in that while shame might not work as an epistemological tool for the characters in the texts, it may do so for the readers who witness that shame. First, I see shame as experienced by the characters within the novel as a motivator that incites sexual violence, where the fear of being shamed causes the Caco women to treat each other in ways, such as testing, which actually produce shame. Second, shame can be seen as a tool for reading, where readers, motivated by a reading of shame, can be triggered to not only witness the damage it does but to also understand its underlying power structures. As a result



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of engaging with shame-fuelled differentiation processes, new notions of the self may be negotiated within the affective text-reader relationship.

Feminist readings of shame The emotion of shame is arguably the most-theorized of all classically categorized and named emotions in recent feminist theorizations of affectivity (see Locke 2007: 147; Woodward 2000: 211; Sedgwick and Frank 2003: 97). In order to understand the salience of shame in the domain of affective feminist work, we need only consider Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s assertion that shame is ‘the place where the question of identity arises most originarily and most relationally’ (2003: 37, orig. italics). In other words, shame as an affect raises crucial questions about the very foundations of our identities in a way that is relational, thereby signaling a decidedly dynamic relationship between shame and identity. Shame is an affect of intimacy, in that it is experienced as exposure (Ahmed 2004: 103) which shapes (sexual) identities. The intimacy of shame entails that it has been seen as a ‘sticky’ affect (ibid.: 91), something that is contagious (Sedgwick 2003: 36; Kainulainen et al. 2010: 9). By way of their stickiness, literary emotions may be transmitted and shifted to the reader in the affective text-reader relationship (see Pearce 1997).2 This affective dimension of the text-reader relationship serves to testify that affects and their readers are co-dependent. The recognition and reading of affects depicted in the text calls for the reader to move, or to be moved. Thus, affects need readers and readers need affects in order to grasp literature and to be grasped by it. The question is therefore not only about the text’s grip on the reader or vice versa, but rather about the affects circulating in this dialogic situation and what meanings they can help generate. The reader’s affective responses to the texts they read may have a link to sexuality and sexual politics, a theme which is particularly prominent in the literary tradition of contemporary Anglophone Caribbean women’s writing. In her reading of the poetry of the Jamaican woman poets Una Marson, Vera Bell and Lorna Goodison, Anita Haya Patterson discovers shame to have a ‘distinct cultural resonance’ (2001: 269). In these poems, women’s sexual pleasure is, on the one hand, seen as a self-recognized feature of Afro-Jamaican women’s identities but, on the other hand, it is seen as shameful and disrespectable largely as a consequence of the slavery that abused those (sexual) bodies (ibid.: 275). Furthermore, Patterson contends that ‘the act of putting a name to the experience of shame itself was a critical step in the historical development of

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women’s literary emergence in Jamaica’ (ibid.: 275). While I agree with Patterson on the importance of bestowing a name on an affect for it to be individuated as a discernable emotion within a particular cultural context and literary tradition, my concern in this chapter is with the ramifications of the expression after it has been named, and how it is then transmitted to a reading audience. My concern is not only with shame as an expressed emotion in the novel but also with the reading event as a site of shame where shame’s meanings are negotiated in the affective encounter between the reader and the text. This negotiation of shame’s varied meanings leads to the question of what we, as readers, can do with affects – and indeed, what they do to us. I do not refer to the simple adoption of literary affects by the reader, but rather to a more complex reading practice of reworking (with) affectivity for meaning and understanding. When reading scenes of shame, readers come into contact with shame while witnessing it, even if they reject the feeling themselves. Shame functions as a differentiating device in these violent ‘intercorporeal encounters between others’ (Ahmed 2004: 103). Simultaneously, shame exposes us to a ‘double movement’ of individuation and relationality (Sedgwick 2003: 37). Thus, shame creates identities and relationships, alienation and community, and it possesses a certain sociality (cf. Woodward 2000: 212). In Danticat’s novel, shame produces gaps, distances and pain between women. From the idea of shame’s cognitive edge (Woodward 2000: 213) arises the notion of shame as an active agent of social being and doing. In a similar vein, Elspeth Probyn takes a refreshing approach to shame when she notes that it can be positive (Probyn 2005: xviii) in that it does things and is productive in making us re-envision the constructions of our humanities (ibid.: xviii). According to Probyn, it ‘goes to the heart of who we think we are’ (ibid.: x) and it contains the promise of ‘a return of interest, joy and connection’ (ibid.: xiii ). As such, shame therefore suggests that we care. Like Probyn, I attempt to discuss shame in productive ways. Shame in my view has a cumulative affect that, despite the tragedies for individuals or collectives it causes, may also be seen as a force for change and regeneration. I do not suggest that all shame is productive, but that we as readers can view it in a productive manner. Regarding shame as situational may allow shame to be seen as a tool which ‘demands that big questions be asked in a modest way’ (Probyn 2005: xviii). It is my hope in this chapter that shame may be put to good (albeit modest) use in reworking it for the purposes of reading-for-change.



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The sexual shame of testing Haiti’s history of violence established by its colonial legacy and decades of dictatorship has been referred to as state terror (Chancy 2004: 304).3 The traumatic history of sexuality in Haiti is ‘a living presence’ (Scott 2004: 461) in all of Danticat’s writing, not least in Breath, Eyes, Memory. The novel is concerned with the gendered and sexualized side of the country’s structural violence, which projects its sombre shadow onto the lives and bodies of Haitian women and girls. Indeed, this violence is so pervasive that it is self-inflicted by women themselves, with state terror in its gendered nature referring to ‘the violation endured by Haitian women because of their sex’ (Chancy 2004: 316). Sexual violence against women and girls under the Duvalier regime was openly perpetuated by his militia henchmen, the Tonton Macoutes. In the novel’s scenes set in Haiti (in Sophie’s childhood and when she returns to see her grandmother, Grandmè Ifé, and Tante Atie as an adult), according to Helen Scott, ‘we see the casual brutality of the Macoutes, whose presence is overtly sexualized and intimidating’ (2006: 33). For example, young Martine is raped by a masked Macoute who ‘kept pounding her until she was too stunned to make a sound’ (Danticat 1994: 139) while threatening to kill her. Sophie feels threatened by them when she rides in the same van in Haiti (ibid.: 97). When Sophie goes to the market with her grandmother, a vendor wrongly accused of stepping on a Macoute’s foot is beaten to death by the militia men while ‘every one watched in shocked silence, but no one said anything’ (ibid.: 118). Tante Atie’s friend, Louise, reminds Atie that they might be next to be taken by the Macoutes (ibid.: 138), demonstrating the randomness of these acts and threats of violence. Sophie recounts what she has learnt of the Macoutes: ‘they did not hide’ and ‘if a woman refused, they would make her sleep with her son and brother or even her own father’ (ibid.: 139). The ubiquitous sexual violence in the novel is coupled with other bodily misfortunes, as Scott notes elsewhere (2004: 466): Sophie’s mother, aunt and grandmother all suffer from tumors (Martine’s case is most severe in that she has breast cancer), and Sophie herself suffers from bulimia soon after her marriage (Danticat 1994: 179). These bodily manifestations of damage lead Scott to claim that, in the novel, ‘again and again bodies, especially women’s bodies, are assaulted, mutilated, abused, become diseased, and die’ (2006: 38). Showcasing the social history of rape and sexual violence in Haiti in Breath, Eyes, Memory, Danticat not only reveals the patriarchal, sexist power structure of the aftermath of the Duvalier regime (Francis 2004: 79), but she also demonstrates how this power structure is

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continued and supported by women in the families (ibid.: 82). As grandmother Ifé explains to Sophie, her job was to keep her daughters’ sexual purity intact until they find her a suitable husband (Danticat 1994: 156).The polarization of sex as either acceptable in matrimony or shamefully degrading outside marriage leads to a sexual discipline fuelled by the ideals of respectability, responsibility and honour (Francis 2004: 82). Behind these three ideals, shame does its work to support and validate the practice of testing. Against the background of structural sexual violence towards the female body, Breath, Eyes, Memory brings the ‘virginity cult’ of testing (Danticat 1994: 154) to the fore as its key theme and recurring motif; it is where a girl’s sexual chastity becomes a point of obsession for their mothers. The protagonist, Sophie, narrates her understanding of the preoccupation with virginity: I have heard it compared to a virginity cult, our mothers’ obsession with keeping us pure and chaste. My mother always listened to the echo of my urine in the toilet, for if it was too loud it meant that I had been deflowered. I learned very early in life that virgins always took small steps when they walked. They never did acrobatic splits, never rode horses or bicycles. They always covered themselves well and, even if their lives depended on it, never parted with their panties. (Danticat 1994: 154)

The severity of this ideal of chastity is highlighted by the conjunction phrase ‘even if their lives depended on it’, which suggests to us that chastity in the novel does indeed become a matter of life and death. In my attempt to read the affective ramifications of testing for Sophie, my attention is drawn towards the self-perpetuating and recursive nature of state terror morphing into the ubiquitous affect of shame, with regard to the tradition of testing. Sophie realizes at the end of the novel how ‘nightmares are passed on through generations like heirlooms’ (Danticat 1994: 234). The many contingencies of shame are an integral part of these nightmares-as-heirlooms passed on from women to their daughters (Francis 2004: 76). The way that shame circulates in the novel is tied up with other affective formations, as they serve to carry its weight. In Breath, Eyes, Memory responsibility, honour, respect and being ‘good’ are close relatives of shame (cf. Ahmed 2004: 103) as they become evoked when validating testing; it is a mother’s responsibility to take care of the family’s honour by testing, and the daughters need to be respectful of their parents and be ‘good’ by abstaining from premarital sex. Failure to adhere to these codes leads to shame (Danticat 1995: 156). These related affects help shame’s work by making it ambivalent and contradictory (cf. Ahmed 2004: 105,



Reading the Intimacies of Shame in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory 43

112). Discussing shame in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Woodward (2000: 218) notes that it is passed down from one generation to the next. This intergenerational circulation of shame means that it is not simply a temporary, passing emotion (as we tend to think of emotions), but rather that it is ‘not so much identifiable as a particular emotion as it is virtually inherent in the way that one responds to the social world’ (ibid.: 224). In Breath, Eyes, Memory, the ramifications of shame are so pervasive that they do not need to be singled out and named all the time. However, in the instances where it is named, it becomes clear how and why it is the central affect, worthy of discussion on its own terms, as well as in relation to other affects. When Sophie is sent to the United States to live with her mother Martine in New York, the older woman inquires of her twelve-year-old daughter whether she has been ‘good’ (Danticat 1994: 60). She need not explain further, as Sophie explains to the reader that the question ‘meant if I had ever been touched, if I had ever held hands, or kissed a boy’ (ibid.: 60). Martine’s control of her daughter’s body works in this case through concealed language, where there is no need to overtly state anything sexual. In contrast, Martine then proceeds to inform Sophie about testing by telling her of her own experience of the practice, as administered by her mother years earlier: ‘When I was a girl, my mother used to test us to see if we were virgins. She would put her finger in our very private parts and see if it would go inside’ (ibid.: 60). Martine backgrounds the motivation to her daughter by telling her that testing was performed because it was the mother’s responsibility to ensure her daughter’s virginity until marriage. By evoking responsibility, Martine validates the testing which she does not carry out on Sophie at this stage but saves for the future, when she suspects the eighteen-year-old Sophie of potential sexual relations. After the explanation of testing, Martine tells her pre-teen daughter how she was conceived of a rape in the cane field, when an anonymous, masked man attacked her on the roadside when she was ‘just barely older than’ Sophie (ibid.: 62). Learning about rape as the origin of her conception, Sophie realizes that she is a constant reminder of the traumatic event for her mother (Scott 2004: 462). Thus Martine’s violation by rape and Sophie’s testing become discursively linked, as both are acts of sexual violence seeking control. Throughout the novel, we are faced with the novel’s characters being reminded of their pasts which, according to Scott, denotes the ‘historical continuities’ (2004: 463) at play in the novel as well as in Haiti. Testing can be located in these haunting historical continuities of Haiti, as one instance of the importance of social respectability in a class society where a woman’s worth was

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determined by her marriage value. As a woman’s respectability and economic class were largely determined by her marriage (Scott 2004: 469) and her honour by her respectability (Francis 2004: 82), the dynamic relationship between these factors leads to a harsh sexual discipline, desperately monitored by mothers wishing for a ‘better’ life for their daughters through marriage. According to Francis, the logic of this historical chain is that a ‘woman is property and her worth is determined by an exchange value that is measured by her virginity’ (2004: 82). In testing, the virginal female body becomes the valuable goods whose having remained intact ensures not only her own respectability, but that of her entire family. Foreshadowing the beginning of Sophie’s testings, Martine alludes to this chain of honour by lamenting its loss among the new generation of Haitian girls in the New World.4 She explains: ‘The problem with the new generation is that a lot of them have lost their sense of obligation to the family’s honor’ (Danticat 1994: 80) and instead of striving for respectability in the form of a middle-class occupation (particularly that of a doctor), they opt for unskilled menial jobs which bring in ‘quick cash’ (ibid.: 80). Her daughter Sophie turns out to be deemed a specimen of this new generation, unconcerned with issues of honour and middle-class aspirations, when she fails to come home early from her visit next door to see her new friend, the African-American jazz musician, Joseph. At home, the 18-year-old Sophie is taken upstairs to her bedroom by her mother, where she has to lie down on her bed while being tested for the first time (ibid.: 84). In the following weeks, Sophie undergoes a weekly testing in order to ascertain, in her mother’s words, whether Sophie is ‘still whole’ (Danticat 1994: 86, original italics). In this expression, wholeness and virginity become equated as a sign of the young woman’s worth to her mother. The allusion to wholeness is particularly ironic in the sense that as the testing continues over the following weeks, Sophie’s mind begins to disintegrate and she describes herself as follows: ‘My mother rarely spoke to me since she began the tests … I was feeling alone and lost, like there was no longer any reason for me to live’ (Danticat 1994: 86–7). What for her mother is an attempt to guarantee Sophie’s future security through virginity leading to respectable marriage, in fact for Sophie means the loss of a will to live and further alienation from the mother with whom she never developed a maternal bond growing up in Haiti. One night, when her mother goes out with her boyfriend, Marc, Sophie goes to the kitchen and finds a mortar and a pestle in the cabinet (Danticat 1994: 87). In an effort to salvage herself from further subjection to the traumatizing



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experience of testing, and in an act of sexual resistance, Sophie pushes the pestle inside herself in order to break her hymen, using the domestic object for selfinflicted violence (Scott 2004: 476). Causing herself immense physical pain, Sophie narrates in excruciating detail how her ‘flesh ripped apart’ as she pushed the pestle into her vagina and saw ‘blood slowly dripping on the bed sheet’ (Danticat 1994: 88). This act of self-inflicted violence can be seen as the drawing of a boundary in the form of breaking another – the hymen – as an effort to protect the surface of one’s body from transgression. Knowing that it will result in disgrace and loss of honour in her mother’s eyes, Sophie hurts herself to preserve her own sense of her bodily integrity by herself determining its uses. This act of self-inflicted violence may thus be seen as an act of resistance, yet it provides a hollow victory for Sophie (Francis 2004: 84) as it causes pain and trauma, landing her in the hospital where stitches are needed to repair her wounded labia. In order to understand Sophie’s decision to violently break her hymen, a closer look at the passages that explicitly evoke shame reveal to us the ramifications of sexual violence. Shame first becomes named in the novel when Sophie returns to Haiti about a year after the final incident of testing by her mother, which, of course, she fails (Danticat 1994: 88). This causes Martine to throw Sophie out of their home, and Sophie marries Joseph. Experiencing sexual problems in her marriage due to pain, phobia and lack of sexual desire, Sophie decides to return to Haiti in an effort to reconnect with her past. She takes her 20-week-old baby Brigitte with her to meet her Tante Atie and grandmother Ifé, and it is in Haiti that Sophie begins to address testing in a discussion about it with her grandmother. In the conversation with Grandmè Ifé, Sophie equates testing with humiliation. Her grandmother enquires: ‘Your mother? Did she ever test you?’ ‘You can call it that.’ ‘That is what we have always called it.’ ‘I call it humiliation,’ I said. ‘I hate my body. I am ashamed to show it to anybody, including my husband. Sometimes I feel like I should be off somewhere by myself. That is why I am here.’ (Danticat 1994: 123, latter italics mine)

In this passage, Sophie explains shame in two ways. First, by referring to testing as humiliation, she gives the practice the name of an affect (humiliation) which in turn leads to hatred and shame about her body. In Silvan Tomkins’s ‘polar continuum’ (Probyn 2005: 22) of affect, humiliation and shame are paired,

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suggesting a close dynamic between these singular, yet related, affects. In referring to testing as humiliation, Sophie invokes shame as its related meaning, thereby drawing the effects of testing closer to the actual deed in an effort to make sense, understand, and finally gain control over the destructive affect of sexual shame. Pointing out the relationship between shame and the body, Probyn remarks that ‘affects are of the body’ (ibid.: 27). Nowhere is this more poignant than in this passage, where Sophie relates her experience of testing to her grandmother. This ‘negative script’ (ibid.: 27) of humiliation writes its shameful text on Sophie’s body and leads her to hate her own body. It also triggers her wish to escape ‘off somewhere’ without her husband. This she cites as the reason for her coming to Haiti, and we can therefore read her sexual shame (borne from the humiliation of testing and the subsequent hatred and shame of the body) in its second meaning in this passage as a moving force; one that activates a quite literal transnational movement from the United States to Haiti in the form of her visit. As debilitated as she is by shame in her marital sex life, Sophie’s sexual shame is not entirely subjectivity-dismantling as it drives her to return to Haiti and begin the process of re-working her identity. In a further discussion with her grandmother, the dimensions of shame are complicated by Grandmè Ifé’s account of testing as a method of preventing – rather than a cause of – shame. Explaining to Sophie the reasons for testing, her grandmother states that: … from the time a girl begins to menstruate to the time you turn her over to her husband, the mother is responsible for her purity. If I gave a soiled daughter to the husband, he can shame my family, speak evil of me, even bring her back to me. (Danticat 1994: 156, my italics)

The fear of being shamed in this passage is yet another example of how shame functions in a circular, self-generating manner. Again, a looming and quite possible consequence of being shamed is a driving force of action. Unfortunately, as the chain of historical continuities would have us understand, at the same time as one form of potential shame is prevented by testing, shame is transferred to the tested subject. In this way, sexual shame ultimately reproduces that which it tries to avoid, as its effects reverberate in the identities and actions of those subjected to and by it. In other words, in shame we can see the simultaneous existence of cause and effect, of reason and result. It is therefore no wonder that shame circulates with such power in the narrative, as its selfgenerating and validating logic is fuelled by everything and everyone that it touches.



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Returning from her trip to Haiti, where Sophie is reunited and finally makes peace with her mother, Sophie learns that her mother is now pregnant. Having endured rape, continuous nightmares of the traumatic event throughout the years, breast cancer and her daughter’s disgrace in failing testing, Martine’s distraught state is amplified by the pregnancy. As she tells Sophie that she is pregnant, shame emerges again in the exchange between mother and daughter: ‘Pregnant?’ I stuttered. ‘Marc and I, we have –’ ‘You sleep together?’ She nodded, looking ashamed. (Danticat 1994: 189)

Even as a middle-aged woman, the grandmother of her daughter’s child, Martine still experiences shame when her non-marital sexual relationship with Marc, her long-time boyfriend, is revealed to her daughter. It also exposes the double standard of such ideals of sexual ‘purity’: while attempting to protect her daughter by testing, Martine has at the same time herself been sexually active as, having been raped in adolescence, she thinks she no longer has anything to lose. Not long afterwards, Martine commits suicide by stabbing herself in the stomach with a knife. In this act of violence she symbolically and literally kills her shame: by taking the life of herself and her unborn child, she retrospectively attempts to undo the lifelong shame inflicted on her by Sophie’s birth out of wedlock. At the same time, she makes sure not to experience further shame by again becoming an unwed mother (despite Marc’s wish to marry her, which she rejects, perhaps thinking she is beyond redemption). Taking her mother’s body to Haiti to be buried in her home village, Sophie, grandmother Ifé and aunt Atie conduct their own private wake for Martine, playing cards and singing a funeral song: ‘Ring sways to Mother, Ring stays with Mother. Pass it. Pass it along. Pass me. Pass me along’ (Danticat 1994: 230). Listening to the song, Sophie becomes aware of the larger frame involved in the passing on of the legacies of her ancestors. The word ‘pass’, repeated as an imperative in its many senses, refers to the historical continuities discussed in relation to testing and structural sexual violence. Sophie comes to realize that it is not only a question of her relationship to her mother, but also, as Francis comments, that of ‘a larger cultural framework that enforces misogynistic patriarchal values’ (2004: 85). As the request ‘pass it along’ morphs into the form ‘pass me’ and then ‘pass me along’, it signifies the need not only for the deceased to pass along to the other side (i.e. heaven), but

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also the need for those who stay behind in the land of the living to move along in their lives, to get past the losses that they have experienced. Furthermore, Sophie, the only married woman in the group, uses her wedding ring to be swayed in a thread during the wake song, thus incorporating her own marriage and married status in the ritual. The ring sung about in the song then comes to also symbolize the passing on of daughters from mothers and fathers to husbands in the patriarchal marriage institution. In understanding that ‘we were all daughters of this land’ (Danticat 1994: 230), Sophie comes to realize how also the land and the nation are made of its histories of oppression, not only its people. After that, her healing can proceed as she comes to understand that she no longer has to pass on the trauma, shame and pain as heirlooms to her own daughter.

Reworking shame in reading What does the work of shame in the novel do to the reader? Ahmed writes that shame is experienced as an exposure (2004: 103), where those who experience it are simultaneously turned to and from themselves. In shame, the subject feels the need for a hiding place, as they have revealed themselves and/or been exposed to others (ibid.: 103). That is why, in shame, we turn our heads, cover our eyes or turn away. In the novel, Sophie turns away from herself by separating her mind and body in ‘doubling’ when she is being shamed by testing: ‘I would close my eyes and imagine all the pleasant things that I had known. The lukewarm noon breeze through our bougainvillea. Tante Atie’s gentle voice …’ (Danticat 1994: 155). Explaining such a need to hide when feeling shame, Ahmed notes: ‘Shame consumes the subject and burns on the surface of bodies that are presented to others, a burning that exposes the exposure’ (2004: 103). In shame, we see ourselves through the eyes of another (ibid.: 106), and this un-covering is followed by our need to hide from ourselves – or from others. Thus, shame shapes the surfaces of our bodies and our orientation towards and away from the surrounding world (cf. Ahmed 2004: 4). Drawing on Tomkins’s theory of shame, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank note that shame is activated by ‘the drawing of a boundary line or barrier’ (2003: 116), where the dynamics of covering and un-covering that Ahmed discusses are in operation.5 Placing this idea in the context of Breath, Eyes, Memory, I wish to examine where the boundary lines or barriers are that a reader draws when reading about testing and the shame it generates.



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In order to discuss the need to draw boundaries between the text’s and the reader’s potential affects in reading the shame of testing, I turn to Ahmed’s (2004: 34) analysis of reading the contingency of pain in accounts of Aboriginal Australians – the Stolen Generation – abducted and adopted into white families. Ahmed cogently explains why readers should not adopt the texts’ affects as their own, because ‘to hear the other’s pain as my pain, and to empathize with the other in order to heal the body … involves violence’ (ibid.: 35, my italics). This domination of the other in the form of identification is based on a desire to relate to the other through a process of becoming-like, whereby ‘in becoming more like you, I seek to take your place’ (ibid.: 126). Likewise, taking the other’s place in feeling shame would generate it into a ‘wish feeling’, a projection of what the subject imagines the other person is feeling (ibid.: 30). Instead, witnessing shame entails an understanding of the links in historical, socio-cultural and interpersonal chains that create and trigger shame and which, in return, are themselves created by shame. Observing the different forms of shame in the text enables us to shift position according to each event of feeling shame in order to understand and observe the differences and gaps that they serve to create between women. The shamepreventing and indeed shame-generating act of testing ultimately produces that which it strives to avoid, as it serves to merely instil and shift shame into the tested subject. The dynamic is akin to that described in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: internalized subjection to patriarchal, sexist (and colonialism-derived) power spurs women to exercise control over each other as did the Macoutes, the dictator’s henchmen. Participating in this dynamic by the act of reading, the reader need not pass the shame onto herself by a self-identifying reading. To do so would allow the future continuity of the circulation of shame. Instead, a rejection of shame by the reading subject temporarily breaks the infective, historical cycle of shame. The reader’s exposure to this intergenerational shame produces not only testimonial witness, but also the limits of the interplay of that which is common and shared, and that which creates ruptures, damage and distrust between women. All the generations of women in the novel had to endure testing: its effects were different for each, but everything was fuelled by fear turning to humiliation and, in turn, to shame. Understanding the mechanisms of shame teaches us about the mortal coil that it produces, and that we, as readers hoping to be affected by our reading, may be able to resist. Woodward states this beautifully as she considers what can be achieved by the desolate, non-redeemable scenarios of shame in The Bluest Eye: reading shame can serve as ‘a touchstone

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for understanding what we expect to achieve’ (2000: 229). For, having reflected on the novel’s sexual histories, we as readers then orient our sights toward a different future. In Woodward’s case, reading Morrison’s novel may teach white readers to gain a more refined understanding of the work of racism (ibid.: 212). In Danticat’s case, shame in the novel may motivate its reader to a heightened sensitivity to read, observe and understand how it draws on the moral insight gained from its traumas. In that way, we not only understand the work of racism as in the case of Woodward’s reading of Morrison’s novel, but we also come to understand how sexism, violence and classism work within the arena of shame. Although the characters cannot all choose their reactions and responses to shame in a productive way, like Martine Caco who commits suicide, the selfreflexive nature of reading grants us, as readers, access to a variety of choices. We may choose to respond to shame, to speak to it and demand that it bends to our political purposes. A close reading of shame gives us access to the contexts in which it arises in each particular shame story, thus giving us the chance to learn from it lest we the readers (whoever we are) be damaged by it. As we recognize the varieties of shame, it ceases to exist as monolithic. Breaking shame down into smaller components is precisely where (in this case, a white) feminist reader’s privileged position can be put to work. Utilizing shame through a self-identificatory attempt at feeling the novel’s shame is not useful. Rather, adopting a respectful distance in order to witness this traumatic testimony in full is arguably a far more fruitful strategy. We are not to usurp Sophie’s, Grandmè Ifé’s or Martine’s position of shame, but to resist it precisely because of our adopted, affective reader’s position. There are times when it is best to be affected by curtailing that very affectivity.The novel’s shame needs to be resisted, not in an effort to be above such confining oppression, but rather because of the assumption, after Sedgwick, that an affective reader might be ‘shame-prone’ (2003: 37) to its contagiousness (ibid.: 36). Resistance to the novel’s shame produces a reader’s preferred observant position from which to witness Sophie’s process of freeing herself from sexual shame towards the end of the narrative, ultimately revealing the liberatory potential of Danticat’s novel. Eventually, Sophie finds help from the collective ritualistic agency of a women’s community. She enrols in group therapy sessions with fellow survivors of sexual violence. It is the collective act of naming their wrongdoers in a ritual that serves as a catalyst for healing, as each woman writes a name on a piece of paper and burns it. The act of naming here functions as a transmission to a consciousness of collective healing, where the meaning of one’s trauma is no longer lodged into an individual experience of violence but, rather, shared



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suffering is experienced by the community’s black women. As the offending deed has received its agent in the act of naming, both the survivor and the healing women’s community move on to a collective and communal polyphonic identity in their chant of affirmations individually and in unison. In this way, shame finally becomes reoriented towards its perpetrators and away from its victims, away from the narrative, and away from the reader.

Works cited Ahmed, S. (2001), ‘Communities that feel: intensity, difference and attachment’, in A. Koivunen and S. Paasonen (eds), Conference Proceedings for Affective Encounters: Rethinking Embodiment in Feminist Media Studies. Turku: Turun yliopisto, taiteiden tutkimuksen laitos, mediatutkimus, sarja A, pp. 10–24. Available: http://www.hum. utu.fi/oppiaineet/mediatutkimus/tutkimus/proceedings_pienennetty.pdf [accessed 23 May 2012]. —(2004), The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Campbell, S. (1997), Interpreting the Personal. Expression and the Formation of Feelings. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Chancy, M. (2004), ‘“No giraffes in Haiti”: Haitian women and state terror’, in M.-A. Sourieau and K. M. Balutansky (eds), Ecrire en Pays Assiégé: Haïti – Writing Under Siege: Haïti. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 303–21. Danticat, E. (1994), Breath, Eyes, Memory. London: Abacus. Derrida, J. (2004), Dissemination. Translated from the French by Barbara Johnson. London and New York: Continuum Books. Originally published in 1981. Francis, D. (2004), ‘ “Silences too horrific to disturb”: writing sexual histories in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory’, in Research in African Literatures, 35.2, 75–90. —(2010), Fictions of Feminine Citizenship. Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gourdine, A. (2002), The Difference Place Makes: Gender, Sexuality and Diaspora Identity. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Kainulainen, S. and Parente-Capkova, V. (2011), ‘Häpeän latautunut toiminta: esipuhe’ (The charged action of shame: a preface), in S. Kainulainen and V. Parente-Capkova (eds), Häpeä Vähän! Kriittisiä Tutkimuksia Häpeästä (Shame on You! Critical Studies on Shame). Turku: Utukirjat, 6–21. Koivunen, A. (2010), ‘An affective turn? Reimagining the subject of feminist theory’, in M. Liljeström and S. Paasonen (eds), Working with Affect in Feminist Readings. Disturbing Differences. London: Routledge, 8–28. Locke, J. (2007), ‘Shame and the future of feminism’, in Hypatia, 22.4, 146–62. Narain, D. C. (2002), ‘Standing in the place of love. Sex, love and loss in Jamaica Kincaid’s writing’, in P. Mohammed (ed.), Gendered Realities: Essays in Caribbean

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Feminist Thought. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press and Centre for Gender and Development Studies, 334–57. O’Callaghan, E. (1998), ‘ “Compulsory heterosexuality” and textual/sexual alternatives in selected texts by West Indian women writers’, in C. Barrow (ed.), Caribbean Portraits: Essays on Gender Ideologies and Identities. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 294–319. Patterson, A. H. (2001), ‘Contingencies of pleasure and shame. Jamaican women’s poetry’, in E. Bronfen and M. Kavka (eds), Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 254–82. Pearce, L. (1994), Reading Dialogics. London: Edward Arnold. —(1997), Feminism and the Politics of Reading. London: Arnold. Probyn, E. (2005), Blush: Faces of Shame. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Puren, N. (1995), ‘Hymeneal acts: interrogating the hegemony of rape and romance’. Australian Feminist Law Journal, 5, 15–26. Scott, H. (2004), ‘Ou libéré? History, transformation and the struggle for freedom in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory’, in M.-A. Sourieau and K. M. Balutansky (eds), Ecrire en Pays Assiégé: Haïti – Writing Under Siege: Haïti. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 459–78. —(2006), Caribbean Women Writers and Globalization: Fictions of Independence. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Sedgwick, E. K. (2003), Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Sedgwick, E. K. and Frank, A. (2003), ‘Shame in the cybernetic fold: reading Silvan Tomkins’, in E. K. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 93–121. Smith, F. (2011) (ed.), Sex and the Citizen. Interrogating the Caribbean. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. Valovirta, E. (2010), Sexual Feelings. Reading, Affectivity and Sexuality in a Selection of Anglophone Caribbean Women’s Writing. Turku: Anglicana Turkuensia No 28. Weir-Soley, D. (2009), Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women’s Writings. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Woodward, K. (2000), ‘Traumatic shame. Toni Morrison, televisual culture, and the cultural politics of the emotions’, in Cultural Critique, 46, 210–40.

Notes 1 The word testing is always written in italics in the novel, perhaps to highlight the horror it evokes in the narrator-protagonist, Sophie. 2 In a sense, affective reading embraces as well as questions the dreaded affective fallacy coined by New Critic W. K. Wimsatt, by which he referred to readers’ tendency to



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naively interpret texts according to their own feelings. This allergy toward the reader as someone who feels led to the eradication of emotions from reading and literary theory altogether. In the advent of the feminist affective turn (cf. Koivunen 2010), the affective methodology of reading, i.e. the ways in which we engage or could engage with texts through affect, has become a point of focus for feminist theorists (see Pearce 1997; Sedgwick 2003; Ahmed 2004). For more on the figure of the reader as an empirico-theoretical construct, see Pearce (1997) and Valovirta (2010). 3 Dictators François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier, ruled Haiti in the latter half of the twentieth century (1954–71 and 1971–86, respectively). During that time, thousands of dissenters were brutally murdered and the Duvaliers ‘encouraged foreign corporations to exploit Haitian workers in low-wage agriculture and industry’ (Scott 2006: 3). Historically, Haiti is the only country in the world with a successful black-led revolution in 1791. Despite (or perhaps even due to) this, Haiti remains one of the world’s poorest countries. 4 Martine never considers her own obligation to family honour, as she clearly considers herself a lost cause on account of her rape as a young girl in Haiti. This is also perhaps why she feels free to have a boyfriend, Marc. Later on in the novel, however, Martine is deeply conflicted about conceiving an illegitimate child with Marc, suggesting how her traditional rural Haitian beliefs clash with her adopted lifestyle in New York, the metropolis. More poignantly, however, Martine’s mental health deteriorates as she begins to hear her unborn child chiding her from the womb, calling her ‘a filthy whore’ (Danticat 1994: 217) and evoking visions of her rapist, Sophie’s biological father (ibid.: 199). 5 In testing, the hymen is seen as both a symbolic and literal boundary line that defines virginity and thus a woman’s marriage value, and, when broken, dismantles it. In cases of patriarchal virginity preservation, the hymen can be seen, after Nina Puren (1995: 15), as ‘a hegemonic phantasy’ and ‘its own myth’ (ibid.: 16) which stays fixed (or unfixed when broken) in the texts on rape and romance that she reads. Jacques Derrida (2004: 238) views the hymen as profoundly ambivalent, an undecidable that defies binary logic by simultaneously being a fold in the (vaginal) lining and (made of) that same lining that cannot be smoothed as there never was an original crease that could or should be smoothed. This ambivalence of the hymen formulated by Derrida as a part of his deconstructive project can be seen in Danticat’s novel in the way in which shame and the hymen do not, despite the efforts of those mothers who test their daughters, in fact become conflated as oppositional – the presence of a hymen does not in fact prevent shame – but as ambivalently co-dependent in that the hymen itself is a hegemonic phantasy that generates shame in all who become interpellated into that phantasy. As Sophie’s breaking of her own hymen without male penetration shows, the ‘hymeneal’ (cf. Puren 1995) logic of testing is a case of false logic.

4

Citation and Intimacy in Janet Frame’s Autobiography Sylvie Gambaudo Durham University

Janet Frame (1924–2004) was a New Zealand writer who published autobiographical and fictional work, short stories and poetry. She gained many literary accolades (for example, a CBE for Literature in 1983; the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize in 1989) and has reached iconic status in her native New Zealand. In the western world, Frame is probably better known for her lifelong dealings with mental illness, an experience that Jane Campion dramatized in her awardwinning film of the author, An Angel at My Table (Campion 1989). Frame was diagnosed with schizophrenia in her early 20s, in 1945, and spent eight years of her life in and out of psychiatric institutions in New Zealand. The diagnosis of schizophrenia was reversed in her late 30s, but psychiatric experience had an impact on the author’s vision of herself. During her formative years, the young Janet worked very hard at liberating herself from what she perceived as imposed rules regarding how and what aspects of her literary self she should reveal. In this chapter, I aim to show how Frame’s take on intimacy is entrenched in the literary treatment of family narratives she learned from birth. With the help of Judith Butler’s theory of identity I am hoping to show that Janet Frame’s practice of literary intimacy lies in her engagement with the concept of ‘citation’. Autobiography is traditionally regarded as the site where the author dedicates him/herself to revealing an intimacy of self. Revelation of the intimate would imply that such an intimate self, perhaps dormant, perhaps hidden, has been waiting to be revealed. Yet, this may not be the case. Among other explanatory discourses, the debates over the origin of one’s self presuppose the existence of a biological core or divine intervention, environmental determinism, reincarnation, or discursive effect. One of the most recent and controversial theories

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in this domain is Judith Butler’s concept of the ‘citational self ’, introduced in 1990 with the publication of Gender Trouble (Butler 1990). Butler’s take on how citation facilitates the revelation of one’s intimate self is particularly pertinent to the autobiographical exercise. She made her fame by insisting that what we perceive as a ‘self ’ is no more than an effect of citation. True to its postmodern roots, the ‘cited self ’ destabilizes the conception of the ‘I’ as the expression of a continuous, identified self, but her theory went a step further than postmodern critiques of the unified subject because she successfully proposed a framework that would explain the sense of ‘identity’ as well as critiquing the idea of a pre-existing form of essential selfhood. If identity was no longer the outcome of one’s revelation of one’s interiority, how could intimacy be resignified? In the wake of Butler’s work, Sidonie Smith partly addressed that question by discussing the link between autobiography and citation. ‘Autobiographical performativity’ (Smith et al. 1998: 108–15) would be an attack on the very idea of autobiography as a self-expressive act. Smith repeats Butler’s argument that there is ‘no essential, original, coherent autobiographical self before the moment of self-narrating. […] the interiority of self that is said to be prior to the autobiographical expression or reflection is an effect of autobiographical storytelling’ (Smith et al. 1998: 108–9). Smith argues for the process of autobiographical writing as one of performativity. She therefore rejects the idea of autobiography as the means to make-believe in the autobiographer’s real interiority. To suggest that autobiography is one of the revelatory modes of a trueness of self reinforces, she says, ‘the foundational myth of autobiographical storytelling as self-expressive of an autonomous individualism’ (Smith et al. 1998: 114). In the context of Butler’s work, Smith’s thesis is convincing. Indeed, autobiographies are the site of a literary mise-en-scène, at the crossroads between the writer’s intention, socio-political permission and the reader’s expectations. In what she calls ‘tactical dis/identifications’(Smith et al. 1998: 110), Smith points to the importance of self-censorship in autobiographical work: the autobiographer ‘adjusts, redeploys, resists, transforms discourses of autobiographical identity’ (Smith et al. 1998: 111). Autobiographies, then, are the site where the author at once reveals his/her intimacy and censors it. Smith’s application of Butlerian rhetoric to the field of autobiography is a step in the right direction in answering the question of intimacy in a theoretical climate where the existence of an interiority of self is doubted. Indeed, I will argue that Butler’s academic (and political) engagement with finding an epistemic framework that would explain the mechanics of self-revelation/censorship away from notions of a pre-existing self has much to offer to a study of intimacy. More precisely, I will argue that



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Butler’s ‘citational self ’ befits the autobiographical work of New Zealand author Janet Frame. In the early 1980s, Janet Frame published her three-part autobiography: To the Is-Land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984a) and The Envoy From Mirror City (1984b). The publication of Frame’s autobiography and later her official biography (King 2000) reinforced the image of the writer as an ambivalent character. Frame scholar Ruth Brown spends some time discussing this in her essay ‘Beyond the myth: Janet Frame unframed’: Frame is seen as standing apart, remote, a bit mysterious, shrouded in a kind of mist of otherness created by an intellectuality whose brilliant originality elevates her to that rank of writers given to high seriousness and accorded iconic status in the New Zealand literary culture. (Brown 2003: 122)

Brown finds that other critics (Williams, for example) are less charitable and see in Frame’s success a shrewd management of self-image towards literary celebrity (Brown 2003). There is then a tension between those who read Frame as the writer who successfully reveals the mysteries of inner selfhood, and those who see her success as the controlled promotion of a fabricated image. Frame is constructed as either a champion of intimate writing or as a master of disguise. But these opposed views of Frame need not be mutually exclusive. As we shall see, Frame uses citation as a means to express an intimacy of self, but also as a means to critique the very possibility of intimacy. In the first part of her autobiography, To the Is-Land, Frame puts forward the idea of citation as the act by which the self is both revealed and concealed. The first volume of the autobiography chronicles her journey into adulthood and describes her formative years. Strangely, Frame’s mother’s influence is seldom considered as a key factor in the construction of a narrative of self. Yet, it seems to me that the place given to her mother is paramount to an understanding of the author. Frame’s struggle to say who she is is clearly intertwined with the struggle to master the rules of how to say it. Her autobiography describes her effort to integrate different sets of rules (the family, school, friends, and so on) but in my reading, her mother has centre stage. Importantly, Frame’s autobiography also deals with her struggle to decipher the mechanics of self-regulation and the hidden purpose she sees in the exercise. To the Is-Land is filled with stories that describe the young Janet’s battle with a citation of self that would both copy learnt narratives and be distinct from them. Indeed, Frame is, from an early age, sensitive to the contradictions of intimacy and ritually returns to the question of how to reveal herself to the world and how the world will reveal itself to her. The young Janet establishes and then tries to unravel the

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puzzle of self-expression. On the one hand, words have the power to reveal one’s interiority to the world. But on the other, the same words also make unintelligible those other parts of the self that received family narratives do not accommodate. For example, in To the Is-Land Frame describes an excited seven-year-old Janet eagerly reporting at the dinner table what she has experienced that day (Frame 1990: 45). That afternoon, she had spent time with her best friend Poppy and learnt with delight the meaning of the word ‘fuck’, while the pair spied on Janet’s sister Myrtle having sex with a local boy. When she proudly announces that her sister ‘fucked’ that afternoon, she is not met with parental interest in her newly acquired knowledge but with her irate father, who verbally and physically lashes out against his daughters: Myrtle is hit with a belt and Janet ordered to sever all links with Poppy (Frame 1990: 45). The scene captures the passion of the protagonists but especially the confusion of the child that one word should connote such opposites: intimacy on the one hand, and fear and solitude on the other. The child learns in that moment that certain experiences are self-defining to her, but that the sharing of intimacy necessitates the understanding of how to do revelation the polite way. In other words, censorship becomes the key to good intimacy while unrestricted intimacy is the sure path to rebuff. This is further evidenced in Janet Frame’s use of the term ‘Ancestral’ to explain the rules of expression. The young Janet’s battle to liberate herself from familial and social constraints means liberating herself from the ways of ‘Ancestors’, as she calls them throughout the autobiography. Frame uses the word ‘Ancestor’ with a capital ‘A’ to refer to influences during her upbringing. The capitalisation confers the sense of awe the ancestral narrative is supposed to inspire in her and Frame’s overt mocking for the overrated importance ‘Ancestors’ are afforded.1 It seems at first reading that the term ‘ancestor’ could have quite happily been substituted for ‘family’ or ‘environment’. But I think Frame is looking to encompass much more than this, and the word ‘ancestor’ will undoubtedly have stronger connotations to a New Zealand readership familiar with Maori culture. ‘Ancestor’ in Frame is at the crossroads between several discourses, including the cultural, familial, political and historical. It is deconstructable by definition, but also at another more unconscious and primal level, it is the ancestral legacy of our humanity that lies beyond discourse. The question of how we make the ‘ancestral’ mean through narrative is a question that Frame engages with throughout the autobiography. The young Janet begins to grasp the idea that intimate revelation is tied to discursive formation from a very early age: content and form cannot be separated. From the beginning of To the Is-land, she observes how her mother, Lottie, frames the story of her daughter’s birth with an obvious concern for its



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future insertion in the ancestral narrative. Janet’s mother picks and censors elements of the birth experience that will confirm her (and by extension her daughter) as having made history at several levels. Frame tells us that she was delivered by the first female medical graduate in New Zealand; that her twin, unnamed, died after a few weeks (repeating the great-grandmother’s loss of two sets of twins); that Janet was ‘always hungry’ (Frame 1990: 10) but that maternal milk was so abundant it fed both herself and other babies. Lottie thus makes of Janet’s coming-to-existence an experience of historical, genealogical and heroic proportions: it is an experience in which the mother is the central character. Frame’s birth is clearly not about baby Janet but about validating Lottie as an instrument of the country’s history, as the subject of genetic misfortune, and as a heroic and virtuous figure, showing courage and generosity. In turn, Frame adopts her mother’s style and begins to cite the ancestral model. The autobiographical narrative thus becomes the repository of several converging voices: one is Lottie’s ancestral tale that the young Janet has integrated and that the narrator remembers; another re-cites this tale in what seems to me an overt parodying of the ‘ancestral’ legacy, in order to demark herself from it. This is better explained by turning to the description Frame gives us of her childhood. Frame’s mother, the narrator tells us, was strongly invested in the ritualistic revival of the past as the only mode of self-expression. Frame describes how she was conditioned to learn and use pre-agreed narratives of family history, the accurate performance of which became the condition to guarantee validation by and intimacy with other family members: Mother, a rememberer and talker, […] remembering her past as an exile remembers her homeland; Mother in a constant state of family immersion […] and immersion so deep that it achieved the opposite effect of making her seem to be seldom at home, in the present tense, or like an unreal person with her real self washed away. (Frame 1990: 8)

The children perceive their mother’s immersion in the family as a maternal frenzy unleashed in order to recall memories of her family life and of cultural events that marked her early years. Lottie associates memories of her childhood with elation. She re-cites lists of ancestors and their actions and she performs acts that are a repeat of ancestral acts. But the cultural events that marked her youth are selected for the sense of dread and catastrophe they inspire: earthquakes, slavery, and the sinking of the Titanic, for example. Hence, citation is double-edged: there is the ‘voice of mystery and wonder’ and the ‘panicked, […] earthquake-and-lightening voice’ (Frame 1990: 29). The double-bind of

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the past is taught to the children, who are requested to memorize and re-cite particular events in theatrical performances where the ancestors have centrestage. Through citation, family passions (magical but catastrophic, doomed but euphoric) are magnified. The revelation of one’s intimacy is then presented as an oscillation between two voices, euphoric and despairing, where the one at once cancels but also compensates for the other. Frame later tells us that her mother’s childhood was not one of happy intimacy but, on the contrary, one of neglect and solitude. While Frame draws no theoretical conclusions, the implications are there to be seen: Lottie’s polarized narratives (and later Janet’s) originated at the very point of Lottie’s lack, when the child she was split her world into two distinct categories: on the one hand, she invented a world of wonderful imaginary characters (ancestors) that could support her need for intimacy far better than the real ancestors. On the other, neglect and solitude, catastrophic for the child, are contained outside the family circle in ‘events’ that come to signify disaster. Lottie’s teachings of what intimacy entails – re-cited narratives, live performances, and ritualized bodily gestures and tones of voice – is experienced by her children as both the place where intimacy can be found and where it is denied. Jane Campion’s film captured very vividly the ritualized mise-en-scène of life events which, in order to be ‘shared’ and internalized as part of family history, must be recast as theatrical performances. But Frame also insists on a less pleasant effect of this maternal compulsion to ‘theatralize’ the past. While the children actively ‘perform’ to seek and share intimacy, they also experience performance as a haunting, a possession of their mother by ‘the space that another world and another time occupied in [their] mother’s life’ (Frame 1990: 8). Against the maternal wish that the past should be ‘remembered as paradisal’ (Frame 1990: 8), Frame increasingly expresses her wish to escape in the search for a truer sense of self. At the age of eight, Frame finds that she now has the literary maturity to appropriate and master the ancestral narrative, and to challenge its pretence to stand as the only narrative of her intimate self. This ‘discovery’ is the outcome of an event that changes the young Janet’s perception of both her mother’s truthfulness and by extension the truthfulness of her teachings. During the visit of the maternal grandmother, a possessive and judgemental woman, the young Janet becomes the spectator of exchanges between her mother and her grandmother and begins to suspect her mother’s confusion of closeness with theatrical performance. Frame conveys her consternation when her grandmother chastises Lottie for failing to stick to the ancestral narrative (Frame 1990: 57). The child



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is not concerned with her mother’s welfare but rather recoils at the revelation of their similarity of selves. Mother (Lottie) and daughter (Janet) are strikingly alike in the way they express their intimate selves, in the manner they spell out who they are to the world. Indeed, Frame’s phenomenal memory and focus on poetic details mirror her mother’s own obsessive listing of genealogy and poetic despair; they both oscillate between high and low states of emotions, and emotional oscillation signifies their common desire for good ancestry and the knowledge of its loss. Self-expression is thus found in the co-presence of euphoria/despair, in euphoria that despairs and in despair turned euphoric. Moreover, Frame identifies in her mother’s flights into imaginary worlds her own resistance to ancestral narratives. Poetic resistance becomes the means by which both daughter and mother convey a truer sense of being. Or to put it differently, by defying established narratives they successfully reveal a more intimate sense of self: She [mother] knew that we [children] knew now that her own mother had not been so perfect, after all, that she was just like all mothers around, […] and when she told us about the birds of the air, flying down to feed from Grandma Godfrey’s hand, Mother was really talking about herself […]. (Frame 1990: 58)

Interestingly, Lottie’s narrative of self (the birds flying down to feed off her hand), effectively a theatrical fabrication (a lie), is now recast as a truer expression of self. The young Janet can now truly see who her mother is in the fairytale Lottie creates about herself. It conveys both Lottie’s resistance to ancestral imposition upon the self and the imaginary reconstruction of what is more truly desired. During the grandmother’s visit, Lottie is torn between satisfying her mother’s demands, preserving the ancestral lie she created to counterbalance her own disappointment, and meeting her children’s needs for a more authentic intimacy. Incapable of choosing between conflicting conceptions of ‘family intimacy’, Lottie loses the allegiance of both her mother and her children, assumes a passive attitude, and falls into a melancholic state. For Janet, this moment is pivotal in understanding the true origin of what she perceives as intimacy, and in developing a critical eye for those areas of expression that mark intimacy as a coded narration of events. She comes to realize the role of citation in the narration of one’s self, and the relationship between narration and intimacy. In time, Frame will grow very skilful at flushing out what constitutes the fallacy of intimacy and develops a strategy of resistance to forced (fallacious to her) intimacies that will become her take on truer intimacy. Yet, on Frame’s own admission, recourse to citational tactics

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(resorting to more fabrication to resist fabrication) becomes the family trait that binds daughter and mother in an intimacy Frame feels uneasy about and which she prefers to put down to necessity rather than literary choice. As she put it: ‘I may have polished this shell of memory because it is constantly with me, not because I have varnished it for display’ (Frame 1990: 13). If Frame is admitting to an environmentally motivated interiority of self that predestined her to become the writer she became, she does not so easily capitulate before the evidence, nor does she resign herself to an interiority modelled on her mother’s. Her following years will be spent reclaiming Lottie’s citational strategy towards a more adapted, more singular, indeed more ‘polished’ and ironically more truthful sense of who she is. The end of the maternal claim to a paradisal past also coincides with the end of Frame’s naive performances of intimacy. Frame recognizes in her mother’s disappointing ploys her own desire to resist the terms by which intimacy is regulated. Like Lottie, Janet longs for an autobiographical narrative that would enable her to achieve the impossible: to become self-reliant and yet intimate, to cut herself from ties she experiences as oppressive and still convey intimacy to/with others. Beyond autobiographical revelations, Frame is also engaged throughout the autobiography in a self-critique of intimacy and writing. The close of the autobiography conveys the same message of hesitation, of being torn between keeping experience hidden and the imperative to tell: ‘You know it’s time to pack this collection of years for your journey to Mirror City’ (Frame 1990: 434–5). For Frame, Mirror City represents ‘the transformation of ordinary facts and ideas into a shining palace of mirrors’ (Frame 1990: 434). Yet, the fabrication of Mirror City, the writing of intimacy, will mean the desecration of phenomenological experience that writing alters and only reflects: ‘Take care. Your recent past surrounds you, has not yet been transformed. Do not remove yet what may be the foundation of a palace in Mirror City’ (Frame 1990: 434). Even at the end of some four hundred pages of autobiographical revelations, Frame still concludes in favour of waiting, of not ending the autobiography, signalling her reluctance to use up her autobiographical material. Her waiting is hesitance rather than reluctance, and a means to answer the question of intimacy with another question. Indeed, Frame remains aware to the end of the double-bind of intimacy, that it is at once an act of dissemination and dissimulation. While being aware of her limitations as a writer, or perhaps because of them, she devised a ‘technique’ to dampen the dissimulating effect of writing intimacy. In what follows, I would like to return to Frame’s journey towards authorial maturity and show how she succeeded (at least partly) in making resistance to dissimulation the site of enhanced intimacy.



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We have seen that both mother and daughter share a desire to liberate themselves from ancestral constraints and this desire goes well beyond the expected wish to grow up and fly with one’s own wings. It is also a wish to sever the link from bad blood, while at the same time compensating for the loss of ‘family’ this severing entails. If ancestors are unreliable, the young Janet puts her trust in literature and focuses her energy on self-teaching the citational tactics that will give her the means of self-expression she covets. Frame tells us that as she matured, a more thought-out sense of intimacy emerged. This is felt in the autobiography through a change of style that is both that of Frame imparting maturity to the child she was, but also the child’s own choices. For example, from the age of eight, Janet makes more direct attacks on the adult world, and these are events that the adult Frame remembers and reports, not without humour. The reports are enmeshed with retrospective assessments of the young Janet’s critical engagement with herself and the world, and of how she began to spell out the criteria for a narrative of self that would become her literary trademark. Criticism and resistance to adult constraint mark Frame’s teenage years. But again, this is more than the clichéd image of the hormonal adolescent. More interestingly, this resistance to constraint is felt at several levels of her development: it is felt in her adult assessment of those formative years and in the autobiographical exercise, in short, in content and form. The literary embedding of a lost past in the ‘present’ of writing creates the superimposition of different moments, which, under the writer’s pen, amount to a new time trail that defies the passing of time. But it does not mean Frame has found the means to beat the problem of Mirror City. The past and present are fully entwined also as part of a literary technique that reveals the arbitrariness of the writing exercise and the author’s rejection of the omniscience that is supposed to come with hindsight. For example, when she tells us she felt ‘physical discomfort’, ‘restricted’, ‘sealed’, ‘captured’, ‘imprisoned’ and ‘powerless’ (Frame 1990: 116), the same set of words literally refer to the tightness of her clothes that do not fit the growing child and to the constraining world she grew up in, but they also signify the adult author objecting to literary conventions cramping her style then and now. When she talks of a ‘strong attraction to ordinary objects that might in the end become extraordinary’ (Frame 1990: 117), Frame is referring to her own revolt against familial, social and literary conventions. Those objects are conventionally meant to be ordinary, or more to the point, Frame is supposed to see them as such. It is the subtext behind ordinary, the ‘meant to’ or ‘supposed to’ that Frame is attracted to. In systematically grabbing ordinary objects and

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transforming them via literature into extraordinary ones, she undoes (and thus shows) the process by which the object is averaged in the first place. This includes herself as object. She revolts against the averaging of self and the autobiography is very much the space where she defies conventions about self and about autobiography to share something unique, something extra-ordinary, something intimate. The extra-ordinary self we are presented with has nothing to do with the fantasy of a super-self. Rather, ‘extra-ordinary’ refers to the wish for singularity, for the recognition of her (and by extension others’) unique interiority. Time and time again, Frame expresses her fear that in respecting conventions, she is agreeing to an ordinariness of self where her unique interior is evened out to an average of selfhood: Well, my sister had died, and the cats had died, and my brother had epilepsy, but for all that and for all my newly acquired or acknowledged imagination, I and my life, I felt, were excessively ordinary. […] I felt keenly […] Shelley’s probable disapproval of me, for he had complained of Harriet that she was interested only in looking at hats. I resolved I would never be like Shelley’s wife. (Frame 1990: 132)

It is in many ways a complaint against the normalizing of self that Frame is voicing. Because of her investment in literary expression, her work becomes the site of a critique on socialization and on the promotion of the self when it has been levelled out to an average, when it becomes a ‘benchmark of the self ’, so to speak, shared by a community: ‘women’ are interested in hats and dull; ‘poets’ are imaginative and exciting. Hence, with a bold statement – ‘They think I’m going to be a schoolteacher, but I’m going to be a poet’ (Frame 1990: 132) – she defies ‘them’ and sets poet-hood as the antidote to dullness. More precisely, poetry becomes, in the young Janet’s mind, the condition to resist becoming ordinary. Her only career path should be to embrace the teaching profession; she resolves instead to become the unimaginable for a girl growing up in 1930s New Zealand: a poet. But there is no feminist undertone here. The young Janet’s rebellion targets something else – the literary formation of the acceptable self – and actively seeks resistance to this compulsion to the ordinary. In the hope of escaping the ancestral influence, Frame methodically applies herself to changing her relationship with the past. Her predilection for ‘techniques of making […] things last’ (Frame 1990: 86) that she had inherited from her mother’s teachings becomes the focus of self-analysis. In ‘making things last’ both mother and daughter found a means to preserve a sense of stability in the face of an ever-changing reality and a defence against an unsatisfactory past.



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But where Lottie defended against change by forbidding deviation from recited narratives, effectively forbidding loss and keeping it at bay, Frame became famous for the skills she developed as a writer of loss. Indeed, she describes in To the Is-Land how she finds ‘solace in such learning of all those new worlds, of changes in the past’ (Frame 1990: 91). Frame thus develops a skill in pinpointing those moments in the past that carry within their fixed narratives a sense of transformation, of loss, of death, and of change. The literary treatment of those moments, mostly magnifying their phenomenological truth, enables her to recapture that ‘something’ that was believed lost. Arguably, Frame’s strategy is on a par with the maternal injunction to defend against loss, but Frame finds her sense of self not in the avoidance of loss but, on the contrary, in the moment of loss. Loss increasingly becomes one of the criteria by which Frame finds the intimacy of self she covets. The author will later publish numerous semi-autobiographical and fictional pieces in which she actively seeks to write about those experiences where the main character has lost ‘something’ (through death or madness, for example; see Gambaudo 2012). That ‘something’ becomes Frame’s preferred literary theme. The particular thematic formations of loss are those that one expects to find: for example, death, insanity or exile. But more unusually, ‘loss’ becomes increasingly synonymous with ‘constraint’; where there is constraint, there is censorship and therefore loss. Frame’s strategy to better recapture herself thus goes along the following sequence: to reveal who she is, she must resist ancestral constraint. To resist constraint, she must resist loss. To resist loss, she must seek out the lost object and recapture it by ‘making it last’. In Frame’s work, the lost ‘something’ that must be resisted becomes diversified from a family-contingent sense of constraint into a community-contingent one. Possibly, this diversification stems from her early belief that nothing of significance happened to her that could count as ‘something lost’. At age eight, the young Frame deplores her inability to fulfil the criteria for poet-hood (to be melancholic), because she has not, at that point in her life, known ‘loss’. In her own childhood perception: ‘How could I ever be a poet when I was practical, never absent-minded, I liked mathematics, and my parents were alive?’ (Frame 1990: 92–3). Her following years will be marked by the recasting of ‘loss’ away from ‘loss of a loved one’ and towards the loss of ‘something’. Frame found in that ‘something’ the terrain where she could express a singular literary practice and therefore a more intimate sense of self: In spite of my longing [to be a dreamer], I remained uncomfortably present within the world of fact, more literal than imaginative. I wanted an imagination

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Scenes of Intimacy that would inhabit a world of fact, descend like a shining light upon the ordinary life of Eden Street, and not force me to exist in an elsewhere. (Frame 1990: 101)

Frame finds she conveys her interiority better by making of herself the writer of the mundane and bearing witness to the painful experience of a ‘passing’ of everyday reality. On her own admission (Frame 1975) the author actively sought those life experiences out of which she could extract a sense of ‘loss’. She became famous also for writing about experiences that seemingly contain little in terms of events or actions. For example, in many places, the narrator of To the Is-land dwells on what could appear dull, uninspiring and pointless descriptions of agricultural chores or the details of a walk in the countryside. Indeed, some critics have expressed their ‘disappointment over the author’s ostensibly laconic and impassive’ (Henke 2000: 652) rendering of events. They are referring to those parts of her work where seemingly nothing happens. More interestingly, they are referring to those events in Frame’s life which should inspire some form of excitement; for example, the candid depiction of her suicide attempts, or of her predilection for reading books in cemeteries, or of her loss of sanity that led to her incarceration in a psychiatric hospital. Frame successfully conveys such extra-ordinary events as if they were no more significant than a stroll along the river. In another example, The Reservoir, she does the opposite. The short story describes the journey of three children who, disobeying adults, decide to walk to the local reservoir. By the end of the day, nothing has happened; the children are back safely and their parents remain unaware of their disobedience. Yet, the reader is led to believe that to the children, the walk to the forbidden reservoir is a self-defining moment in their lives. Such narratology has led some critics to argue in favour of the author’s mental instability, suggesting autism or social anxiety disorder (Abrahamson 2007; Heath 2009). While their careful tracking down of possible symptomatologies in Frame’s biography and autobiographical work can lead to conclusions in favour of some form of mental disorder, I also think they are partly missing the point. I would suggest instead that Frame’s interest in transforming the everyday into the extra-ordinary is a form of authorial resistance to lingering maternal injunctions to be intimate the ancestral way. She became a specialist in narrating the extra-ordinariness of the mundane (agricultural chores, the silhouette of rabbits against the green backdrop of a hill or seagulls defecating on a garden gnome) or narrating the routine humdrum of extra-ordinary events (how to kill yourself or life on a psychiatric ward). The latter was especially significant for Frame given her obvious connection with extra-ordinariness (‘madness’ and literary fame).



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Indeed, to a large extent it was the loss of her ‘madness’, of her claim to an extraordinary (schizophrenic) self, that became the stepping stone towards a more systematic use of citation in her work. An analysis of Frame’s literary treatment of her alleged madness is very telling of the key role the mis/diagnosis of mental disorder played in shaping her sense of intimacy. Her emancipation from psychiatric constraint was much less liberating than she had imagined it would be and the reversal of her diagnosis highlighted the supporting role constraint played in her life. Indeed, in renouncing the label ‘schizophrenic’, Frame found that her own survival mechanisms were under threat: ‘Now, without my schizophrenia, I had only my ordinary self to use to try to explain my distress’ (Frame 1990: 382), she says at the end of the third autobiographical volume, The Envoy from Mirror City. From age twenty-one, Frame’s life was very much organized around her psychiatric condition and ‘schizophrenia’ was pivotal to her day-to-day existence. First, being diagnosed gave her a right to public assistance, in the form of financial help (the equivalent of today’s disability benefits) and access to health care, in particular psychiatric organisations. Second, in the wake of R. D. Laing’s work, the 1950s anti-psychiatry movement provoked a rise of interest in ‘madness narratives’ and Frame found her own experience opened publishing opportunities (for example Faces in the Water 2009). It also regulated intimacy. Her schizophrenia (as she put it) had become a defining characteristic of the self, a self-explanatory term that preceded her in her exchanges with others. Hence, the manner she presented her schizophrenic self played a crucial part in Frame’s aptitude to connect with others. It was in fact one of the features that regulated a certain dynamic of intimacy: it could be the pretext to request others’ help or, on the contrary, it could be the justification for choosing isolation. In return, she became the object of others’ curiosity or concern or frustration. In short, schizophrenia was the key to intimacy and to its avoidance. ‘Having’ a psychiatric condition made Frame’s narrative of self only a partially cited one. From a literary perspective she could, to some extent, claim an inherence of interiority which she alone could not reveal. Intimacy then relied on the expert intervention of medical diagnosis, for example, or of biographers au fait of the long history poets shared with madness, or of feminists who understood the relationship between womanhood and madness, or of any other narrative that could explain the relationship between madness and social intelligibility. Indeed, without her schizophrenia what would she use to signify who and what she was, and demark herself from the ordinary? The diagnosis reversal (informally relayed to Frame in the late 1950s and medically certified in

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writing in 1974) became the turning point in Frame’s move towards a fully cited intimacy of self. Following diagnosis reversal, Frame increasingly moves away from a naturalistic explanation of self and towards recasting ‘her mad self ’ in terms of a ‘doing’ of mental illness. Schizophrenia changes from something that she has to something that she did in order to gain intelligibility in an environment that required her to do so. Frame is referring not only to psychiatric hospitals, but also to the world outside hospitals. Her autobiographical work has many examples of awkward moments when she believes medical staff, family members, friends and publishers anxiously expect her behaviour to confirm the diagnosis. Frame suggests that she increasingly learned to slip into character and performed according to a script observed during internment. The diagnosis reversal equals the withdrawal of her life script, and leaves her to undo its performative mechanics and replace them with self-made ones: ‘No longer, I hoped, dependent on my “schizophrenia” for comfort and attention and help, but with myself as myself, I again began my writing career’ (Frame 1990: 385). At the end of her autobiographical trilogy, Frame notes how literature again becomes the space where she seeks self-salvation. She reappropriates her schizophrenic self and a more literary citation of self becomes the source of intimacy. Until the end of her life and beyond her death, Frame remains the champion of a certain form of expression in which readers find the accomplishment of their own struggle to reveal who they are. If we follow Frame’s lead, successful intimacy is the struggle to find a way to tell the world about one’s unique experience of ‘self ’ in a context favouring more typical, and therefore less intimate, expressions of identity. Janet Frame’s rise to international literary recognition intensified following the release of New Zealand director Jane Campion’s film about her, An Angel at My Table. The Women’s Press took the opportunity to publicize Frame’s work by reissuing her autobiographical trilogy in one single volume. While this helped Frame’s international career as a writer, it also brought her into the public eye. Her work and life became the focus of a particular type of interest and scrutiny, a voyeuristic curiosity for Frame’s lived experience of ‘madness’ and its ‘treatment’, which Campion had so vividly captured in her film. Some critics and reviewers went ‘looking for Janet Frame’, inspecting her work and her life to confirm a diagnosis of mental illness (Abrahamson 2007). Most critics defend her oddness and find in it a more intimate understanding of what it is to be human (Henke 2000; Delrez 2002; Brown 2003; Gambaudo 2012). The question of Frame’s deliberate focus on areas of human experience that resist accepted forms of citation (the ‘something



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lost’ I described earlier) remains key to understanding this author’s engagement with intimacy. It is, in my opinion, one way of explaining why some critics feel the need to maintain the possibility of Frame’s ‘mad’ narrative. The maintenance of the ‘mad’ Frame is even more pertinent in the current theoretical context. Frame’s autobiography now appeals to a middle-class readership invested in the idea of the self as property (King 2000). In the wake of Judith Butler’s innovative intervention in the field of identity theory in 1990, the focus on intelligible and unintelligible (or ‘queer’, to borrow from Butler) areas of experience have allowed theories of self to take new directions. A Butlerian framework befits Frame’s literary style. Frame’s narrative of self defies any pretention to finding a recipe for ‘doing intimacy’ or instructions on how to use one’s self towards better intimacy. Indeed, it is precisely those consensual formulas that her work reveals as antithetic to intimacy. I would go as far as suggesting that Frame’s work even supports the opposite. Anything that is not intimate, that is, anything that does not reveal the unique character of individual experience, any attempt at mirroring, copying or repeating consensual narratives of self are for her markers of personal sabotage and thus a form of ‘madness’. As far as the self as commodity is concerned, Frame offers us the possibility of literature as critique. Abiding by established ‘recipes’ of self enables the proprietor to display their adherence to agreed formulae. It would seem then that following consensual recipes would be the path towards a common intimacy. Yet Frame tells us something else. Under her pen, the exposure of her mother’s attachment to ancestral narratives, Frame’s own predilection for peculiar areas of experience and for those experiences that connote loss become the sites of a critique of the very idea of self and of intimate experience. The need to maintain the possibility of Frame’s ‘mad’ narrative could thus have two motives: intimacy is the act by which the individual consents to particular rituals while pathology is the act by which Frame prevents intimacy; or intimacy is a singular experience approximated only through extra-ordinary (mad) expression. Either way, the ‘mad narrative’ becomes the condition for intimacy. My reading of Frame’s citational tactics towards intimacy aimed to show something else. Inasmuch as we can talk about ‘queering’ narratives as critical methodology, then Frame’s ‘queering’ tactics say something interesting about autobiography and intimacy. This is what I will finish with. Frame’s take on intimacy shows a paradox. She was famously a very private person and was certainly not ordinarily the socialite her rise to fame required her to become. Faced with undesired critical attention, her response was to direct attention at her work, rather than herself, effectively encouraging us to

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find her in the literary treatment of experience. Citation is both the way towards intimacy and its avoidance, but avoidance goes well beyond the refusal to connect. She successfully used a citation-of-self in her autobiographical work to reveal an intimacy of self she felt she was denied by others’ citational modes. The cited self was constituted as the author gained independence from maternal and psychiatric narratives. The dissolution of imposed narratives of self coincides with the emergence of a more intimate self. To begin intimacy, Frame warns us, is to confront ourselves with myth (Frame 1990: 7). In her case, it meant the unravelling of a narrative peopled with ‘ancestors’. The very exercise of writing intimacy ends with the waiting of what she calls ‘the Envoy’ (Frame 1990: 435). The Envoy is that character who has expectations from the author, a force that propels the narrative forward and asks the author to deliver ‘autobiography’. The Envoy is even more powerful as a trope because it is not clear who s/he is, nor who sent him/her. Is the Envoy Frame’s agent? Her readers? Herself? Was he/she sent by society? God? Inner desire? Frame does not specify, but what matters to her is that the Envoy should be an expectant figure. As Frame delivers the last line of her autobiography – ‘And the Envoy waits’ (Frame 1990: 435) – hopes for a completed autobiography are not fulfilled. Thus, to the end, the literary practice of intimacy lies in not satisfying the expectant Envoy. Janet Frame will not abide by the rules that could regulate the autobiographer. She will not normalize her work, nor deliver the expected finished product. To the end, she remains critical of ‘techniques’ of intimacy, even her own, and finds intimacy in the dissolution of its formation.

Works cited Abrahamson, S. (2007), ‘Did Janet Frame have high functioning autism?’ in The New Zealand Medical Journal, 120/1263. Online: http://journal.nzma.org.nz/ journal/120–1263/2747/ [accessed 13 August 2012]. Brown, R. (2003), ‘Beyond the myth: Janet Frame unframed’, in Journal of New Zealand Literature, 21, 122–39. Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble. London: Routledge. Campion, J. (1989), An Angel at My Table. New Line Cinema. Delrez, M. (2002), Manifold Utopia: The Novels of Janet Frame. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Finney, V. (1993), ‘What does “Janet Frame” mean?’, in Journal of New Zealand Literature, 11, 193–205. Frame, J. (1962), The Edge of the Alphabet. New York: Brazillier.



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—(1975), Television interview in Three New-Zealanders: Janet Frame. Documentary by Endeavour Television Productions Ltd. Commissioned by the NZBC. —(1982), To the Is-Land. New York: Braziller. —(1984a), An Angel at My Table. New York: Braziller. —(1984b), The Envoy From Mirror City. Auckland: Century Hutchinson. —(1990), An Autobiography. London: The Women’s Press. —(1996), The Reservoir. London: Phoenix. —(2009), Faces in the Water. London: Virago Press. Gambaudo, S. (2012), ‘Melancholia in Faces in the Water’, in Journal of Literature and Medicine, 30:1, 42–60. Henke, S. A. (2000), ‘Jane Campion frames Janet Frame: A portrait of the artist as a young New Zealand poet’, in Biography, 23:4, 651–69. Heath, D. S. (2009), ‘Towards another summer’, in Psychiatric Services, 60:12. Online: http://psychservices.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/60/12/1694 [accessed 01 May 2011]. King, M. (2000), Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame. Berkeley, CA and New York: Counterpoint. Smith, S. and J. Watson, (1998) (eds), Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.

Note 1 In what follows, I am using ‘ancestor’ as a Frame-specific term without a capital letter.

5

Textual Intimacies: Letters, Journals, Poetry – Ghost Writing Telegraph Cottage Felicity Allen Artist

Simon Smith

University of Kent

At the beginning of A Lover’s Discourse Barthes sets out his project: ‘What is proposed … is a portrait – but not a psychological portrait; instead, a structural one which offers the reader a discursive site’ (1990: 3), and this outline summarizes the project Telegraph Cottage, which started its life as two separate pieces of writing. The prose sections are extracts from a lifelong journal by Felicity Allen, and the poems by Simon Smith are cut-ups from the love letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, originally written and dispatched in 1845 and 1846 (Browning; Barrett: 1899). When we compared notes we saw motifs, patterns, repetitions and counterpoints emerging in the two writings, in a kind of Barthean drama. It appeared we had an intertwined text where the immediacy of the diary ‘spoke’ through the ghostly, semi-erased traceries of the poems, as the work took on a quality of chiastic balance. This balance is one driven by the dynamic Heidegger identifies in his essay ‘The Thing’, between ‘nearness’ and ‘distance’, where ‘nearness … cannot be encountered directly’ (1975: 166), but only through things, through the materiality, resistance and operation of the word as thing – through textual intimacies. The rhythm, juxtaposition and tension between the impersonality of poetry and the privacy of the journal, it seemed to us, created a narrative engine and symbiosis, identifying the archetype in the everyday, a love letter to the moment. And there were further points of coincidence: we live literally yards up Telegraph Hill in South East London from where Robert Browning received and dispatched those now-famous letters. While the letters were being exchanged, Elizabeth Barrett was writing her ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ (1850). In their

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‘restored’ form they reveal their ‘ghosting’ of the letters, and through the revolutionary punctuation, fragmented syntax and leaps of the writing process, these sonnets emerge, intimate with her shifts of thought and emotion. In the name of Browning’s house we found the title of our book: Telegraph Cottage (2007). Telegraph Cottage is a journal – a journal containing fifteen poems intertwined and intimate with a diary. This is a book intimate with the events that have happened, a witnessing; its truth intimate with that telling through the closeness, and the exact detail of its telling. Another book contemporaneous with Telegraph Cottage is Swoon (2001), a book that started its life as an email correspondence between Gary Sullivan and Nada Gordon in the 1990s, which soon took on the intimacy of ethereal love letters passing across the ether. At the height of drama in their book Swoon, Gary remarks to Nada: ‘we’re fragile beings … & as strong as intimacy makes us … to have it severed … is disastrous’ (2001: 171). Does intimacy make us strong, or simply vulnerable? And do we mistake closeness for intimacy, where the purpose of writings of intimacy is to hold us apart, not to allow us to collapse into the annihilation and consummation of One? Intimacy is in the distance between close and closed, bound in the difference of that one consonant. For Maurice Blanchot in The Space of Literature (1982) the ‘Journal’ is that which the writer has recourse to: His feeling is one of extreme repugnance at losing his grasp upon himself … What must the writer remember? Himself: who he is when he isn’t writing, when he lives daily life … the tool he uses in order to recollect himself is … the very element of forgetfulness: writing … The truth of the journal lies not in the interesting, literary remarks … but in the insignificant details which attach it to daily reality. The journal represents the series of reference points which a writer establishes in order to keep track of himself … It is a route that remains viable … Here true things are still spoken of. Here whoever speaks retains his name and speaks in this name … The journal – this book which is apparently altogether solitary – is often written out of fear and anguish at … solitude. (Blanchot 1982: 28–9)

What Blanchot remarks on here marks also the movement of the diary of Telegraph Cottage to speak to that solitude outside time, and yet also contingent on the microscopic shifts from moment to moment registered in the diary, engaging the attention of the dead, and those to come, those outside these contingencies of the present through a different register, a further reach of address. Blanchot continues:



Textual Intimacies: Letters, Journals, Poetry – Ghost Writing Telegraph Cottage 75 The recourse to the journal indicates … He doesn’t want to interrupt the … days … which really follow one upon the other. The journal roots the movement of writing in time, in the humble succession of days … it is said in the security of the event. It belongs to occupations, incidents, the affairs of the world. It happens that writers who keep a journal are the most literary of all, but perhaps this is precisely because they avoid … the extreme of literature, if literature is ultimately the fascinating realm of time’s absence. (Blanchot 1982: 29–30)

In Telegraph Cottage the poems are counterpoint to this idea of the journal’s personal sentiment, made of the letters of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, in their signing off, an intimacy opened out into a new depersonalized, poetic space. This new-found, personal address of the reader in the new poems, as though realized miraculously, is a freshly negotiated intimacy, cleansed of the immediate, an opening out of the personal into a discovered intimacy for the reader through the spaces, juxtapositions, the turning of lines through a new poem. Seeing the words as though for the first time, the circumstance, the mundane pared away, fashioned into the intimate, the newly phrased utterance, newly mouthed, felt around by the lips with each reading. Each violent breakage of the letters’ text is an extremity, and a new intimacy is revealed in the intimacy of ‘the work’. Blanchot again: ‘there is a work only when, through [the book], and with it the violence of a beginning which is proper to it, the word being is pronounced. This event occurs when the work becomes the intimacy between someone who writes it and someone who reads it’ (1982: 22–3). The words step outside time on their first occasion, stumble blinded, stuttering into the light of this new context, their new solitude. And yet letters, even intimate letters between lovers, are not the same as the journal. This is the site of extreme sentiment and emotion with no space for the observer, the casual or attentive reader placed in the difficult position of the unwilling eavesdropper, or the furtive voyeur. The reader squeezed out, uninvited, or the reader gorging surreptitiously, in frenzy. The journal speaks, in silence to itself, mouthing the words, an aide memoire, an annex to the writer’s psyche, by the writer for the writer. The secret is the journal and letter writer’s mutually held risk, which the reader beyond might discover – their intimacy dissolved. The poems of Telegraph Cottage and ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ pass by one another in space and time, through Blanchot’s intimate space of the night. The poems of Telegraph Cottage are raised from the letters, like the dead. Barrett finds it almost impossible to hold the sonnet together: it sinks back into the conversation of the love letter; the informality and intimacy of the fragment; the

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sonnet-form a mere grid held over the fragmentation of the language, desperately employing all manner of punctuation, ellipses, syntactical breaches and eventually breaking into a new intimacy, neither sonnet nor letter but both. Her sonnets are a graphic trace of form and fleeting tatters of conversation or thought, stream-of-consciousness in a box, a light-enough contingency to be blown away on the wind and the breath, enacting a kind of Mallarméan crisis of language, both the wrought and the raw in an intimacy of feeling and form: the intimacy of breakage; the playing out of a theatre of intimacy, drawing away from circumstance and the everyday; stripping away reference to reveal the intimacy of the poem and self-referentially revealing its own procedure in the intimacy of its own process. What Blanchot says of Mallarmé applies to Barrett and Telegraph Cottage: ‘from here on, it is not Mallarmé who speaks, but language which speaks itself: language as the work and the work as language (1982: 41).

Telegraph Cottage (for Guy and Béatrice)

Sunday 11 February 2007 Just put a branch of beautiful fat sticky buds in the brass vase. S + I went to Nunhead Cemetery this morning – I broke them off a chestnut tree that had been toppled by the ferocious winds of the last few days. We rose late this morning after a lovely peaceful time together lying in bed, Simon reading me poetry, in the morning sun, and then the walk. Now Simon’s making his standard Sunday fry-up for us all. In the cemetery we walked our usual walk up the hill, past the ruins of the church, on up to the right towards the brow of the hill, past the rich, grand, absurd Victorian graves, round again to the right, up to the top and, just as you tip down, looking across through the narrow diagonal vista that frames St Paul’s, cut through the dense trees, down, sloping through the wilder woods tangled up with the fallen stones which were once graves, and back towards the gate. As usual we stopped and read the names on the memorial of the Scottish freedom fighters from the turn of the nineteenth century who were transported to Australia for demonstrating for the right to vote. And then out of the big iron gate on to the beautiful huge pavement slabs of limestone past the pinched housing estate and the dusty road which always looks too bare with too many



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suburban cars that leads back past Aske’s playing fields. Then over the railway bridge footpath and across the road to the high park where we look at London. Today, clear, we saw it all, way past the Wheel to the new Wembley Stadium. Then round the corner, between the school and the reservoir, home.

Later Simon suggested a way we might write together. It symbolized for me a teenage fantasy of mine: finding a mate to make art with. Provoked me to tell him I felt more unconditionally loved by him than anyone since my mother died. Combination of stability, reciprocity, and not being fazed by each other’s emotional life. Free to be emotional + secure, reminiscent of being loved by Mum. She, of course, has a lot to answer for: died leaving me full of her nineteenth-century Romantic love manifestoes, Cathy and Heathcliff, Jane and Rochester, Elizabeth and Darcy, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. To defend the memory of Mum, to carry her mantle, I had to love like them, to find love like them: not easy, not very practical. Not achieved. It is a new work with your mark on it Cut up into little stars diluted with rain-water No-one thinks like you That about the child How one writes & writes over & over the same thing But day by day the same sun rises over & over & nobody is tired That I should have forgotten you or so remembered you This morning’s letter here     I will go sit presently And walk it back to its senses Held up in that light I to whom they are sun air & human voices A promise of pure gold & thank you as pure gold I could not bear to have words from you which the world might listen to And walk walk

Later still As we entered the cemetery we were approached by a family who have been haunting me. They had all the signs of poverty – cheap comfortable ‘sportswear’ clothing, each was overweight, the woman, who had a worn and remarkably open, kind face, looked a few years older than the man who was large and round

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but still had his hair. The pubescent son and daughter were pasty-faced with no apparent charm: yet to become swans. The man said, ‘Sorry to be a pain, but do you know if there’s a church nearby?’ They explained they’d been looking for a grave. ‘My daughter, she came to the funeral seven years ago, we know it was in Nunhead. We’re looking for a graveyard with a church.’ The daughter wandered off, still searching. They’d already scoured the cemetery. Simon suggested they look in the local library. ‘But it’ll be closed today,’ I said, ‘Do you have a car?’ The man, who by now I’d decided was a younger partner for the woman but wasn’t her daughter’s father and who was trying to do the right thing by her children, said, ‘We left it at Brent Cross. We’ve come down from Northampton and we’ve got travel cards for the tube.’ We couldn’t think of anything. I liked them and was troubled by his apology for pain, which was not ours but theirs, which unwittingly expressed the pain they carried along with the fear and love they felt for the girl whose pain, for whatever reason, was the focus of a family day out. I wanted to invent a solution, to help them find the grave, the thing they thought they needed to find, that would help make the girl better, that would then enable them to go further – beyond the grave – to really help the girl get better. I wished I could be their chauffeur. It was so sad, I could feel how hard they were trying to make life all right for these children, to be positive and resolute in the face of tough, tough life. The woman had triggered something in her partner, that led him to suggest this quest. They’d come, new Dick Whittingtons, to find not fortune but, they hoped, catharsis. But they didn’t know how to do research, how to use a public library.

Wednesday 14 February 2007 (half-term, Valentine’s) It’s the middle of my day off and I’ve only just had a bath because I was awake in the night and slept late this morning. I go up to Dearest you are the best A very very very little lower than the angels Thursday is our day I think It is easier to say thursday on monday than on saturday I cannot distinguish between your acts now The actual good you get out of me May be stated at about two commas & a semi-colon you on the other side



Textual Intimacies: Letters, Journals, Poetry – Ghost Writing Telegraph Cottage 79 I cannot cannot You might have said one word What do you think I have been doing today You are kissed whether you feel it or not The written thing with a shadow of meaning stays I should not reconcile myself to your picture

see Robbie who has cleared up his room, a huge task. I walk in and am impressed. He’s turned back the corner of his duvet. It is what Graeme did for Rob and Lizzie when he was looking after them. It showed that he’d been looking forward to their arrival, demonstrating his love, his longing. The triangle of duvet turned at the corner is now an emblem of love (as longing). Later we talked about missing Graeme. I made him a humus salad sandwich and a glass of chocolate milk – an odd combination, but I wanted, as well as nutrients, to give him something milky sweet for the sake of love. Then I cuddled this young man, my beautiful son nearly a foot taller than me. We talked. He said, ‘I can’t feel Dad any more. I can’t feel him hugging me.’ ‘I know …’ ‘I can feel him hugging me, but I can’t.’ I thought about Graeme’s smell still on the shirt which I’ve kept in a plastic vacuum wrapper. It must have come from extreme mental pain secreting sweat on to his lovely white linen shirt which, after five years, is now stained the colour of earth, smelling of suicide. But for me the scent of comfort, because I had once realized that Graeme carried the same smell as my Dad, I remembered it from when I cuddled up behind that bare freckly back when I was nine, lying in bed between him and Mum on Sunday mornings. ‘I just want to see him again. I can’t believe I’ll never see him again.’ ‘I know.’ In desperation at Mum’s death, all through my teens I used to plonk her down into a street scene I witnessed from the top deck of a bus. But I couldn’t ever make it come to life. I’d forgotten I forgot to say anything yesterday This morning I mean Observe how the days are made The Homer-subject till to-morrow

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Scenes of Intimacy And then speak arrows voice within voice! Happiness does not come with the sun or rain If one shuts one’s eyes & listens to the birds singing A break of the blue real sky with a star in it No note to guide me no note to guide me And half put into my mouth Rubbing out figure by figure A good deal nearer the angels Writing such unlawful disorderly things Today has gone by with me

the three-hundred-and-sixty degrees of her, the feel of how she would look. I knew the facts, the stagger, the peering, but I couldn’t get the feel. ‘I just want to be seen. I just want him to see me.’ ‘He would have been so …’ Robbie has been eating his sandwich. It’s not that big, but there’s still a chunk he hasn’t managed to tackle yet. Last night I woke hot and fretful. The hole inside of me, where the artist once was, gets bigger every day. It occupies about three quarters of the world now. I tried not to move too much as the hole opened up, not to aerate it. Then Simon said, ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘Nothing. I’m just awake.’ He said, ‘I just wondered because I want to look after you.’ ‘It’s just that I’m fretting about work …’ and I told him. ‘Why don’t you come here for a cuddle?’ ‘Because I’m too hot.’ ‘Why are you too hot?’ ‘Because I’m fifty-four.’ He laughed. ‘You are funny.’ ‘I hoped you’d think so. It is true that I think it’s because I’m fifty-four, but I hoped you’d laugh.’ ‘Come here.’ Happiness goes the same way to my fancy Safe & free & calm & pure I nearly fell backward down the stairs I will tell you this year of grace I felt as if my voice & breath went together Ran violent down a steep place



Textual Intimacies: Letters, Journals, Poetry – Ghost Writing Telegraph Cottage 81 Into some sort of conversation They are gone and forgotten The whole world lying in darkness The thread of a sentence will not Lie still out of the way But you go higher and it is the same thing Time is fearfully short forgive me my shortComings every hour in the day

I cuddled his back and then he comforted me and after a while, after I’d thought of Robbie + Lizzie, and of Graeme who took his life in the dead of night, I went to sleep. When I woke up it was Valentine’s.

Sunday 4 March 2007 This morning Lizzie said she’d wanted to call me when she was at Laila’s last night because she’d been feeling very loving towards me. (We’d been out on Saturday and I’d treated her to some new clothes. I’d felt blinded by her beauty, shy almost to look.) I told her I felt very loving towards her all the time. I corrected myself. Most of the time, but not usually on Friday afternoons when we have our regular telephone rows (it’s 4.30 pm, I’m at work having vainly hoped to be at home ‘for the children’, her arrangements for the weekend are just crystallizing into an amorphous fusion of anonymous parties, limitless, homeless, libidinous, parentless, with infinite promise. I try to charter and reduce some of this aspiration, time is short, work is pressing, emotions run high, I close my office door and go martinet, she responds cartoon teenage, caught off-guard by the unfair absurdity of the universe, eventually a compromise is found, and I see her the next morning and we’re back to normal). She wasn’t aware of Friday’s routine and laughed. We were looking out of her bedroom window at the dismal Sunday rain and I was half-thinking about pruning the roses.

Later (interrupted) In fact last Friday was different. Morning row w S cont. into afternoon by phone and text. He’d been angry about R&L using the bathroom. Anger doesn’t help. Quite unbearable to me, this fractious family in this house we all love, each with our own space, the garden we’ve created from scratch. The place where

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we began at last to live lives we might have envied. At the top of this lovely hill, with its wonderful views across London, the intimacy we have with Goldsmiths’ tangled sculpture as we walk in the mornings down the hill to work, with the winter sun rising to shine on to its back and every time I love the way the architect’s sifted the surfaces and allowed the building to mess about, playing like a toddler, having such fun with sunlight. And at night we walk down the hill to go out and see the uniform City skyscrapers razzle-dazzled up for I hardly dare cry out lest the charm break Where I go you go where I descend It is after you like Tennyson’s blackbird What a mad folly marriage would be! Who who began calling names It’s warm the rain like you Yesterday I planted a full dozen More rose-trees all white But you really think the confirmation Of that sentence and you promise You promise at the very lowest Calculation writing to me on every Day we did not meet I cannot Distinguish between your acts

the evening, and London is gorgeous from this place and all those well-heeled North Londoners are missing such a treat and, boy, does it give me such pleasure. It’s mine, it’s ours, it’s lovely. How could Simon text me ‘that house’? Another fretful night. Now, no Graeme, there’s no one to recapture my teenagers’ past with, to help them feel rooted, meshed into a family with a shared history, a shared pride, now. Every day I can feel my children feeling it. Every day I can feel Simon feeling it. And I feel it. Eventually I went back to sleep. When I woke our row was over and S showed me his latest poems for Telegraph Cottage, and I was happy to be safe with no buzz of other people’s lives. Just us enjoying the still print of a page, image in a word, quiet simplicity of two beings, a bit lumpen, happy to find themselves with each other. I told him about something that had happened the day before and said, I know what I’m going to write now.



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5 March 2007 I have been picking up on the writing I did ten years ago, before Graeme and I split up, before I started working full-time in the museum, before I moved back to London. Today I re-read this:

Summer 1996 Do you know about longing? How entrancing it is, how it can occupy you like a lover’s genitalia, how it can fill you with calm, delicious pleasure? Do you know how it can empty you, turn your insides out, how it can make your body feel like a dog whining? How suddenly your big solid body can feel wafer thin and too light for the world, leave you fearful it will float away if you open a door? And longing mixed with disbelief: do you know that dismal cocktail? Someone has gone – it’s not possible – you want her want her, you want her want her – she’ll come back and make it all right – blank. Mothers usually wait to die until after you have had a go or two at substituting them with someone else. You have your substitute ready, and sometimes you’re lucky enough to have made a reasonable choice. The longing at that breakup is just Take my       last words I ever shall send you It is part of the horror of such things The words at once, taken out virtually The inevitable horrors of dirt and roughness Nothing can be done nothing effectual My time is out too much & too out of place So free so free as a matter of pure reason Poor world   it is more desperately wrong than I thought Yet the chance as chance seems much the same Here be proofs      the system operates beyond The limits of its operations quarrelsome letters As I choose you are wrong & if you are wrong How are we to get it right we all look to you Instead of opening the door & keeping your secret

like the other, only it isn’t the first person in the world you have loved. Longing for the first person, before you have your substitute to hand, means you have to substitute that person with Longing. At all costs, you must keep Longing alive. Otherwise there is just blank for ever.

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So Longing gets mixed up with loving, and loving can never be the same again. The desire for absence surpasses the desire for presence. Presence isn’t the real thing. Longing is the next best thing to being mothered. Longing keeps you real, makes loss liveable. Fetishize it, adore it, warm it, curl it around you, up you, twist it through your insides, knead it, know it, kiss it, whisper to it, lick it, love it. Long. What have you to lose once violated by Longing? Knowing it as a child, won’t you always be wanting Longing for your future pleasures?

Winter 1998/9 (I’m guessing) Do you long to, or long for? Active or passive? A plucky girl, a stalwart mother, Clare’s adolescence was lived to long. Those Brontë novels (the peak of her pilgrimage into Romantic and, often, sentimental Victorian literature) trapped their heroines in defiant weatherproof stone houses where their torrential imaginations were the last corrupt vestiges of freedom. This was sex and love for girls. Each day, as she wiped our mouths with a flannel, or brushed our hair, or buttoned our coats, she moulded our brains to long. Clean that crumb off your chin (Heathcliff will be yours one day). I must sew that bottom button back on (see how the wild trees sweep up the clouds in their branches and that handsome young man strides out in all weathers). We four daughters were also encouraged to brave the smashing tides and the riotous winds, but it wasn’t necessarily love. In love we would be met by a bigger braver person with enough wet weather gear for two. It was love if we didn’t find him but were out there on the moors, catching pneumonia in our paltry shawls, battered and searching; never finding, always longing. That was the nature of love. Long, long, long. Believe, have faith, never give up, long, long, long. No arrival, no coming. All journey. Long, long, long. I would just call the police Promises & vows may be foolish things For the most part it is so wet & dreary Do you not see & think of you       do you not feel All your corrections are golden Little circle to circling faces The postman fell into a trance A little little less thought To conceive of things which nevertheless are Do you smile & will you take aim this time



Textual Intimacies: Letters, Journals, Poetry – Ghost Writing Telegraph Cottage 85 First of all kiss me in as few words as possible Is society a thing to desire to participate in Men who live only in the first instance Next men who attend to the world first

How Clare’s love of longing was mocked, how scornful was Death as he rode into town and locked her in the wobbly, feeble body of terminal illness, the anti-hero’s hero forcing her to endure confinement with her resentful, longing, adolescent daughters. She taught us longing well. We prove, year after year, just how well as we replicate her rules at Christmas, as we make her jokes for her, as we act her out or peer ever further inwards on ourselves, getting into every gory crack and corner, braving our internal elements in our deeper search for the hero, our mother.

Later I looked back at January’s writing, and found this:

21 January 2007 The Blues know that zombie, Longing: children torn from their mothers grown into men interminably seeking a filling for the hole, a poultice for the ripped soul. Sex, a woman. Crying out, upscale and downscale, haunting songs of men flaunting their emo-dignity despite unspeakable loss. Mostly it’s men. And Nina Simone. Pleading for Daddy to put some sugar in her bowl, save her soul … The opening piano tickling the painful empty gut. The hollow sax solo is more like sex than sex … Soo-oothe me, I want [high, yelping] some sugar in my bowl. The lyrics pierce through the body to the soul to the sex, up down the scales, up down the spine, the sugar the bowl the sexual epiphany of sweetness of the female orgasm. Sometimes I feel like a motherless chil’. Longing, vulnerable to big boys playing daddy through their cocks, dangling over, wrapping up, giving sweetness and oblivion. Sexual longing. Scenting desire, longing, wet, obsessed, stiff with longing. One-track mind, straight up and down that spine. The empty womb, a cervix craving feather caresses. The heart aching for love. Sex not sex, sex the soul, ever longing. Society is not worth living in The lowest possible ground

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86 What loss is there His word was nothing Is language only a shade Removed from all harm He is nothing It is society’s affair Spoken or unspoken The poorest creature Dreams of being angry Then he must Go into the world To say as little

11 March 2007 Friday night re-read Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’, loved it again. Remember very first time I read it: a few months after Mum’s death, Sally studying it for A Level – told me how good it was. I read it, couldn’t understand why it was good (I was nearly 12), but 3 years later bought Penguin edition of Browning from independent bookshop in Norwich (with a very good poetry section, run by Giles, friendly with Sally, by then a student at UEA). Liked Browning for his stories. Poetry usefully combined being hip (it was the late 60s) + keeping my Mum alive. Friday I liked Browning again. Realized that the poem damned the outgoing aristocratic collectors’ connoisseurship – then being replaced by the shared scholarship of the democratizing middle classes (supported by the new museums conceived + built in that period to share a public culture). I’d forgotten the bronze. It is also such a proto-feminist poem. Next morning read Barrett Browning’s ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ and found them = shocking. Took me back to the girls’ annual I somehow acquired as a child (was it Sally’s?), w. a cartoon story about the Barretts of Wimpole St. I remember little other than the b+w graphic drawings of a rather ugly Victorian girl w. her hideous ringlets, the chaise longue on which she lay in the fussy drawing room on the 1st floor. Her father, I remember, was an over-bearing, strict muttonchops kind of man. My image of the Victorian invalid was entirely borne out in these poems, which depend on ideas of love based on confinement and release, and an identification with supine passivity and narcissistic fantasy.



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The horror was that I realized that that was the image of love, bound up so strongly with between-the-lines images of imprisonment, that Mum had left me with when she died.

Good Friday 6 April 2007 Mum medicated our childhoods with doses of syrupy Victorian literature. Despite her apparent modernist aesthetic, Victorian pathos clung to us through Little Women, John Halifax Gentleman, or The Green Graves of Balgowrie – stories unctuous with the death of sickly girls and women, taking elevated places in the holy world of ghosts. However, her healthy party line was that Out of the world by being let go quietly To say to the people I find between Do you look to this point and slap his face In every possible shape I speak for the world Not for me because of a dull day Its unmistakeable shape by a touch or two Then directly before the sacrifice of little I only speak as I see & of the sun Shines on as brightly I read   first of all Kiss   so it seemed like magic Disagreeing letters leave off loving me At the end I seem to see through this crevice How it would be like the sun’s setting Only more darkness more pain

Victorians were maudlin, mawkish, hypocritical and obfuscating. The manifestation of her avant-garde modernism was distilled in the pure abstraction of absence she left as bequest to us. No gravestone, no burial, no plaque, no notices, no notes, no heirlooms, no treasures, no objects of sentimental value, no objects. Only memories which one’s own senses culpably failed to deliver; reciting them was the best we could do. So poetry it was. Her father was a poet, a Presbyterian, and the son of a Scottish miner. Every sentence Mum spoke carried several quotes. The narrative of cut-ups she left in memory is a robust construct of Romantic love, laced with political dissent, wit, fantasies of freedom, transcendence, earthy bathos. Blake was her man … to emulate, not a suitor.

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Exactly two weeks ago I was in a Damascene restaurant with my Syrian artist colleagues, Reem and Iyass. They’d taken us to see a Sufi dancer (or whirling dervish, in British caricature). I was mesmerized as I watched this beautiful man – in his dirndl white skirt, his white trousers and bodice, his loose short white jacket, and his brown fez – perform his circling dance with geometric minimalist precision. One leg peddling the floor for pace and turn, the other rooted, as if chained to the ground, he went round and round and round, his skirt lifting high and low as he gathered and reduced speed, like a top about to take off, his arms lifting, turning in, reaching out, his hand curling up, pointing out, propping his tilting head, or apparently pulling it from the top up to the sky. Total control over all movements, extraordinary playful symmetry and asymmetry, the aesthetic meeting of early twentiethcentury Russian Suprematist abstraction, eighteenth-century English Quaker meeting houses, late twentieth-century American minimalist music; cross cultural spiritual (and aesthetic) qualities … and flight. The dancer danced a dance about longing for God. The song expressed in words and tune what the dancer manifested in his body – not speaking Arabic, it was the body I heard. Iyass explained to me that traditionally the dance would take place outside (I imagined, the desert), and the Sufis would perform it only occasionally, together, following a fast, as part of a religious ceremony to bring God into them. The song and dance took you through the process of wanting God, concentrating to find God, longing for him, and finding him, connecting from earth to sky. Deserve to know in a sense read by your light I listened for the footsteps     the footsteps of my letter Always always yet you cannot you know You know you cannot for knowledge for more Reasons than one there was sunshine for you For you never to have seen my face In the city I seem to have more need Than usual of seeing you how can you Seeing so much see that possibility ever Arise in me to you I am wholly yours In the matter we refer to I am growing Conscious of one or two repetitions The words are words and faulty Inexpressive or wrongly expressive



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On the flight home I wondered about Romantic atheism and mysticism; about man in the image of God, about narcissism fuelling Romantic love. Anticipating the exhibition we’re putting on next year at work, about nineteenth-century Orientalist British painting, I wondered about a possible nineteenth-century connection between the obsessive love spun in the letters of Barrett and Browning and the desire – the longing – to find a golden age in a religious landscape, in an Other culture … the romance that Victorians saw in that culture, of ancient civilisations and religions as they emerged from the landscape in the form of archaeology. After I’d read the ‘Sonnets’ I thought of the equivalences between their obsessive intricacies of thought about love, and the Islamic (or is it simply Syrian?) craftsmen who make a mystical correlation between making and being, whose objects – the filigree carvings, the fine marquetry – match Barrett’s poetry in obsessive intensity. How many (obsessive) academics have pursued these thoughts with the rigour of Barrett and the craftsman, while I merely speculate and generalize, aeroplane-thinking? What I’ve also come across in Amman and Damascus these last few months has been an individual/cultural expression of loss and longing – most obviously centred on those very landscapes painted by the Orientalists – Al Kuds/ Jerusalem. There’s political, social, cultural longing for freedom, freedom from war and from confinement, freedom in political self-determination. But I’ve also come across an unbound, quasi-religious longing for a fantastical ancient golden age, a kind of Eden, that is quite creepy, and which my Jordanian colleague, Samah, has said she loathes. She expressed huge frustration at the swooning fatalism that locks in with their countries’ (pride in their) extraordinary ancient civilisations (dug up, I’d add, with the help – or colonial, museological determination – of the European Victorians). To define and be defined by. One night in Amman Anwar gave me a simple set of histories of Syria and Jordan – and the Region, as it’s known to the English-speaking press – that helped me understand the impact of what is a relatively recent emergence from first, Ottoman imperialism, then French and British colonialism, and now, of course, US and British military, economic, cultural and political interventions. But leaving aside the present, I came to see how the identification, for instance, Zoya or Reem make between their own art and that of ancient Syrians, is a struggle for an authentic Syrian cultural identity I live under your eyes and die I came home dead It went to my heart & stayed there in the night At dream-time no words but just your own Between heaven & earth weights of flowers

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Scenes of Intimacy Try to understand what I mean as it will be As much mine as yours & yours as mine Rather rather see winking eyes      & that Other word is I write what I write to throw It off my mind & have done Wednesday or thursday shall be our day Without blotting the air Writing notes this morning Perfect rest and happiness here on earth All ending in the marriage day

out of centuries of cultural confinement/denial/oppression. Never mind art history. They just want to make something that’s theirs. I came home from Damascus understanding how Mum’s Romantic literature and mid-twentieth century British cultural education for girls had suffused my adolescent self with an atheist individualist version of a Sufi religious quest. Looking for a soulmate, as well as a sexual mate, as well as a housemate and, indeed, a mate mate, all in one. A kind of mother and a breadwinner – father – to have babies with. (A god?) It’s taken me a pilgrimage to step beyond it. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ express just this, and she eloped from her narcissistinduced=inducing confinement, believing that, in a single leap, she could achieve it. My father, a pacifist, was imprisoned twice in World War II. Already engaged to be married, to celebrate his twenty-first birthday in Wormwood Scrubs, Mum sent him an anthology she had made of carefully chosen poetry and prose. When Dad died, a few months before Graeme and I split up, my stepmother passed it on to me. It’s so fragile now, it is a treasure I rarely look at. That morning in February when I read Barrett Browning I realized it was time to consult Mum’s anthology again: I was sure these ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ were part of the childhood medicine, at least in essence, that the pituitary tumour forced her to deliver to me early, catching in anticipation my adolescent need before she died as I hit puberty. I was right. Mum’s themes are love, imprisonment and separation (‘what is loved becomes instantly what may be lost …’), freedom and fidelity (the spirit of ‘a single mind’ in the face of tyranny, or Winifred Holtby on defending individual freedom in love). She opens it with For my darling love – because these people have said in far better words than I can, what I feel for you. 23.10.40



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Of the thirty-nine entries, mostly historic poems (but also The Bible and prose quotations) three are from ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ – numbers VI, XIV, and XXII. Each is one that resonated that Saturday morning as I read them in bed, bringing my mother’s cultural echo to me after nearly forty-five years, the period in which I’ve fictionalized her with myth and memory, I want the love at one life’s end In the ordinary chances of life Two great light to rule the day & night I write without waiting & looked and looked & looked I like the note beyond the imagination Tell me      I was going to write that tell me The window being wide open I walked straight to it to shut it The shadow had a sign of you I looked after it till it vanished Now the black intervals I believe and want not proof Have you a pair of scales like Zeus & me? With respect to the immediate We breathe together understand together know feel live Not to go out in the open air

having shared life together for only a decade. I shuddered as I read Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand Henceforward in thy shadow. …             The widest land Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine With pulses that beat double. What I do And what I dream include thee, as the wine Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue God for myself, He hears that name of thine, And sees within my eyes, the tears of two. (Browning 1995: 379)

XIV begins: If thou must love me, let it be for nought Except for love’s sake only. (Browning 1995: 383)

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She always said we should do things for the sake of love, not for money or reward. Clare loved me the way good mothers do: what we now call unconditionally, which is the type of love that Barrett Browning is describing in poem XIV. (And which often springs simply from parents to their biological children, who reciprocate, at least until they’re teenage. For everyone else love is a labour. Freedom of choice – selecting one’s love – is the touchstone we use to make it work, which is partly why being stepchildren is such hard bloody work.) The explanatory note fills up prose after prose The feelings must remain unwritten   unsung too Kind and kinder & kindest My life & love flow steadily under all those bubbles A serious purpose of going out walking out Flies are flies   as flies A talking ladder to something else The intellectual worker looking up to the stars at nights If there were no motion there would be no morning If one built a palace without a noise to make a noise Would commit suicide rather than live as you Dropping its blotchy oil all the bright colours of our poetry If you knew how hard it is for me As if you were not in the world with me

For all the transcendence, Mum and Barrett Browning bring us down to earth in XXII proposing to stay together on earth: A place to stand and love in for a day, With darkness & the death-hour rounding it. (Browning 1995: 387)

A day, to me, seems short; it seems parsimonious, hysterical, Victorian. Mum didn’t include the sonnet that broke my heart – it wouldn’t have seemed to apply then, to her and Dad. Number XVIII offers her lover a lock of her hair (damn that irritating cartoon ringlet), on which … Finding pure, from all those years, The kiss my mother left here when she died – (Browning 1995: 385)

Once again, Barrett Browning makes the link between the love her mother gave her and the love she is creating with the man who will be her husband. Kiss-death.



Textual Intimacies: Letters, Journals, Poetry – Ghost Writing Telegraph Cottage 93 Is it wrong to laugh a little to put it off let your thoughts be with me One comfort is the walking in a moment in the field I see a beautiful sunshine how we would go out I lock out the world and then look down on it There is a vast view from our greatest hill Wordsworth was shown that hill R.B. lives over there by that hill Wordsworth  we call that such as that   a rise Perhaps if Hatcham should not be swept away In the Railway scirocco I may see The hill or rise at some distant day I would rather see it than Wordsworth’s mountain? I write nothing about your walking with me by The garden wall and on the hill and looking down on London?

Works cited Allen, F. and Smith, S. (2007), Telegraph Cottage. Los Angeles: Mindmade Books. Barthes, R. (1990), A Lover’s Discourse. Translated from the French by Richard Howard. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Blanchot, M. (1982), The Space of Literature. Translated from the French by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Browning, E. B. (1995), Aurora Leigh and Other Poems, John Robert Glorney Bolton and Julia Bolton Holloway (eds). London: Penguin Books. Browning, R and Barrett, E. B. (1899), The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1845–1846 with Portraits and Facsimiles in Two Volumes: Vol. II. London: Smith, Elder and Company. Gordon, N. and Sullivan, G. (2001), Swoon. New York: Granary Books. Heidegger, M. (1975), Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated from the German by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row.

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Poetry and Intimacy: The Engagements of Keston Sutherland Aaron Deveson

National Taiwan Normal University

In A Lover’s Discourse, first published in 1977, Roland Barthes stakes his claim for the amorous text as a paradoxical form of transgression aimed at the ‘new morality’ of those so affirmatively schooled in the violent avant-gardism of the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille that a language might, in their ears, be ‘obscene precisely in that it puts the sentimental in place of the sexual’ (Barthes 1979: 178). Love, Barthes tells us, pretending not to notice the historical and polemical nature of his own argument, ‘falls out of interesting time; no historical, polemical meaning can be given to it’ (1979: 177–8). A little later he shores up the abjectly bourgeois status of his partially autobiographical discursive figure by linking his suffering with the development of an interiorized subject; or, as he puts it, with a reference to Wagner’s Parsifal: ‘the deeper the wound, at the body’s centre (at the “heart”), the more the subject becomes a subject: for the subject is intimacy (“The wound … is of a frightful intimacy”)’ (Barthes 1979: 189). Barthes has let us know from near the beginning of his book that ‘Amorous dis-cursus is not dialectical; it turns like a perpetual calendar, an encyclopaedia of affective culture’ (1979: 7), its intimate and self-defeating language supposedly incompatible with ‘received languages’ (1979: 211): ‘[a]s for Marxist discourse,’ Barthes adds, with purposeful brevity, ‘it has nothing to say’ (1979: 211). A Lover’s Discourse remains, in many ways, a brilliant cul-de-sac in the domain of philosophically inflected literary writing: an unrepeatable virtuoso performance referring principally to itself and, after that, to other works by the ambiguous entity, ‘Roland Barthes’. And yet, because of the way in which it sets up a problematic set of relations between sentimentality and sexuality, between doomed-to-repeat, echoic bourgeois forms and singularity and between

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narcissistically uncompromising personal suffering and the productive mass of humanity, Barthes’s collection of fragments continues to offer co-ordinates with which to discuss some of the most important and distinctive recent contemporary writing that partly supersedes it. This chapter is an attempt to account for some of the intensities in the poetry and prose of Keston Sutherland, one of the most thought-about poets of his generation, and one whose work variously extends Barthes’s mode of excessive self-consciousness into an amorous discourse newly opened up to social and political theory. In particular, I am concerned with the way in which Sutherland makes it possible to discard, even as exciting polemic, Barthes’s assertion that Marxism has nothing to say to the subject who constitutes herself in the fragmenting process of announcing her desire, while retaining Barthes’s sense of the powerfully transgressive intimacy of the lover’s language. In a highly instructive introduction to a selection of work by four writers for a British Poetry issue of Chicago Review in 2007, Sam Ladkin and Robin Purves identify Sutherland as notable among a variably affiliated group of youngish experimental writers whose academic, social and poetological links to the University of Cambridge, and especially to the older poets J. H. Prynne and Tom Raworth, bring them within range of the label ‘Cambridge School’. Implicit in this linkage is Sutherland’s response to a British avant-garde tradition that had itself confronted the challenge of Black Mountain, ‘New York School’, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and other American and European avant-garde poetries coeval or anterior to it.1 Ladkin and Purves explain Sutherland’s work in its overlapping relations with his other literary activities: as an editor and publisher of Quid magazine and especially together with Andrea Brady at Barque Press, Sutherland, who studied at Cambridge and now teaches at the University of Sussex, has extended a small-press lineage of poetic and critical transmission and self-publishing which includes Cambridge-associated projects such as Drew Milne’s Parataxis, Rod Mengham’s Equipage press, and Equofinality, edited by Mengham and John Wilkinson (2007: 9). A less explicitly sociological account of poetic genealogy in the same journal issue by the distinguished Cambridge University-based poet-critic Simon Jarvis affirms the lexical, syntactic and tonal affinities between Sutherland’s work and that of Prynne, Wilkinson and Milne. While Jarvis’s article concludes by gesturing towards the complex and original ‘relation between attention and metrico-rhythmic texture in Sutherland’s poems’ (Jarvis 2007: 3), Ladkin and Purves’s broader-stroked characterization of Sutherland’s poetry leaves the potential reader with a vivid sense of its commingling of erotic and polemical themes when they call it ‘the violently futile attempt to reconcile immediate corporeal sensation and political



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strategy, and to live inside that impossibility as the truth of the times’ (Ladkin and Purves 2007: 12). Near the end of their article, both the fragmentary nature of the Barthesian lover’s dis-cursus and the fundamentally Marxist political programme from which that figure allegedly absents himself hover into view in their comment that the innovative mode in which Sutherland is writing is one that allows him and the three other writers collected to stage ‘the disintegration of selves as coherent sets of managed needs and desires, one agent of which is anguish at the endless pleasures proffered this side of the capitalist equation’ (Ladkin and Purves 2007: 13). The unabashed intensity of Sutherland’s Marxism is already apparent in an important piece of writing he delivered as a conference paper in 2006, entitled ‘Vocal Stupor 2: Notes on Love Poetry’. This ‘account of the difficulties of writing and reading love poetry in a capitalist state’ (Sutherland 2006: unpag.) stages an agon between the poetics of two writers close to Sutherland. On one side is the implied contention of Andrea Brady’s poetry that ‘the objectivity of suffering is a social truth which can be illuminated by the work of psychic compromise in a relationship with an individual lover’ (Sutherland 2006: unpag.). Against this is the view of J. H. Prynne’s poetry that ‘we make an exhibition of our complicity in the suffering of others’ – ‘those unmanageably remote people whom we intimately murder’ – ‘every time we soften in lyrical acceptance of what we can securely regard as our own individual psychic compromises’ (Sutherland 2006: unpag.). It is the dynamic interaction of these two self-accusing, potentially worldrevealing types of intimacy that determines, in large part, the powerfully affective structure of Sutherland’s most written-about love poem, Hot White Andy, which first appeared in the British Poetry issue of Chicago Review in 2007 and was then made available in printed form in a volume of twenty-eight unpaginated pages in 2009, where it appears in three suspiciously Hegelian-sounding parts (‘.A’, ‘.B’ and ‘A.: TURBO’). The reader uninitiated into Sutherland’s poetics may appreciate a brief evocation of the poem’s substance and character. It might very loosely be described as the staging of an encounter between a stubbornly forlorn lyric subject and an accelerated version of the globalized world anyone can know from Bloomberg Television or the internet. The reader is raced like capital over borders from Russia to East Asia, pelted with bullying slogans (‘Disorder is the enemy of progress’ [Sutherland 2009a: unpag.]) and cosmopolitan proper nouns that seem to update T. S. Eliot’s sinister inter-war metonymy (‘Rojario climbs to his knees’; ‘but was I perhaps wrong to be maddened by Akinfemiwa?’ [Sutherland 2009a: unpag.]). In amongst Sutherland’s collage of late modernity we are treated to a footnote elucidating the nature of an entirely fictitious

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reality TV show called Bleaching Henry featuring ‘Famous comedian Lenny Henry’ (Sutherland 2009a: unpag.) and a few pages after this comes a lengthy and strangely hilarious monologue supposedly emanating from Stalin’s Show Trial prosecutor Vyshinsky but probably more closely related to the reactionary plain-speaking rhetoric and paranoia of Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush’s Republican Party: ‘In the past I never locked any of my doors. In fact, I never had a key to my home. … Now I understand I live in a very secure area, but ever since the attack I find myself making sure all the doors of my house are locked before I go to bed’ (Sutherland 2009a: unpag.). It would be wrong to speak of a narrative in relation to this poem but when this Vyshinsky/Rumsfeld character speaks ecstatically of his fear of ‘the Cheng bubble, of Cheng futures, Cheng chic, of Cheng penetration …’ (Sutherland 2009a: unpag.) he points to a strong tendency towards motivic repetition and some of the ways in which the erotic and the political combine in Sutherland’s work. Introducing Hot White Andy at a reading at Notre Dame University that year, Sutherland explained, with deliberate ambiguity perhaps, that its focus was on ‘how we project our predatory feelings outwards, in this case outwards to China specifically’ (qtd. in Ladkin 2007: 301). That theme emerges emphatically in what begins as the bathetic mock-elevation into a love god(dess) ‘in light’ (Sutherland 2009a: unpag.) of one to whom a footnote refers en passant as ‘an unnamed but invidiously Chinese companion of unfathomable gender’ (Sutherland 2009a: unpag.). This is in fact the quite adequately named Andy Cheng, ‘the export manager for a tungsten production company in Wuhan, China’ (Purves and Ladkin 2007: 304), whose business-friendly and ‘hot’ datable hybrid appellation Sutherland apparently picked almost at random from the internet: a character whose objectified role in the poem can at least partly explain a line such as: ‘WLa–15 types to Tungsten electrodes Aaron Zhong’ (2009a: unpag.). In fact, the reader of this typical Sutherland line may also need to decide that the italicized preposition ‘to’ is the reappearance in exchanged form of the missing part of the infinitive in the poet’s disfigurement, across enjambment, of Lenin’s question, ‘What is to be done?’ into a Hegelian declaration-cum-imperative-cum-prayer determining the sown-up rightness of history, ‘What is / be done …’ (2009a: unpag.). This is an act of substitution which would seem to be specifically and bitterly related to China’s replacing State Communism with State Capitalism as well as to the poem’s ‘long arabesque of equivalence’ (Sutherland: 2009a: unpag.). The latter begins with the opening’s evocations of Russia’s conversion to the magical wish-fulfilments of the stock market, and it continues with serial movements across different



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forms of regressive, pseudo-individualized (‘monoplex’) consumption (‘Now swap / buy for eat, then fuck for buy, then ruminate for fuck …’ (Sutherland 2009a: unpag.)) and what looks and sounds like flesh translated into undifferentiated stock in industrial forms of plastic surgery and gymnastic fitness. A multilingual epigraph quoting de Sade – a figure whom Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer famously read as metonym for the barbarism unleashed when Enlightenment thought frees the bourgeois individual from tutelage – allows the reader to ask for a form of transgression to replace the transgression that has us given us the world as Hot White Andy knows it. The name of this transgression is ‘love’, which is more or less what happens to the mock-love for Andy Cheng. The influential (and already mentioned) poet and critic John Wilkinson, in what he himself calls a ‘fan letter rather than a critique’ of the poem (2008: unpag.) suggests that it is being self-disgustedly immersed in ‘chichi excess’ (2008: unpag.) – that is, the linguistic and phenomenological excess of the new (old) international capitalism – that allows Sutherland ‘to throw up a beautiful lyricism’ and be, himself, ‘spoken by it in the verifiable model of lyric intimacy’ (2008: unpag.). In fact, this sort of intimacy, or the desire for it, emerges initially in a ceaseless intermezzo (that is, interruptive) structure involving tonalities reminiscent of the ‘My nerves are bad to-night’ section of The Waste Land (Eliot 1963: 67–8) that may be thought democratic in their lamentation within the general condition of substitution (‘Do not leave me for Stan whom you make love with’ [Sutherland 2009a: unpag.]) but also decadent in their often faintly translationese self-advertisement (‘it hurts, and I disappear but the nights stick’ [2007: unpag.]).2 When a more fully realized lyric intimacy levitates from the polymorphous Sadean liberalism powering the rest of the poem, as it does in a bordered-off section in each of the three parts, it is necessarily as an act that must follow such severe deprecations as Sutherland’s depiction of the affective state of the polis in terms of a city glowing ‘in natural repose, / listening to Winds of Change or Kindertotenlieder’ (Sutherland 2009a: unpag.) – that is, as an act posed between the bathos of triumphalist capitalist kitsch (as enunciated by the West German soft metal band Scorpions) and an irretrievable protomodernist intimacy embodied in Mahler’s songs.3 This is more or less where we find Sutherland when he is spoken by the clearly delineated lyric section of the final part: My bed is by the window. I speak to you. You are impossible to forget,

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the face ecstasy screams under, lighting the world you damage and repossess. I am communicating this. You undiminishably are what I mean by all love defiant under The shadow of a dispassionate end in the right head. I go on without you. Impossibility mitigated by the comedic brake, on loving to square that mitigation with the future hermetic sex square. You soften inside but can’t, Submission is just the disquiescence of the ecstatic scream. You harden inside but at last can’t, it is simply pointless to live without that light. I wait to say this. I now say it, without you to your face and without knowing how stupid is my desire for the next big thing: CHINA. (Sutherland 2009a: unpag.)

What is this intimate language made of? The most immediate sensation is of a sudden banishing behind closed doors (or perhaps just one rented door) of the clamorous world, making possible an almost hallucinatory sense of audibility. And it is in that audibility that we realize even here, perhaps especially here, voices have been accumulating. At the metapoetic level – always personal in Sutherland’s milieu – the verse clearly acknowledges its lyric softening in defiance and hardening in acceptance of the Adorno/Prynne injunction to think the world’s total anguish, in a refrain that appears several times in the poem and that always enjoys the power of its intimate ambiguity to embarrass. More specifically, the verse makes its own intensity of the way in which the phosphor-white hot intensity of absolute anguish and impossible happiness in love is shown to be proleptically opposed by the shadowy possibility of having a dispassionate psyche and by the abstract notion of compatible sex with some indefinite future not-you (‘mitigation with the future hermetic sex square’ [Sutherland 2009a: unpag.]), both of these conditions corresponding to an ‘anonymity’ that compels ‘excess of voice in screaming’ to become ‘compulsorily bearable’ (Sutherland 2010a: 127), to quote Sutherland from a recent prose



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piece on Frank O’Hara. He writes there that O’Hara’s lyric is everywhere ‘both the confession of excessive sensibility and the theatrical attempt to claim an impossible new possession of it’ (2010a: 127). In Sutherland’s own lyric, the theatrical aspect of the quelling of the absolute scream of love lies not only in the mordantly desperate pretence of relativizing anonymity occasioned by the comedic choice of love-object (‘Andrew Cheng’) but also in the quavering flat parabasis of this particular section’s self-referential deixis, which allows itself to be overheard as the announcement of near-contentlessness hiding an excess of sensibility: ‘I speak to you’; ‘I am communicating this’, ‘I wait to say this. / I now say it, without you to your face’ (Sutherland 2009a: unpag.). This last speech-act summons the implied co-conspiratorial bodily presence in the line, ‘now I will say it, thank god, I knew you would’, from O’Hara’s ‘Joe’s Jacket’ (O’Hara 1995: 329–30) – a poem partly about the difficulty of enunciating a sexual betrayal – in order to foreground its own more abject dialogic condition in absence as well as the, as it were, dignified sublimation of its hologrammatic Beckettian tenor. It is all very much in the style of the Barthesian lover’s dark glasses, which he puts on to mask and so probably reveal his eyes swollen from amorous weeping. Barthes comments: ‘to hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen’ (1979: 42). The endless replayability of these words from Hot White Andy via their location on YouTube increases this densely lived sense of performativity as Barthes describes it, as deixis keeps touching into virtual and perhaps real life the same wound where intimate presence was. In this context, the self-deprecating reference to a ‘stupid’ ‘desire for the next big thing: CHINA’ functions partly as another willingly overheard grasping after tender words of concern from a beloved who must be exceptionally tuned to her unwanted lover’s narcissistic taste in displacement projects, his Donne-esque greed for signifiers of ultimate undifferentiated anonymity. (My reference to narcissism here signals its own debt to Jennifer Cooke’s essay on the poem – one of the few critical responses to Sutherland that creates enough of a gap between his poetics and Adornoan Marxist theory to sniff out the extent to which his violently disjunctive and self-expansive writing may actually be self-pleasuringly complicit with the sexualized forces of domination he ostensibly critiques [2007: 323–40]). But, despite the sense it creates of an opportunistic and complicatedly exhibitionist negative sublime, the reference to China cannot fail to be heard also as the more truly confounding re-entry into the lyric texture of the emergent totality of social relations. These relations

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may have been illuminated by the precious luxury of all the bourgeois selfinvolvement it interrupts: ‘lighting the world you damage and repossess’, as the lyric says, in quoted isolation reminding us, in an ambiguous juxtaposition of lyric and accusatory second-person address, of bathetic praise and rentier class exemption from non-lyric pain. But the stupefying fact of ‘CHINA’ may also seem to blast all intricacies of inter-subjective thought; the poem’s next line is: ‘But simply pointless life in sum is the continuum like any other’ (Sutherland 2009a: unpag.), which seems to deposit the reader somewhere close to the climax of Prynne’s snarled-up provocations towards Auden and other humanist ‘masters’ in ‘Questions for the Time Being’: ‘now not even elegance will come / of the temporary nothing in which life goes on’ (Prynne 2005: 112–13). Despite this outcome near the end of Hot White Andy, it is hard to agree completely with Prynne (himself) in his cursory-seeming judgement (from a review written in 2007) that the poem’s ‘enhanced upward registers are all pseudo-sublime and hysterical’ – even if it is a view that reflects his thoroughly approving abyssal feeling that the poem can invoke ‘no superior third stage’ (Prynne 2009: 83) as vantage in its dialectical working out of the globalized (dis) order slamming ‘extreme degradation into the intimacies of survival’ (2009: 81). Against this can be set his discovery of ‘besieged tendresse’ (Prynne 2009: 80) in its textures and also the reading offered by Neil Pattison, who, while noting how some of Sutherland’s earlier poetry’s ‘livid fantasies of self-harm gleam through’ (2009: 86) the reflective window imagery of the later poem’s lyric sections and how ‘abrasion with the promiscuous text around them … narrates the gathering of the poet’s despair’ (2009: 84) at their failure to engender love in the beloved, emphasizes the ‘sustained fluent beauty’ (2009: 86) of Sutherland’s lyric form, its capacity ‘more-or-less’ to endure ‘the duress exerted upon it’ (2009: 84). One is tempted to add that what Sutherland’s tendresse must endure above all else is itself; in being uttered it announces an almost unbearable knowledge of its own deformative provenance. Somewhere between Prynne’s and Pattison’s positions, which hover around the historically elapsed but irreplaceable notion of resistance in lyric autonomy as Adorno explored it, is the reading of Hot White Andy which, influenced by Sutherland’s own reading of O’Hara, emphasizes the understanding the poem exhibits of its author’s and the charmed reader’s own very deep complicity with the bourgeois consumption of psychological self-dramatization. This reading keeps in view the Barthesian notion of a wound of intimacy that continually blows its own cover by opening out to the world through desperately virtual or histrionically self-mocking (‘soft’ and ‘hard’) subjectivities ‘as a



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real man / accumulating men, desire and intensity until I die’, to quote the very end of Sutherland’s poem (Sutherland 2009a: unpag.). This is the wound that in Hot White Andy says, ‘The superpower to come is love itself ’ (2007: unpag.) in order to disown and so return us to the greater potency of its own intimate address and that, with similar effects, twice utters the phrase, ‘I accumulate you’, at a point in the discourse where the cancelled but implied words, ‘I love you’, can be made to sound in any ‘inner’ reading, rather in the unsettlingly beautiful manner of brass fanfares sounding offstage in Mahler’s Second Symphony; it is certainly quite different from Prynne’s vehement mangling of Auden in ‘Questions for the Time Being’: ‘Buy one / another or die’ (Prynne 2005: 113). The substitution of ‘I accumulate you’ for ‘I love you’, if that is what it amounts to, also recalls the way in which Barthes, at the very end of A Lover’s Discourse, allows his earlier expressions of suicidal despair to gleam still through his self-consciously Western appropriation of the Buddhist non-will-to-possess in his self-directed injunction, ‘I keep myself from loving you’ (1979: 234). But Sutherland’s performative self-pity, as expressed in that ‘I accumulate you [I love you]’, has its own more extensively intimate confession for the reader to accept as her own – a confession recording the vampiric objectification of bodies past, present and future which has made possible our own privileged experience of despair being transformed into beautiful existential protest from the time of the Romantics, through Kafka, Beckett and Celan, to the late modernist tradition in which Sutherland is writing. The already quoted ending of Hot White Andy (‘as a real man / accumulating men, desire and intensity until I die’) gestures in a highly ambiguous manner towards some of this (discontinuous) literary history – and thus to a further elucidation of the category of intimacy in Sutherland’s writing – by way of its subtle allusion to Wordsworth’s famous definition, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, of the ‘Poet’: ‘a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed common among mankind’ (1990: 877). In his recent book of philosophical criticism, Stupefaction: A Radical Anatomy of Phantoms, Sutherland explicitly links Wordsworth’s canonical paratext with Marx’s critique of capital and in doing so effectively adds a layer of polemical meaning to his own already affectively complex – and, in fact, sexually ambiguous and even virtual – ‘real man’ when he quotes Marx on the irreversible horror of nineteenth-century wage labour to gloss Wordsworth’s ‘Man’, initially at least, as ‘a whole man, not as “a productive expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands etc” ’ (2011: 79).4 So far, so

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bleak: the specific passion and tenderness of the lyric voice resonating with us at the end of Hot White Andy, this paratextual and intertextual reading reminds us, has, like the bourgeois human who conjured it, accumulated its lively reality as the expense of countless others’ real lives. Presumably out of more historically nuanced consideration for Wordsworth’s intentionality, however, Sutherland follows this first gloss of ‘Man’ with a second: ‘the sheer humanity we are yet to be allowed, the goal of Republican self-knowledge at the end of the way of revolutionary despair’ (2011: 79). And in fact, Wordsworth’s contention, acknowledged and apparently affirmed in this second gloss, that ‘Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge’ (Wordsworth 1990: 881) – the Preface also defines the Poet’s role as one of ‘bind[ing] together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time’ (1990: 881) – should be thought no less important for our understanding of Sutherland’s statements of accumulation at the close of Hot White Andy than its insinuations of a disgusted self-critique. The poem’s climax is specifically recalled when Sutherland, in Stupefaction, points out what he calls the ‘logic of subtraction’ that is involved in Wordsworth’s conjuring of the ideal conditions of communication between the Poet and her readers, who must give up their ‘professionalized activity and function’ (as lawyer etc.) to become ‘truly and literally men’ (2011: 79). All of these passages need to be read in relation to an essay Sutherland wrote on Prynne demonstrating that poet’s early rejection of the Wordsworthian figure of the poet as representative of ‘Man’ and the psychological realism that descends from this figure and tracing Prynne’s subsequent rejection of the poetico-philosophical model that had replaced it, namely Charles Olson’s Maximus, the figure who reaches to the ‘limit of the world and history’ and that I become by being ‘in the right place’ (Sutherland 2009b: 115), which is ‘the centre’ – for it is there that ‘each of us, the world and I, will both magnify the other to its greatest dimension and diminish the other to the intimacy of truth’ (Sutherland 2009b: 115). The aspiration towards this ontological and epistemological sort of intimacy has apparently been invalid for Prynne since the time of his Her Weasels Wild Returning collection of 1994, diminished to bathos through its manifestation of ‘American imperialism’ (Sutherland 2009b: 121). The upshot of all this for Sutherland’s poetics should already be fairly clear: though the ending of Hot White Andy hedges its bid to reinstate an Olsonian and Wordsworthian mode of fraternal self-extension with warnings about where a complacently universalist language may lead us – ‘I accumulate you Andrew Lumocolor’ (Sutherland 2006: unpag.): a reference to Staedter’s corporate ‘universal color’ – the bid is movingly there; it resounds.



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As the successor in length and theme to Hot White Andy, Sutherland’s 2009 poem Stress Position goes even further than its predecessor along the double path of intimacy and illimitability and does so in a rhetoric that puts the intimate mode of autobiographical lyric poetry under even acuter degrees of strain without renouncing it completely. The opening statements of its first section (‘Stress Position I: The Question’) unfurl an impression of a human scale that both eludes and includes the abstracted bourgeois reader perilously raised on self-authenticating confessional and realist literature, advancing with astonishing efficiency as they do the poem’s own particular Trickster handling of the by-now-familiar theme of complicity with murder (and sanctioned torture): This is the honest account of the passion of Ali whoever, read it deep in the words, general VAMPIRE, fashioning from this trance in mental colours an idiot stilt to trip, taking the time that the carousel in this rhyme-sound claims is yours, mindful always of imperative limits and where they lie, general JURISPRUDENT, the limits to meaning and power, and as the innumerable stresses rise in a pyramid of lyric ash and flame, keep your eyes out. (Sutherland 2009c: unpag.)

In the early twenty-first-century context in which this poem’s apparently innumerable seven-stress lines have, along with some equally uncompromising later prose sections, first appeared, the unmistakably facetious first line’s use of an Arabic name, especially once it has combined with the explicitly military (and Adornoan) sense of ‘general’ in the subsequent vocative phrases, gestures towards an ongoing phase of destruction that is mediated initially through an outrageous picaresque narrative of feverish, Orientalist displacement and mock-illumination, e.g. ‘Al-Mansur turned, clutched at my wrist / and fixed my eyes in his, uttering then what must have sounded / in my brain like the following words, for these are what I remember …’ (Sutherland 2009c: unpag.). But the battleground gradually comes into over-focus through a supercharged lexical and discursive field that yolks lyric vocality to expansionist domination and includes the items ‘sweetened Diyala’ (referring to a governorate in Iraq) and ‘our own commission’.5 Other examples include ‘renditioned awake’, ‘renditioned to pulp’, ‘rendition / of the voice’, ‘draining it from the hearts and minds’, ‘who is this person making faces / at the faces of Jeremy Greenstock really for?’, ‘But the rules changed’, ‘too late to pull out now’ – a phrase that refers ostensibly to the poem’s own supposedly autonomous thematic accumulation and momentum – and ‘Reconstruct this arcade’ (2009c: unpag.).

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This last imperative phrase is one of the poem’s many references to the writings of Walter Benjamin, in particular his epic fragmentary archiving of ‘the unsettling effects of incipient high capitalism on the most intimate areas of life and work’, to quote the English translators of The Arcades Project (Eiland and McLaughlin 2002: xii). As Stress Position travels further out along its own violent cartoon version of the angel of history’s large-scale view – captured metonymically in the second stanza’s bizarre montage image of ‘the screen test / of Lucas Manyane Fritzl, leaping on strings up the escalator but / going backwards, his crutches in knots, hallucinating modernity’ (Sutherland 2009c: unpag.) – it also keeps returning to what Benjamin, slightly adapting Marx’s terminology, called the ‘phantasmagoria’ of that modernity, especially its intérieurs, its ‘residues of a dream world’, where what is dreamt is the epoch to follow and ‘we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled’ (Benjamin 2002: 13). Benjamin traced an historical development from the Louis Philippe era’s ornate domestic interior, in which the private individual brought together ‘remote locales and memories of the past’ (2002: 19) as a theatrical form of defence from daily office realities, to the Jugendstil’s ‘liquidation of the interior’ (2002: 20) and anticipation of a time when ‘the true framework for the life of the private citizen must be sought increasingly in offices and commercial centres’ (2002: 20). Stress Position affixes its own surrealistic and more violently unconcealing addenda to this narrative, even as it reminds us, sometimes very distantly, that rooms are places of potential intimacy where a humanity stripped of (bourgeois) ‘professionalized activity and function’ (Sutherland 2011: 79) might dream of a world joined together by loving (self-)knowledge. In his essay on Hot White Andy Pattison notes the intentionally tragic and ridiculous ‘againness’ of the lyrically patterned suffering experienced by the lover of this poem (2009: 90). There is a reminder in this of Barthes’ lover’s wilful and bathetic ‘scenography of waiting’ (Barthes 1979: 37), in which, in the manner of the Winnicottian infant’s fetishistic imaginary of the mother’s breast, he creates and recreates the object of his love ‘over and over’ alone by a telephone in a room or a café, keeping the ‘habit of hallucinating the being I have loved’ even ‘long after the amorous relation is allayed’ – like ‘an amputee who still feels pain in his missing leg’ (Barthes 1979: 39). In Stress Position the one who loves is no longer alone, but the hallucinatory feeling of againness is necessarily intensified by the fact that its problematically erotic interior scenes refer both to each other and to the equivalent existential predicaments in the earlier poem, modifying them as they partially repeat them. There are



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also many misplaced limbs in these rooms. The first notably erotic encounter returns us to the parodic god(dess)-in-light passages of Hot White Andy but with a new intensity that anachronistically recalls the section beginning ‘I rose; and bending at her sweet command’ (l. 403) of Rousseau’s testimony in The Triumph of Life (Shelley 1977: 466), not only in its hyperbolically Romantic reification of simple-past-narrated time and place (already figured in the first stanza’s ‘fashioning from this trance’ [Sutherland 2009c: unpag.] passages), but also as a result of a feeling of (self-)knowledge vanishing into haziness and an infusion of disfiguring verbal violence, both of which Paul de Man showed to be an essential motifs in Shelley’s late fragmentary poem (de Man 1984: 99–100): I walked inside that room and saw the night shear forward flung at my back and knew you sitting there the ground up shadow caught like tinder about my neck the watered people grew into the flickering heel I threw around the sky and music strained a beautiful agony out of my ordinary steps to be at your side who sitting there I never knew was you until your head turned and your breathlessness lit me (Sutherland 2009c: unpag.)

This motif of coming into a room to recognize momentarily one who is there (in her humanity or otherwise) recurs throughout the poem, and does so with descending levels of normal comfort for the reader, despite or especially with the reminders it carries of the intimacy that would shield us from the truth of war. The mostly latent sense in the just-quoted stanza of the body parts ‘back’, ‘neck’, ‘heel’ and even ‘side’ and ‘head’ becoming involved in a contorted thrownness is enlarged by the speaker’s statement in the next stanza that ‘acrobatic skeletons wrung from every / motionless body in that room flash into my missing eyes’ (Sutherland 2009c: unpag.). In the second part of the poem, which briefly reads as an address ‘To the anagrammatic Diotima’ (2009c: unpag.) – and thus perhaps as a text in scrambled remembrance not only of love Platonically defined as the path to the Absolute but also of Hölderlin’s beleaguered erotic project of psychic and cultural enlivening in the war text Hyperion – the speaker, now in the present, goes ‘inside’, shuts the door to ‘unfold the hiding place’ and ‘softly’ (2009c: unpag.), we are pointedly told, begins to stare. The bourgeois ‘reward’ for such theatrical tact is ‘self-sacrifice’ (Sutherland 2009c: unpag.) – which turns out to be an ironic way of referring to the sacrifice of another human being: Looking down into a woman laid on her back I abruptly look into a hole bored into her foot.

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The white foot is raised in the air awaiting intensity, I can’t understand how beautiful it is, my thin heart thrashes at the limit it sets in stony flesh flooded by brilliancy later unknown, this is the real dot I hear my final voice repeat as the shrinkwrapped air collapses spinning into the floor. (2009c, unpag.)

Barthes’ lover’s manner of making of his beloved’s body into a ‘fetishized corpse’ (1979: 71) in his scrutiny of its tender (voiceless) parts, ‘in which I could read, without understanding anything about it, the cause of my desire’ (1979: 72), becomes, in Sutherland’s poem, an invasive quasi-surgical gaze that overwrites lyric yearning with the strong affect of affectless pornography (‘awaiting intensity’ [Sutherland 2009c: unpag.]) and overwrites both of these with the no less pornographic kind of spectacle made famous in Charles Graner Jr. and Lynndie England’s photographs of their own serial abuse of Iraqi detainees – here summoned by the poem’s recurrent image-within-an-image of a floor spinning with body parts.6 In Paul de Man’s extravagantly desperate reading of Shelley, self-knowledge is always being permanently erased on the way to general disfigurement, with the effect that ‘nothing, whether deed, word, thought, or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence’ (de Man 1984: 122), whereas Sutherland’s poetics of recurrence and substitution suggest we may know and take further what we have learned in the encounter with accumulating intensity, even if what we learn is the (positive) necessity of personal fragmentation or subtraction. And the force of subtraction is certainly evident in the image of the ‘real dot’ in the lyric stanza quoted above, which comes to be associated not only with the reductive pixelation of pornography (Sutherland 2009a: unpag.) but also a form of narrated life – ‘I turn the hole in her foot into / a man called DOT’ (2009a: unpag.) – that has already been linked, through the phrase ‘the quiet screaming dots on the glass’ (2009a: unpag.), to a perspective arising from both microscopic technologies and the cycles of self-harm. The latter are also present in the game of battleships that Sutherland repeatedly plays with his ‘own’ body and the reader’s when he interrupts the already intermezzo-like texture of the first section with a menacingly post-human lexis of size-specified targets that include ‘TEETH 7’ and ‘CONE GUTS 6’ (Sutherland 2009a: unpag.).There is a reminder here of Barthes’ self-involved lover struggling ‘in a kind of lunatic sport’ with his ‘figures’ (Barthes 1979: 4) that refuse to take the shape of any



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socially acceptable discourse. But Sutherland’s riskily exhibitionist mimesis of corporeal dismantling is one which both the ‘shouted body parts[’]’ (Sutherland 2009a: unpag.) capitalized relation to the mired ‘professionalized functions’ (e.g. ‘general JURISPRUDENT’) and his epigraph’s ironic borrowing from Ben Jonson’s promotion of a colonially unified archipelago (‘Obedience doth not well in parts’ [Sutherland 2009c: unpag.]) invite us to see as an auto-erotic act of refusal in the face of an abstracted phenomenological homeliness vis-à-vis commodity fetishism and the violence it throws up. Despite its deconstructive bent, then, Stress Position is a poem positively committed to transformation of the world through generally recognizable forms of theatrical protest and, moreover, forms of address and degrees of selfnarration that would, by Prynne’s severer standards, be judged inadmissible. In one of the poem’s many entering-a-room sequences, Sutherland’s ‘I’ unfolds a tale of his ‘rape’ in a toilet cubicle, ‘my mother waiting outside, my sister / with her there’ (2009c: unpag.), at the hands of a gang of skinheads. The whole episode can be read as crudely pixelated 1980s British middle-class phantasmagoria, where the wildly incommensurate relation this branch of psychic experience bears to the actual indignities and death suffered by unnamed countless others can be inferred from the sardonic anti-autobiographical description of its interior: ‘the graffiti / penis surrounded by frantic and tender confession, of neurosis / or just desire’ (Sutherland 2009c: unpag.). But this effect is subtly modified by what is almost a direct quotation or anticipation of Sutherland’s characterization of the younger, Charles Tomlinson-influenced Prynne’s poetological experience of being intimately bounded by the world through extended radical knowledge of it (see Sutherland 2009b: 113), the speaker shifting to the future tense to say how, after the attack, ‘I will continue / with her to the town centre and shopping passionately erect and tiny’ (Sutherland 2009c: unpag.). Here is language that locates the lyric poet in the blandly homogenous heart of consumption (Benjamin’s ‘commercial centres’ [Benjamin 2002: 20]) but which also strips this figure of his institutional power so comprehensively, even in relation to the ‘real man / accumulating men’ of Hot White Andy – and does this, as Barthes’ lover’s discourse had done before it, by linking his passion to the Mother, the original Diotima – that we can almost believe that the most soothing intimate address will be possible again soon. And yet it is sometimes very difficult to affirm that Stress Position presents a form of stripping down to size that is ultimately coextensive with a greater re-gathering of the forces of the maximal, Wordsworthian or Olsonian ‘Man’. The poem’s later prose sections, which form the second half of ‘Stress Position

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II: The Workings’, proliferate re-heightened forms of meta-narration (including a versified reference to Prynne under erasure) that suggest the only reliable kind of knowledge available for the moment will be a specifically textual sort of self-knowledge. There are also beguilingly lucent dreams and quasi-personal memories here, implying the possible extension of some empathetic relation (one section is headed, ‘with a carrot for my mother’), but these occur ultimately only in the condition of fragmentation that shows the one empathizing how indebted she is to the verbatim duplications of what Prynne called ‘the unwitty circus’ (see Sutherland 2010b: 146): ‘yet another journalism photo of Iraq [a theatre near you]’ (Sutherland 2009c: unpag.; italics and square brackets in original). In the first of these prose sections, the reader is treated to a more exhaustively post-human rerun of the deictic lyric from Hot White Andy discussed above: this time, if there is to be any intimate bond of self-knowledge, it seems, it will have to be reconstructed from the hazy depths of a dream of interpersonal life as a primitive kind of computer game: We do gather up the handfuls, moving around what in my translation of it is a maze as though she and I were blips. I can’t explain to her why this is so terrible, though it is, because her blip is not disposed to countenance the thing in my language, though it is as much her thing as mine. When do I say it? Now, for example. (Sutherland 2009c: unpag.)

The ambiguous recovery of first-person and second-person lyric address comes close to stalling altogether in ‘Stress Position III: The Answer’, where these registers are increasingly invaded by waves of a new despondency about this poetry’s own performative function: ‘But why go on / the show in the first place …’; ‘what the fuck do you see in publicity imagism / like that for?’ (Sutherland 2009c: unpag.). It is here, too, that we find Sutherland’s rhetoric giving the domestic bourgeois self ’s participation in global domination both the brief and putatively universalizing frisson of the uncanny and the demolition job of bathos, turning Celan’s ‘schwarze Milch’ to ‘extorted black spunk, Cheney and Rumsfeld Inc. / trinken und trinken’ (Sutherland 2009c: unpag.) and enacting the final ‘invasion / of privacy’ with these words: ‘The echoing clock, the thunder and rain / beating the window, the howling wind, and, creepiest of all, / the sound of steps coming slowly up the creaking stairs’ (2009c: unpag.).7 ‘What goes on in your head? Or up but won’t come down?’ the poem has already asked the reader in her affective confusion (Sutherland 2009c: unpag.). If, in Stress Position, Sutherland yokes the intimate confessional mode more grotesquely and bathetically than ever before to the horrors of neo-colonial



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torture and exploitation in order to invalidate (and perhaps re-validate) that mode, in Hot White Andy he had already made the connection in a more insidious way: by allowing the bourgeois reader to luxuriate in reflexive awareness of her intimate complicity with violent expansionism as an extended form of lyric beauty. Both of these poems, however, may be considered extraordinary for the degree to which they linger over any averagely privileged person’s intimate relation to the world in its apparently ungraspable recent development. Both poems continue Prynne’s activity of interrogating what kind of knowledge poets and poems might be allowed to (re)possess, while adding a new figurative and visceral immediacy to the fundamental story which late modernist poetry has sometimes been able to tell the reader about herself. Like Barthes’, this is a story that begins and ends with the intimacy of self-knowledge but, unlike Barthes’, it is one that never allows the reader to forget either the intractable unevenness of the world or the self-and-world-shattering possibility of an end to that evenness as these things materialize in her own ever-recurring desire for the next (big) thing.

Works Cited Adorno, T. W. (2002), Essays on Music. Translated from the German by S. H. Gillespie. Berkeley: University of California Press. —(2003), The Jargon of Authenticity. Translated from the German by K. Tarnowski and F. Will. London: Routledge Classics. Anon. (2010), ‘Words in pictures: Keston Sutherland’, New Statesman [online] Available at: http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/cultural-capital/2010/04/hot-white-andysutherland [accessed 14 June 2012]. Barthes, R. (1979), A Lover’s Discourse. Translated from the French by R. Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. —(1986), The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation. Translated from the French by R. Howard. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Benjamin, W. (1999), The Arcades Project. Translated from the German by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Brady, A. (2005), Embrace. Glasgow: Object Permanence. Celan, P. (1996), Selected Poems. Translated from the German by M. Hamburger. London: Penguin Books. Cooke, Jennifer (2007), ‘The laughter of narcissism: loving Hot White Andy and the troubling chain of equivalence’, in Purves, R. and Ladkin, S. (eds), Complicities: British Poetry 1945–2007. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia.

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De Man, P. (1984), ‘Shelley disfigured’, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 93–123. Eiland, H. and McLaughlin, K. (1999), ‘Translators’ foreword’, in Benjamin, W. (1999), The Arcades Project. Translated from the German by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Eliot, T. S. (1963), Collected Poems 1909–1962. London: Faber and Faber Limited. HÖlderlin, F. (2008), Hyperion or The Hermit in Greece. Translated from the German by R. Benjamin. Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books. Jarvis, S. (2007), ‘The poetry of Keston Sutherland’. Chicago Review, 53(1), 139–45. Ladkin, S. (2007), ‘Problems for lyric poetry’, in Purves, R. and Ladkin, S. (eds), Complicities: British Poetry 1945–2007. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia. Ladkin, S. and Purves, R. (2007), ‘An introduction’. Chicago Review, 53(1), 6–13. O’Hara, F. The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pattison, N. (2009), ‘Lyric purity in Keston Sutherland’s Hot White Andy’, Hot Gun!, 1, 84–94. Prynne, J. H. (2005), Poems. Tarset: Bloodaxe Books. —(2009), ‘Keston Sutherland: Hot White Andy’. Hot Gun!, 1, 78–83. Purves, R. and Ladkin, S. (eds) (2007), Complicities: British Poetry 1945–2007. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia. Shelley, P. B. (1977), Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Sutherland, K. (2006), ‘Vocal stupor 2: notes on love poetry’ (New Readings of British Contemporary Poetry, University of Dundee, 3 June 2006). —(2009a), Hot White Andy. London: Barque Press. —(2009b), ‘X L Prynne’, in I. Brinton (ed.), A Man of Utterance: The Poetry of J. H. Prynne. Exeter: Shearsman Books, 104–32. —(2009c), Stress Position. London: Barque Press. —(2010a), ‘Close writing’, in R. Hampson and W. Montgomery (eds), Frank O’Hara Now: New Essays on the New York Poets. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 120–30. —(2010b), ‘Hilarious absolute daybreak’. Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary, 2, 115–47. —(2011), Stupefaction: A Radical Anatomy of Phantoms. Chicago: Seagull Books (Chicago University Press). Wilkinson, J. (2008), ‘Mandarin ducks and chee-chee chokes’, Jacket, 35. Online at: http://jacketmagazine.com/35/r-sutherland-rb-wilkinson.shtml [accessed 14 June 2012]. Wordsworth, W. (1990), The Poems, Volume One. London: Penguin Books.



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Notes 1 The other writers included in the sample are Peter Manson, Chris Goode and Andrea Brady. Evidence for Sutherland’s relatively high profile beyond the academy comes from a puff on the New Statesman website announcing, ‘Sutherland is at the forefront of the experimental movement in contemporary British poetry’; though in introducing the linked clip of Sutherland reading Hot White Andy (available via the channel ‘meshworks’ on YouTube), the anonymous author cautions: ‘It is dense, high-octane poetry, to which, for newcomers, acclimatisation may require several viewings’ (Anon. 2010: unpag.). 2 See ‘Loving Schumann’ (1979), in which, as well as writing of the ‘dizzying’ effects of the intermezzo ‘when it extends to all of music, and when the matrix is experienced only as an exhausting (if graceful) sequence of interstices’ (Barthes 1985: 295–6), Barthes calls Schumann ‘the musician of solitary intimacy, of the amorous and imprisoned soul that speaks to itself ’ (1985: 293), thus bringing this utterly radical and utterly buergerlich composer into a direct relation with the self-fragmenting discourse of the lover (and, I would argue, Hot White Andy). 3 Of considerable relevance here may be Adorno’s utopian (and grief-affected) references to Kindertotenlieder in ‘Marginalia on Mahler’ (1936), where these songs are seen as perfected examples of how intimate remembrance, ‘stroking the hair of the helpless [i.e. the dead]’, aims at ‘The rescue of what is possible, but has not yet been’ (Adorno 2002: 612). That Adorno’s essay ends with the following hopeful sentences – ‘[Mahler] promises victory to the losers. All his symphonic music is a reveille. Its hero is the deserter’ (2002: 617) – should certainly be borne in mind by readers contemplating Sutherland’s seemingly cynical musical references. 4 See Sutherland 2011: 26–7 for a full discussion of the passage from Marx. 5 The word ‘commission’ is a specific example, for Adorno, of ‘bureaucratic language, seasoned with authenticity’ (Adorno 2003: 66) in German phenomenology, in which Adorno saw signs of a quasi-bureaucratic ‘apparent humanization of the thingly; the actual turning of man into thing’ (2003: 67). Adorno suggests the jargonistic useage of ‘commission’ may be traced back to the first of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, where it helps to express ‘the vague feeling that an unsayable element of experience wants something from the subject’ (2003: 68) – an effect he considers typical of ‘much that is irrational from the era prior to fascism’ (2003: 69). 6 For a powerfully extended polemical meditation on these events and their mediation, see Brady’s negative pastoral, ‘Saw Fit’ (Brady 2005: 54–7). 7 The vandalized poem of Celan’s is, of course, ‘Todesfuge’ (Celan 1996: 62–5).

7

Talking About Love in Raymond Carver Catherine Humble

University College London

In Raymond Carver’s ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’, a cardiologist named Mel McGinnes, his wife Terri, and their two friends, Laura and Nick, sit around a kitchen table, drinking gin and talking about love. Terri explains that her ex-boyfriend loved her so much he tried to kill her. Mel says he loved his ex-wife more than life itself; he asks, ‘What happened to that love?’ (Carver 2003: 120). ‘Well, Nick and I know what love is,’ says Laura, ‘You’re supposed to say something now.’ She turns a large smile on him. Mel says, ‘What do any of us really know about love?’ (2003: 120).

Published in 1981 in the titular volume, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, the story has become one of Carver’s most renowned. The collection received high acclaim, securing Carver’s reputation as the master of minimalism. However, recent years have seen the publication of the unedited stories that made up What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. In December 2009, Tess Gallagher, Carver’s second wife and literary executor, along with the scholars William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll, republished the stories from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in their original form. The volume, entitled Beginners, reveals the extent to which Carver’s editor, Gordon Lish, transformed his original prose. Lish cut as much as 70 per cent of several stories, excised Carver’s more capacious voice, and mined the so-called minimalist style for which Carver became famous. The story ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’ and the unedited version, ‘Beginners’, both explore the inexpressibility of love, but through

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different forms of linguistic expression. In both stories love is what cannot be expressed through conventional linguistic meaning. But in the minimalist edit, the conjunction of highly literal language and gaps in meaning make love at once determined and unknown, fixed and void. In ‘Beginners’, however, the language is more expansive. Characters scuttle around the point: their stuttering, visceral expression captures an otherness of love. In his book Encore, Jacques Lacan draws a distinction between two modes of linguistic expression that bear some likeness to Carver’s edited and unedited prose: the whole refers to a mode of language in which meaning is highly fixed but also empty, and the not whole indicates a form of language which is corporeal and pulsating, making meaning opaque (Lacan 1999: 75–80).1 These different modes of language have different implications for love, as we shall see in my following reading of Carver and Lacan.

Lacan: language, otherness, love This year I shall have to articulate what serves as the linchpin of everything that has been instituted on the basis of analytic experience: love. (Lacan 1999: 39)

For Lacan, love stems from the impasses in structures of signification, what he terms the real that resists linguistic definition. ‘To make love, as the expression indicates, is poetry’, says Lacan, ‘Love aims at being, namely, at what slips away most in language’ (Lacan 1999: 39). In Lacan, love aims at what cannot be identified in conventional language. In other words, love aims at being, that part of the human subject that escapes everyday linguistic meaning. In this way, love can be expressed through poetry, which dismantles conventional linguistic meaning and says something else. Lacan states: ‘the effects of those instances of saying can give a stumbling, bumbling shadow to the feeling known as love’ (1999: 46). As we shall see in my reading of Lacan, the whole and not whole positions refer, loosely speaking, to different poetic forms of language that gesture at something which escapes everyday meaning — and so they gesture at love and being. Taking my lead from Lacan’s suggestion that philosophical and analytic discourse is itself pervaded with ambiguities, I will read Lacan’s own writing not only for its manifest content but for its opacity, attending to the indefinite aspects of his prose (1999: 48). To this end, I will focus in detail on one of Lacan’s Seminars, Encore. Lacan rebukes those critics who ‘assume I have an



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ontology, or, what amounts to the same thing, a system’ (1999: 70). In paying close attention to Lacan’s own prose, at times my readings of his whole and not whole positions will contravene critical interpretations of them, which have tended to systematize the different forms of language (Žižek 2002: 57–77; Soler 2002: 99–109; Salecl 2002: 94). Thus, in reading Lacan through Carver we will see how Carver’s prose helps us understand Lacan’s different linguistic positions, but also challenges dominant readings of them, so that rather than affirm prior knowledge of Lacan, I reach my own distinctive readings. Lacan also enriches our reading of Carver, in particular the different psychical structures that underlie the different languages of the edited and unedited prose, and the implications these have for love. But before turning to Carver let us take a brief detour through Lacan’s whole and not whole positions. As we have seen, for Lacan, love arises from a relationship with the unnameable real of being – that part of the subject that escapes fixed linguistic meaning. But this indefinite dimension of the subject can be approached in different ways. The whole and not whole refer to different ways in which the subject inhabits or relates to language. For Lacan, the whole position refers to the subject’s whole relationship with what Lacan calls the symbolic (2006: 25–52). To backtrack a little, Lacan’s symbolic is the differential system of signification which works along two axes. First, on a vertical axis, the word or signifier negates the actual thing by signifying it (something of the real thing is lost in the word). Second, on a horizontal plane, the word attains its meaning through its difference from and similarity to other words (‘cat’ is only ‘cat’ because it is not ‘bat’; ‘bat’ is ‘bat’ because it is not ‘bag’, and so on) (Lacan 2006: 25–52). In this sense, the symbolic order is differential. In the symbolic, there is therefore no inherent or natural relationship between the word and the thing it signifies; the symbolic is a system of linguistic meaning that operates according to convention. Lacan’s symbolic therefore functions according to two different logics of absence: first, the word’s negation of the thing, or being, and so its absence, and second, the differential gaps, or absences, between words in the chain of signification (the differential gaps between ‘cat’ and ‘bat’ and ‘bag’ and so on). Thus, assigned to the symbolic order, subjectivity is exposed to alterity, outside itself (Lacan 2006). The subject therefore always encounters a loss and division within language: part of being escapes symbolic meaning. For Lacan, the whole position is wholly defined by the symbolic order: by its operations of meaning and absence (Lacan 1999). Lacan refers to the vertical axis, by which the thing or being is negated and defined by the word, as ‘linguistic castration’ (1999: 44, 81–8). The word

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cuts into being, as something of being is severed from the word’s meaning, but at the same time the subject is determined by the word (i.e. we rely on meaning to operate as communicable subjects). Lacan identifies the first, ‘originary linguistic cut’ (1999: 44, 81–8, 108), which refers to the subject’s first acquisition of language; this is the infant’s first traumatic split between becoming the subject of meaning and the negation of its pre-linguistic being. I read Lacan’s whole position in language as operating according to a radically polarized logic of meaning and lack. Via a close reading of Lacan, I locate his whole position as pertaining to the first, traumatic ‘linguistic cut’, where the word negates being and we have an extreme polarity between meaning and lack (Lacan 1999: 81–8). This is distinct from full integration within the symbolic, where lack is inscribed in the differential gaps between signifiers that move along the horizontal chain of signification. Unlike the interrelated gaps of signification, the first linguistic cut, which negates being for the first signifier or acquisition of language, fosters a calcified form of alterity – in the first traumatic lack of being. There is thus a difference between the ‘love’ that arises from the linguistic negation of being and the ‘love’ that arises from the gaps between signifiers (Lacan 1999: 44, 81–8, 108). The not whole, on the other hand, is defined as not wholly castrated by language and so not split by it (Lacan 1999). Lacan states, ‘oddly enough (singulièrement) [the not whole position] is intrinsically’ inside language (Lacan 1999: 40; my italics). The not whole position inhabits the very materiality of language. Otherness, as in the outside of meaning, arises from the indefinite corporeal texture of language itself. Indeed, Lacan’s term singulièrement hints at a more ‘singular’ relation to language. In inhabiting the indefinite textuality of signifiers, the subject experiences contact with the singularity of being. In Lacan, the whole and not whole positions in language have different implications for knowledge. The whole position operates according to finite meaning, and so it pertains to finite knowledge. The alterity of the whole position, that which is outside of its meaning, continues to pertain to the field of knowledge, but it is its inverse: the unknown, situated in the gaps in symbolic meaning (Lacan 1999: 96). In the not whole position, otherness (of meaning) is more ‘radically other’ (1999: 96): otherness is not simply the inverse of knowledge, as the unknown; it is ‘unfathomable’ (1999: 96) — radically outside the very field of knowledge. This has consequences for love. For Lacan, gaps in knowledge give rise to desire. But that which is radically outside the field of knowledge, unfathomable, gives rise to love. As we shall see in our reading of Carver, in the edited text the other person is depicted as an unknown object of desire. This



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unknown other person remains within the logic of determinate meaning, but as its hollowed out, unknown, semblance. In the unedited text, however, the other person is presented as radically other to the field of knowledge, unfathomable, and therefore loved.

Beginners at love ‘My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right’; so opens ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’ (Carver 2003: 114). These opening lines display determinacy of linguistic meaning: the sentences are lean, syntactically straightforward; the subject of the sentence occupies the position of grammatical subject. In line with Lacan’s whole position in language, the subject of the sentence appears to be in command of linguistic meaning, rather than inhabiting the materiality of language itself. As Lacan puts it, the subject has the signifier, instead of being the signifier (Lacan 1999: 73–4). The measured repetitions of the same subject-verb-object conjugation enhance the sense of semantic determinacy. Immediately after the word ‘right’, Lish cuts Carver’s original lengthy paragraph and starts a new one, so that alongside finite meaning comes the empty page. In contrast to the edit, the opening of ‘Beginners’ is more faltering: ‘My friend Herb McGinnis, a cardiologist, was talking. The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking …’ (Carver 2009: 177; note, Herb is renamed Mel in the edit). With the sub-clause and run-on sentences, in the unedited version we see signs of a more capacious voice. The edited story continues: ‘We lived in Albuquerque then. But we were all from somewhere else’ (Carver 2003: 114). Inserting a full stop before ‘But’, Lish’s edited line becomes pithy, economical. Again, the line is followed by a paragraph cut, leaving the reader lingering on the inscrutable ‘somewhere else’. Even in the opening lines, Lish’s editorial strategy is clear. On the one hand, he clips back Carver’s original expansive sentences, studding lines with full stops to enhance their literalness of meaning; on the other hand he lops paragraphs, creating linguistic cuts at especially nebulous moments. We see Lacan’s whole dynamic emerging — finite meaning meets emptiness (Lacan 1999). Lish’s lean rhythms work similarly. Critics have remarked on the choppy Hemingway-like rhythms of the edited Carver (Morrison 2009; Campbell 2009; Barth 1984: 1). Indeed, we have seen this rhythm in the opening lines. Responsible for the thudding repetitions, Lish inserted the ‘he said’, ‘she said’ that became Carver’s trademark:

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The gin and the tonic water kept going around, and we somehow got on the subject of love. Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He said he’d spent five years in a seminary … He said he still looked back to those years … Terri said the man she lived with before she lived with Mel loved her so much he tried to kill her. Then Terri said, ‘He beat me up one night …’ Terri looked around the table: ‘What do you do with love like that?’ (Carver 2003: 114; my italics to indicate edit.)

We learn that Terri’s ex-boyfriend, Ed, loved her so much he tried to kill her and also himself, but he ‘bungled it’ (Carver 2003: 116). His head swelled up to twice the size. Mel says, ‘We had a fight over it. I didn’t think she should see him like that. I didn’t think she should see him, and I still don’t’ (Carver 2003: 118). Lish inserts this repetition. As Deleuze and Guattari have demonstrated, repetition has a contradictory effect: on the one hand, it affirms meaning; on the other hand, it negates it (we lose the sense of the words the more they are repeated) (Deleuze 1994). The same effect is produced in Lish’s edit, as the repeated words certify literal meaning, but also render meaning redundant, emptying it. Again, we have the dynamic of Lacan’s whole: both over-determined meaning and lack.

Lish’s linguistic cut In Lish’s minimalist edit we do not simply have a linguistic dynamic of meaning and then lack of meaning, since this would merely ascribe to the logic of the symbolic order, which works according to signifiers of meaning and differential gaps in meaning, as we have seen. In the edited Carver, the relationship between meaning and lack of meaning is more extreme, polarized. It is my contention that the minimalist prose performs a cutting into linguistic meaning, which might be understood in terms of Lacan’s ‘linguistic cut’ (Lacan 1999: 44, 81–8). The minimalist prose amplifies the very contradiction of linguistic castration – that is, the subject’s original severance between meaning and lack; it is as if the minimalist prose hones in on this originary linguistic cut, exposing the traumatic institution of meaning and absence. We see this in Lish’s tendency to lop paragraphs, which both emphasizes the determinacy of the preceding lines and creates semantic gaps. In the unedited story Herb and his friends make a toast: ‘We touched glasses. /“To love,” we said’ (Carver 2009: 182). After this sentence Carver originally started a new line. But Lish starts a whole new subsection. Here, the protracted gap on the page creates an unsignified space, so that love appears inexplicable. This dynamic continues.



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In the edited story, time and again references to love are followed by line breaks, which constitute a kind of cut: ‘What do you do with love like that?’ [Line break] ‘I sure know you wouldn’t call it love.’ [Line break] ‘Does that sound like love to you?’ [Line break] ‘To love’ [Line break] (Carver 2003: 114, 115, 119). In the unedited story, ‘Beginners’, characters ramble around the point. For example, Herb says: Did that love just get erased from the big board, as if it was never up there, as if it never happened? What happened to it is what I’d like to know. I wish someone could tell me … I know that’s what would happen with us, with Terri and me, as much as we may love each other. With any of us for that matter. I’ll stick my neck out that much. We’ve all proved it anyhow. I just don’t understand. (Carver 2009: 183)

But in the edit the word ‘love’ is frequently followed by stark impasses. It is curious that, more than for other heavy-handed editors, critics have drawn on a vocabulary of violence to describe Lish’s edit. In Blake Morrison’s review of ‘Beginners’ in the Guardian he calls ‘the true Carver … less brutal’ (Morrison 2009). The stories ‘were substantially, if not brutally, edited by Gordon Lish’, says James Campbell, who also reflects on ‘a five-page Lish excision’ (Campbell 2009). In contrast to the unedited ‘Beginners’, in Lish’s edit ‘the characters can be more brutal’, says Gaby Wood (Wood 2009). ‘Two stories had been slashed by nearly seventy per cent’, we learn, in The New Yorker’s ‘Rough crossings: The cutting of Raymond Carver’ (Anon 2007; my italics). The comments tap into what I see as the psychical truth of Lish’s edit: that his minimalist prose approaches the subject’s originary linguistic cut – the traumatic split between linguistic meaning and the failure of meaning to capture being, instituting an originary loss (Lacan 1998: 236–8). Lacan describes the whole position in terms of the brutal primordial loss instituted by linguistic castration (Lacan 1999: 44, 81–8). As we have seen, the symbolic order of language works according to two institutions of lack: first, the negation of being by the word, creating the lack of being; and, second, the lacks (or gaps) between signifiers in the differential chain of signification. In this way, the first, original lack of being is structured via the lacks in the structure of signification. In the symbolic order Lacan says that being ‘slips’ behind the signifiers which ‘eclipse’ it, so that being is partly hidden and partly revealed through language (Lacan 1998: 236–8). But the subject of the whole position appears to be more radically split by the first negation of being via the word: the subject is more radically riven between meaning and lack. Roman Jakobson described literature as ‘organized violence committed on

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ordinary speech’ (1987: 378), and this is precisely Lish’s procedure. But rather than dismember language and manipulate it into new, so-called experimental formations, Lish exacerbates its inherent logic — the brutal cut between determinate meaning and negation. In so doing, he captures a certain truth of the subject, what Paul de Man has described as the tragic linguistic schism: ‘literature is itself a cause and a symptom of the separation it bewails’ (1983: 115). Revealingly, in his attempt to define the whole position Lacan also deploys the language of the cut: ‘I cannot designate it any better or otherwise because I have to rough [tranche] it out’, he states (1999: 74). In a footnote to the English edition of Encore, the translator, Bruce Fink, provides the original French term for ‘rough it out’ as ‘tranche’. In Lacan’s passage, the term tranche is used figuratively as in ‘determine’ but it also resounds with its literal sense, ‘to slice or cut’. To determine meaning is thus to institute a cut. As we have seen, critics have spoken of the violence of Lish’s edit, but they have also, curiously, described it as a kind of bodily cut: ‘He also consistently cut the stories to the linguistic bone, developing a uniquely spare, laconic, almost threatening aesthetic that was eventually dubbed “minimalism” or “Kmart realism”’ (Anon 2007). Indeed, expressing his own discomfort with his minimalist prose, Carver once described the style as a kind of bodily lesion: I knew I’d gone as far the other way as I could or wanted to go, cutting everything down to the marrow, not just to the bone. Any farther in that direction and I’d be at a dead end … In a review of the last book, somebody called me a ‘minimalist’ writer. The reviewer meant it as a compliment. But I didn’t like it. (Carver 1983)

Just as Lacan’s whole position cuts into the primal being, so for both Carver and his critics, the minimalist aesthetic of the edit appears to excise something original, cutting out something bodily. Framed as a corporeal cut, minimalism captures the originary cut between meaning and the loss of being.

The pleasure of the edit Critics have noted the strange enjoyment one experiences in reading Carver’s language of omission: ‘But there is scant room for argument about the abrupt, elliptical tone of the early Carver, which intoxicated a generation of readers and writers’, says James Campbell (Campbell 2009). I suggest that this affect can be understood in terms of the experience of painful pleasure that Lacan



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calls jouissance; jouissance refers to the pleasurable illusion of limitless access to being, to total self-presence prior to the subject’s split within language (Lacan 1999: 66, 75). Lacan states: ‘No jouissance is given to me or could be given to me other than that of my own body … The result of the limit [of language] is that jouissance dries up for everybody’ (qtd. in Fink 1995: 101). In other words, jouissance, as the pleasure of full self-presence, is necessarily impossible, always precluded because of the limits of meaning introduced by language; and thus such illusions of pleasure are also painful. I will consider the distinctive affects of Carver’s edited and unedited prose in terms of Lacan’s different formulations of jouissance: the jouissance of the whole and not whole positions (Lacan 1999). First, the jouissance of the whole position refers to the pleasurable pain procured through the lack (of being) instituted by language. ‘The goal of satisfying the thought of being’ is ‘never satisfied, except at the price of a castration’, says Lacan (1999: 115). In this sense, the jouissance of the whole position is the painful satisfaction that arises from linguistic castration – the subject’s first traumatic split between linguistic meaning and lack (of being) (Lacan 1999: 105). This is the painful pleasure of renunciation; Lacan calls it ‘insufficient jouissance’ (1999: 96) – the pleasure of renunciating full self-presence, getting off on the originary loss of complete being. On the other hand, the jouissance of the not whole position refers to the corporeal pleasure of inhabiting language (1999: 72–4). Lacan calls this ‘supplementary jouissance’ (1999: 72–4). Like the jouissance procured through Julia Kristeva’s ‘semiotic’ language, her language of ‘bodily pulsions’ (Kristeva 1984: 25), this is a corporeal jouissance that arises from inhabiting ‘the being of signifiers’, the materiality of language (Lacan 1999: 71). Instead of the painful pleasure that arises from omission, the unedited Carver creates a gentle, more moving, or bodily affect, critics suggest. In place of dissociation comes feeling. Gaby Wood writes: ‘The edited characters well up; the original characters spill over’ (Wood 2009); Blake Morrison states: ‘The true Carver, we now see, is gentler, fleshier, less brutal than Lish’s Carver’ (Morrison 2009). Returning to the edited Carver, it is not just the reader or critic who experiences discomforting pleasure from omission. This appears to be the predicament of the edited characters — why they seem so compelled to keep on talking about love. ‘To speak about love is in itself a jouissance’, says Lacan (1999: 83). This is the jouissance of the whole position: the inability to define love elicits the painful pleasure that arises from gaps in linguistic sense. In the edited Carver, where talk of love consists of clipped meanings and impasses, such talk is not so much an attempt to understand love as to rub up against its enigma, to

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gain painful satisfaction from it. This jouissance of the whole position ascribes to what Lacan calls the logic of ‘necessity’: ‘it doesn’t stop not being written’ (1999: 59; my italics). In the edited Carver, the characters enact the pleasure of repeatedly confronting the lack in linguistic meaning. In Lacan’s account of the jouissance of the whole position ascribing to the logic of ‘necessity’, of repeated negations, he appears to elide the whole with the repeated movement of negation that constitutes the symbolic order. In this way, he suggests that mobility inheres in the whole position (1999: 59). Indeed, critics have defined the jouissance of the whole position as arising from the symbolic order of language: the movement of negation in which one word is not another word along the differential chain of signification that continues, ad infinitum. Speaking of the whole position, Bruce Fink states: ‘pleasures are limited to those allowed by the play of the signifier itself … to what might be called symbolic jouissance. Here, thought itself is jouissance laden’ (Fink 1999: 106). For Bruce Fink, the jouissance of the whole position is the experience of mobility, of moving along the gaps in meaning produced by the symbolic order: jouissance is ‘tied to the aspect of the real that under writes, as it were, the symbolic order’; it is what ‘keeps the symbolic moving’ (Fink 1995: 107). A reading of the minimalist Carver, however, suggests that the jouissance of the whole position gives rise to inertia more than motion. The edited Carver certainly stages the inexorable drive to talk about love, and thereby confront the lack of meaning, but rather than foster mobility this gives rise to stasis. On the level of content, we see this in the characters’ failure to get anywhere on the topic of love; spatially, this is presented in the characters’ stagnation within one setting, and in terms of affect, stasis is evoked in the numbing dissociation that critics have detected. In this way, Carver’s prose appears to question the putative mobility inherent to the structure of the whole position. It is my contention that Carver’s prose suggests a rereading of Lacan’s whole position in language that situates it closer to the inertia produced by the first, more extreme institution of lack than to the pleasure and mobility produced by the differential gaps in the symbolic order. The jouissance induced by the minimalist Carver is less the pleasure of moving from one gap in meaning to the next in the infinite chain of signification, than the pleasurable pain produced by the original linguistic cut. Rather than a mobilizing force, Lacan describes the ‘insufficient jouissance’ (1999: 72) of the whole language as stagnant; this ‘jouissance brings with it inertia’, he says (1999: 72). This is the dissociation and inertia one experiences from reading the minimalist Carver, in contrast to the corporeality of the unedited prose, which we will consider in what follows.



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The space of otherness In the edited Carver, the split linguistic logic of finite meaning and lack has implications for the presentation of the other person. Returning to the edited story, when the group of friends make their toast to love, Carver originally writes: ‘We raised our glasses again and grinned at each other like children who had agreed on something for once’ (Carver 2009: 182). In a striking alteration, Lish writes: ‘We raised our glasses again and grinned at each other like children who had agreed on something forbidden’ (Carver 2003: 120; my italics). In Lacan’s whole position, the linguistic cut creates finite meaning but also fosters the fantasy of something mysterious, something off-limits. This is what he calls ‘object a’, which refers to the subject’s fantasy of lack: an illusion of the unknown fills the originary lack (Lacan 1999: 92). Bruce Fink notes that while the subject of the whole position is ‘wholly castrated, there is nevertheless a contradiction: that ideal of non-castration — of knowing no boundaries, no limitations — lives on somewhere, somehow, in each and every man’ (Fink 1995: 111). Similarly, Lish’s institution of finite meaning and lack gives rise to a sense of enigma. In the whole position, says Lacan, ‘knowledge’ of the other ‘is censored or forbidden’, giving rise to what he calls ‘idealism’: ‘it is by missing’ (Lacan 1999: 121), says Lacan, that the subject ‘sublimates with all its might, it sees Beauty and the Good — not to mention Truth’ (Lacan 1999: 121). In my reading of Lacan, the whole position engenders a space of omission which is the flipside of finite meaning: the fantasy of a determinate post-linguistic other. This alterity is the ‘semblance’ (1999: 92) of determinate meaning but in its inverted, empty form. The concept of ‘fantasy’ accrues different meanings in Lacan’s theoretical trajectory. But in Encore it refers to the fetishizing of linguistic lack, the phantasmatic fixity of the unsignified (1999: 92). Accordingly, in carving out gaps in meaning, it is my contention that Lish creates spaces reserved for unsignified fantasy; the lacks instituted through language become fetishized, calcified. This accounts for the strange phantasmatic feel to the stories that are otherwise so seemingly realistic. Characters fantasize about love’s enigma much more so in the edited story than the unedited; likewise, they idealize others. We see this played out not only in Ed’s early idealization of Terri, but also in Terri’s near-obsession with her ex, Ed. Both Ed and Terri fantasize the other who is off-limits (Terri left Ed for Mel; Ed is now dead). This is a more extreme form of fantasy than the neurotic’s desire for the unobtainable. Lacan says: ‘it is insofar as something brutal is played out in writing … that the impasses that are thereby revealed are a possible means

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of access for us and a reduction of the function of that being in love’ (1999: 49). In place of love, we might call this fantasy of the impasse ‘desire’, as Lacan does at times in Encore (1999: 80–109). Capturing something of the nature of this desire, Colette Soler writes: ‘desire is a phenomenon of the subject, related to castration; hence, its essential correlation with not having’ (2002: 105). In other words, desire stems from prohibition, from not having something. Ed’s ‘desire’ for Terri and hers for him appears to be more extreme than neurotic or symbolic desire. There’s a violence inscribed in it, leading to Ed’s suicide and to Terri’s morbid defence of it. ‘It was love’, Terri says, in the edited story, ‘Sure, it was abnormal in most people’s eyes. But he was willing to die for it. He did die for it’ (Carver 2003: 118). In Blanchot’s terms, we have a brutal ‘seizing of the other’ (1987: 18): instead of respecting otherness as ungraspable, the alterity of love becomes what Blanchot calls ‘sensational’ (1987: 18). While in the edited story Ed and Terri harbour the most dramatic fantasies of the other, Mel and the narrator are similarly disposed. Mel is nostalgic for his ex-wife and describing his new wife, Laura, the narrator states: I touched the back of Laura’s hand. I picked up Laura’s hand. The hand was warm to the touch, the nails polished, perfectly manicured. I encircled the broad wrist with my fingers, like a bracelet, and held her. (Carver 2003: 116)

First introduced as a body part, Laura brings to mind the theoretical origin of Lacan’s ‘object a’, its reformulation of Freud’s ‘part-object’ (Freud 1905: 197–206; 1930: 152–7). Just as the bracelet is an unsignified object of beauty, so Laura is encircled by the narrator’s unsignified desire. Here, we have a modern-day blazon of the other as part-object. Indeed, two of the central figures of fantasy are presented as body parts — Laura as a hand, Ed as an imploded head — uncanny objects that occupy the space of lack. Bringing to mind Wallace Stevens’s lines, ‘A man and a woman / Are one. / A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one’ (Stevens 2005: 1260–2), Lacan states: ‘The sexual relation consists of three terms, one, the other, and object a’ (Lacan 1999: 49). It certainly seems that in Carver-land couples rely upon third terms on which to project their unsignified fantasies (the unknown other couple in ‘Neighbours’, the blind man in ‘Cathedral’, the indeterminate voice down the phone in ‘Whoever Was Using this Bed’, the man with no hands in ‘Viewfinder’) (Carver 2003: 10; 1995: 68–74, 292–308, 347–62). In ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’ each couple appears to need the mystery of the other couple, acting as an unknown third term between them, to spur on their conversation about love.



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The bodily text In the edited Carver we have a linguistic logic of determinate meaning and semantic gaps, which incites calcified fantasies of the unknown other. In the unedited story linguistic meaning and alterity are more intertwined. Instead of positing otherness outside linguistic meaning, otherness is more internal to language. In Lacan’s terms, at times the unedited prose harbours the ‘being of signifierness’: it conveys the visceral materiality of language itself (1999: 71). In the unedited prose, Herb’s account of love is particularly corporeal: But it seems to me we’re just rank beginners at love. We say we love each other and we do, I don’t doubt it. We love each other and we love hard, all of us. I love Terri and Terri loves me, and you guys love each other. You know the kind of love I’m talking about now. Sexual love … attraction to the other person, the partner, as well as just the plain everyday kind of love, love of the other person’s being, the loving to be with the other, the little things that make up everyday love. (Carver 2009: 182; my italics)

The word ‘love’ is repeated with such frequency that the finite meaning fades within the pulsating beat of the prose. In contrast to Lish’s lean repetitions, which foster fixed meaning and emptiness, here the repetition captures a bodily beat or rhythm. This is an embodied form of expression, closer to Lacan’s not whole position, which is acoustic, consisting of sound stripped of sense — visceral pulsations. The not whole might be defined as ‘lalanguage’, says Lacan, resembling a ‘stutter’, the ‘repetitive language of children’ (Lacan 1999: 44). This corporeal form of expression is captured in the title of Lacan’s Encore, which refers to ‘more’ but is also pronounced the same as ‘en corps’: in the body. While the whole position is disembodied by the first linguistic cut, sundered apart, the not whole position embodies language. Indeed, Julia Kristeva, along with other writers associated with L’ecriture feminine, draws on Lacan’s corporeal not whole position in her conception of a ‘feminine’ language of ‘pulsions’ (Kristeva 1984: 25) that captures the original bodily rhythm of pre-linguistic being. In the throbbing repetitions of ‘love’, the unedited prose has a stammering effect. As in the edited prose, love is refused fixed definition. But its otherness is evoked through the pulsating language, the corporeal, rolling rhythms. In Lish’s edit of the same passage, the sentences are more clipped and taut. The long-winded quality that characterizes the unedited Carver, instituting the logic of excess, is pared back. For example, the original phrase, ‘attraction to the other person, the partner, as well as just the plain everyday kind of love,

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love of the other person’s being, the loving to be with the other, the little things that make up everyday love’, is scrapped. In its place we have the controlled and pithy ‘love of the other person’s being, his or her essence’ (Carver 2003: 120). Love remains other in the edit, but the finite meaning juxtaposed with ellipses expresses love as elsewhere, unknown. This is a key difference from the unedited version. Whereas in the edited story love remains within the field of knowledge, but posited in its gaps, in the unedited story love is more unfathomable. In the edit, characters ask determinate questions of love in search of finite answers. In the unedited story, characters ask questions about love but these questions lose their impact in the expansiveness of Carver’s prose. Through pulsing plosives and sprawling lines, love appears more unfathomable than unknown: radically outside the very field of meaning, rather than the inverse of finite meaning as finite lack. Like Lacan’s ‘cloud of language’ (1999: 120) that forms the not whole, the capaciousness clouds the questions of love, as the reader experiences less the search for love’s meaning and more its subtle corporeality.

Holding otherness: rethinking Lacan ‘I’ll tell you what real love is’, says Mel, ‘I mean, I’ll give you a good example’ (Carver 2003: 120). He tells the tale of an elderly couple who are hospitalized following a car accident. The couple are bandaged head to toe and the old man becomes depressed, not because he is immobilized, but because he cannot see his wife. Since they have been married, they have never spent a day apart. In Lish’s edited prose I have attempted to show that the dynamic of finite meaning severed from lack fosters the fantasy of the unsignified other. Curiously, Mel’s story about the elderly couple performs the same linguistic dynamic, of meaning and lack, but the effect is different. Rather than forge fantasy, the impasses perform a kind of holding function — both indicating otherness and containing it. While in ‘Beginners’ Herb’s story about the elderly couple takes up seven pages, Lish wraps it up in three. In place of the rambling account of the elderly couple, as before the edited story gains its impact through omission. Excising the background rattle, the image of the elderly couple in bandages comes into sharper focus: ‘the couple are in casts and bandages, head to foot, the both of them’; the husband ‘couldn’t see her through his eye-holes’ (Carver 2003: 126). The image is at once highly determinate: the couple are fixed, immobilized in their bandages. But the image also evokes lack: blunt vacancy in the cut-out eyes



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that cannot see. While the image is present in the unedited story, it gets folded into the garrulous backstory. Rather than elicit idealization of the unsignified other, in the edited story, here, lack incites responsibility, protection of the other. The Greek mythological figure Orpheus tries to see what should remain hidden and so he loses the one he loves; but in the edited Carver, the elderly man experiences love precisely through not seeing (Blanchot 1999: 437–42). Here, in Blanchot’s terms, not seeing is seeing: it is recognizing that one’s orientation towards the other comes from not capturing their otherness, not seizing or fantasizing it (Blanchot 1995: 40, 50). Evoking Levinas’s account of the subject’s ‘destitution’ (Levinas 1969: 215) before the other, Mel says: ‘I mean it was killing the old fart just because he couldn’t look at the fucking woman’ (Carver 2003: 127). Rather than affirm the subject, the other person’s alterity is the subject’s undoing, his self-wrenching. In this crucial passage, which comes near the end of the edited story, lack no longer elicits idealization of the unsignified other, but starts to incite responsibility, protection of the other. Instead of fantasized, the other is sheltered by the elderly man’s love. The notion of protection is implied by the bandages, which conceal but also heal, such that not seeing provides protection. On the level of language, the dynamic of finite meaning and omission also starts to have a sheltering effect. The language becomes dense with a matrix of restrained repetitions: Well the husband was very depressed for the longest while. Even after he found that his wife was going to pull through, he was very depressed. Not about the accident, though. I mean, the accident was one thing, but it wasn’t everything … Little eye-holes and nose-holes and mouth-holes … I’d get up to see his mouthhole, you know and he’d say no, it wasn’t the accident exactly because he couldn’t see her through his eye-holes … the man’s heart was breaking because he couldn’t see … he couldn’t look … (Carver 2003: 126–7; my italics to indicate repetition)

In this passage, which appears towards the end of the edited story, the repetitions work just like the repetitions in the early part of the edited story: they assert meaning and empty it. But they also have a containing function. Unlike the more pulse-like, irregular repetitions of the unedited version, the repetitions are restrained. But they are also less like the forceful thuds of meaning and emptiness that have characterized the edited story so far. The interlacing of quietly controlled repetitions has the effect of containing otherness, holding lack between the intricate lines. This reading of the whole structure of language as ‘holding otherness’ is distinct from dominant readings of Lacan’s whole position, which locate the

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narcissism of the relation with ‘object a’, or the fantasy of lack (Morel 2002: 79; Soler 2002: 102). However, in his own account of the whole position, it is my contention that Lacan hints at another mode of relationship with the other than that of fantasy. Lacan suggests that the whole position can open up another relation with the other which is not based on fetishizing lack. This is not a different logic from that of finite meaning divorced from lack. Instead, the logic is used differently. Lacan describes: a web … in which one can grasp the limits, impasses, and dead ends that show the real acceding to the symbolic … Its value lies in centering the symbolic, on the condition of knowing how to use it, for what? To retain (retenir) a congruous truth … that of the half-telling, the truth that is borne out by guarding (garde). (1999: 93; my italics)

The logic of the whole is used differently, so that the original lack of being is opened up to the symbolic, without being totally homogenized by it. Moreover, this form of the symbolic is not simply that of a systematic, differential order of signifiers and negations, but an intricate web-like integration of delimited meanings and impasses, which hold (retenir, garde) the otherness of the real. Similarly, in the Carver passage, the rhythms enact the bifurcated logic of finite meaning and otherness, but in a mosaic-like pattern of interrelationships, as the rhythms intersect. Thus signifiers relate to other signifiers, taking us away from the stasis of the originary cut to the mobility of the symbolic. But as in Lacan’s different way of using the whole, this is not the homogenized, universal order of the symbolic, in which lacks get lost in the overarching system; it is a symbolic order that retains close contact with the originary cut of being. Otherness is not so much calcified and fetishized, as opened to relations with other signifiers, but otherness retaining its form as originary lack. A kind of in-between space is opened up: between the web-like birfucating rhythms; here, otherness can be held, contained as other without being immobilized or fixed, but also without losing its distinctive origin as lack. It is in this passage in Carver that the language of the edit begins to most resemble that of the unedited version: in the quieter rhythms, the more meandering sentences. This overlap troubles Lacan’s neat division between the whole and not whole. While for Lacan, the two positions are mutually exclusive, for Carver an interrelationship emerges. Indeed, the edit harks back to the unedited, but it is also hard to read the earlier text without invoking the later edit. Like the textual repetitions towards the end of the story, reading Carver is itself a repetition – one that creates an interstice space where the two texts



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interweave without merging. This is where the true experience of reading is held: in the in-between space of alterity.

Works cited Anon. (2007), ‘Rough crossings: the cutting of Raymond Carver’, in The New Yorker, [online] 24 December. Available at: [accessed on 7 July 2012]. Barth, J. (1986), ‘A few words about minimalism’, in New York Times Book Review, 28 December. Available at: [accessed on 7 July 2012]. Blanchot, B. (1995), The Writing of the Disaster. Translated from the French by Ann Smock. London: Nebraska Press. Blanchot, M. (1987), ‘Everyday speech’, in Yale French Studies: Everyday Life, 73, 12–20. —(1999), ‘The Gaze of Orpheus’, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader. Edited by G. Quasha. New York: Station Hill. Boothby, R. (2005), Sex on the Couch: What Freud Still Has To Teach Us About Sex and Gender. New York: Routledge. Campbell, J. (2009), ‘The real Raymond Carver’, in The Times Literary Supplement, [online] 29 July. Available at: [accessed 7 July 2010]. Carver, R. (1983), ‘The art of fiction No. 76’, in The Paris Review, [online] Summer No. 88. Available at: [accessed 7 July 2012]. —(1995), Where I’m Calling From: The Selected Stories. London: The Harvill Press. —(2003), What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. London: Vintage. Originally published in 1981. —(2009), Beginners. London: Jonathan Cape. Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press. Fink, B. (1995), The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton New Jersey: University Press. Freud, S. (1905), ‘Three essays on the theory of sexuality’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. —(1915a), ‘The unconscious’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. —(1915b), ‘Repression’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. —(1930), ‘Civilization and its discontents’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press.

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Green, Andre (1999), The Fabric of Affect in the Psychoanalytic Discourse. Translated from the French by Alan Sheridan. London: Routledge. Jakobson, R. (1987), Language in Literature. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University. Kristeva, J. (1984), Revolution in Poetic Language. Translated from the French by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan J. (1977), Écrits. Translated by from the French by Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock. Originally published in 1966. —(1988), The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Translated from the French by Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton. Originally published in 1973. —(1992), The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.). Translated from the French by Dennis Porter. New York: Norton. Originally published in 1986. —(1999), Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX, Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.). Translated from the French by Bruce Fink. London: Norton. Originally published in 1975. Leader, D. (1993), ‘The not all’, Lacanian Ink, [online] 11 January. Available at: [accessed 7 July 2012]. Levinas, E. (1969), Totality and Infinity. Translated from the French by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. de Man, P. (1983), Blindness and Insight – Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press. Meyer, J. (2010), Minimalism. London: Phaidon Press Ltd. Morel, G. (2002), ‘Feminine conditions of jouissance’, in S. Bernard and B. Fink (eds), Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality. New York: State University of New York Press. Morrison, B. (2009) ‘“Beginners” by Raymond Carver’, in the Guardian, [online] 17 October. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/17/raymondcarver-beginners-blake-morrison [accessed 7 July 2012]. Runyon, R. P. (1994), Reading Raymond Carver. New York: Syracuse University Press. Salecl, R. (2002), ‘Love anxieties’, in S. Bernard and B. Fink (eds) Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality. New York: State University of New York Press. Stevens, W. (2001), Harmonium, London: Faber Poetry. Soler, C. (2002), ‘What does the unconscious know about women’, in S. Bernard and B. Fink (eds), Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality. New York: State University of New York Press. Wood, G. (2009), ‘The kindest cut’, in the Observer, [online] 27 September. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/27/raymond-carver-editor-influence [accessed 7 July 2012]. Žižek, S. (2002), ‘The real of sexual difference’, in S. Bernard and B. Fink (eds), Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality. New York: State University of New York Press.



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Note 1 The French terms tout and pas-tout are translated into the English whole and not whole by Bruce Fink (1999), while other translators prefer ‘all’ and ‘not all’. Leader, D. (1993), ‘The not all’, Lacanian Ink, [online] 11 January. Available at: [accessed 7 July 2012].

8

Rebecca Brown, Intimate: A Literary Response to Stereotypes about Gender and Lesbian Sexuality Lies Xhonneux

University of Antwerp

This chapter addresses the question of whether there are ways in which non-heterosexual perspectives on intimacy can be said to complement and correct traditional views. I will answer this question by focusing on the work of Rebecca Brown (born in 1956), a contemporary American author who has largely escaped critical notice so far. She is known for being a ‘writer’s writer’, though her most famous novel, The Gifts of the Body (1994), is popular with the general reading audience and has been a bestseller in Japan. It earned Brown several awards, including a Lambda Literary Award. Brown’s oeuvre contains a wide range of genres including a ‘Modern Bestiary’, as she subtitled The Dogs (1998); a fictionalized autobiography, The End of Youth (2003); and prose poems inspired by a number of paintings by Nancy Kiefer, Woman in Ill-Fitting Wig (2005). Illustrating the ability of literary texts to substantiate as well as critically explore social theory, her fiction offers an illuminating contribution to intimacy thinking. As I will be exploring, Brown’s oeuvre helps to expose the frequently overlooked gaps in theories of intimacy and to counteract the taken-for-grantedness characterizing some of their foundational principles. I will concentrate here on the writer’s literary explorations of intimacy on two levels, addressing first her opposition to what sociologists Jean Duncombe and Dennis Marsden label ‘the last and most obstinate manifestation … of gender inequality’, namely ‘gender asymmetry in relation to intimacy’ (qtd. in Jamieson 1998: 170). To demonstrate this, I will undertake an analysis of Brown’s conspicuously veiled descriptions of taboo subjects like imbalanced same-sex relations and violent lesbian sex acts. The second level concerns the reader’s intimacy with Brown’s characters, a special bond created by the author’s minimalist style.

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Punching new life into (representations of) same-sex intimacy The background against which Brown’s resistance to gender inequality in the realm of intimacy has to be understood is constituted by a pervasive stereotype that can be found in the writings of, for instance, Carol Gilligan – namely, the claim that women have a so-called natural capacity for intimacy. Nancy Chodorow, on whom Gilligan relies, starts from the observation that raising children is chiefly a woman’s responsibility (qtd. in Gilligan 1982: 7). Consequently, she argues, identity formation for girls occurs through experiences of attachment, while boys, to identify as masculine, disconnect and differentiate themselves from their mothers. Chodorow concludes that the period of early identity formation furnishes girls with a sense of self built on and around empathy – a process that has no parallel in boys’ developmental scheme (qtd. in Gilligan 1982: 8). This psychoanalytically influenced account may seem dated, but its consequences can be felt to the present day. The contemporary sociologist Lynn Jamieson, for instance, maintains that ‘men are less intimate than women’, their friendships being characterized by ‘doing things together’ (1998: 99), whereas woman-to-woman bonds are typified by intimacy, by mutual revelations and a thorough understanding of each other. The popular myth that men seek sex while women seek intimacy – or as Candace Vogler describes the unhappy marriages we read about in self-help and pop psychology books, ‘The husbands miss sex. The wives miss talk’ (2000: 50) – can also be traced back to the weight such theorizations still carry. An important corollary of the prevalence of these clichés is what Mary Bernstein and Renate Reimann refer to as ‘the flip side of discrimination’ (2001: 7), namely, romanticization. Lesbian relationships are frequently idealized as non-violent and intimate, since sharing the same gender is thought to result naturally in an increase of gender-related traits (Jamieson 1998: 127). Jeffrey Weeks et al. sketch lesbians’ intimate involvements as ‘power-free and therefore abuse-free zones’ (2001: 118), while Jamieson deems violence especially rare in lesbian love relations because they centre on ‘emotional closeness’ (1998: 154) and are less often imbalanced, and because women are assumed to have little talent for abusive and physically intimidating behaviour. Moreover, lesbian women, having personally to fashion as well as continually to negotiate the exact nature of their relationship in the absence of socially sanctioned models for same-sex couples, are thought to develop egalitarian bonds on the basis of this need for greater creativity, openness, and communication (Carrington 2002: 12). Yet such reasoning fails to take into account the difficulty lovers might



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experience in talking about what they feel or want – a familiar problem for Brown’s average heroine, who is typically confronted with ‘things I wanted but I did not know to ask’ (2003: 6), to quote the narrator from The End of Youth. Another reason for the higher level of intimacy and equality believed to distinguish lesbian relationships, according to Weeks et al. this time, is the alleged absence of the traditional sex-role ideology, which allows lesbian couples to escape ‘the rigid assumptions about gender which continue to define heterosexual relationships … especially the power imbalance which seems to play such a significant role’ (2001: 47). This supposed power difference results in a binary gender classification according to ‘enjoyment of power in sexual relations’ – thought to be low for feminine identities and high for masculine ones (Sedgwick 1994: 7). We should note that this explanation loses sight of what thinkers like Judith Butler have done so much to impress upon us: the fact that gender is a social construct only contingently linked to biological sex or the physical body. This means that same-gender-loving relationships can also be created in a heterosexual context. What is more, the heterosexual binarism of dominance versus submission that lesbian relationships are said to overthrow unquestioningly accepts the equation of women with powerlessness – a reasoning we should not automatically accept. Though the widely held ‘Egalitarian Myth’ – to use Christopher Carrington’s term (2002: 177) – can obviously be refuted, what matters is that it continues to influence lesbians’ views on their own sexuality. Here, the fact that ‘people often draw on public stories to reinterpret and make sense of their own lives’ (Jamieson 1998: 158) produces the unhappy side effect of turning abusive lesbian relationships into an inviolable taboo. The idea of the lesbian model couple stigmatizes those women who find themselves in aggressive, non-communicative, or otherwise undemocratic same-sex relations, and it is ultimately no less dogmatic or prescriptive than the old myth of lesbianism as unnatural or abject. While Anthony Giddens’s suggestion that same-sex sexuality may be leading the way in a democratization and ‘transformation of intimacy’ (1992: 137) largely functions to support romanticized representations of lesbianism, a non-idealizing author like Brown shows that such a transformation had better paint a less rosy picture of women-to-women relations. Since fiction contributes importantly to non-heterosexuals’ expansion of knowledge about what it means to be queer – as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, among others, has argued (1991: 67) – Brown’s non-stereotypical representations of intimacy are of great cultural significance. Jamieson maintains that the kind of intimacy mainly sought after since the twentieth century is one she describes as ‘disclosing intimacy’ (1998: 1). Her

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definition of this type rightly stresses the importance of knowledge. ‘What is being meant by intimacy’, she says, ‘is often a very specific sort of knowing, loving and “being close” to another person … The emphasis is on mutual disclosure, constantly revealing your inner thoughts and feelings to each other’ (1998: 1). ‘Trust’ is the central constituent of an intimacy founded on ‘faith that confidences will not be betrayed and privileged knowledge will not be used against the self ’ (Jamieson 1998: 9). Due to the idealization of lesbian relationships in some quarters, such a disclosing intimacy has chiefly been linked to same-sex sexuality (Weeks et al. 2001: 120). Brown’s work, by contrast, repeatedly dramatizes how the confidentiality that is such a central aspect of intimacy can be extremely problematic – not because of the information ‘overkill’ among high-disclosing partners which Candace Vogler warns of, nor because of the unnaturally static sense of self the critic thinks is generated by such relationship talk (2000: 85); rather, Brown’s characters turn intimate knowledge into a means of control. The tales from The Terrible Girls are a case in point. This ‘Novel in Stories’, as Brown subtitled her collection, deals with power imbalances in lesbian love relationships. In ‘The Ruined City’, for example, we see the title’s all-female city thrive and then perish because of a lack of water, which is when ex-lovers start exploiting their special knowledge to get the scarce drops everyone sorely needs: The gangs of girls marched into where we lived like they were welcome. (And, to be fair, they had been once …) They knew from how they’d known us where we kept what was dear to us … But the sweet things we’d once said to them now mattered less than nothing. The terrible girls took anything that might contain a drop. (Brown 1990: 130)

‘Knowledge,’ as Sedgwick asserts in a Foucauldian vein, ‘is the magnetic field of power’ (1994: 23). The example from Brown illustrates how disclosure gives power that may boomerang later in a situation of heightened vulnerability. This is particularly relevant in a lesbian context. Since many lesbians live relatively powerless lives in a hostile environment, the power of intimacy they have given to their partners may become all the more self-destructive if it is later turned against them. While popular stories tend to propagate disclosing intimacy by portraying the damage a lack of such closeness can cause to a relationship (Jamieson 1998: 159), Brown addresses the equally likely, but much less frequently explored, possibility of emotional harm done through being too intimate. There are several ways in which intimacy, in the hands of Brown’s characters, may be turned into a coercive tactic. Another instance revolves around a lack



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of commitment, causing power imbalances. Many of Brown’s antagonists, to use the narrator’s description of the addressee in ‘The Dark House’ from The Terrible Girls, ‘certainly make no promises [so] one would be wrong to assume or expect’ (Brown 1990: 1). Their behaviour typically corresponds to what Christopher Lasch has classified as ‘the survival mentality’ (1985: 16), which means shying away from lasting emotional involvements. In our consumer society where, as Lasch puts it, the attitude of ‘keeping your options open’ (1985: 38) tends to embody freedom of choice, the selection of a career, friends, or a lover can only be provisional. In Brown’s lesbian couples, one partner typically refuses to commit and protects herself by keeping a distance. This lover remains unapproachable and gains power by being desired, and by keeping the desiring party waiting – a practice that, according to Roland Barthes, is ‘the constant prerogative of all power’ (1979: 40). Consider the addressee’s compelling tactic in ‘The Dark House’, a tale in which the narrator fails to convince her closeted lover to elope with her: Never, you said, not me. Don’t waste your time waiting. But after a while you said, Well possibly. [You] said that if anything were perhaps to happen it would take a long, long time. But if one were around anyway and felt like it, one might wait. This was your way of saying Someday. Of telling me to wait. (Brown 1990: 1)

Brown’s work reveals that, in the well-known amorous predicament Barthes describes as ‘an always present I … constituted only by confrontation with an always absent you’ (1979: 13), one of the partners – the ‘I’ – puts herself at risk by allowing her lover close to her, by exposing too much of herself and becoming dangerously dependent. Brown’s representations of imbalanced relationships are often relayed through and augmented by symbolism. This can be demonstrated beautifully by means of ‘An Augury’ from The Last Time I Saw You (2006), a collection of tales that centre on what the brain can do to haunting memories. In this story which features, like the majority of Brown’s tales, protagonists that remain nameless – a conspicuous trait that will be discussed later on – the narrator is committed to her relationship with the anonymous female addressee, encouraging the latter they should live together. Yet this loved partner does not really care for the unfortunate narrator. Their imbalanced relationship, with the narrator exposing and the addressee shielding herself, is reflected in a domestic detail that is nevertheless crucial, given the story’s title. The narrator drinks tea every morning and the addressee always reads her tea leaves. The addressee’s drink, by contrast, cannot be interpreted: ‘you always had coffee …, and it was always

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black’ (Brown 2006: 10). This dramatizes how the addressee cannot be read either – she does not open up to the narrator, who bares her soul to her. In several of Brown’s stories, one partner may be seen to distance herself from the other by wearing sunglasses and gloves, thereby avoiding direct contact and staying both literally covered and figuratively out of reach. The most obvious example occurs in What Keeps Me Here (1996), subtitled ‘A Book of Stories.’ In one of these stories, ‘An Enchantment’, which makes use of recognizable fairy-tale ingredients, the anonymous narrator is fascinated with and then carried off by a mysterious empress. The narrator immediately confides in her: ‘She asked me things about myself that I had never thought. I heard me tell Her’ (Brown 1996: 93). The empress, however, covers herself, literally and figuratively. Whereas the narrator always walks around naked, the empress is constantly enveloped in body armour, complete with ‘a helmet with a visor’ that protects her face (1996: 91). Even when they have sex, all the narrator is allowed to know and feel of the empress is this armour. The narrator wrongly trusts that someday she will be allowed to see what is underneath: ‘I believed She longed to tell me, and for me to see and know Her, but … this would take some time … I told myself She needed time and I would wait for Her’ (1996: 98). Once, while the empress sleeps, the narrator tries to touch her arm, but she cannot feel anything inside her sleeve: ‘I could not reach Her’ (1996: 100). In the end, the empress gets tired of the narrator and turns violent when her former plaything refuses to leave. Jamieson suggests that in unequal relationships intimacy is ‘at best the forced intimacy of a coercive and controlling dominant figure’ (1998: 169), but Brown illustrates how this kind of intimacy need not be forced. After all, the narrator comes to the following conclusion: ‘this, truly, is the worst, the most terrible part – I didn’t want to leave Her. I asked, I begged Her to let me stay’ (Brown 1996: 103). Brown shows that this more twisted form of intimacy may be extremely powerful in its effect: the empress’s potent strategy keeps the narrator craving for her unreachable lover. A striking feature of Brown’s work is that it does not shy away from depicting violent lesbian relationships in which actual physical abuse occurs, such as in ‘Folie A Deux’. This narrative is to be found in Annie Oakley’s Girl (1993), a collection of short stories mostly featuring dominant partners who try to mould their lovers into something they are not. The anonymous narrator and the nameless addressee of ‘Folie A Deux’ ensure their co-dependence by mutilating each other: in laconically recorded gestures that betray some of Samuel Beckett’s influence on Brown, the addressee burns the insides of the narrator’s ears, while the narrator puts out the addressee’s eyes. As the narrator puts it, playing



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on the common cultural understanding of women ‘lacking’ something that men provide them with in the ideal heterosexual union (Butler 1993: 205): ‘This made sure we were always together. Each of us had something the other didn’t have, something the other needed’ (Brown 1993: 45). Furthermore, the addressee resorts to violence to make herself understood: because she is blind and the narrator deaf, she scratches and pinches the latter, or slaps her to hammer home her messages (1993: 51–2). Such depictions of violent lesbian relations marked by inequalities of power carry suggestions of sadomasochism. In ‘The Dark House’, the already mentioned story from The Terrible Girls, the addressee’s superiority is apparent when the narrator, who is down on all fours to scrub her partner’s floor, does not even get a look from her (Brown 1990: 6). Her power derives from her superior ‘social status’ as the organizer of an important conference, and from the fact that she ‘is desired’ (Allen 1996: 84). Eager to wield this power, she takes to lording it over the narrator: she makes the latter into a servant girl, complete with uniform, and is rough to her when they are intimate. ‘I didn’t hear someone sneak up behind me,’ the narrator says, but I felt someone slap their hands over my mouth so I couldn’t scream, and push me and my [coffee] cart into the empty elevator … As the elevator went between the first and second floors, you yanked me towards you and kissed me on the mouth. Between the second and the third floors you stuck your tongue down my throat and squeezed me hard through my uniform. I tried to touch you … Wait, you said. (Brown 1990: 7–8)

Though Brown does not really describe the couple’s sexual activities as such, there is an obvious S&M overtone to someone forced into the position – and outfit – of the servant girl. As this coffee-cart girl recounts, ‘I … squatted down under the table to wipe the wall and floor. When I was under the table, my dress pulled tight against me, I felt someone pawing my butt’ (1990: 13). The Dogs, Brown’s ‘Modern Bestiary’, features a similarly pitiable servant. In a subversion of the classic power balance, the narrator here is her pets’ ‘domestic, hired help, their parlor maid’ (Brown 1998: 78). The girl often has to get on her ‘hands and knees to service them’ (1998: 79), an occasion on which the dogs ‘sniff [her] ass’ (1998: 79). Again the S&M overtones are evident, as is the case in the relationship the narrator of ‘An Enchantment’ has with her unreachable empress, who is violent with her while they have sex: ‘I felt the metal and slapping gloves and I felt Her rise above me and Her hand was on my throat and there were cuts and blows and fists and slaps and She did the thing [the narrator’s euphemistic way of referring to sex]’ (Brown 1996: 102).

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By putting women in the position of both master and slave, Brown undermines a rigid determination of gender identity according to acts of dominance versus submission as adhered to by, for instance, Catharine MacKinnon. In Carolyn Allen’s summary of MacKinnon, ‘“men” are those defined in a sexually dominating social position and “women” are those defined in subordination’ (1996: 238). Moreover, Brown’s depictions of S&M highlight the ‘excess’ (Palmer 1999: 13), as Paulina Palmer terms it, of lesbian sexuality in a heteronormative society, as well as its potential to upset the status quo – this in contrast to early lesbian fiction, which tended to focus on ‘feminist camaraderie’ (Palmer 1999: 6) and woman-to-woman bonding, as exemplified by Brown’s mock summary of the standard plot line of such exemplary narratives: ‘I became a lesbian, then I started working in a collective, and we’re all friends’ (Brown 2012). Lesbians and gay men did pioneering work in a variety of social and cultural practices (Warner 1999: 38), a realization Brown translates into her characters’ concern with other acts still generally regarded as ‘grotesque, perverted, decadent, and/ or déclassé by the mainstream’, namely those ‘“perverse” sexualities [like] S&M’ (Michael Moon, qtd. in Sedgwick 1994: 283). Of course, S&M practices cause commotion within the queer community, too. Kath Weston mentions sadomasochism as one of the topics that are ‘controversial among gay men and lesbians themselves’ (1991: 14) – a reality experienced first-hand by Sue, one of the participants in interviews by Weeks et al.: I do find that I’ve been judged down by the wider [lesbian and gay] community and that my personal sexual practices [i.e. S&M] give them something to judge me for. And for me, that experience is exactly the same as coming out within the heterosexual society – it’s the same kind of judgment – in that what I do in my private time, and how I express myself sexually, is an area for wider judgment. Even down to lesbian strength marches, where S&M dykes weren’t allowed to march. [I]n that way I don’t feel part of the wider community. (2001: 91)

By representing a more aggressive sexuality, Brown counters a prevalent ‘normalizing’ (Warner 1999: 52) tendency toward deploying gay and lesbian identities that emphasize parallels with the majority over and against differences from the hetero-patriarchal dominant order (Bernstein 1997: 532; Carrington 2002: 16). In this context, Joshua Gamson warns against the emergence of a ‘new, postcloset kind of normalization pattern’ (2001: 83) – a pattern in which the acceptance that ‘model’ homosexuals are starting to gain comes at the cost of a demonization of those who deviate from the mainstream image of the



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homosexual, such as transgender people, radical queers, or lesbians practising S&M. This means that the domain of inclusion into the dominant heterosexual culture simply shifts: a ‘collective delegitimation’ turns into ‘a selective one’ (Butler 2002: 27), and new hierarchies emerge. Lesbians and gay men are now confronted with a novel standard to live up to – that of ‘the healthy homosexual’ (Sedgwick 1994: 156). The process relegates nonconformists to ‘the haunting abject of gay thought itself ’ (Sedgwick 1994: 157). Such inequality is even more difficult to confront: it does not revolve around a more widely established identity (as the ‘gay movement’ at large does) and is often harder to detect and name. There is an apparent danger to the foreclosure of options that occurs when, from an urgently felt need for social change or a bid for recognition, the mainstream lesbian and gay movement ‘naturalizes the options that figure most legibly within the sexual field’ (Butler 2002: 20) or when, ‘enthralled by respectability’ (Warner 1999: 25, 31), it even tries to distance itself entirely from the association with sex. From a historical perspective, this stance paradoxically requires a wilful forgetting of the fact that gay and lesbian organizations materialized precisely because large groups of people felt connected in terms of sexual preference (Warner 1999: 47). Thus, Michael Warner is able to complain that the current most influential of these organizations act as ‘instrument[s] for normalizing gay men and lesbians’ (1999: 25), serving the purpose of ‘in-group purification,’ rather than as the radically inclusive movements they initially were (1999: 32). All this de-queering of queer life just to ‘wring … a token of dignity from the very culture that produces and sustains so much shame and stigma in the first place’ (Warner 1999: 49) is what Warner calls ‘the most important [and, he adds, “widely misrecognized”] fault line in the movement’ (1999: 71). Brown, by contrast, problematizes exclusionary societal ethics at large, addressing, for example, prevailing biogenetic notions of kinship organization or binary genders. Brown stages this (variously defined) tactical opposition in the fifth tale from The Terrible Girls, ‘Lady Bountiful and the Underground Resistance’, whose title character is the narrator’s (closeted) ex-lover. In one of her many fantasies, the narrator catches Lady B in an act of heterosexual mimicry, dancing with a boy along with ‘hundreds of almost identical boy-girl couples’ seemingly ‘guided by a giant puppet master’ (Brown 1990: 81). The narrator imagines spectacularly disrupting this scene: she envisions breaking through the doors and windows of Lady Bountiful’s luxurious villa and wreaking havoc in her posh ballroom, supported by a band of fellow rebel girls. The narrator is explicit about the

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gang’s deliberate espousal of violence, explaining their change of tactic as follows: ‘We’ve traded in our let’s-try-to-relate-to-each-other-and-give-eachother-space diplomacy for sub-machine guns, uzis and some mini-nuke units we picked up cheap at a CIA garage sale’ (1990: 82). Clearly, assimilation (both with the heterosexual majority and with the more conformist gay and lesbian minority) has had to make way for transgression in such a scenario. S&M, as depicted in Brown’s oeuvre, can thus serve as ‘a site of pure resistance, a site uncoopted by normativity’ (Butler 2002: 18). The problems with intimacy marking the imbalanced and violent relationships of Brown’s characters are frequently reflected in the language they use to speak of sex. Their emotional and psychological crises are rendered as an inability to talk about this aspect of their lives, which results in conspicuously veiled descriptions of that ‘ultimate peak of intimacy’ (Jamieson 1998: 108), as Jamieson puts it. For instance, in Brown’s collection of essays American Romances (2009), making love is described as ‘to get the thing One needs from her’ (Brown 2009a: 99), or to do ‘the truest thing that made you who you were’ (2009a: 100). In The End of Youth, the narrator expresses her wish to have sex with a woman she is in love with as ‘I wanted to … something … her into next year and back again’ (Brown 2003: 58), while having sex becomes simply ‘do[ing] it’ in Annie Oakley’s Girl (Brown 1993: 52). Part of the explanation for Brown’s remarkable vagueness in this context can be found in her claim that ‘Writing about the mechanics of sex isn’t of interest to me as much as writing about the relationship, whether physical, psychological, or spiritual’ (Brown 2012). Yet, by resorting to such reticence, Brown may also be dramatizing the lack of a language with which to discuss lesbian sexuality, certainly at the end of the eighties when she started writing. Because sex is still mainly thought of as ‘penis-vagina penetrative intercourse’ (Weeks et al. 2001: 138), lesbians often feel deprived of a vocabulary with which to talk about sex. The idea of woman-to-woman sexuality becomes impossible to represent and, therefore, inconceivable in the current discursive regime which is ruled by heterosexual sex (de Lauretis 1990: 18). Sedgwick aptly summarizes this idea as follows: ‘if sex means penetration, and penetration means penis, then there’s no sex in the absence of a penis or penis prosthesis, and no sex between or among women’ (1994: 98). Brown dramatizes the terminological gap by representing her characters’ sex lives in obscure terms. She also thematizes the lack of an appropriate discourse with which to discuss woman-to-woman sexuality, for instance in ‘Invisible’ (from American Romances), when the narrator asks herself: ‘What are you when you are someone who’s not been seen before? What are you when the thing you are does not yet have a name?’ (Brown 2009a: 119).



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In the absence of an established, freely circulating language for what they are or do, lesbians are especially susceptible to harmful or unsuitable redescription by others. Richard Rorty, following Nietzsche, explains how ‘self-knowledge’ should be tantamount to ‘self-creation’ (1989: 27), in that the development of a (sense of) self is best paralleled by the creation of a novel rhetoric with which to depict this self. Individuals should not settle for others’ portrayals of themselves (Rorty 1989: 28); rather, they are supposed to work at creating and preserving their own vocabulary to account for their deeds, values, and lives. This is what Rorty terms someone’s ‘final vocabulary’ – ‘the words in which we formulate … our deepest self-doubts and our highest hopes. They are the words in which we tell … the story of our lives’ (1989: 73). Some people, however, are in great danger of being redescribed rather than understood in terms of their own final vocabulary: as many of the leading voices in postcolonial theory have also insisted, redescription of the inarticulate other is a potent means to gain control over this person. Obviously, most people try to resist such an appropriation and, Rorty adds, ‘want to be taken seriously on their own terms’ (1989: 90). He concludes that ‘threatening one’s final vocabulary, and thus one’s ability to make sense of oneself in one’s own terms rather than hers, suggests that one’s self and one’s world are futile, obsolete, powerless. Redescription often humiliates’ (1989: 90). By means of veiled portrayals of lesbian intimacy, Brown’s narrators arguably also manage to avoid painful redescriptions by more articulate or otherwise more powerful others. They keep control over the accounts of their lives thanks to an idiosyncratically vague final vocabulary. Descriptions like ‘someone sometime somethinged me’ (Brown 2003: 57), to be found in The End of Youth, have become a recognizable hallmark of Brown’s writings. Her women are subjects in possession of their own definition through an oblique language that they mark as their own. Thus they seek to convert what might be a severe disadvantage – the lack of an autonomous discourse with which to discuss their same-sex sexuality – into an indirectly affirmative force. Brown’s characters repeatedly rise up to the challenge of finding their own vocabulary, and the resulting vagueness in descriptions of their intimate lives (which could otherwise also ‘be very easily distracted into prurience’ [Brown 2012]) is established over and against redescriptions by dominant outsiders, like the moral guardians evoked in American Romances who label homosexuals as simply ‘perverts’ (Brown 2009a: 59).

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Intimate with fictional characters: the possibility of reader identification One of the more conspicuous characteristics of Brown’s explorations of intimacy is that they also create a special intimacy with her readers. She succeeds in heightening the reader’s involvement and identification with her characters through her handling of a minimalist style. The omissions and elisions characteristic of literary minimalism typically ask for extensive reader participation for completion and interpretation (McDermott 2006: 118). Minimalism embraces what Mark McGurl calls ‘the poetics of “show don’t tell” ’ (2009: 101), which implies that observation and registration replace analysis and evaluation. Consequently, ‘the experience of something read [becomes] no less than the experience of something lived through’ (Tobias Woolf, qtd. in Hallett 1996: 494). Brown’s readers tend to get little information on her characters’ inner experiences. The author admits that she detests ‘conscious emotional manipulation’ and wants to ‘create some kind of experiential or almost physical effect on the reader’ (Brown 2012) instead. Emotions are thus not evoked in a sentimental way and this forces readers to feel for themselves and reflect on these feelings. For instance, in Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary (2004), Brown’s nonfictional account of her mother’s death from cancer, we read: I went to my mother’s room and touched her, her face and her pulse, and I saw her face and I said to my sister and Chris [i.e. the narrator’s lover], ‘She’s dead.’ Chris touched my mother and said she was. She was dead. I don’t remember what I did. Did I cry out loud or say anything? Did I lean over my mother and kiss her? I don’t remember. (2004: 96)

Along the same lines, Brown’s work frequently resists character individuation. Readers know little of her protagonists, their motivations, backgrounds, or even looks. The Terrible Girls contains a fable-like story called ‘What I Did’, which describes the job of a nameless first-person narrator. This Sisyphus-like character has to carry a heavy bag down a walled-off path as long as a spot of light shows the way. When the light stops, the load has to be dropped, and the light followed back up the path. The next day, the torment starts all over again. Strikingly, readers are left in the dark as to who the narrator is, why the bag has to be carried, what it contains, or who commands the narrator to go through her daily ordeal. Yet the futility of the narrator’s daytime activities and her position of powerlessness might be recognizable to readers, as these are dramatic exaggerations of a situation that everyone experiences at some



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point in their lives. The first-person narration also places readers structurally in the position of the protagonist, thereby further encouraging them to identify with this strangely inscrutable Sisyphus figure. As David Mamet asserts about character representation on stage, though his comment is equally valid for fiction: ‘the less the hero … is inflected, identified, and characterized, … the more we will identify with him – which is to say the more we will be assured that we are that hero’ (qtd. in McDermott 2006: 118). At its most effective, readerly identification with Brown’s characters is paradoxically heightened through the lack of deepened individuation of her protagonists, who can thus be endowed more easily with readers’ own experiences and meanings. Seeing that Brown’s minimalism actively encourages her audience to imaginatively assume her characters’ positions, mainstream readers are brought into an intimate relation with people who are still often marked as ‘other’: lesbian women. It is useful to remind ourselves here of Rorty’s claim that it is in literature that we tend to meet most intimately the widest range of fellow human beings, including those abjects that call for an expansion of our very notion of the human. The intimate relation between the reader and Brown’s characters makes the lesbian protagonists potential key players in what Rorty terms literature’s ‘contribution to our knowledge of human possibilities’ (1989: 161), since our sense of solidarity is ‘a matter of imaginative identification with the details of others’ lives’ (1989: 190). Brown’s minimalist recording of such details can be seen to tie in with Rorty’s solidarity-building project. In Brown’s fiction, moreover, minimalism’s penchant for externalities translates into the creation of a multisensory experience in which the narrators devote scrupulous attention to the details of sound, smell, or sight of everything they depict. A magical fantasy from The Children’s Crusade (1989), in which the narrator dramatizes the bitter divorce of her parents by drawing parallels with civil warfare, serves as an excellent example. The following scene occurs when the child narrator imagines being reunited with her lost brother: I hear the huff of his breath, its eagerness and weariness. I hear the swish of his shorts against his skinny thighs. Then in the darkness I see flashes of white light, like a fish underwater at night. I hear the thump of his shoes on the bottom step of the porch, the rasping of his lungs. I feel his moist skinny arms around my back, his heaving chest. I feel the flutter against my stomach, my brother’s beating heart. (Brown 1989: 62)

As a result of such vivid, intimate evocations, readers can experience for themselves what is described and share tactile knowledge with Brown’s

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characters. This attention to bodily materiality may be linked, further, to Brown’s democratic project of opposing the abjection of ‘others’. Our faculties play a major part in matters of ethical responsiveness, the possibility of which entails the existence of a normative field in which the recognition of subjects is carefully regulated. In Judith Butler’s summary of Jessica Benjamin, recognition is ‘the condition under which the human subject achieves psychic self-understanding and acceptance’ (2004: 131). Solidarity originates from raising awareness of ‘the particular details of pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people’ (Rorty 1989: xvi), which reduces the likelihood of disregarding unknown others through the assumption that, surely, ‘They do not feel as we would’ (1989: xvi). Becoming alert to the misery happening around us – increasing our sensitivity to others’ pain – is, according to Rorty, a primary moral goal, so the task of enlarging the sphere of the human cannot skirt around a politics of the senses (1989: 93). Note that, though Brown’s work directs readers’ attention to the value of, for instance, sensory experience in debates of moral good, her type of humanism cannot be aligned with straightforward didacticism. Understanding perfectly well the limited possibility of art to change readers’ attitudes and the naiveté of a fiction that believes in unproblematic linguistic authenticity (even thematizing linguistic scepticism in ‘Isle of Skye’ from The Terrible Girls), Brown nevertheless steers clear of the idea that fiction can be nothing more than ironic or nihilistic wordplay. As the author herself acknowledges: ‘I have strong feelings about a lot of things, things I think are right and wrong, that I don’t want to lie or prevaricate about’ (qtd. in Eldaly 2009). She calls herself ‘one of those woefully guilt motivated artists’ who want to help people in ‘practical, physical ways’ (qtd. in Guess 2007: 6). Brown consequently stresses a writer’s need to ‘reimagine or refashion a world that is an alternative to or a respite from the awful one you inhabit’ (qtd. in Stadler 1999: 8). Drawing her readers into this fictional project by means of a minimalism that requires their active participation, Brown avoids the trap of what she calls ‘preachy art’ (qtd. in Eldaly 2009). ‘Nervous about getting into anything like that’ (qtd. in Eldaly 2009), Brown encourages her readers to actively ‘reimagine’ or ‘refashion’ alternatives with her (qtd. in Stadler 1999: 8). The acts of ‘The Brothers’ in Brown’s story of the same title show what the terrible consequences of a lack of sensory attention to others might be. In the beginning of this tale from Looking Together, a collection of prose pieces to accompany visual artwork that Brown co-edited, the deficiency of the Brothers’ faculties is established. Living in a land where winter reigns permanently, they are surrounded by a perpetual snow that muffles all sounds, making their



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surroundings ‘[s]o quiet you had to work hard to hear. So hard to hear, the Brothers stopped listening. Then they didn’t hear at all’ (Brown 2009b: 53). The gang of Brothers always selects one of their own to torment till death, and they have no qualms about doing this precisely because they do not hear – nor see, feel, or otherwise become aware of – their victims’ anguish. During yet another torture session, though, one of the Brothers is roused from his stupor to realize what exactly they are doing, suddenly feeling terribly sorry for the victim. The story suggests that the sudden change in empathy has everything to do with the Brother regaining his sensory faculties. His sight returns – ‘he was seeing, actually seeing, for the first time in his life what he, what he and the Brothers, his Brothers, were doing physically, bodily, painfully to the other guy’ – as does his hearing – ‘he realized what that cold, tickling sensation at the side of his head had been: he had heard something’ (2009b: 55). From then on, he is incapable of joining the Brothers in ‘beating their brother to a bloody pulp’ (2009b: 56). The protagonist runs away, and the ensuing (physical and emotional) distance from his familiar environment allows him to rethink their wilful ignorance, their refusal to listen to their senses, and the resulting detachment from their fellow Brothers: It was like, while he was doing it, the whole thing was a TV show, a docudrama about some place long, long ago in a faraway land and with the sound turned off. It was like our guy had been … watching what he was doing, what they were all doing, but not really seeing it, not hearing it, not even doing it. It was like someone else was doing it – no, not even that. It was like no one was doing it, like it was just happening. As if all by itself. (2009b: 56)

By ‘paying attention to paying attention’ (Brown 2012), to borrow a phrase Brown herself uses to capture the physical quality of a lot of her work, ‘The Brothers’ dramatizes how a lack of sensory attention to others’ pain or physical individuality almost automatically evolves into an absence of empathy. The story thereby reveals the existence of certain prerequisites to all compassionate acts, such as a fundamental attentiveness to others’ pain. Hence Joan Tronto’s choice of ‘caring about’ as the first of her ‘four phases of caring’ (1994: 106) – it is, indeed, a precondition for caring. More specifically, it is ‘the recognition in the first place that care is necessary … Caring about will often involve assuming the position of another person or group to recognize the need’ (Tronto 1994: 106) – in other words, identification with others’ bodies. The process of coming to regard other human beings – for instance, lesbians – as ‘one of us’ rather than as abjects or ‘them’, Rorty usefully reminds us, is a matter of sharing intimate

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and sensory knowledge about ‘what unfamiliar people are like’ (1989: xvi); it is the literary task par excellence.

Conclusion To conclude, I would like to reinsist on the cultural value of Brown’s non-heterosexual representations of intimacy. According to Weeks et al., ‘many non-heterosexuals create the opportunities through which traditional ways of doing family and intimacy are turned on their heads’ (2001: 198). This is arguably the case with an intelligent, nonconformist writer like Rebecca Brown, whose depictions of sexual and domestic violence do away with the oppressive stereotype of women’s natural capacity for intimacy and, consequently, the glorification of lesbian couples as necessarily intimate and equal. Brown shows that Giddens’s idea that we are witnessing a ‘transformation of intimacy’ – mainly in same-sex relations – toward a new form of emotional equality might well be an idealization. Rather than participate in such romanticizing, her oeuvre focuses on the frequently unmentionable topic of violent lesbian relations. Through depictions of S&M, moreover, Brown highlights the fact that striving for a cultural acceptance of ‘the Good Gay’ (Warner 1999: 114) merely results in the creation of new exclusionary practices for those who fail to live up to the ideal. In addition, readers are prodded into (re)considering their notion of who counts as human, as Brown’s minimalism encourages them to bond intimately with her lesbian protagonists through gaps and omissions both in terms of narration and characterization, through a consciously adopted antisentimental stance as well as the creation of a multisensory experience in her work. The narrator of American Romances wonders, ‘Who is it we’re not seeing now? Who will not look or see? Who else will we forget and make invisible?’ (Brown 2009a: 127). Brown’s prose, tackling as it does taboo subjects like people in abusive same-sex relations and lesbians practicing S&M, can be an important step in addressing and answering these intimate questions.

Works cited I would like to thank Jennifer Cooke for her intelligent editorship, and for the organization of ‘Writings of Intimacy in the 20th and 21st Centuries’. I am also grateful to Bart Eeckhout for his useful comments on an earlier draft of this



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essay, and to Katrien de Moor for guiding me to the interesting field of care ethics, including literature by Joan Tronto and Carol Gilligan. The paragraphs on Rebecca Brown’s creation of a multisensory experience for her readers are based on an earlier article titled ‘Rebecca Brown’s disidentificatory reading of canonical minimalism: placing anti-abjection on the literary agenda’, in which I read minimalist traits like her use of sensory words as a ‘disidentification’ (to cite José Esteban Muñoz’s term) with the minimalist tradition embodied by Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver (2012: 858–75). Allen, C. (1996), Following Djuna: Women Lovers and the Erotics of Loss. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Barthes, R. (1979), Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse. London: Jonathan Cape. Bernstein, M. (1997), ‘Celebration and suppression: the strategic uses of identity by the lesbian and gay movement’, in The American Journal of Sociology, 103, (3), 531–65. Bernstein, M. and Reimann, R. (2001), ‘Queer families and the politics of visibility’, in M. Bernstein and R. Reimann (eds), Queer Families, Queer Politics: Challenging Culture and the State. New York: Columbia University Press, 1–17. Brown, R. (1989), The Children’s Crusade. Seattle: The Seal Press. —(1990), The Terrible Girls: A Novel in Stories. San Francisco: City Lights. —(1993), Annie Oakley’s Girl. San Francisco: City Lights. —(1994), The Gifts of the Body. New York: HarperCollins. —(1996), What Keeps Me Here: A Book of Stories. New York: HarperCollins. —(1998), The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary. San Francisco: City Lights. —(2003), The End of Youth. San Francisco: City Lights. —(2004), Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary. London: Granta Books. —(2006), The Last Time I Saw You. San Francisco: City Lights. —(2009a), American Romances. San Francisco: City Lights. —(2009b), ‘The Brothers’, in R. Brown and M. J. Knecht (eds), Looking Together: Writers on Art. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 53–8. —(2012), Personal interview. Conducted 20 March 2012. Transcript. —(texts) and Kiefer, N. (images) (2005), Woman in Ill-Fitting Wig. Washington: Gorham Printing. Butler, J. (1993), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. London: Routledge. —(2002), ‘Is kinship always already heterosexual?’, in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 13, (1), 14–44. —(2004), Undoing Gender. London: Routledge. Carrington, C. (2002), No Place Like Home: Relationships and Family Life among Lesbians and Gay Men. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Eldaly, S. (2009), ‘Interview with Rebecca Brown’, in N. Y. Soto, T. C. Batista, O. Isabel et al. (eds), Sixers Review. http://www.sixersreview.com/InterviewRB.html [accessed 14 May 2012].

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Gamson, J. (2001), ‘Talking freaks: lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender families on daytime talk TV’, in M. Bernstein and R. Reimann (eds), Queer Families, Queer Politics: Challenging Culture and the State. New York: Columbia University Press, 68–86. Giddens, A. (1992), The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gilligan, C. (1982), In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Guess, C. (2007), ‘Rebecca Brown’ – Interview with Rebecca Brown, in Lambda Book Report, 15, (3), 6–7. Hallett, C. (1996), ‘Minimalism and the short story’, in Studies in Short Fiction, 33, 487–95. Jamieson, L. (1998), Intimacy: Personal Relationships in Modern Societies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lasch, C. (1985), The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times. London: Pan Books. de Lauretis, T. (1990), ‘Sexual indifference and lesbian representation’, in S.-E. Case (ed.), Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 17–39. McDermott, J. D. (2006), Austere Style in Twentieth-Century Minimalism. New York: Edwin Mellen Press. McGurl, M. (2009), The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Palmer, P. (1999), Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions. London and New York: Cassell. Rorty, R. (1989), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sedgwick, E. K. (1991), Epistemology of the Closet. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. —(1994), Tendencies. London: Routledge. Stadler, M. (1999), ‘Rebecca Brown: the Byronic woman’, in Lambda Book Report, 8, (3), 6–8. Tronto, J. C. (1994), Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. London: Routledge. Vogler, C. (2000), ‘Sex and talk’, in L. Berlant (ed.), Intimacy. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 48–85. Warner, M. (1999), The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. New York: Free Press. Weeks, J., Heaphy, B., and Donovan C. (2001), Same Sex Intimacies: Families of Choice and Other Life Experiments. London and New York: Routledge. Weston, K. (1991), Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press. Xhonneux, L. (2012), ‘Rebecca Brown’s disidentificatory reading of canonical minimalism: placing anti-abjection on the literary agenda’ in English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature, 93, (7), 858–75.

9

Impersonal Intimacies: Echoes of Bataille in Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach Jill Marsden

University of Bolton

The same emotions in man and woman are yet different in tempo: that is why man and woman never fail to misunderstand each other. (Nietzsche 1973: 93)

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Ian McEwan’s novel On Chesil Beach (2008) is the savagery with which his protagonists insult each other on their wedding night. Barely eight hours into their honeymoon and after a disastrous attempt to consummate their union, Edward and Florence are to be found on the shingle beach exchanging the most bitter accusations they can summon. Having been privy to the details of their gentle, affectionate and urbane courtship, the reader is taken by surprise at this sudden change of emotional tempo. As their previous ‘companionable near-silence’ (McEwan 2008: 148) is displaced by unprecedented verbal violence, their prior intimacy becomes a wild parody of itself, the whole course of their love seemingly redirected by the events of a single day. Shocking as the confrontation on Chesil Beach might seem, its credibility is compelling. McEwan succeeds in offering an acute insight into the mercurial nature of intimacy by carefully plotting the progress of his protagonists’ love in relation to the precarious contingency of time. When Florence and Edward’s attempt to consummate their marriage is hopelessly bungled, they are suddenly and involuntarily liberated from their respective projections of their married future and are plunged into a state of ‘freefall’. It is in this ‘break’ in the familiar order of things that an alternative kind of intimacy is glimpsed. This essay seeks to illuminate this other kind of intimacy. Drawing on Georges Bataille’s meditations on intimacy in Theory of Religion (1973), it will be proposed that the intimacy refused at the level of conjugal love in the lives of McEwan’s protagonists is rediscovered at the level of a more fundamental intimacy. It will be suggested that what

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is compromised in the conflict between Edward and Florence is not intimacy as such but the humanist register within which the discourse of intimacy is conventionally situated. In short, it will be argued that intimacy is less an index of human closeness than a closeness to something inhuman or impersonal. Although Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach and Georges Bataille’s Theory of Religion have quite different objectives, it is intriguing that each text should present consciousness as an impediment to intimacy. In the first part of this discussion it will be suggested that the anxieties of McEwan’s protagonists as they orientate themselves towards their first intercourse can be amplified by Bataille’s ideas about human consciousness and its relation to time. Accordingly, the second part of the essay will explore how the failed intimacy of McEwan’s characters is simultaneously a ‘release’ from the temporal coordinates of self and world and an encounter with the wild reaches of a ‘sacred’ and inhuman intimacy. Having heeded the echoes of Bataille in On Chesil Beach, the final part of the discussion will examine McEwan’s reflections on time and contingency with a view to supplementing Bataille’s tantalizing remarks on intimate life. In view of McEwan’s subtle subtext of the trauma of ‘arrested time’, it will be asked whether it is possible to develop the notion of impersonal intimacy beyond the confines of Bataille’s anti-humanist imperative.

Love in the ‘order of things’ The opening sentence of Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach identifies the point around which the narrative will painfully twist and towards which it will endlessly return: ‘They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible’ (McEwan 2008: 3). The reader encounters McEwan’s protagonists on the brink of their new lives together as a married couple. The narrator observes that the early 1960s were not a time in which young people could enjoy their youth with reckless exuberance. Marriage offered young people a flight path from the restricted and prescribed routines of childhood, an escape from its tedium into the dream-like freedoms of adult life: ‘And they had so many plans, giddy plans, heaped up before them in the misty future, as richly tangled as the summer flora of the Dorset coast, and as beautiful’ (McEwan 2008: 6). As each of the central characters projects ahead to their exciting and scarcely imaginable futures as married people, they also separately reflect upon the immediate history of their chaste and somewhat



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inhibited romance. While Edward is aware of Florence’s sexual reticence, he has no inkling of its depth or gravity: Where he merely suffered conventional first-night nerves, she experienced a visceral dread, a helpless disgust as palpable as seasickness. For much of the time, through all the months of merry wedding preparation, she managed to ignore this stain on her happiness, but whenever her thoughts turned towards a close embrace – she preferred no other term – her stomach tightened dryly, she was nauseous at the back of her throat. (McEwan 2008: 7)

Unable to broach the topic of sexual unease with her new husband, Florence concentrates on trying to conceal her disquiet. There is a painful comedy to Edward’s careful seduction of Florence: his excitement fuels his optimism that her moans and shudders are signs of incipient delight. In bold anticipation of the forthcoming sex act, Edward penetrates Florence’s mouth with his tongue, seeking to elicit some eager response. Florence, however, can only concentrate on not panicking and gagging: If she was sick into his mouth, was one wild thought, their marriage would be instantly over, and she would have to go home and explain herself to her parents. (McEwan 2008: 29–30)

As the foreplay progresses, both Florence and Edward anticipate their own ruin, even rehearse it by envisaging the possibility of failure to perform according to the social etiquette that the occasion demands. It is significant, given what happens later in the narrative, that Edward should fear ‘his own savage impatience and the furious words or actions it might provoke, and so end the evening’ (2008: 95). With the risk that one uncontrollable urge will undo all this work of civilization, the tension can only increase. It is ironic that although ‘free’ to behave as they choose, the young couple feel constrained at every turn, even to the point of eating the evening meal for which neither of them has any appetite. It is also ironic that just as Florence struggles with the fear that her body will betray her horror, Edward struggles with the fear that his body will betray his desire, ‘tipping him towards disgrace’ (2008: 31). Radically out of step with each other’s needs, their clueless lovemaking charts a series of attempts to suppress the evidence of their bodies. Florence feels her leg muscles go into involuntary spasm, Edward has to ‘hold down a little storm of his own’ (2008: 85–6). A few moments later he is obliged to stifle ‘a sudden impulse to laugh’ (2008: 96) as the mournful squeaking of the bed makes him think of other honeymoon couples who had used this room – a ‘solemn queue stretching out

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into the corridor, downstairs to reception, back through time’ (2008: 96–7). Edward and Florence are just one couple in a long line of couples past and to come who must complete this ritual without laughing, vomiting, weeping or ‘arriving too soon’. Although their respective desires are plainly at odds, the two characters are united in their earnest attempts to rein in their unruly impulses in order to cement their intimacy in the orthodox manner. It is not simply the case that the two protagonists in On Chesil Beach are impeded in their expressions of sexual intimacy by their containment within the prevailing social codes of courtship; more specifically their actions are governed by an internal time-consciousness which is for the most part lived at odds with libidinal existence. Edward suffers from his youth and inexperience and from a future coming towards him which he both fears and desires. He prepares for his wedding night by abstaining from masturbation for a week, but this ‘crazed restraint’ bears down hard ‘on his body’s young chemistry’ (McEwan 2008: 89). He regards his ‘excitement, ignorance and indecision as dangerous because he did not trust himself ’ – he was ‘capable of behaving stupidly, even explosively’ (2008: 91). Although an outwardly gentle man, Edward is secretly fond of street fighting, a ‘madness’ (2008: 95) he takes care to conceal from Florence behind the mantle of ‘his more recent, more sophisticated self ’ (2008: 95). Only in the ‘wild freedom’ (2008: 91) of a fist fight did he discover ‘a spontaneous, decisive self that eluded him in the rest of his tranquil existence’ (2008: 91). In similar fashion, Florence is ‘adept at concealing her feelings’ (2008: 50). She avoids family rows or confrontations, never quite believing that ‘hard words could be unsaid or forgotten’ (2008: 51). As unworldly as her future spouse, Florence ‘would not have trusted herself ’ (2008: 11) to be frank with anyone about her perceived weaknesses. Her experience of falling in love with Edward has revealed to her how ‘habitually sealed off ’ (2008: 61) she is in her everyday thoughts and actions: ‘All these years she had lived in isolation within herself and, strangely, from herself, never wanting or daring to look back’ (2008: 61). It is only in her regular string quartet meetings that she is in tune with her physical being and is assured in her sense of who she is: ‘The Florence who led her quartet, who coolly imposed her will, would never meekly submit to conventional expectations’ (2008: 81). Like her husband, Florence is only confident in her physicality when engaged in activities which define her as a separate individual intent on a particular action, rather than as a partner in a marriage. In his extended essay Theory of Religion, the French philosopher Georges Bataille offers an account of the domain of human agency and desire which serves to illuminate the angst-ridden state of McEwan’s protagonists. According



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to Bataille, the individual learns anguish insofar as ‘the world of things has posited his duration as the basic condition of his worth’ (1989: 52). To be human is to be locked down in a ‘system of projects that is the order of things’ (Bataille 1989: 52): The separate individual is of the same nature as the thing, or rather the anxiousness to remain personally alive that establishes the person’s individuality is linked to the integration of existence into the world of things. (1989: 51)

It is by virtue of involvement in a productive economy of future goals – be they the results of labour or the rational ends of wants and needs – that the individual is held in the world. Seen from this perspective, McEwan’s protagonists are inhibited in their corporeal being by their absorption in ‘the world of things [which] has duration as its foundation’ (Bataille 1989: 46). To the extent that it is embedded within marriage, sexual intimacy is goal-orientated and entirely compatible with the order of things (significantly, Florence looks forward to bearing Edward a child). By contrast, erotic activity is threatening to the order of things because it promises to return the separate ‘discontinuous’ (Bataille 1962: 16) individual to the immanent order where ‘there is no opposition of the mind and the body’ (Bataille 1989: 38). Bataille asserts that ‘no thing in fact has a separate existence, has a meaning, unless a subsequent time is posited, in view of which it is constituted as an object’ (1989: 46). Rendered merely utile by this goal-orientated economy, consciousness is inherently ‘fettered’, ‘self paralysed’ (Bataille 1989: 54) and incapable of ‘letting loose’ (1989: 54). McEwan’s characters embody this consciousness to the detriment of their intimacy. In order to preserve a secure identity within the order of things they struggle to maintain control of their wayward impulses, to briskly marshal their desires and to target their activities at the horizon of the ever-receding ‘future’. On Chesil Beach moves backwards and forwards in time throughout its narration, endlessly refining and revising the significant moments in the history of the intimacy between Edward and Florence. The kaleidoscopic shifting between memory and anticipation in McEwan’s ever-changing narrative ‘present’ perpetually locates the characters in a world of ‘before’ and ‘after’, with the wedding night marking a momentous threshold. From the perspective of anticipation, the honeymoon is a thrilling occasion for Edward because it promises a legitimate yet scarcely believable transgression of hitherto restrictive social codes. His expectation of finally lying naked with Florence is experienced with the torment of barely suppressed urgency:

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The prospect – was it actually going to happen? To him? – once more sent cool fingers through his lower gut, and he caught himself in a momentary swooning motion which he concealed behind a contented sigh. (McEwan 2008: 19–20)

As Edward experiences foreshocks of the cold thrill of sexual abandon, he struggles to maintain the façade of insouciant contentment. McEwan’s narrator suggests that for Edward the long-awaited sexual coupling ‘seemed as remote from daily life as a vision of religious ecstasy, or even death itself ’ (2008: 19–20). By contrast, Florence is ‘trying not to think of the immediate future, or of the past’ (2008: 99). An unhappy victim of an act that cannot be endlessly deferred, she imagines herself ‘clinging to this moment, the precious present, like an unroped climber on a cliff, pressing her face tight against the rock, not daring to move’ (2008: 99). While Edward is in awe at the imminent crossing of a boundary, Florence’s whole being is ‘in revolt’ (2008: 9) against the appalling intermingling of flesh: ‘her composure and essential happiness were about to be violated’ (2008: 9). She stumbles against the banal truth – ‘self evident enough in retrospect’ (2008: 30) – that in consenting to be married ‘all her choices over the past year were always narrowing to this’ (2008: 30). The confetti and cake are ‘a polite distraction’ (2002: 30) from this inevitable moment – the unspoken telos of marriage. Despite the profound hold that the order of things has on consciousness, Bataille maintains that there is an irrational craving to be liberated from this order which at its limit is tantamount to abdication from the human condition. The paradox is that consciousness is looking for what it has lost and what it must lose again as it draws near to it. This is because what it has lost is not outside it: ‘Consciousness turns away from the obscure intimacy of consciousness itself ’ (Bataille 1989: 57). When Edward identifies the prospect of sexual bliss with the self-annihilating raptures of mystical experience and ‘even death itself ’, he attests to the deep truth of an intimacy that threatens to shatter rather than confirm the central order of things. According to Bataille, the ‘most violent thing of all for us is death which jerks us out of a tenacious obsession with the lastingness of our discontinuous being’ (1962: 16). In his wider work Bataille suggests that ‘flights of Christian religious experience and bursts of erotic impulses’ (1962: 9) are part and parcel of the same movement which at its most extreme means ‘assenting to life up to the point of death’ (1962: 11). In his lexicon, the transition from the ‘normal state’ to that of erotic desire ‘presupposes a partial dissolution of the person’ (1962: 17) as a self-contained (or ‘discontinuous’) being. Edward feels the tug of a ‘momentary swooning motion’ that in Bataille’s terms would



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indicate a longing for the ‘violation’ (Bataille 1962: 16) of his very being. More elementally, this impulse from discontinuity towards continuity answers to a yearning for a ‘lost continuity’ linking us ‘with everything that is’ (1962: 15). In Theory of Religion, Bataille presents the human as the being who has lost and even rejected ‘that which he obscurely is, a vague intimacy’ (1989: 56). The guiding thesis of this text is that religion is a ‘search for a lost intimacy’ (1989: 57), but this intimacy does not denote a personal relation with a divinity or imply any analogous dialectic of self and other. In the religious context as in the erotic, intimacy is presented as an utter immersion in immanence, ‘a deep subjectivity’ (Bataille 1989: 33) or profound ‘continuity’ with ‘neither separations nor limits’ (1989: 42). There is no potential for recognition of self in otherness because from the perspective of this fundamental intimacy epistemological conditions do not obtain: ‘In the degree that he is the immanent immensity, that he is being, that he is of the world, man is a stranger to himself ’ (1989: 42). This is a profoundly impersonal intimacy, one which abrades the very notion of what it is to participate in the world of agents and of ‘things’. Since the functioning of self-consciousness and world is predicated upon the order of things, it follows that Bataille’s notion of the ‘intimate order’ is unknowable by consciousness qua consciousness: … consciousness of intimacy is possible only at a level where consciousness is no longer an operation whose outcome implies duration, that is, at the level where clarity, which is the effect of the operation, is no longer given. (1989: 57)

With this assertion, Bataille makes the relationship between temporality and intimacy more explicit. He goes on to argue that ‘the difficulty of making distinct knowledge and the intimate order coincide is due to their contrary modes of existence in time’ (1989: 98). According to Bataille, when one acts ‘according to the principles of the world of production’ one does so ‘with a view to a future result’ and this ‘matters more than the satisfaction of desire in the moment’ (1989: 87). By contrast, when one acts ‘according to the intimate order’ one does so ‘from violent impulses and putting calculations aside’ (1989: 87). McEwan’s meticulously observed narrative of sexual anticipation clearly exemplifies the first of these tendencies. However, it will not escape notice how well the row between Florence and Edward on Chesil Beach exemplifies the second. For Bataille, the return to the ‘lost intimacy’ of immanence demands the ‘sacrifice’ of ‘real’ relations, the ‘system of projects that is the order of things’ (1989: 52). In their exchange of protests and insults on their wedding night, Florence and Edward cast off their carefully choreographed future together and

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recklessly negate their past, flinging all restraint aside. In doing so, a breaking point is reached and the order of things gives way to the ‘precipitate and contagious movement’ (Bataille 1989: 52–3) of sacred expenditure: The sacred is that prodigious effervescence of life that, for the sake of duration, the order of things holds in check, and that this holding changes into a breaking loose, that is, into violence. (Bataille 1989: 52)

The violence of sacred intimacy On the face of things it must seem extraordinary that one episode of premature ejaculation could end a marriage barely eight hours after it was sanctified. That this shameful mishap should be freighted with such portent is something that the characters themselves scarcely comprehend. The irony of the story is that Florence and Edward experience greater intensity of emotion and libidinal release in their one and only argument than they do at any other moment in their relationship. In the angry confrontation on Chesil Beach all the passion that had been so lacking in the honeymoon suite explodes in a fury of rebellion against the very substance of their marriage. In Bataille’s terms, what is being destroyed here are ‘real relations’ understood as part of the ‘world of things on which distinct reality is founded’ (Bataille 1989: 44–5). As the order of things is undone, the cultivated habits of self fall away, plunging the couple into rapid and uncontrollable decline. Florence no longer hides her sexual squeamishness; Edward no longer suppresses his nascent aggression. Ironically, in this respect the couple advance towards greater self-exposure the more they undermine their previous ‘intimacy’. The confrontation between Florence and Edward on Chesil Beach is focalized entirely through Florence, a narrative decision which serves to distance the reader from Edward’s viewpoint – ‘he remained an unreadable, two dimensional shape against the sea’ (McEwan 2008: 154) – and which simultaneously enables the reader to follow the arcs and troughs of Florence’s fluctuating mood. In the moments preceding their exchange of words Florence experiences a rush of guilt, shame and fear, yet, when she starts to speak, it is anger which claims her voice. Her perspective on the event in the hotel room appears to shift and shift again, never resolving itself into a lasting attitude. Significantly, on Chesil Beach her experience of time itself becomes imprecise, faltering and taking on a dreamlike quality:



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She watched him coming along the strand, his form at first no more than an indigo stain against the darkening shingle, sometimes appearing motionless, flickering and dissolving at its outlines, and at others suddenly closer, as though moved like a chess piece a few squares toward her. (McEwan 2008: 139)

In the dialogue which ensues, Florence surprises herself ‘with the hardness in her voice’ (2008: 143). In answer to Edward’s exasperated question, ‘Did you really need to come this far?’ she replies, ‘I don’t care how far it is. I needed to get out’ (2008: 143). Florence is in flight from both her past and her future, from ‘the real ties of subordination’ (Bataille 1989: 43) of which Bataille speaks. When Edward reproves her for running out of the hotel room, she unwisely responds that what he did was ‘absolutely revolting’ (McEwan 2008: 144). With this sudden reversal of polarity from attraction to repulsion, sexual love spills over into warfare. Words now function as deeds and Florence’s declaration of disgust is a classic ‘body blow’. As soon as she has uttered these words ‘she imagined she heard him grunt, as though punched in the chest’ but he ‘came out swinging’ (2008: 144), hurling accusation upon accusation at his new bride: ‘You don’t have the faintest idea how to be with a man …You’ve never let me near you … You don’t even know how to kiss’ (2008: 144). The shift in diction is staggering in its force and reference. As the verbal exchange develops, the tone rapidly escalates from the petulant to the violent, only briefly touching a gentler note when Florence tentatively suggests that Edward seek alternative partners for sex outside the marriage. Incandescent with rage, Edward pours scorn on this ‘disgusting and ridiculous’ (2008: 156) idea, accusing his wife of deviousness and ‘fraud’ (2008: 156); having already deployed the stinging word ‘bitch’ (2008: 156) he completes his offensive with the fatal diagnosis of ‘frigidity’ (2008: 156). There is something fierce, infantile and essentially sacrificial about the trading of accusations and insults on the darkening beach. As Florence reflects, ‘there were no words to name what had happened, there existed no shared language in which two sane adults could describe such events to each other’ (2008: 139). In fact, Edward responds to Florence’s unorthodox solution to their problem with bitter words of accusation and body language of ‘unashamed violence’ (2008: 155): He made a noise between his teeth, more of a hiss than a sigh, and when he spoke he made a yelping sound. His indignation was so violent that it sounded like triumph. (2008: 155)

On Chesil Beach, Edward no longer feels the need to discipline his impulses and steady himself, his bestial howling sounding oddly victorious. Nor is he averse

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to ‘savouring the full deliciousness of the injury and wrong and insult she had inflicted on him’ (2008: 157). Similarly, Florence relinquishes her strategy of avoiding ‘hard words’ and succumbs to the sweet pleasure of violating taboos: Her heart beat hard and she wanted to tell him that she hated him, and she was about to say these harsh and wonderful words that she had never before uttered in her life when he spoke first. (2008: 148)

Florence realizes that they had been frightened of ever disagreeing, but ‘now his anger was setting her free’ (2008: 148). For the first time in their relationship the two characters are uninhibited in their actions. Each is brought closer to the ‘intimate order’ in their violent rejection of the over-coded behaviour of ‘real’ relations. In Bataille’s terms, this is the dangerous ‘conflagration’ (Bataille 1989: 54) of the sacred – the contagion of a ‘shared life grasped in its intimacy’ (1989: 48). Edward’s brutish gestures suggest a regression to an animal ferocity, but Bataille makes it clear throughout Theory of Religion that impersonal intimacy is primal rather than primitive. Since for the animal ‘nothing is given through time’ (1989: 18), at most the animal experiences mere ‘unconscious intimacy’ (1989: 53), lacking the anguish attendant on duration: [Sacrifice] favours human life and not animality; the resistance to immanence is what regulates its resurgence, so poignant in tears and so strong in the unavowable pleasure of anguish. (1989: 53)

If the ruinous actions of Edward and Florence attain a kind of vicious intensity it is because they are felt in the anguish of desire, in an intimacy charged with sudden loss. Hostility can never be unmediated, but unmitigated hostility is closer to intimacy than socialized sexuality can ever be. Away from all the reminders of their civilized selves, McEwan’s characters abandon the world of real things, effectively rejecting the identities that they have struggled so carefully to preserve. If to be human is to be bound to this order, what Florence and Edward enter is not so much a state as a movement, a falling away from the condition of goal-orientated action. In a frenzy of negation, Edward is as quick to renounce his share in his wife’s wealth and a career working for her father as Florence is to give up all future sexual contact (‘So keep your money … I don’t want to work for your father’ [McEwan 2008: 147]). Edward will not countenance Florence’s proposal for an alternative kind of marriage and she will not be ‘bullied’ (2008: 145) into yielding to his desires. There is clearly something exhilarating about this frantic urge to jettison all that they have planned. Such spectacular recklessness is emblematic of the rituals



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of sacrifice so central to Bataille’s philosophy of non-productive expenditure. In the denial and destruction of all the fundamental elements of their married status they abandon their temporally determined identities in a contagious thirst for annihilation: To sacrifice is not to kill but to relinquish and give […] What is important is to pass from a lasting order, in which all consumption of resources is subordinated to the need for duration, to the violence of an unconditional consumption; what is important is to leave a world of real things, whose reality never resides in the moment … (Bataille 1989: 49)

It is essential that what is relinquished is all that it is reasonable to hold on to and preserve. For Bataille, sacrifice is the antithesis of production. Nothing that transpires in this bonfire of gratuitous expenditure is amenable to rational explanation. It is not surprising that as the altercation on the beach intensifies, Florence should be ‘feeling a little mad’; she ‘had never known her own feelings, her moods, to dip and swerve so’ (McEwan 2008: 152). In this unique exile from the human condition, all certainties start to sway and swim: She wanted to hurt him, punish him in order to make herself distinct from him. It was such an unfamiliar impulse in her, towards the thrill of destruction, that she had no resistance against it. (2008: 152)

This impulse to destroy – like the tears of anguish – is profoundly sacrificial and even has the character of unexpected triumph. In Bataille’s vision, such paradoxical affects ‘make us exult, but always madly, far beyond the concern for a future time’ (1989: 48). According to Bataille, ‘future time constitutes this real world to such a degree that death no longer has a place in it’ (1989: 46). However, it is for this very reason that death means everything to the real world because it disturbs the order of things which holds us: The real order does not so much reject the negation of life that is death as it rejects the affirmation of intimate life, whose measureless violence is a danger to the stability of things. The real order must annul – neutralize – that intimate life and replace it with the thing that the individual is in the society of labour. But it cannot prevent life’s disappearance in death from revealing the invisible brilliance of life that is not a thing. (1989: 47)

The collapse of the order of things does not bring Edward and Florence closer to death but it does bring them closer to a life which is more intimate with death because it is severed from projection, object-relations and futurity. Something

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is experienced here in default of the grammar of experience. Something is glimpsed in the very moment of its occlusion. This encounter – which lacks the coordinates of subjective experience – exposes the imposture of reality which has duration at its foundation. Indeed, Bataille insists that ‘death reveals life in its plenitude and dissolves the real order’ (1989: 47). This is something that is primarily felt rather than understood or cognized. In just this sense, Florence experiences such unimagined oscillations in her moods that she is more witness than agent at the upsurge of her emotions. In fact, Bataille goes so far as to assert that the revelation of intimate life in its plenitude is ‘fully restored to my sensibility’ (1989: 47) through the collapse of the truth of this realm of ‘real’ things. For Bataille, ‘intimacy cannot be expressed discursively’ (1989: 50). Unknowable, it is refractory to our conceptual and intellectual constructs. He claims that ‘life’s intimacy does not reveal its dazzling consumption until the moment it gives out’ (1989: 47); it is ‘precisely the disappearance of duration, and of the neutral behaviours associated with it, that uncovers a ground of things that is dazzling bright’ (1989: 48). This is a harsh brilliance, irradiating rather than enlightening, for although it can be potentially experienced, it cannot be known (1962: 22–3). It is here that we approach the limit of Bataille’s meditations. If Bataille’s notion of intimacy is unknowable and ineffable, only available to consciousness when liberated from duration (and hence also from clarity), it must be by definition of limited value in illuminating human relations. Indeed, what sense can we make of the claim that ‘the need for duration conceals life from us’ (Bataille 1989: 48) and that the death of the real order restores life in its plenitude to our sensibility? Here, where Bataille’s text falls silent, McEwan’s narrative may yet sound echoes of its own. As we shall now discover, beyond the anti-humanist tenor of Bataille’s thinking, McEwan’s novel offers surprising resources of its own for exploring impersonal intimacy.

In search of lost time The temporal structure of On Chesil Beach frequently moves back from the narrative present of the honeymoon to earlier moments in the courtship of Edward and Florence. It also projects ahead to their imagined future and ultimately to their lives apart. The closing pages of the novel detail the essential milestones of Edward’s life after the separation from Florence, taking him from young adulthood through to old age. As time goes on Edward becomes wistful about the past, eventually admitting to himself that ‘he had never met anyone



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he had loved as much [as Florence]’ (McEwan 2008: 165). It is with regret that he looks back on what happened between them, wishing only that he had possessed love and patience in equal measure. As we have noted earlier, Edward approaches the wedding night with intense excitement, sensing the possibility of a kind of transcendence of all that is civilized and restrictive. However, on Chesil Beach – the other side of the threshold – Edward’s indictment of their relationship is damning. With a casualness that is effortlessly cruel, he now refers to their love as something past: ‘I loved you but you make it so hard’ (2008: 150). The locution is odd – is at odds with itself – because it announces both a completed past and a continuous future. Significantly, Edward fails to correct himself as Florence muses wonderingly on his choice of tense: ‘You loved me?’ (2008: 150). Florence does not believe that Edward has ceased to love her but what is at stake in their confrontation is not the truth of the real but the formulation of what will have been the case. What McEwan’s text offers the reader of Bataille is a unique insight into the ‘deep subjectivity’ (Bataille 1989: 33) or profound ‘continuity’ (1989: 35) of intimacy. It is all too easy to assume that the loss of duration is equivalent to timelessness, or, in what amounts to the same thing, a kind of enduring presence (a moment ‘in’ time). However, what is disclosed in the breach in the ‘lasting order’ is not the ‘truth’ of events in any meaningful sense but the sheer contingency of the real order which has duration at its foundation. Edward’s words are incoherent when seen from the perspective of duration, but this is not the perspective from which he speaks. Edward and Florence share an overwhelming freedom from the order of things, but it is a freedom that cannot then be articulated according to its terms. If Edward effectively ‘wins’ this battle it is because he succeeds in momentarily establishing his version of events as ‘true’: ‘She knew that she had not set out to deceive him, but everything else, as soon as he said it, seemed entirely true’ (McEwan 2008: 156). What this essentially reveals is that intimacy does not present itself at the level of duration. The implications of this could not be more crucial for Edward and Florence. Of the two protagonists, Florence is clearly the most changed by the wedding night catastrophe and McEwan’s choice of focalization prompts the reader to take heed of the potential reasons for her plight. When Edward unexpectedly ejaculates over his half-dressed bride, Florence is seized by a ‘visceral horror at being doused in fluid, in slime from another body’ (2008: 105). She is assailed by an unaccountable but uncontainable revulsion which summons ‘memories she had long ago decided were not really hers’ (2008: 105). McEwan’s narrator tells us nothing of these memories other than to remark that the ‘intimate

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starchy odour’ (2008: 106) of the semen on her skin drags with it ‘the stench of a shameful secret locked in musty confinement’ (2008: 106). This moment of crisis for Florence, a hollow parody of the orgasmic crisis of sexual bliss, is a moment of potential release of something ‘time-locked’ in the living present. What Florence’s embodied being appears to ‘remember’ her cerebral ‘self ’ does not. As a result, on Chesil Beach she is obliged to bear the sting of Edward’s charge of ‘frigidity’ as wholly applicable. We learn on the first page of On Chesil Beach that Edward had never stayed in a hotel before ‘whereas Florence, after many trips as a child with her father, was an old hand’ (2008: 3). This seemingly innocuous detail – one of many marking the subtle class differences between the couple – accumulates greater weight as the novel progresses. Further information, seeded through the narrative, prompts the reader to question her father’s habit of taking his young daughter for trips in his boat. The most telling moment in relation to these memories occurs in Section Three of the novel when Florence, lying on the bed in the honeymoon suite, tries to distract herself from her predicament by concentrating on a ‘green coin-sized stain’ (2008: 99) on the sagging canopy of the four-poster bed (‘how had that got there?’ [2008: 99]). However, as she struggles to absent herself from all thoughts of what is to come or what has gone before, she is beset by an involuntary memory, triggered by the saline scent of the breeze: She listened to the distant waves, the call of herring gulls, and to the sound of Edward undressing. Here came the past anyway, the indistinct past. It was the smell of the sea that summoned it. She was twelve years old, lying still like this, waiting, shivering in the narrow bunk with polished mahogany sides. Her mind was a blank, she felt she was in disgrace. After a two-day crossing, they were once more in the calm of Carteret harbour south of Cherbourg. It was late in the evening, and her father was moving about the dim cramped cabin, undressing, like Edward now. She remembered the rustle of clothes, the clink of a belt unfastened or of keys or loose change. Her only task was to keep her eyes closed and to think of a tune she liked. Or any tune. She remembered that sweet scent of almost rotten food in the closed air of a boat after a rough trip. She was usually sick many times on the crossing, and of no use to her father as a sailor, and that surely was the source of her shame. (2008: 99–100)

As the remembered scene with her father becomes superimposed on the present, the reader is prompted to identify the source of Florence’s ‘primal disgust’ (2008: 105). The temporal present of the young bride is superimposed onto the remembered past of the pubescent girl: ‘Her only task was to keep



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her eyes closed and to think of a tune she liked’. McEwan’s simple sentence hovers placelessly in the narrative, serving simultaneously to describe the coping mechanisms of the adolescent and the current coping strategies of the new bride. It now becomes clear why Florence’s ‘visceral dread’ of sex should be likened to a ‘helpless disgust as palpable as seasickness’ (2008: 7) and why she has lived her life in so guarded a manner, ‘never wanting or daring to look back’ (2008: 61). Her ‘memory’ of the sea voyages summons a feeling of nausea which screens the implied sexual abuse by her father. The sickness displaces the primacy of the abuse as the ‘remembered’ source of disgust. It is only when the feel of semen on her skin provokes an unconscious memory that she springs up from the bed in a ‘frenzy of anger and shame’ (2008: 106). Florence’s disgust at the feel of semen on her body tends to suggest delayedonset trauma, or Freudian Nachträglichkeit (‘deferred action’) (Freud 1966: 353–6). Arguably Florence’s hysterical response has been ‘primed’ by earlier events which were lived through but not assimilated into experience (she closed her eyes, distracted herself by thinking of a favourite tune). Owing to these prior events, Edward’s unfortunate ejaculation catalyses a response of disproportionate intensity. Paradoxically, the primary trauma is only experienced after the subsequent events, is oddly engendered by them, calling into question received ideas about chronology and causality. Florence suffers from a past that she cannot remember (‘her mind was a blank’) and from a time which has never arrived (the ‘indistinct past’). Most importantly, it is uncertain whether this wounding past is ultimately retrievable, since at no point did it ‘present’ itself to consciousness as an item of experience. Insofar as it cannot call itself to presence it has no place within the ‘order of things’. If it can be reasonably claimed that the ‘defloration’ of a bride is a religiously sanctified wounding, what McEwan appears to present us with is the schema of a tragedy in which the worst has already happened. What is seemingly opened up on the wedding night is a wound in time. The ‘stain’ on Florence’s happiness – the wordless mark of abuse – appears to have impeded her sexual flourishing, foredooming her marriage before it has even begun. However, one of the strongest lessons of McEwan’s text is that the past is never fixed once and for all. Despite all that has objectively ‘happened’ in Florence’s past, its relationship to the future is always subject to revision. Past and future are not experienced as independent, equivalent points in a series or timeline; rather, they are irreducible components of the living present. McEwan’s text shows how the intelligibility of the present is achieved by way of a process of constant reconstitution, an incessant reconfiguring of consequences, connections, conclusions. It is small

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wonder then that in making her unusual proposal to Edward, Florence feels ‘as though she were trying to re-invent existence itself ’ (McEwan 2008: 152). Here, as elsewhere in the narrative, McEwan reassembles timelines, redrawing the relationships between causes and consequences to supply alternative visions of the future. Earlier in the text the reader is repeatedly encouraged to share Florence’s hope that she can ‘get through’ (2008: 103) the first intercourse, gradually ‘whittle her anxieties away through sheer familiarity’ (2008: 101) and even cultivate ‘the beginnings of desire’ (2008: 87). She goes so far as to imagine that from the position of future confidence her honeymoon misery might be retold as a ‘funny story’ (2008: 101). Far from being predetermined or foredoomed, the past might yet become livable and not a stain on the blossoming of the future. It does not logically follow from all that has been said here that Florence’s ‘deferred action’ is cathartic, but her hysterical behaviour precipitates a new crisis, one which will function as a catalyst for change. In the sacrificial expenditure on Chesil Beach the two protagonists cast off their identities as polite, restrained and circumspect individuals. It is a ‘death’ of the selves that they have become for one another and a return to the pre-egoic magma of primal intensity. What the future will have been and what the past might yet become is not negotiated within the order of duration. Life ‘in its plenitude’ is lived in the eclipse of consciousness. Speaking of On Chesil Beach in an interview, McEwan remarks: … it’s something I always have an interest in: how something small, like not saying the right thing or not making the right gesture, could then send you down a slightly different path in life. It must happen to us countless times, but we barely notice. (McEwan 2007: unpag.)

What McEwan does is to take contingency so seriously that what will count as past, present and future is itself a chain of possibilities rather than a predetermined series. What we have is not the collapse of time so much as the crash or confluence of all tenses. The contingency of things, which is constantly lived but never perceived as such, is here felt with the force of necessity: she ‘had never known her own feelings, her moods, to dip and swerve so’ (McEwan 2008: 152). In their perilous, splendid liberation from the ‘given’, Florence and Edward encounter the openness of their horizons to a variety of possible pasts and futures. These young people have been undone and have shared being undone, but it is not inevitable that they should survive into different lives. Indeed, it would be too swift to conclude that this was a bogus love affair, that neither felt sufficiently committed to the other or that a generally suppressed



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enmity bubbles up to the surface in a moment of authentic rage. Their ‘hatred’ is utterly ‘real’ and wholly contingent, poised on the cusp between chance and necessity. She cannot know how keenly he feels his social inferiority to his bride. He cannot know how traumatized she is by the prospect of sex. But the solution to their problems does not lie with the knowable. What destroys the intimacy between Edward and Florence is not their violent row but its cessation. Their malevolent words and angry gestures are wild and extreme but their shared violence is buoyed on a tidal wave of pre-personal ‘sensibility’. In the inhuman time of impersonal intimacy, all investment in their civilized selves is sacrificed and they have a chance to start anew. Florence’s error is to depart the scene, Edward’s to let her go, each too eager to retreat into the familiar order that has brought them such mixed fortunes: This is how the entire course of a life can be changed – by doing nothing. On Chesil Beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back. (McEwan 2008: 166)

Works Cited I would like to thank Jennifer Cooke for all her helpful editorial suggestions. Bataille, G. (1962), Eroticism. Translated from the French by Mary Dalwood. London: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd. —(1989), Theory of Religion. Translated from the French by Robert Hurley. Zone Books: New York. Freud, S. (1966), ‘Project for a scientific psychology’, in J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 1. London: Hogarth, 283–398. McEwan, I. (2008), On Chesil Beach. Vintage: London. Nietzsche, F. (1973), Beyond Good and Evil. Translated from the German by R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Tonkin, B. (2007), ‘Ian McEwan: I hang on to hope in a tide of fear’, in The Independent, 6th April. Available online: www.edge.org/images/Independent_McEwan.pdf [accessed 12 May 2012].

10

‘Dear Osama’: Impersonal Intimacy and the Problem of Mothering in Chris Cleave’s Incendiary Reina van der Wiel

Birkbeck, University of London

The concept of ‘impersonal’ (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 27) or ‘depersonalizing intimacy’ (Vogler 2000: 51) signifies a radically different understanding of intimacy in twenty-first century critical theory, psychoanalysis and philosophy, defined as an ‘experience of exchange … of desire indifferent to personal identity’ (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 122). It is predicated on the principle that rather than make us happy, the personal intimacies we all long for, chase and treasure frequently bring out the worst in us and can cause profound dissatisfaction, isolation and suffering. The theory of impersonal intimacy has been put forward, therefore, as a potential way out of this conundrum. In this chapter, I will probe and problematize the workings of this theory, and especially its roots in the impersonality of mothering, through a close reading of Chris Cleave’s Incendiary (2005). The novel’s narrative enactment of impersonal intimacy combined with its depiction of dysfunctional intimacies allow me to investigate not only the ways in which (impersonal) intimacy is created in the text, but also the correlation between intimacy, mothering, trauma and violence. Employing a psychoanalytic framework, Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips argue that the cause of problems with traditional conceptions of intimacy is ‘our murderous antagonism toward difference’ (2008: 76). Difference is a frightening threat to the ego and thus becomes something to be mastered via hostility to, and possibly destruction of, the other. This mastery, in turn, generates a selfsatisfying or narcissistic pleasure. Since intimacy and vulnerability are closely linked, and intimate relationships are founded on interdependent yet potentially conflicting needs and desires, it is unsurprising that personal intimacies

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in particular can incite feelings of hatred, and even violence. Interpersonal violence, moreover – both on an individual and a collective, political level – is heavily connected to the power structures described by Michel Foucault as operating within relationality: on the one hand, the dynamics of power and control within intimate relationships (see Layder 2009); on the other, ‘the power intimacy has in drawing boundaries that mark out difference, distinctions which exclude “others”’ (Cooke 2009: 2). Consequently, Bersani and Phillips’s theory of impersonal intimacy is a response to ‘Foucault’s call for “new relational modes”’ understood ‘as at once an instance of political realism and moral imperative’ (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 77). Changing the way we relate to each other personally is the first step toward effecting political and social reform; yet, for any significant changes to occur, institutions and politics will have to radically transform their approach to relationality. The contemporary project of reframing intimacy in terms of impersonality is thus an attempt to locate a form of relationality that begets equal distribution of power and restrains our self-protective yet gratifying aggression. Based on sameness rather than difference, on self-forgetfulness rather than ‘reciprocal self-expression and self-scrutiny’ (Vogler 2000: 48), on ‘being-with’ (Cooke 2009: 8) rather than knowledge of the other, impersonal or depersonalizing intimacy aims to do this by removing the emphasis on differentiation (in the form of personality or individuality) from the current discourse on intimacy. Conversely, the concept also highlights that intimacy is not by definition personal intimacy in the sense that we often understand it – i.e. a feeling of closeness and openness within a loving and trusting family, friendship or sexual relationship – but can rather take on unexpected and unsolicited forms. Intimacy can occur between strangers, for example, and acts of violence can be exceptionally intimate. This chapter therefore examines representations of intimacy in Incendiary, a contemporary novel deeply concerned with violence and human relationality, especially in the aftermath of trauma. Framed as an open letter to Osama bin Laden, Incendiary is the fictional first-person narrative of a nameless, working-class woman who has lost her husband and son in a terrorist suicide-bomb attack on the Arsenal football stadium. In an interesting twist to the trauma plot, at the time of the explosion she was having sex with a man called Jasper Black, a successful journalist with the Sunday Telegraph. He was supposed to have been at the stadium because his girlfriend, Petra Sutherland, had told him ‘to get up to speed with the game’ in order ‘to hold [his] own at dinner parties’ (Cleave 2005: 41). Running into each other on the street, shortly after having slept together for the first time,



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the narrator invites Jasper Black to watch the game on television at her place rather than at the stadium, so that she can initiate him into the world of football. While they are having sex with half an eye on the game, ‘the whole East Stand explode[s] in flames’ (Cleave 2005: 55). A thousand people lose their lives in the explosion and the stampede that follows, including the narrator’s son and husband. In this one, traumatic moment, public and private domains collide. Swiftly termed ‘May Day’ by the media (Cleave 2005: 73), the attack causes London to descend into a police state founded on curfew, barrage balloons and anti-Muslim racism. What ensues is not only a grief- and guilt-stricken mother and widow’s plea to Osama bin Laden to end the bloodshed, but also a story about the unforeseen and sometimes violent intimacies that arise due to this brutal and traumatic event. The novel offers both a demonstration of how impersonal intimacy might successfully operate and a portrayal of intimacy gone wrong, with post-traumatic depression turning an initially impersonal yet potentially affectionate relationship into obsession and sexual violence. In what follows, by looking more closely at the theoretical premise of impersonal intimacy and offering subsequent readings of the novel, I aim to show that while immensely important and theoretically compelling, impersonal intimacy is a somewhat idealistic and potentially conservative concept. In theory, it holds great promise to liberate us from the existing, arguably dysfunctional and destructive discourse of intimacy founded on personal identity and knowledge of the other, but in practice it may be difficult to implement in a society that very much operates within a ‘same/different paradigm’ (Cooke 2009: 6). The problem, as Jennifer Cooke points out, lies in the fact that its emphasis on sameness runs counter to the endeavours by feminist, queer and postcolonial theorists to expose ‘a conservative political agenda aiming to maintain the status quo by excluding or silencing otherness’ (2009: 6). In Incendiary, this particularly concerns male dominance, sexual division of labour and, most alarmingly, sexual violence against women. When read through the lens of impersonal intimacy, the novel seems not only to uphold these gender divisions but also to condone violent behaviour. This is diametrically opposed to the primary aim of impersonal intimacy: to prevent aggression and violence against (loved) others. Consequently, this chapter seeks to problematize the concept of impersonal intimacy and divert its focus away from sameness toward mutual transformation. Following some of the central characteristics of psychoanalysis, the chapter is structured via three distinct yet related experiences of intimate exchange: talk, sexuality and mothering.

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Endless talk, or intimacy as address Contrary to the traditional psychoanalytic view of object-love as a resurrection of the love for one’s mother and one’s own idealized infantile self, Leo Bersani draws on a more positive and mystical understanding of love as found in Plato’s Phaedrus (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 77–87). Here, Socrates describes the love between an older man and a young boy whose beauty and moral character trigger in the man memories of heavenly, ideal Beauty and the particular nature of the god they must have both followed in their prior existence as souls in heaven. The man thus seeks to draw out in the boy these particular godlike qualities, making the boy more like himself in the process. The boy, in turn, ‘becomes a lover as a result of being loved’ (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 82), unconsciously embracing his own beauty mirrored in the man’s desire. Bersani coins the term ‘impersonal narcissism’ (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 85) to describe what Cooke aptly refers to as ‘reciprocal love-of-the-same-in-theother’ (2009: 4). This is both self-love and object-love, rooted in potentiality and ‘a general, universal, individuation’ (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 82) rather than personality. Through their relation to each other, ‘worshipping [their shared] godlike nature’ (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 84), the lovers become ever more like their ‘virtual ideal being’ (2008: 87). Their impersonal narcissism creates a virtuous circle in which they continue to bring out the best in each other and themselves. Furthermore, devoid of any desire for individual personality, impersonal narcissism aims to reduce the potentially destructive hierarchy of power within intimate relationships. It thus holds the potential for an intimacy that in its ‘non-threatening supplement of sameness’ (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 86) does not incite the violence accompanying ‘an aggressively defensive posture toward the differences outside [the ego’s] identitarian frontiers’ (2008: 85). Instead, it offers ‘a narcissistic pleasure that sustains human intimacy’ (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 72). When we feel secure and good about ourselves, it is easy to feel and behave positively toward others. The Socratic version of love that underlies impersonal narcissism is nurtured through ‘intrinsically unending dialogue’ (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 87). This suggests that to sustain love and intimacy we need to talk, endlessly – not to get to know each other, but to get to know our own potential, ideal self; to forget rather than to express our personality and individuality. Incendiary is made up of precisely such endless talk between the narrator and Osama bin Laden, the novel’s object of address. Although theirs is, of course, no love relationship, the narrator reaches out to Osama in the hope of establishing an intimacy based on



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sameness (in the form of a shared love for her son) that would end his violent crusade derived from the threat of difference. She is convinced of the overriding power of such love: ‘I know you’d stop the bombs in a second if I could make you see my son with all your heart for just one moment’ (Cleave 2005: 4). Divided into four parts corresponding with the four seasons, each part of the novel opens with the words ‘Dear Osama’ (Cleave 2005: 3, 163, 239, 323). This is followed, at random intervals, by the narrator briefly halting her story for the direct address of apostrophe. Within a rhetorical context, Maureen McLane identifies intimacy as precisely this figure of speech or personal address: ‘[P]erhaps we might say that intimacy happens if apostrophe works. Where apostrophe is, intimacy may be’ (2000: 436). The use of the personal pronoun in apostrophe provides ‘a grammar of intimacy’ (McLane 2000: 439). It is remarkable, therefore, that the narrator chooses to address Osama rather than her late husband, for example.1 Defined by McLane as a ‘turn[ing] away, outward’ (2000: 440), here apostrophe straddles the domains of the private and the public, with Osama bin Laden as both the ultimate public enemy in the War on Terror and the murderer of the narrator’s loved ones.2 By calling him by his first name, however, the narrator indicates that she perceives him as a human being rather than as an abstract concept of evil incarnated. The fact that the narrator calls Osama – the absent and personally unknown object of address – by his first name right from the start becomes even more striking when we consider that she, her husband and her son all remain nameless, whereas the two other male characters (Jasper Black and Terence Butcher) are mostly referred to by both their first and surname. The latter produces a sense of detachment rather than intimacy, even though these are the men that the narrator is sexually and emotionally involved with. The ostensible reversal of intimacy and detachment in the novel can be partly accounted for precisely by Osama’s absence and disinterest. ‘[T]he impossibility of a satisfying “re-turn”’ that McLane (2000: 440) identifies as generating an impasse in elegies and epitaphs becomes something to be desired: it is easier to admit to certain behaviour in the knowledge that there will be no direct or reproachful response. In this sense, Incendiary seems to adhere to what Candace Vogler distinguishes as the ‘self-expressive model of intimacy’, in which a need for ‘self-expression and self-scrutiny’ (2000: 51) underlies the narrator’s talk – in other words, precisely the model that impersonal or depersonalizing intimacy works against. But the intimacy between Osama and the narrator is impersonal not on account of the absence of personal information, but because she believes that their shared motherly love will prevail over their marked differences

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in nationality, ethnicity, religion and gender. The narrator is convinced that by telling him about her son and ‘the shape of the hole he [has left] behind’ (Cleave 2005: 4), Osama will start loving him and consequently stop his violent behaviour. In Bersani and Phillips’s terms, this love would allow him to glimpse his virtual ideal being which would, in turn, strengthen his self-love and self-esteem and diminish feelings of fear, anger and hatred that can lead to aggression. The narcissistic pleasure experienced in impersonal intimacy would replace that of satisfied aggression. According to the narrator, the love felt by a mother for her child is just as ‘furious and brave and loud’ (Cleave 2005: 338). The narrator thus appeals to Osama to recognize her dead boy as the vehicle through which to achieve this impersonal intimacy between them, just like the memory of heavenly Beauty and the god shared between Socratic lovers. There is, however, obviously a profound discrepancy between that blissful, mutually beneficial conception of love and an intimacy derived from the sudden, intentional and violent death of a four-year-old boy. Indeed, all the intimacies portrayed in Incendiary are not ‘normal’ but borne out of the same traumatic event. Their starting point is violence, loss and suffering rather than kindness and affection. One could argue that it is here that Bersani and Phillips’s model of impersonal intimacy comes up against its impossible idealism while simultaneously establishing its necessity and urgency. The hopefulness displayed in both Incendiary and the concept of impersonal intimacy – the belief that a less violent relationality and society may be attainable – seems to be based on the impersonal, universal power of mother love, which I will turn to shortly. But first I would like to put forward another possible reading of the impersonal intimacy between the narrator and Osama, involving the correlation between intimacy and sexuality.

Talk without sex Despite her explicit declaration to the contrary, the novel soon becomes about the narrator rather than about her boy. ‘I suppose I ought to tell you a bit more about his mum’, she says to Osama, before you get the idea I was some sort of saint who just sewed fluffy toys and waited up for her husband … I wasn’t a perfect wife and mum in fact I wasn’t even an average one I was what the Sun would call a DIRTY LOVE CHEAT. (Cleave 2005: 12)



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It appears that, in Cleave’s novel at least, sexual activity by no means underlies intimacy. Sex, for the narrator, ‘is a condition caused by nerves’ (2005: 12): Ever since I was a young girl I get so anxious … Your Twin Towers attack or just 2 blokes arguing over a cab fare it’s all the same … And when I get nervous about all the horrible things in the world I just need something very soft and secret and warm to make me forget it for a bit … I’ll go with anyone so long as they’re gentle. (2005: 12–3)

So when her husband, a policeman working in bomb disposal, goes out to work, the narrator sometimes goes out to the pub in search of something soft, secret and warm, as on the night she meets Jasper Black. In fact, adultery is omnipresent in Incendiary: the narrator is married, Jasper Black has a long-term girlfriend, Terence Butcher is married; but all seek sex, if not intimacy, elsewhere. Although this is clearly a fictional world, in which conflict drives narrative, to some extent it confirms the original premise of impersonal intimacy that often our personal intimacies do not seem to gratify us enduringly. Cleave plays with gender stereotypes by making the female narrator desire impersonal intimacy through sex: her sexual encounters provide temporary self-forgetfulness and personal identity is inconsequential to her choice of men. By contrast, Terence Butcher – her husband’s former boss and Chief Superintendent in the police force, with whom she has a brief affair until she finds out about his role in the May Day attack – longs for a warmth, familiarity and understanding that is lacking in his marriage. Before anything has happened between them, he confesses to the narrator that when he thinks of her, instead of craving sex, he imagines her ruffling his hair in his caravan (Cleave 2005: 185). It is her caring, maternal nature toward which he is particularly drawn. Yet the narrator’s initial and explicit reason for writing to Osama – her appeal to stop ‘making boy shaped holes in the world’ (Cleave 2005: 4) – by no means necessitates the level of disclosure she demonstrates about her sexual activity. I would like to draw a parallel, therefore, between Adam Phillips’s remark that ‘[p]sychoanalysis is about what two people can say to each other if they agree not to have sex’ (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 1), and the relationship between the narrator and Osama. Although evidently not an analytic encounter, or even an encounter per se, the narrator tells Osama the most intimate details of ‘the emptiness that was left when [he] took [her] boy away’ (Cleave 2005: 4). This one-way confession can be said to resemble the ‘extrapsychoanalytic imitation’ of the ‘sexually neutralized encounter’ (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 5) as described by Bersani in Intimacies. By virtue of their not having sex, Osama is the only

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adult man (as opposed to Jasper Black and Terence Butcher) the narrator can truly be intimate with in any sustained fashion. This new ‘relationality’, which in the context of Incendiary proves a more useful term than ‘encounter’, is based on ‘talk without sex’ and ‘a being-present perhaps independent of the personality constructed within a personal history’ (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 4). The narrator’s relationship to Osama mirrors the ‘pure potentiality’ (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 26) of the psychoanalytic setting, their ‘conversation suspended in virtuality’ (2008: 28). Like the psychoanalyst, Osama never reveals anything about himself or takes whatever she says personally (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 92). It is within this relationship, it appears, that the narrator hopes to find ‘a love freed from demand’ (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 28), and perhaps a way to love and forgive herself. For it is only at the end of the novel that the reader realizes the full extent of the situation the narrator finds herself in when writing to Osama. She herself has resorted to violence, even though throughout most of the novel she is a paragon of kindness and motherly care despite being heavily traumatized by the loss of her boys and a sexual assault. Down-and-out, waiting for the police to arrest her for assaulting Petra Sutherland after Jasper Black’s suicide and her own eviction, she invites Osama to come to live with her and her imaginary boy in London after she comes out of prison. Her mental state is partly to blame for this capitulation: the effects of trauma, violence and hatred have worn her out. One could argue, moreover, that she only reaches this point of showing Osama clemency after having transferred her initial anger toward him onto Terence Butcher, with disastrous consequences for the latter. The budding romance between Terence and the narrator ends violently, in an act of betrayal and retaliation on the latter’s part, when she discovers that he intentionally failed to stop the May Day attack despite knowing about it beforehand. His decision ‘for the greater good’ has such traumatic consequences for her and her family that it annihilates any possibility of love or impersonal intimacy; it is too personal, too intimate, to absolve. ‘He murdered them’, she tells Osama. ‘He just used your Semtex to do it with’ (Cleave 2005: 263). With no one left in the world on her side, writing to Osama thus also becomes the narrator’s attempt to forget her own personal history and discover her virtual ideal being instead: ‘I wish I was a saint because it was what my boy deserved’ (Cleave 2005: 12). It is precisely in her mothering role that this potential lies.



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The impersonality of mothering Although derived from Greek literature and pertaining to adults, like any psychoanalytic theory, impersonal intimacy has its roots in the mother-child dynamic. Especially early on, Bersani and Phillips argue, this relationship is characterized by a mutual ‘impersonal narcissistic investment’ (2008: 113). ‘The impersonality of mothering’, Phillips posits in his chapter of the book, ‘is the precursor, the precondition of an impersonal narcissism’ (2008: 104). Hence, in this part of the chapter, I will examine two differing theories of mothering and relate them to impersonal intimacy. I will draw attention to the potential problems of a too-conservative model of mothering that serves to preserve gender divisions and condone male violence, and will advocate instead an approach to mothering (and, by extension, intimacy) that strives for mutual transformation. Without denying the necessarily more ambivalent, negative and extreme emotions that a child incites in his or her mother, to a certain extent mothering can indeed be said to rely on sameness, self-forgetfulness and being-with the child. Nancy Chodorow, for example, explains: ‘good-enough mothering is done through empathy, primary identification, and experiencing the infant as continuous with the self and not separate’ (1978: 85). This holds particularly true for the pre-oedipal mother-daughter relationship, in which the fact that parent and child are of the same gender both requires (for the mother) and produces (in the daughter) less differentiation than mother-son relationships do (Chodorow 1978: 167–9). This, Chodorow maintains, in turn reproduces in women (and inhibits in men) the capacity and desire for mothering (1978: 206–7). Lisa Baraitser, glossing Wendy Hollway, similarly posits that ‘[m]othering becomes parenting in the feminine not only due to the particular experiences of pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding, but also because of the uses the child makes of sexual difference’ (2009: 20). This gendering of mothering means that ‘fathers do not “mother”, but can develop a capacity to care’ (Baraitser 2009: 20), provided that in infancy they successfully managed to deal with the conflicts between their masculinity and a positive identification with their mother’s mothering.3 Although Chodorow and Baraitser thus seem to share the (psychoanalytic) conviction that ‘[m]othering requires and elicits relational capacities which are unique’ (Chodorow 1978: 85), these capacities are above all socially and historically specific rather than biological. Chodorow frames her account of mothering within the context of a sexual division of labour: it is based on a view of society

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in which families are ‘male-dominated but … relatively father-absent’ (1978: 106). Baraitser, writing three decades later, acknowledges the increasingly active role of fathers in child-rearing but stresses nonetheless the importance of distinguishing between ‘parenting in the masculine and in the feminine’ (2009: 20). This distinction is based on the fact that, in our society, women are still predominantly responsible for (early) childcare. For instance, Incendiary, published in 2005, portrays precisely such a parenting situation. The narrator’s late husband, who was in full-time employment, took his four-year-old son to all the Arsenal home games, but it was the narrator whose life was ‘centered on child care and taking care of men’ (Chodorow 1978: 5). Not only does (the impersonality of) mothering underlie the concept of impersonal intimacy from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, then; this citation from Chodorow also hints at a blurring of the distinction between actual child-rearing and caring for men more generally, especially in the domestic sphere. As we shall see more clearly later in this chapter, it is this indistinction underlying a conservative view of mothering as inherently feminine that causes difficulties when extended to intimate relationality between adults. Because of the non-working mother’s significantly lower position in the social and economic hierarchy, any model of intimacy based on this situation – where woman/mother equals care and men equals work (and thus social and financial status) – is unlikely to be evenly balanced. Baraitser, however, approaches mothering from a radically different perspective than the traditional prominence of care. Instead, she focuses on the ethically transformative character of becoming a mother: the way in which this interrupting, tantruming, crying, demanding, questioning, loving, unpredictable and ultimately unknowable other that is a child, can be thought of as a particular other for the mother, the response to whom calls us, as maternal subjects, into being. (Baraitser 2009: 8–9)

Not only does difference rather than sameness underlie this view of maternal subjectivity, with its emphasis on the unknowability of the other – as opposed to mutual reciprocity and ‘the perfect knowledge of otherness’ (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 85) stemming from intrinsic sameness – mothering becomes the ultimate exercise in bearing frustration and regulating defensively hostile emotions while remaining responsive to the child. In this sense, Baraitser’s model of motherhood concerns an ethics of responsibility for the other that seems to fuel all that impersonal intimacy attempts to work against: ‘Difference is the one thing we cannot bear’ (Bersani and Phillips 2008: viii). Yet Baraitser’s maternal ethics is especially constructive in its inherently bilateral nature.



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Responding to the particular other that is a child not only facilitates their growth and development, but is simultaneously full of transformative (and perhaps even reparational) potential for the mother: ‘the generative, surprising and unexpected; … motherhood indeed makes us anew’ (Baraitser 2009: 23). It is precisely this radical potential for transformation as a result of the ‘encounter with an inassimilable otherness’ (Baraitser 2009: 8) in Baraitser’s account of maternal subjectivity that Jennifer Cooke identifies as ‘the greatest insight’ of impersonal intimacy: ‘the argument for a new conception of relationality which is about being-with, and a conceptualisation of the future of the relationship as a unpredictable unknown’ (2009: 8). Following Cooke, this chapter argues that for impersonal intimacy to succeed as a model for relationality, it is necessary to place less emphasis on its problematic same/different discourse and focus instead on this insight. To do away with a fixed notion or ‘knowledge’ of the other – and indeed of the relationship itself – and put in its place a relationality that is receptive to change and development, would prevent the stagnation that often leads to rigid patterns of feeling, thinking and behaviour, and the belief that it is no longer necessary to talk with each other and about the relationship. These things frequently result in disenchantment and unhappiness. Impersonal intimacy, by contrast, when perceived from this perspective, would rather foster an environment in which both parties remain primarily concerned with facilitating the other’s transformation and flourishing. This would, in turn, provide the potential for transformation of the self. An emphasis on mutual transformation would thus generate, in a different way from impersonal narcissism, a virtuous circle in which intimate partners bring out the best in each other and themselves. Evidently, this too is easier said than done, as it requires a radical shift from perceiving otherness, difference and change as a threat, toward recognizing them as an opportunity for growth and development. While this mutually transformative potential is one of the most rewarding outcomes of relationality, it involves – in both mothering and intimacy – an acknowledgment of the necessary and inevitable risks of human interaction and change, such as frustration and harm but also estrangement. But if there is a space for personal development within relationality, without immediate feelings of resistance and rejection, there might not have to be an aggressive turning away from the other to create such space. When understood as a finite event or experience of exchange rather than as a static given in any ongoing relationship, intimacy becomes about being-with-the-other-in-the-moment. Cooke phrases it well: ‘If knowledge of the other could be about the lived moment together, rather than

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a personalised past or scripted commitment to a future already imagined, then we might be on the way to breaking the connection that exists between knowing the other and mastering the other’ (2009: 8). An equal, non-threatening and non-violent relationality is thus always focused on the present.

‘Looking after my chaps’: mothering in Incendiary With its foundation in an ‘ethics of interruption’, as the subtitle of the book highlights, Baraitser’s transformative model of mothering is particularly suitable for examining intimacies based on rupture: ‘to be a maternal subject, is, after all, to be an occasionally loving subject, when a mother notices the disruption that a child is in her life’ (2009: 159). I understand this statement to mean that it is precisely the disruption caused by the ‘encounter with an inassimilable otherness’ (Baraitser 2009: 8) that produces the mindfulness and presentness necessary to experience love and intimacy. The disruption generates the potential. But this potential is transient and can be threatening, and it is up to the mother to convert it into actual transformation by embracing it, by becoming a ‘loving subject’. Interruption and rupture are, of course, in no way synonymous but they both denote a break or discontinuity. While trauma is too extreme, in somewhat less severe circumstances it might be possible to locate an intimacy or relationality between adults in which disruption can inspire transformation (and perhaps even love) rather than hate and violence. I will therefore once more turn to Incendiary, to explore whether its representations of mothering and intimacy offer any disruption with transformative potential. The narrator’s namelessness, which I mentioned earlier, might be explained by the fact that her maternal identity seems to overrule any personal individuality. She has no family or friends, and prior to the explosion she was a stay-at-home mother. After May Day and its aftermath she enters the labour force, but relationally she is a self-confessed ‘broken juke box the only tune [she] play[s] is looking after [her] chaps’ (Cleave 2005: 337). Although arguably a post-traumatic compulsion to repeat a mothering that is no longer necessary, it is precisely this mothering desire and capacity that draw the other (male) characters to the narrator. After her husband’s and son’s deaths, her mothering extends to all adult men in the novel: Jasper Black, Terence Butcher, even Osama bin Laden. By being able to relate to these men in this mothering capacity – responding to, if not caring for, them without really knowing them or despite their personal identity and history – the narrator thus seems particularly



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equipped to establish impersonal intimacies. Yet her desire to mother becomes problematic, both personally and politically, when it functions to maintain the status quo of gender inequality and condone male violence. The intimate relationships borne out of her mothering rarely prove mutually beneficial or transformative. The most complex relationship in the novel is the one between the narrator and Jasper Black. Jasper accurately describes its onset as follows: ‘We hardly know one another. We’ve had sex twice. I am very fond of you’ (Cleave 2005: 64). It is precisely this proclamation of affection in his listing of facts, an affection based on being-with rather than knowing her, that defines their relationship early on in the novel as impersonal intimacy. With the narrator lacking any friends or family, however, Jasper Black is the only one to visit her in hospital, where she ends up with broken bones and internal injuries after crawling into the stampede of the stadium in search of her boys. Her initial response is to send him away as he reminds her of the traumatic event, and she shouts at him that she wished it were him rather than her husband and boy to have been blown up. Yet he returns the next evening, and it is at this point of the novel (about one-third in) that he is referred to by his first name only. This small detail is a significant turning point, as it is where he opens up to the narrator about his unloving relationship with Petra Sutherland. She was too busy writing her piece about the explosion for the Sunday Telegraph to realize Jasper was supposed to have been at the stadium. It also signals the start of his cocaine-fuelled downward spiral, after he recognizes that no one has checked to see if he is all right because, in his words, he is ‘a fucking cold heartless cunt too’ (Cleave 2005: 109). This insight suggests that his encounters with the narrator are full of potential for positive transformation, and briefly their impersonal intimacy seems to accomplish precisely that. An intimate moment follows in which Jasper kneels down by the narrator’s hospital bed and ‘[lays] his head on the covers by [her] knee’ (Cleave 2005: 109). This extended moment of vulnerability and silent interaction embodies what Russell Meares defines as ‘tenderness’, that ‘peculiar feeling-tone which attaches to those ideas, behaviours and so forth which make up the core of self and gives them value’ (2000: 3). Jasper visits a few more times, but such tender intimacy or being-with-the-other-in-the-moment never occurs again, despite the narrator’s longing: Jasper … brought me vitamins and things from my flat. I didn’t need all those things half as much as I needed him to lay his head on my bed again but I never could seem to tell him. (Cleave 2005: 110)

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At this point in the novel, the intimacy between them has shifted from an impersonal intimacy of a purely sexual nature to a more affectionate acquaintance rooted in their shared experience of May Day. But when she is released from hospital, Jasper starts to get obsessed with her, compelling her to keep the lights off in her flat so that he cannot see when she is home. One night he follows her to the pub where she is meeting Terence Butcher, and it is here that it becomes a forced and violent intimacy: he sexually assaults her in the cubicle of the ladies’ room. The potential for transformation that the narrator originally offered Jasper Black has turned into his own self-hatred. The May Day attack and its aftermath have opened his eyes about his life and character, and he does not like what he sees. The narrator’s difference in terms of class, temperament and kindheartedness – at first insignificant if not intriguing – is now experienced as threatening and therefore incites violence. As she refuses to have sex with him after May Day because it reminds her of the explosion and triggers strong feelings of guilt, his compulsion to repeat the sexual encounter so intimately linked to the inception of his self-loathing becomes aggressive.

Violent intimacy and the problem of mothering Although shocking enough in itself, the most remarkable and disturbing aspect of the sexual assault scene is the narrator’s reaction. At first she tries to fight Jasper off, yet she soon realizes its futility. A rush of sadness comes over her, as she grasps the desperation of his actions, and she gives up struggling, tears streaming down her face. Indeed, when Terence Butcher comes to check up on her, as she has been gone a while, she pretends all is well. She even stops him from entering the cubicle where Jasper has her pinned down. Her maternal instinct kicks in on account of a sound that Jasper makes after the assault. I quote at length: It was the smallest start of a cry. Just a sad little squeak right in the back of his throat. It was the exact same sound my boy used to make the instant after he’d fallen over and banged himself a nasty knock … Now you wouldn’t understand this Osama because you’re not a mother. That’s my whole point I suppose. But when I heard that sad little squeak I went on auto-pilot. I still had my hands free and I moved one of them up to Jasper’s cheek. I stroked his face very gentle. Then I took my other hand and I pulled down on the wrist of the hand he was holding over my mouth. He fought against me for just the tiniest part of a second and then he looked in my eyes and he let



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his hand fall away from my mouth onto my shoulder. Suddenly he was as good as gold. (Cleave 2005: 192)

She tells Terence that she will be out in a minute, giving drunkenness as an excuse, while stroking Jasper’s hair. ‘There you go’, she comforts him. ‘You’re a good boy really. You’ve just been very lonely haven’t you?’ (2005: 193). Jasper starts sobbing and they remain like that for quite some time. When read through the lens of impersonal intimacy, one could possibly argue that the narrator’s mothering capacity allows her to transform the sexual assault into an intimacy, a being-with-the-other-in-the-moment, derived from a recognition of shared sadness, loneliness and guilt. Yet the narrator’s wish to ‘mother’ her assailant is obviously disconcerting and, arguably, implausible. Impersonal intimacy aims to counteract aggression, but here the impersonality of mothering appears to condone male dominance and violence. While an intimacy based on Baraitser’s model of mothering entails a responsibility to always respond to the other in a non-violent manner, this should never be at the violent expense of oneself. Whereas Cleave initially seemed to trouble gender stereotypes, the narrator’s response to and subsequent silence about the assault (except for recounting it to Osama) is thus highly problematic. Redefined by feminists in the mid–1970s as ‘a crime of violence rather than a sexual act’ and ‘as a method of political control’ (Herman 1997: 30), sexual assault almost invariably results in post-traumatic symptoms in the survivor due to its threat of serious injury and an overwhelming feeling of fear and helplessness – the two salient factors of psychological trauma. One can certainly argue that the narrator is already so traumatized by the loss of her boys that she is numb to this second traumatic event. Yet, as Judith Lewis Herman asserts, ‘the silence of women gave licence to every form of sexual and domestic exploitation’ (1997: 28). The assault scene also reinforces the traditional division of private and public into what Lauren Berlant calls ‘a controllable space (the private-affective) and an uncontrollable one (the public-instrumental)’ (2000: 3). It is in the privacy of their homes that Jasper Black and the narrator have consensual sex, whereas the assault takes place in the most public of places, a pub’s toilet. Not only can this division be perceived in terms of private and public, it is also typically gendered. Due to their mothering responsibilities, Chodorow identifies ‘women’s primary social location’ as ‘domestic’, whereas ‘men find a primary social location in the public sphere’ (1978: 9). She thus argues that ‘women’s mothering is a central and defining feature of the social organization of gender and is implicated in the

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construction and reproduction of male dominance itself ’ (1978: 9). Although Chodorow is not specifically speaking about male dominance in the form of actual sexual violence, the narrator’s desire to mother her assailer can be read as an extreme version of this power dynamic kept in place by perceiving women’s mothering as biological and inevitable. Jessica Benjamin, as Polona Curk points out, similarly disapproves of society allowing ‘the existence of a “private refuge” supported by the split between the psychic and the social’ (Curk 2007: 87). This leads to the mother becoming, in adult relationships, the ideal wife/mother, who “protects the autonomous individual from having to admit his needs by meeting them in advance: she protects him from the shame of exposure, allowing him to appear independent and in control”. (Curk 2007: 87 [Benjamin 1988: 205])

Although the narrator is clearly not the ideal wife/mother, ‘some sort of saint who just sewed fluffy toys and waited up for her husband’ (Cleave 2005: 12), this is precisely how the male characters perceive her because of her desire and capacity for mothering. By offering Jasper Black a ‘private refuge’ in her arms after he has assaulted her, she upholds and reproduces society’s gendered power relations. Albeit in a more literal way than the Benjamin quotation proposes, the narrator ‘protects him from the shame of exposure’, even when Petra Sutherland comes round the next day, shouting, telling the narrator to leave Jasper alone, and slapping her in the face. It is Jasper who ultimately confesses to his girlfriend what has really happened. Petra’s unexpected and incredible response to this information is to take the narrator out shopping, out of gratitude for not reporting him to the police. Although the narrator may be right in her comment that ‘Jasper doesn’t need the police does he? He needs to pull himself together’ (Cleave 2005: 215), it is astonishing and highly problematic that neither woman forces him to at least seek professional help with his drug addiction and his depressive, obsessive and violent behaviour following May Day. At the end of the novel, due to her role in Terence Butcher’s downfall by informing the press of his prior knowledge of the May Day attack, the narrator’s widow’s pension gets withdrawn. Two policemen in plain clothes visit her to press charges, but think better of it when they realize the mental state she is in. When she asks them how she is expected to live without her pension, one of the men says: ‘perhaps you should have thought of that madam before you passed official secrets to the press’ (Cleave 2005: 324). Although she finds a job stacking shelves at Tesco’s she cannot afford to pay the rent, and on the morning of



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Christmas Eve she is evicted from her flat – the final straw, after Petra’s betrayal and Jasper’s subsequent suicide, that causes her to assault Petra. After having talked the narrator into taping Terence Butcher’s confession for publication by the Sunday Telegraph, Petra cuts a deal with the paper and the government not to publish after all. She gets promoted; the British public is none the wiser; Terence gets locked up; Jasper gets fired; and the narrator has her pension withdrawn. The latter tells Osama: ‘Some people are cruel and selfish and the world would be better off without them. You were absolutely right the whole time some people only deserve to burn’ (Cleave 2005: 330). Yet despite her utter desperation and hatred, the narrator does not go through with her plan to set Petra on fire. And it is this retreat, combined with her exhausted yet passionate plea to Osama to do the same, that sparks some hope among all the violence. The conclusion that both the novel and the concept of impersonal intimacy seem to draw is that psychoanalysis is right to emphasize human aggressiveness, yet love, intimacy and forgiveness remain possible.

Conclusion This chapter set out to scrutinize the concept of impersonal intimacy by examining three distinct yet related experiences of intimate exchange: talk, sexuality and mothering. It has drawn together several theoretical strands – from critical theory, psychoanalysis, maternal studies and philosophy – and has put these theories to the test by means of a close reading of Incendiary. At the same time, it has performed a critical reading of the novel which, when read through the lens of impersonal intimacy, appears to preserve the status quo when it comes to male dominance, sexual division of labour and (sexual) violence against women. In this chapter, it has been argued that for impersonal intimacy to succeed as a model for relationality, it has to be stripped from its politically problematic focus on sameness and its underlying conception of mothering that actually upholds gender divisions and condones violent behaviour. Instead, we need to shift its emphasis toward mutual transformation. Baraitser suggests that it is precisely the disruption caused by the ‘encounter with an inassimilable otherness’ (2009: 8) that generates the radical potential for transformation within motherhood. This is not to deny the difficulty of such an ethical shift from perceiving otherness, difference and change as a threat, toward recognizing them as an opportunity for growth and development. But it offers a welcome

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alternative to the finality of Bersani and Phillips’s assertion that ‘[d]ifference is the one thing we cannot bear’ (2008: viii). Within an ethics of responsibility we need to find a way to bear difference without recourse to denial (by focusing on sameness instead). An understanding of impersonal intimacy as an ethical imperative with the potential for mutual transformation also drastically shifts the temporality of relationality. When intimacy is understood as a finite event or experience of exchange rather than as a static given in any ongoing relationship, it becomes about being-with-the-other-in-the-moment rather than about mastering the other. Since, as aforesaid, the intimacies portrayed in Incendiary are forged out of a traumatic event, it is perhaps somewhat unfair to have put impersonal intimacy to the test against these particular representations. It remains absolutely essential, however, to think about, theorize and investigate creatively the love-hate conundrum – particularly where it involves violence and retribution against (loved) others.

Works cited Baraitser, L. (2009), Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption. London and New York: Routledge. Berlant, L. (2000), ‘Intimacy: a special issue’, in L. Berlant (ed.), Intimacy. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1–8. Bersani, L. and Phillips A. (2008), Intimacies. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Chodorow, N. (1978), The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Cleave, C. (2005), Incendiary. London: Sceptre. Cooke, J. (2009), ‘Impersonal intimacy or impossible theory? Appraising a recent psychoanalytic rethinking of intimacy and love’. Paper presented at Persons, Intimacy & Love: Probing the Boundaries, 3rd Global Conference, Salzburg, Austria, 6–8 November 2009. Available online: http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/ wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Cooke.pdf [accessed 7 August 2010]. Curk, P. (2007), ‘From narcissism to mutual recognition: the “mothering” support within the intersubjective dialectic’, in A. Gaitanidis and P. Curk (eds), Narcissism: A Critical Reader. London: Karnac, 71–92. Herman, J. L. (1997), Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (2nd edn). London: Pandora. Layder, D. (2009), Intimacy and Power: The Dynamics of Personal Relationships in Modern Society. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.



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McLane, M. (2000), ‘“Why should I not speak to you?” – the rhetoric of intimacy’, in L. Berlant (ed.), Intimacy. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 435–42. Meares, R. (2000), Intimacy and Alienation: Memory, Trauma and Personal Being. London and Philadelphia: Routledge. Vogler, C. (2000), ‘Sex and talk’, in L. Berlant (ed.), Intimacy. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 48–85.

Notes 1 She tells Osama that she will also write to ‘the leaders of Western imperialism’ (Cleave 2005: 4). 2 On 2 May 2011, when this chapter was in progress, Osama bin Laden was killed by US forces in Pakistan. 3 My account of mothering is necessarily restricted as this is a chapter on intimacy, not motherhood. Yet Baraitser’s (2009) book is a good way into the growing field of maternal studies. See also Studies in the Maternal (http://www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk/ [accessed 6 June 2012]), edited by Lisa Baraitser and Sigal Spigel.

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Breast Cancer Autopathography: The Laws of the Body and the Body of the Law Helen Thomas

University College Falmouth

Winner of the BP Portrait Award in 2010, Daphne Todd’s portrait of her dead mother raises compelling questions about privacy and exposure in the face of illness and death. Todd’s painting, depicting the contorted skeletal body of her recently deceased mother, powerfully situates the themes of illness and dying within the changing dynamics of intimacy, privacy, subjectivity and property. With illness and disease, the laws of the body appear ‘suspended’ or transformed, a situation which instigates unprecedented chaos and instability. Within

Figure 11.1. Last Portrait of My Mother, Daphne Todd (2010).

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autopathography (autobiographical narratives inspired by disease and/or illness) and thanatography (narratives on dying and death), this is negotiated by constant adaptation and redefinition on the narrator’s part, as productive introspection, coherent analysis and political exegesis emerge from emotional turbulence and uncertainty. As the body/self of the autobiographical narrator ‘deconstructs’ amidst a crisis of identity, that narrator often presents a logical narrative of survival, liberation or transformation, while paradoxically producing what Ruth Robbins has called ‘a patchwork of narrative fragments’ (Robbins 2005: 5) that resists unified explanation or interpretation. Illness and death prescribe some of the most intimate moments of the human condition yet simultaneously challenge representation – or what Gillian Rose terms Heidegger’s concept of the ‘possibility of impossibility’ (Rose 1996: 133): the possibility of nothingness. This chapter  examines narratives of breast cancer and subjectivity in the context of the ‘diseased’ or ‘ill body’ via the application of poststructuralist and postcolonial theory, legal theories about the ‘subject’, and the dynamics of intimacy. It explores contemporary narratives of the ‘corrupt’ and cancerous body in relation to changing concepts of the ‘self ’, privacy, medical ethics and death, including artes moriendi (‘the art of dying well’). It posits an interrelationship between intimacy, the laws of the body and the body of the law in terms of the ‘sentence’ of illness, witnessing, testimony, self-elegy, and configurations of power. Here, the term ‘law’ applies to ‘natural law’ (the law of the body/nature), as well as legal power and legislature. The interconnections between the law and autopathography/thanatography lie in their prioritization of the relationship between language and power (the ‘sentence’) and the perceived liberty of the autobiographical narrator in terms of rights and property, while subjected to the violence and terror of disease. One law of the body is that of mortality: a ‘sentence’ prescribed at the outset by both genetic coding and the conditions of life/mortality. Yet illness, disease and death instigate other ‘laws’, such as those concerned with property, and the context-specific (il)legalities of euthanasia and assisted suicide. Moreover, both law and literature (as seen in these narratives) oscillate between power and empowerment, freedom and censorship. As the law demands and depends upon intimate knowledge of its ‘subject’, death and disease – themselves violations of our usual sense of self, resist such demands via a ‘radical refusal’ (Rose 1996: 135) of power. Furthermore, while the law (as legislature) insists upon transparency and the singular meaning of a text, these narratives reject transparency of meaning and the notion of a stable unitary ‘self ’. In illness, the body’s authoritarian power (the laws of the body) appear at odds with the rights and desires of the ‘self ’. As a consequence, the ill or dying



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self – as presented by these narratives – frequently articulates refrains of instability and uncertainty, together with declarations of freedom and (in)justice. Intimacy abounds throughout the dynamics of illness and disease, in terms of revelations of the self, relationships with others, (self-)censorship and resistance to power. Yet, paradoxically, the ill body is also inarticulate in language, speaking eloquently instead in pains and symptoms. Arthur Frank, author of The Wounded Storyteller, writes, ‘We must speak for the body, and such speech is quickly frustrated’ (Frank 1997: 2–3). Susan Sontag’s observation that ‘illness is not a metaphor’ (Sontag 1988: 3) is pertinent here. Readings of subjectivity in the context of illness and dying might productively apply postcolonial concepts of ‘double-consciousness’ suggested by W. E. B. Du Bois, and the notions of ‘otherness’ and self-loathing described by Frantz Fanon (Fanon 1996). Interestingly, Fanon employed metaphors of anatomy and surgical amputation in order to describe ‘epiphanies’ of racial consciousness: On that day, completely dislocated … I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage [sic] that spattered my whole body with black blood? (1996: 111–12).

During illness a terrifying separation of the body from the self can be experienced. Moreover, that part of the diseased/corrupt body that appears ‘other’ evades definition as a ‘definable object’ (Kristeva 1982: 1). Such undefinable ‘otherness’ echoes Julia Kristeva’s definition of the ‘abject’, not only in terms of its opposition/challenge to the ‘I’ (its ‘disturbance of identity, system and order’ (1992: 4)), but its refusal to respect ‘borders, positions, rules’ (1982: 4). Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals (1980) and Ruth Picardie’s Before I Say Goodbye: Recollections and Observations From One Woman’s Final Year (2000) break down the boundaries of intimacy between the private and public self, yet also function as powerful testimonies and critiques of power. They highlight the rights of the self in the context of illness and dying, as well as the legal complexities of posthumous rights and the self as ‘property’. Within both works, as the transformation of the ‘healthy’ self into the ‘ill’ self /‘corrupt’ body is negotiated, issues of control and the ‘art of dying’ are brought into focus in ways that resonate with Gillian Rose’s Mourning Becomes the Law and Jacques Derrida’s reading of Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death. Dorothea Lynch and Eugene Richards’s Exploding into Life (1986) is also considered here, as a metastatic and fatal breast cancer narrative which extends the interrogation of intimacy and rights in the context of medical intervention and public attitudes towards death.

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This chapter also identifies these autopathographies as intimate instances of ‘mourning’ of the self. In Points de Suspension (1992), Jacques Derrida, as quoted and glossed by Geoffrey Bennington, sees mourning as ‘always doomed to failure’, ‘a constitutive failure’ (qtd. in Bennington 2011: xi). Although in this text, as with Freud’s essay on melancholia, Derrida’s ‘other’ is the deceased ‘other’ (qtd. in Bennington 2011: 38), the autopathographies discussed here redefine the past/healthy self as ‘other’; the ‘diseased’/corrupt self must, as Bennington suggests within the context of mourning, seek to ‘incorporate, interiorize, introject, subjectivize’: ‘I must carry the other and the other’s world … in me’ (qtd. in Bennington 2011: 38). In this way, the dying subject – which is the self – becomes the object of mourning’s discourse (Mandel 2008: 666). However, this mode of mourning, in its intimacy and witness, also becomes an act of power, or what Rose describes as ‘poesis’ or ‘making’ (1996: 104). Within these texts, the terms ‘illness’ and ‘disease’ are simultaneously used as noun, verb and process. They present trajectories of both deconstruction and reconstitution, as the autobiographical narrator reads and re-reads herself within a narrative structure/trial that fails completion. Illness and death are paradoxical events in the way suggested by Derrida, i.e. occurrences that are ‘unpredictable’ and ‘unforeseeable’ (Bennington 2011: 41), yet also inevitable. For the most part, representations of disease in the western world have been associated with images of decay, corruption, collapse, dissolution and loss of control – characteristics that contrast starkly to the ‘fixed’, solid images of the healthy body or self (Gilman 1998: 1–2). Here the gothic, with its prevalent themes of decay and decomposition (and sometimes dark humour), comes into play, moving between consciousness and carnality via intimate forms of examination and dissection of the ‘self ’ (Roychoudhury 2012: 22). Likewise, as narratives of ‘loss’, autopathographies present contemplations of mortality – the ultimate ‘loss’ of self – as well as the necessity to ‘testify’ and acknowledge the ‘impossibility of comprehending’ (Diedrich 2004: 113) the meaning of death. Moreover, such narratives witness the ‘absolute loneness’ (Diedrich 2004: 125) of the person who dies. Here subjectivity and bearing witness coincide, not solely as a means of ‘precipitating anxiety’ but as a means of providing coherency and permanency to a self. They are also a means of ‘conferring insight’ and instigating ‘new possibilities’ (Gilroy 1993: 6–9, 79), as suggested by postcolonial transatlantic ‘crossings’ of the subject and (legal) rights to selfdetermination and the right to die (Williams 2005). Intimacy, here, generates a sense of volatility and fragility, as well as a tendency towards a void of meaning. Paradoxically, in their various ways, these



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narratives articulate Seneca’s ideas – as presented by Derrida and Bennington – that there is ‘a kind of living that has to be learned and that is bound up with dying’ (Bennington 2011: 14): ‘My death is structurally necessary to the pronouncement of the I’ (Bennington 2011: 56). Consciousness of one’s perceived state is made more complex and intimate in the context of disintegration of both the self and the self ’s narrative (Robbins 2005: 5). And yet the parameters of this intimacy vie against the prescription and regulation of dying as the ‘last taboo’ (Bennington 2011: 188–9) of contemporary western society.

The language and disease of breast cancer In his study of breast cancer, James Olson highlights what he calls the ‘rich paper trail’ (2002: ix) of breast cancer alongside the gender dynamics of the disease. Olson contends that such literary evidence by ‘female patients and male physicians’ (Olson 2002: ix) has shaped the disease and its treatment. Olson’s study was prompted by his observations of one of Rembrandt’s paintings, Bathsheba at her Bath (1654), at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Olson noticed that Bathsheba’s left breast was discoloured, pitted and swollen at the armpit. Rembrandt’s model, Hendrickje Stoffels, had died after a long illness, which Olson deduced had probably been breast cancer. It was Hippocrates, the so-called ‘father’ of western medicine, who, circa 430 bc, gave the disease its name and provided an enduring description of its origins and appearance (Porter 1999: 575). On close examination, Hippocrates surmised that tumours appeared to have tentacles – like the legs of a crab – which reached out and grasped normal tissue, and so he called the disease karkinos, the Greek word for ‘crab’, from which the term carcinoma evolved. According to Hippocrates, the disease occurred from an excess of fluids from one of the body’s four humours – that is, the black bile of ‘melanchole’. By the eighteenth century, however, no respectable physician would have offered Hippocrates’ ‘black bile’ diagnosis (Porter 1999: 575, 603). In eighteenth-century London, the surgeon John Hunter, celebrated as the ‘most unorthodox, creative physician in England’ (Olson 2002: 30), ridiculed notions of humoral theory and developed instead a systematic analysis of disease and human physiology via hundreds of dissections of human corpses, including women who had died of breast cancer. Hunter’s primary contribution to oncology was his description of breast cancer’s ability to spread to the lymph nodes. Likewise, in eighteenth-century France, the surgeon Henri Le Dran’s performance of mastectomies and removal of

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lymph nodes – possibly aided by Lorenz Heister’s A General System of Surgery in Three Parts published in London in 1748 – led Le Dran to advocate that cancer progressed in stages and that surgery ought to take place before the tumour had metastasized and affected other parts of the body. Such observations depended upon intimate encounters with female subjects – both living and dead.

Breast cancer, cellular pathology and digital technologies Until the introduction of microscopes to differentiate between benign and malignant tumours, all tumours were considered cancerous, suspicious and thus treated accordingly. Contemporary cellular pathology has enabled the diagnosis of benign breast diseases such as lactational mastitis, chronic subareolar abcesses and intraductal papillomatosis, as well as malignant breast diseases, including infiltrating ductal carcinoma, comedo carcinomas, lobular carcinomas and Paget’s disease of the breast (Olson 2002: 55). As a consequence,

Figure 11.2. Mastectomy and Relevant Surgical Instruments, Lorenz Heister (1748). Wellcome Library, London.

Figure 11.3. Latent or Occult Breast Cancer, Lorenz Heister (1748). Wellcome Library, London.



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Figure 11.4. Elizabeth Hopkins of Oxford, Showing Breast with Cancer which was Removed by Sir William Read, engraving by M. Burghers (c. 1700). Wellcome Library, London.

Figure 11.5. Science’s Fight Against Cancer, Richard Tennant Cooper (1912). Wellcome Library, London.

cellular pathology and the digital technologies of the twentieth century have revised Hippocrates’s image of the cancerous crab to encapsulate narratives of unchecked, unregulated cancerous cell growth – that is, as Cooper, quoting the twentieth-century cell biologist, Charles Minot, highlights, ‘the phenomenon of things escaping from inhibitory control and overgrowing’ or ‘indifferent divisibility’ (Cooper 2008: 137). Now it is not only the cancer patient whose narrative is of concern, but the story of the cancerous cell itself: ‘[Such escapes/ growths] are due to the inherent growth power of cells … which for some reason have got beyond the control of the inhibitory force, the regulatory power which ordinarily keeps them in’ (Cooper 2008: 138). Here the laws of the body appear in reverse or in chaos as the constraints of order, control and regulation are suspended and superseded by an excess of life, as the cancerous cell ‘avoids aging and death’ and constitutes instead an ‘uninhibited overproduction of life’, a ‘surplus of life’, a ‘metastasizing

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Figure 11.6. Human Breast Cancer Cells Dividing, Dr David Becker. Wellcome Library, London.

overproduction of life’ rather than its ‘simple negation’ or decline (Cooper 2008: 138). It is this excess of life and production, this avoidance of ‘aging and death’, that also permeates the narratives discussed here. Cancer’s ‘unlimited’ overproduction of life endeavours to ‘break’ through any boundaries in order to exceed the ‘limits of a real, or as it were quasi-“personal”, purposeful organic unity’: ‘[Cancer’s] extortion of the vital life force of organic life (cellular division) … deflects from all ends – other than its own accumulation’ (Cooper 2008: 138). Discussing Aurel Kolnai’s essay ‘Disgust’ (1929), Cooper underscores the ways in which cancerous growth refuses to ‘submit to the limits of generational time and death and instead pursues its own relentless self-accumulation’, a life ‘devoid of any true productive power’ (2008: 138). The problem presented here, that ‘in this surplus of life there resides non-life, death’ (Cooper 2008: 138), corresponds both to the gothic and the monstrous, abjective ‘other’ as narrated by Kristeva: ‘a structure within the body, a non-assimilable alien, a monster, a tumour, a cancer that the listening devices of the unconscious do not hear’ (Kristeva 1982: 11). This refusal to die, a boundless process of (over-)reproduction which constitutes ‘non-life’ or ‘death’, is made manifest in the spectral behaviour of the ‘immortal’ HeLa cell, derived from cervical cells originally taken from Henrietta Lacks in 1951 and propagated ever since for biomedical research (Skloot 2011). If a cancerous growth constitutes a ‘generative process of growth, reproduction, and regeneration’ that escapes ‘the boundaries of organic space and time’ (Cooper 2008: 138), the same may be said of both constructions/deconstructions of the ‘self ’, and the modes of communication made possible by new digital technologies. The intimacy offered by literary discourse, digital technologies and cellular pathology have also had the effect of making the cancerous or ‘corrupt body’ a more ‘public’ site. This has allowed for collaborative ‘partnerships’ and



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modes of communication far beyond the realm of traditional ‘medical’ relationships. More recent modes of digital communication and publication, especially social and professional networking (e.g. emails, blogs and Facebook), have transformed both the boundaries of medical knowledge related to breast cancer, and the gatekeepers of ‘corrupt’ narratives by ‘decomposing’ subjects. Moreover, traditional and digital modes of autopathography have, in certain instances, been further enhanced by visual representations of the diseased/dying subject.

Breast cancer and ‘self-conscious living’: Audre Lorde Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals were published in the same year that the author underwent a modified radical mastectomy aged 46 in 1980. In this multigenre text, the boundaries between the public/private are challenged as Lorde fuses journal, memoir, manifesto and essays written over a three-year period, 1977–1980, to weave a fabric of personal experience and social critique and to challenge the ‘law’ of heterosexuality and the shame/suppression of bodily/ physical ‘difference’ following surgical intervention/amputation. In a sense, Lorde posits cancer as symbolic law: the law of patriarchy, repression and violence. Describing herself as a ‘post-mastectomy woman’ (Lorde 1980: 9), Lorde suggests that ‘each woman responds to the crisis that breast cancer brings to her life’ and that ‘every day existence’ becomes the ‘training ground’ (1980: 9) for how she handles such a crisis. Her own response, she suggests, has been to prioritize the need to ‘voice’ the ‘pain of amputation’, ‘in order to be recognized, respected, and [to be] of use’ (1980: 9) to other readers. Silence, for Lorde, is a ‘tool of separation and powerlessness’: ‘I do not wish my anger and pain and fear about cancer to fossilize into yet another silence … for silence has never brought us anything of worth’ (1980: 9–10). Likewise, death is not a silent player in Lorde’s cancer narrative; rather she refers repeatedly to a ‘confrontation with mortality’ that both terrifies her, yet has turned her attention to the ‘strength of women loving’, and what she defines as ‘the power … of self-conscious living’ (1980: 10). ‘Death’, Lorde says, ‘is the final silence’ (1980: 20). And for this reason, she explains, she has come to believe ‘over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood’ (1980: 19). Lorde’s narrative incorporates journal entries following her mastectomy. In her entry of 26 January 1979, composed six months after her surgery, Lorde articulates her fears, her despair and her sense of multiple subjectivity:

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I’m not feeling very hopeful these days, about selfhood or anything else … Sometimes despair sweeps across my consciousness like luna winds across a barren moonscape. Ironshod horses rage back and forth over every nerve … I could die of difference, or live – myriad selves. (1980: 11)

Her despair has gained a life of its own, ‘like another cancer’ that has come to ‘engulf ’ and ‘swallow’ her into her immobility, to ‘metabolize’ her into cells of ‘itself ’ (1980: 12). She speaks of her cancerous body as being somehow separate from her: ‘I had grown angry at my right breast because I felt as if it had in some unexpected way betrayed me … as if it had become already separate from me’ (1980: 33). And yet she insists that in the context of such pain, she must become ‘completely self-referenced right now because it is the only translation I can trust’ (1980: 11). Five months later, although she acknowledges that the thought of cancer is never far away – ‘I do not forget cancer for very long, ever’ (1980: 14) – she argues that it is her work, together with the love of women, that have kept her alive: ‘They are inseparable from each other. In the recognition of the existence of love lies the answer to despair. Work is that recognition given voice and name’ (Lorde 1980: 13). Thus her cancer expresses her wish to ‘illuminate’ (1980: 25) and ‘give form’ with ‘honesty and precision’ to the experiences of ‘pain faith labor and loving’ (1980: 15) that breast cancer has instigated. Cancer, Lorde suggests, instigates a discourse of power in its parameters of fear and horror which, once occasioned, can never be extinguished: ‘Sometimes fear stalks me like another malignancy … A cold becomes sinister; a cough, lung cancer; a bruise, leukemia’ (1980: 15). For Lorde, pain and fear ought to be acknowledged and examined as a means of understanding mortality as a source of power. Long before the birth of e-communication via the internet, Lorde describes sharing her experiences leading up to her mastectomy with a ‘network’ of female support, a ‘web’ of women who love and sustain her, ‘a corporate effort [of] love and care’ (1980: 30). Conscious of her privileged position of being able to consider the pros and cons of each medical and non-medical approach – ‘I considered the alternatives of the straight medical profession, surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. I considered the holistic health approaches of diet, vitamin therapy, experimental immunotherapeutics, west german pancreatic enzymes, and others’ (Lorde 1980: 30) – Lorde describes herself as ‘empowered from having made a decision, done a strike for myself, moved’ (1980: 31). After her surgery, however, Lorde describes herself as a pariah – ‘There were people who avoided me … it was as if I had gone into purda’ (1980: 49) – and



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potentially exiled from future pleasures: ‘I was thinking, “What is it like to be making love to a woman and only have one breast brushing against her?”’ (1980: 43). For Lorde, the experience of breast cancer and mastectomy trigger an understanding of the ‘need to look death in the face and not shrink from it, yet not ever to embrace it too easily’ (1980: 47). Facing one’s mortality, insists Lorde, prescribes the need for every woman ‘to live a considered life’, to have ‘psychic time and space’ to examine their feelings, and to evaluate the ‘external and destructive controls’ over their ‘lives and identities’ (1980: 58). As part of this, Lorde rejects the offer of a prosthesis as a ‘physical pretense’ that refuses the prescription of ‘loss’: I would lie if I did not also speak of loss. Any amputation is a physical and psychic reality that must be integrated into a new sense of self … I had known the pain, and survived it. It only remained for me to give it voice, to share it for use, that the pain not be wasted. (1980: 16)

The masking of difference, she argues, prohibits a woman from ‘assessing herself in the present’ and coming to ‘terms with the changed planes of her body’ (Lorde 1980: 57). She thus resists the prioritization of the ‘normal’/symmetrical body insisted upon by the medical profession: ‘You will feel so much better with it on,’ she [the nurse] said. ‘And besides … otherwise it’s bad morale for the office’ (Lorde 1980: 59). Lorde’s breast cancer narrative thus inscribes not only the legitimacy of mourning, but also what she calls her ‘politic of action’ (1980: 15) – a new way of living and an internal sense of power: Living a self-conscious life, under the pressure of time, I work with the consciousness of death at my shoulder, not constantly, but often enough to leave a mark upon all my life’s decisions and actions. And it does not matter whether this death comes next week or thirty years from now; this consciousness gives my life another breadth. It helps shape the words I speak, the ways I live, my politic of action, the strength of my vision and purpose, the depth of my appreciation of living … I would never have chosen this path, but I am very glad to be who I am, here. (1980: 77)

Ruth Picardie, Before I Say Goodbye Ruth Picardie’s cancer narrative, Before I Say Goodbye: Recollections and Observations from One Woman’s Final Year, attests to the formation of a new autopathographical genre in terms of its intimacy, its ‘hybrid’ mode of discourse

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and its inclusion of digital narratives and handwritten text. Published twenty years after Lorde’s single-authored text, Picardie’s work is a provocative example of the ways in which digital technologies have transformed modes of communication by enabling the instantaneous unlimited exchange of e-narratives between patients, medics, friends, families and others. Moreover, Picardie prescribes a sense of coherence, stoicism and understanding, as well as crisis and mourning both in terms of the narrator’s understanding of her situation, her loss, and in terms of her representation of illness itself. Whereas in Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (1996), Gillian Rose read Antigone’s burial of her fratricidal brother as a transgression of the laws of the city, Picardie’s text mourns the transgressions of the ‘natural laws’ of the body (Rose 1996). Before I Say Goodbye is a multi-author, multi-genre text. As the subtitle suggests, it contains the ‘recollections and observations’ of its author in her final year, including her emails to her friends and their responses. It also reproduces Picardie’s articles about cancer, previously published in the Observer, together with readers’ responses to those articles. Furthermore, it includes Picardie’s correspondence with her sister, copies of Picardie’s handwritten letters to her children the month before she died, and an epilogue entitled ‘After Words’ by her husband, Matt Seaton. Issues of privacy and intimacy abound within this text – as do issues of control in the event of an author’s death. Barthes’ argument in The Death of the Author seems especially pertinent in the context of the authorship of Picardie, who died aged 33 (in 1997), just under a year after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Hers is a harrowing text but often, due to Picardie’s dark humour and caustic wit, it is also extremely funny. Its intimacy is apparent as we witness Picardie’s observations processed via different modes of discourse about her medical treatment, her battles with her medical team, her intimate thoughts about her children and her dissipating sense of self, as cancer erodes her control over her self and others. Born in London in 1964, Picardie worked as an editor at the Guardian and Independent, and as a freelance writer for City Limits, Vogue, Life (The Observer Magazine) and the Sunday Telegraph. Soon after she married Matt Seaton in August 1994, Picardie discovered a lump on her left breast and underwent tests but was told it was benign. In 1994, Picardie was offered IVF treatment, and in August 1995 her twins Lola and Joe were born. A year after their birth, Picardie’s breast lump increased in size and she was diagnosed with malignant breast cancer. Despite treatment, the cancer advanced aggressively, and, according to her husband, it soon ‘became clear that the disease was terminal’ (Picardie



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2000: viii). At this point, Justine, Picardie’s elder sister, editor of Life magazine, suggested that Picardie write a column about her condition. Picardie managed to write five columns – using the title, Before I Say Goodbye – before her illness took over. In the ‘Foreword’ to Picardie’s cancer narrative, Seaton explains that the magazine articles alone were ‘not extensive enough to make a book’ so ‘we looked at Ruth’s correspondence’ (2000: viii; my italics for emphasis). This reference to ‘we’ is not specified or defined, although the preceding sentences suggest that editorial control lay with Matt Seaton and Justine Picardie. In relation to the publication of digital material, Seaton adds that it was Ruth’s idea ‘that any book of hers might include a selection from [her emails]’ (2000: ix). Such digital discourse offered a ‘new and subtly different medium of communication’ (2000: viii) – a means of expressing thoughts and feelings ‘more spontaneously than in a letter, yet much more reflectively than in a telephone conversation’ (2000: viii-ix). Email correspondence, or what Picardie herself terms ‘cybercancer’ (2000: 17), thus offered the opportunity of speed (a necessity given the medical situation), spontaneity, and long distance, cheap communication as well as intimacy (although not guaranteed privacy, as exemplified by Seaton’s ‘illegal readings’ of her emails (2000: 34)). As Seaton writes, ‘It [email] had a quality of being simultaneously intimate and serious, yet transient and disposable, and this meshed with something in her [Ruth’s] writer’s psyche’ (Picardie 2000: ix). Picardie’s first published email to her friend, Carrie Turk (20 November 1996), describes her shock at the rapid hair loss which results from her first series of chemotherapy treatment – ‘I was a bit freaked out at first’ (2000: 3). Yet her narrative subtly combines upbeat comments –‘Makes you look sick, feel that you are dying, etc, which I am not – it’s simply a function of high dose chemotherapy’ (2000: 3) – with smatterings of medical and pharmaceutical jargon: ‘My tumours are hormone receptive … my primary tumour may have shrunk by a centimeter or so’ (2000: 3) and ‘I asked to go on a protease inhibitor (saquinavar) along with old AZT and a drug called 3TC’ (2000: 8). The emails are also interlaced with psychological reflection and humorous anecdotes: ‘I fancy one of the oncologists – pure transference, like falling in love with your therapist’ (2000: 4). Moreover, Picardie uses email not only to describe how awful she is feeling, but also to comment on the way her husband is dealing with her condition: ‘Matt has perked up, after seeing the breast unit therapeutic nurse … But he is being amazingly unsupportive and egocentric … Mum thinks he’s in denial. Which he probably is, too’ (2000: 5). Whereas Lorde’s text focused its criticism upon the negative consequences of silence about cancer and the denial/repression of signifiers of illness/disease,

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Picardie’s outspoken criticism of medical charlatans is acerbic and unrestricted. She describes her complementary medicine guru as ‘a money grabbing wanker’ (2000: 6) who charges £2,500 for six months’ treatment. She savagely comments upon the lack of consensus among the professional medics, later referring to them as ‘pea-brained oncologists’ (2000: 15): ‘Looked at my bone scan again which looked “hot” in the right place. Not that a fucking doctor would notice’ (2000: 32); ‘Are they [doctors at the hospital] lazy? incompetent? or trying to save money?’ (2000: 34). Picardie refers to cancer as ‘the great unmentionable’, the ‘c-word’ (2000: 6), but highlights the ‘fun things about cancer’ (2000: 7) – such as realizing that short hair really suits you and that you ‘can be really horrible to people and not feel guilty’ (2000: 7). Picardie’s emails reveal that by February 1997, she suspected secondary bone cancer in her sternum: ‘I know in my bones (fnar fnar) that something is up’ (2000: 12). As a consequence, the emotional intensity of her friends’ responses increases dramatically – ‘Ruth, What the fuck is your cancer up to?’ (2000: 13) – while Picardie’s own correspondence becomes more stoical as she faces the reality of having a terminal illness: Let’s cut to the chase, here. Cut the crap. Face the music … Why don’t they just spell it out: you’re dying sucker! And what the fuck is an ‘oncologist’? They can’t even say the C-word … why not embrace the fact that I’m gonna die young and beautiful (I wish). (2000: 19)

Like Lorde, Picardie denounces the continuing silence surrounding breast cancer in western society. As she comments, ‘whereas HIV and AIDS is about recognizing the prognosis (i.e. an early death is almost certain) and then being positive (geddit)’, cancer is ‘steeped in fear and euphemism’ (2000: 20). A month later, when Picardie’s skull ‘involvement’ is confirmed (i.e. secondary bone cancer), Picardie suggests that ‘it’s not a huge disaster’ – rather that ‘the really bad news will be if/when it spreads to the liver’ (2000: 37). On 8 May 1997, in an email to India Knight, this imagined ‘disaster’ has become real: ‘Hold the front page. On Tuesday we found out the “disease” … has spread to my liver and lungs. Have been told I only have a few months to live’ (2000: 39–40). On 10 June 1997 she describes herself as a ‘bitter, angry, envious, depressed old cow who can’t be bothered even to read her e-mails’ (2000: 41–2), an image which recurs in her article for Observer Life, 22 June 1997: You’re 32, a stone-and-a-half overweight, depressed by the stains on the sofa and have never come to terms with having piggy eyes … Your lump, I’m sorry to say, is actually cancer. Or should we say lumps, because, oops, it’s spread to



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the lymph nodes under your arm and in your neck, which means it’s stage three cancer and you’ve a 50:50 chance of living five years … Finally, in May, seven months after the original diagnosis and five days after your 33rd birthday, you learn the disease has spread to your liver and lungs. Abruptly, you enter the bleakly euphemistic world of palliative care. Pollyanna commits suicide … You even go off ER. (2000: 44–5)

On July 1997, Picardie refers to herself as ‘Mystic Picardie’ in terms of her self-diagnosis: ‘CT scan shows I have a brain tumour … Nothing much left in the treatment bag … So it looks like curtains this year. Will be good to have a break from treatment’ (2000: 61). In Observer Life five days later, her acknowledgement of her forthcoming death becomes clear: ‘It’s official, then … No more false dawns, no more miracle cures … The bottom line is, I’m dying’ (2000: 68).

Artes moriendi, or the art of dying well During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the art of dying was a carefully cultivated skill. People sensed it, they prepared for it and the process of death remained visible, rather than denied (Olson 2002: 21). In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however, the medicalization of death, suggests Gilbert quoting Gorer, ‘eliminated [death’s] character of public ceremony, and made it a private act’ (Gilbert 2007: 229). Picardie’s death is certainly not an example of what Philippe Ariès has called a ‘beautiful death’ (Gilbert 2007: 229). It is, rather, an ‘ugly’ death, an impassioned ‘outing of death and its symptoms’ (Gilbert 2007: 230). In Before I Say Goodbye, the dying process functions as a ‘reality marker’ (Gilbert 2007: 230), as Picardie describes her ‘failing autonomy’ and her suffering as cancer spreads from her breast to her lymph, bones, lungs, liver and brain (Picardie 2000: 69, 70). Towards the end she is thinking beyond her own death – ‘How do you write the definitive love letter to a partly imaginary child?’ (2000: 70) – and her discourse significantly alters to the past tense as she begins to refer to herself as though she is already absent: ‘I loved my Matt. We loved our Lola and Joe’ (2000: 70). Her final emails lack capitalization and punctuation. Her last, unfinished column ends with a handwritten note: ‘So here I am, still hoping for the big day which I hope and half-hope won’t come’ (2000: 98). As she had predicted in August 1997, she was ‘going to die, but … going to go bonkers first’ (2000: 69). As her sister and husband testify, Picardie’s brain tumours did make her quite mad: ‘She raged in a hospital bed, while the doctors

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looked embarrassed at their failure to save her’ (Picardie 2000: 106). Seaton witnesses the ways in which disease transforms Picardie’s body as well as her sense of self, with ‘[a]ll those physical metamorphoses and hormonal mutations’ (Picardie 2000: 116); and how her cancer appears not just to grow within her, ‘but between us, spreading, as inexorably as the cancer itself ’ (Picardie 2000: 116). As Picardie’s suicidal urges and confusion take over, she becomes ‘other’ to Seaton; the tumour in her brain, in his words, ‘stealthily performing its own crude version of a frontal lobotomy’ (Picardie 2000: 121), ‘spiriting’ her away and leaving ‘a brain-damaged, zombie-like doppelganger’ in her place (Picardie 2000: 121). It is Seaton’s account that bears witness to Picardie’s dying, the intimacy of her suicidal urges, her mental disintegration, her blank expression, ‘her uncomprehending frightened eyes’ (Picardie 2000: 121). As a right, as a ‘form’ of property, Picardie’s dying appears to have been taken away from her. While Seaton questions his right to write her life/death – ‘What claim have I to write here?’ (Picardie 2000: 111) – he also declares his need to write about death’s ‘messy ambivalence’ (Picardie 2000: 116) and his repositioning of Picardie as other: I just wish … I could have … loved Ruth, or made her feel loved, in the old way, to the very end. But the truth is that it was no longer possible. The cancer had interpolated itself, sending out its rogue cells to multiple and lay waste … Cancer changed everything: it put us on different tracks, stretching our grasp of one another to the limit and eventually forcing us apart … In the end, I could not reach her … And then, she was gone. (Picardie 2000: 117)

Dorothea Lynch and Eugene Richards, Exploding into Life (1986) Although published eleven years before Picardie’s text, the combined literary and visual ‘exposure’ of Dorothea Lynch’s experience of breast cancer further extends the interrogation of intimacy, privacy and illness. As signified by the title, Exploding into Life, cancer’s tendency to reproduce cells – its ‘overproduction’ of life – frames the text and signals the simultaneous production and destruction of the subject and her narrative. Lynch challenges the dynamics of law and the ‘objectification’ of the body in the context of private and public property, as her ‘private’ diary entries are accompanied by photos by her partner, Eugene Richards. She also extends the subjective focus of her narrative and the photographs which accompany it to that of other women dying of cancer. Thus



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the ‘explosion’ within the title can also be seen to refer to the blasting of barriers, prohibitions and cultural taboos surrounding illness and death. In this respect, the graphic and intimate aspect of the words and photographs – of gazes and moments which capture Lynch’s confusion and exhaustion, or ‘reveal’ her body, naked, on the operating tables post-treatment – subvert the established conventions of intimacy, privacy, and stoical suffering. ‘My suffering’, Barthes writes in his Mourning Diaries, is ‘inexpressible but all the same utterable, speakable … Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering’ (2010: 175). In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Barthes quotes Kafka: ‘We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes’ (2000: 53). The literary and visual ‘exposure’ presented in Lynch’s work is a revelation, an aberration and a transgression, as we witness the private ‘act’ of the subject dying. Reading Lynch’s work, we enter Barthes’ emotional zone as he looks at a photograph of his mother as a child: ‘I tell myself: she is going to die. I shudder … over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe’ (Barthes 2000: 96). In Exploding into Life, Lynch, who died following her breast cancer diagnosis in 1978, suggests that there is ‘something worse, after all, than your man turning away from you’: ‘Your own body turning away, running away with a crazy new life of its own’ (Lynch 1986: 10). When she is told by doctors, aged 34, that she needs a modified radical mastectomy and adjunctive chemotherapy, she looks at the doctors and thinks of ‘undertakers, straight and dark and inescapable’ (1986: 12). Subsequently, she criticizes her own as well as other women’s lack of knowledge about their own bodies: ‘We ask in whispers, in the corner at a party or on the telephone, what does a breast lump look like? What does cancer look like? Will I be all right?’ (1986: 16). Unable to sleep, Lynch becomes ‘obsessed’ with the moment when ‘that one different voracious cell in my breast first exploded into life’ (1986: 19). Lynch’s efforts to research the disease and inform her decision-making about treatment options are hampered by the attitudes and beliefs of medical/scientific ‘gatekeepers’ (Eysenbach 2001) such as the volunteers at the National Cancer Institute who ‘refuse to discuss primary radiation or other alternatives to surgery’ (Lynch 1986: 16). Other professionals are horrified by her endeavours to commission ‘intimate photographs’ (Lynch 1986: 71) of herself within the parameters of the hospital and she is told by the American Cancer Society that pictures of cancer treatments are not considered ‘suitable for non-medical people’ (Lynch 1986: 16). Her response to such prohibitions and secrecies is

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quite extraordinary in her text’s inclusion of graphic black and white photographs of herself within the medical environment, both before and after her mastectomy and subsequent chemotherapy – as well as others receiving cancer treatment in hospital. Like Picardie, Lynch ‘loves’ her consultant, but he ‘drives [her] … crazy when he begins talking medicalese’ (1986: 51), words that she has to ‘puzzle through’, making her feel like a kid ‘trying to talk to grown-ups’ (1986: 51). Among the photographs there is one of Lynch lying on an operating table after surgery, her left breast removed, and another of her laughing in a hospital corridor. One photograph is of her squatting by a toilet, presumably following a bout of chemo-induced nausea; and another of her face, bald-headed, eyes fixed on the camera and one finger on her lips: ‘I look at myself in the bathroom mirror when I am home alone. Bald; lashless; eyebrowless; scaly patches of red, dry skin all over my face. I am dried up, older than ancient, sexless. My body is unfamiliar territory now’ (Lynch 1986: 58). Her text reminds us of the violent (explosive) power of cancer – and of its ‘treatment’. Yet following her fifth treatment of chemotherapy, Lynch states, ‘I can never remember being so happy’ and refers to cancer as ‘a disease of life, not death’ (Lynch 1986: 60). When, in May 1982, Lynch’s cancer ‘returned’ to her lymph nodes and developed into brain tumours, the radiation and chemotherapy treatment turns her ‘into a space-cadet, wheeling around like a pinwheel, unable to pull a word from my head, to think a coherent thought’ (1986: 154). Moreover, when Lynch looks at her own writing she says, ‘my handwriting isn’t mine … I can see the writing is not mine’ (1986: 154). Echoing poet Emily Dickinson, Lynch writes: ‘Buzz, buzz, buzz. I am the fly’ (1986: 155). She describes the hospital as ‘a tomb’ in which she is sealed with others, yet also sees herself as ‘changing’ (1986: 161): just as the plants in her back yard ‘sprout one-half-inch here, an inch there’, so too ‘cancer plods on from node to node’ (1986: 161). It is, as she suggests, ‘both remarkable and not remarkable at all’ – ‘[j]ust another growing season’ (1986: 161). The final photograph in the text is repeated twice successively. It catches the reader, as if by surprise, but not as a surprise at all. Lynch, arms stretched behind her, glasses on, her chest revealed as ‘breastless’, her gown pushed to one side. It is indeed, a still life, a life frozen in time, just as her writing has ‘frozen’ her living and her dying. ‘All photographs’, Susan Sontag suggests, ‘are momento mori’: ‘To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s … mortality, vulnerability, mutability’ (Sontag 2008: 15). Lynch’s work demonstrates that such analysis is applicable to both the visual and the written, thanatographical text. In both formats, the subject becomes ‘embalmed’, a ‘spectre’ that haunts the text and



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who ‘becomes’ defined by her absence. As Barthes suggests about figures within a photograph, Lynch does ‘not emerge’, she does ‘not leave’; she is ‘anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies’ (Barthes 2000: 57). Preservation and devastation coexist within Lynch’s narrative. Her work is a ‘witness’ of ‘what has been’ – and the astonishment that ‘that-has-been will also disappear’ (Barthes 2000: 93–4): ‘In the sentence, “She’s no longer suffering,” to what, to whom does “she” refer? What does that present tense mean?’ (Barthes 2010: 15). Concepts of malignancy, malfunction and the uncanny abound within Lynch’s text, but so too do ideas pertaining to freedom, subversion and the power of narrative in the context of life and reproduction. The law of the body and the body of the law is that of change, metamorphosis, (re)production, life.

Works cited Ariès, P. (1981), The Hour of Our Death. Translated by Helen Weaver. New York: Knopf. Barthes, R. (2000), Camera Lucida. London: Vintage. —(2010), Mourning Diary. New York: Hill and Wang. Bennington, G. (2011), Not Half No End: Militantly Melancohlic – Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cooper, M. (2008), Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press. Derrida, J. and M. Blanchot (2000), Demeure: Fiction and Testimony/The Instant of My Death. Translated from the French by Elizabeth Rottenberg. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Diedrich, L. (2004), ‘Without us all told: Paul Monette’s vigilant witnessing to the AIDS crisis’, in Literature and Medicine, 23 (1), 112–27. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1999), The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Bartleby Com. Eysenbach, G. (2001), ‘What is e-health?’, http://www.jmir.org/2001/2/e20/ [accessed 13 June 2012]. Fanon, F. (1996), Black Skin, White Masks. London: Penguin. Frank, A. (1997), The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gilbert, S. (2007), Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Way We Grieve. New York: Norton. Gilman, S. (1988), Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS. New York: Cornell University Press. Gilroy, P. (1993), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso Press.

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Gorer, G. (1965), Mourning in Contemporary Britain. London: Cresset. Kolnai, A. (2004), ‘On disgust’, in Barry Smith and Carolyn Korsmeer (eds), On Disgust. Chicago: Open Court Press. Kristeva, J. (1982), Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Lorde, A. (1980), The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Love, S. (2005), Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Lynch, D. and E. Richards (1986), Exploding into Life. Oxford: Aperture in association with Many Voices Press. Mandel, N. (2008), ‘Contours of loss’, in Criticism, 50, (4), 663–72. Minot, C. (1908), The Problem of Age, Growth and Death. London: John Murray. Olson, J. (2002), Bathsheba’s Breast: Women, Cancer and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Picardie, R. (2000), Before I Say Goodbye: Recollections and Observations From One Woman’s Final Year. New York: Henry Holt and Co. Porter, R. (1999), The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present. London: HarperCollins. Robbins, R. (2005), Subjectivity. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Rose, G. (1996), Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roychoudhury, S. (2012), ‘Forswearing fever: medicine, materialism, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 12, (1), 4–22. Skloot, R. (2011), The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. London: Macmillan. Sontag, S. (1988), Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. —(2008), On Photography. London: Penguin. Williams, M. (2005), Secrets and Laws: Essays in Law, Life and Literature. London, Routledge-Cavendish.

Index abject 95, 101, 137, 143, 147, 148, 149, 193, 198 abuse 4, 5–7, 38, 39, 41, 108, 136, 140, 167 Adorno, Theodor 99, 100, 101, 102, 105, 113n. 3, 113n. 5 adultery 176–7 affect 4, 7, 9–10, 12, 14, 15, 17, 21n. 3, 21n. 4, 38–9, 42–3, 45–6, 49, 53n. 2, 108, 11n. 3, 122–4, 163 affective 10, 21n. 3, 38–40, 42, 50, 52–3n. 2, 95, 97, 99, 103, 110, 185   aggression 160, 172–3, 176, 185, Ahmed, Sara 10, 38, 39, 40, 42, 48, 49, 53n. 2 Allen, Carolyn 141, 142 amputation 193, 199, 201 anger 81, 160, 162, 167, 176, 178, 199 animals 10, 27–30, 34n. 2, 162 Antigone 202 apostrophe 3, 175 Ariès, Philippe 205 Armstrong, Isobel 29 Auden, W. H. 102, 103 autobiography 12, 17, 31, 55–71, 73–93, 135, 191–210 autopathography 191–210 autothanapathography 13 Baraitser, Lisa 179–82, 185, 187, 189n. 3 barebacking 9 Barth, John 119 Barthes, Roland 10, 18, 73, 95–7, 101–3, 106, 108, 109, 111, 113n. 2, 139, 202, 207, 209 Bataille, Georges 10, 18, 95, 153–69 BDSM 11 Beckett, Samuel 101, 103, 140 being-with 14, 172, 179, 181, 183, 185, 188 Bell, Vera 39 Benjamin, Jessica 148, 186 Benjamin, Walter 106, 109

Bennington, Geoffrey 194–5 Berlant, Lauren 8, 9–10, 185 Bernstein, Mary 136, 142 Bersani, Leo 9, 19, 171–2, 174, 176–80, 188 birth 47, 55, 58–9, 179, 202 Blake, William 87 Blanchot, Maurice 10, 18, 26, 32, 74–6, 126, 129, 193 body 7, 9, 10, 14–15, 23, 37, 42–9, 83, 85, 88, 95, 107–9, 123, 126, 127, 137, 155–7, 165, 167, 191–210, Bowen, Elizabeth 29 Brady, Andrea 96–7, 113n. 1, 113n. 6 breast cancer 191–210 Brennan, Teresa 10 Brontë sisters 84 brother 41, 64, 147, 148–9, 202 Brown, Rebecca 135–52 Brown, Ruth 57, 68 Browne, Thomas 29 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 73–93 Browning, Robert 73–93 bulimia 41 Burghers, M. 197 Burroughs, William 11 Bush, George 98 Butler, Judith 9, 17, 55–7, 69, 137, 141, 143–4, 148 de Caires Narain 37 Campbell, James 119, 121–2 Campion, Jane 55, 60, 68 cancer 5, 19, 41, 47, 146, 191–210 capitalism 9, 98, 99, 106 care 40, 67, 149–50, 178–80, 200, 205 Carrington, Christopher 136, 137, 142 Carroll, Lewis 28, 34n. 1 Carroll, Maureen P. 115 Carver, Raymond 18, 115–33, 151 castration 117, 120–3, 125–6 Celan, Paul 103, 110, 113n. 7

212 Index cellular pathology 196–9 censorship 11, 56, 58, 65, 192–3 Chancy, Myraim 41 chemotherapy 200, 203, 207–8 China 98, 100–2 Chodorow, Nancy 136, 179–80, 185–6 citation 55–72 Cixous, Hélène 30, 32 Cleave, Chris 171–90 Clough, Patricia Ticineto 10 commitment 139, 182 commodity 69, 109 confessional 4, 105, 110 consciousness 50, 76, 96, 154, 156–9, 164, 167–8, 193–5, 200, 201 Cooke, Jennifer 101, 172–4, 181 Cooper, M. 197–8 Cooper, Richard Tennant 197 Curk, Polona 186 cybercancer 203 Danticat, Edwidge 37–53 daughter 5, 17, 37, 38, 42–4, 47–8, 53, 58, 59, 61–4, 78, 84–5, 166, 179 Dean, Tim 9 death 3, 4, 5, 10, 12–17, 19, 26–7, 33, 41–2, 65, 68, 79, 85–7, 92, 108–9, 146, 149, 158, 163–4, 168, 176, 182, 191–210 Deleuze, Gilles 120 Delrez, Marc 68 depersonalizing intimacy 171–2, 175 Derrida, Jacques 7–8, 10–11, 16–17, 19, 21n. 2, 21n.6, 24–5, 28–9, 32, 53n. 5, 193–5 desire 9, 14, 27, 45, 49, 61–3, 70, 84–5, 89, 96, 97, 99, 100–1, 103, 108–9, 111, 118, 125–6, 139, 141, 155–9, 162, 168, 171, 174–5, 177, 179, 182–3, 186, 192 Dickinson, Emily 28, 208 Diedrich, Lisa 194 difference 29, 38, 49, 117, 118, 128, 137, 142, 166, 171–2, 174–5, 179–81, 184, 187–8, 199, 200, 201 Dimen, Muriel 9 disclosing intimacy 137–8 disease 41, 191–210 disgust 5, 7, 99, 104, 155, 161, 166–7, 198 Dodgson, Charles 24, 34n. 1

dreams 24, 86, 89, 91, 106, 110, 160 Du Bois W. E. B., 193 Duncombe, Jean 135 dying 5, 7, 12, 191–210 dying well 192, 205–6 Eeckhout, Bart, 150n. 1 Eiland, Howard,106 ejaculation 160, 167 Eldaly, Shokry 148 elegy 14, 16, 192 Eliot, George 30 Eliot T. S., 97, 99 Ellmann, Maud 24 email 3, 74, 199, 202–5 empathy 19, 136, 149, 179 Empson, William 24 endless talk 174–6 see also intimacy as address England, Lynndie 108 environmentalism 27, 32 euthanasia 192 extimacy 33 Eysenbach, Gunther 207 family 8, 17, 19, 38, 42, 44, 46, 53n. 4, 55, 57–63, 65, 68, 77–8, 81–2, 146, 150, 156, 172, 178, 182–3 Fanon, Franz 193 fantasy 64, 77, 86, 125–6, 128, 130, 147 father 17, 26–7, 30, 41, 48, 53n. 4, 58, 78, 86, 87, 90, 162, 166–7, 179–80 fear 38, 46, 49, 58, 64, 74, 78, 98, 155–6, 160, 176, 185, 199–200, 204 feminism 8, 10 feminist 5, 9, 21 n. 3, 37, 39–40, 50, 53n. 2, 67, 86, 142, 173, 185 Fink, Bruce 122, 123, 124, 125, 133n. 1 Forster, E. M. 29 Foucault, Michel 4, 49, 138, 172 fragmentation 3, 10, 12, 18, 76, 108, 110 Frame, Janet 17, 55–71 Francis, Donette 37, 38, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47 Frank, Adam 10, 39, 48 Frank, Arthur 193 Freud, Sigmund 7–8, 21n. 2, 24, 26–7, 32, 126, 167, 194

Index friendship 136, 172 funeral 47, 78 Gallagher, Tess 115 Gamson, Joshua 142 gender 9, 41, 98, 135–52, 173, 176–7, 179, 183, 185–7, 195 gender divisions 9, 173, 179, 187 gender inequality 9, 135–6, 183 Giddens, Anthony 9, 137, 150 Gilbert, Sandra M. 205 Gilligan, Carol 136 Gilman, Sander 194 Gilroy, Paul 194 Ginsberg, Allen 10 Goode, Chris 113n.1 Goodison, Lorna 39 Gordon, Nada 74 Gourdine, Angeletta 37 Graner Jr., Charles 108 grave 76, 78, 87 grief 3, 12–17, 113n. 3, 173 Guattari, Félix 120 Guess, Carol 148 Hallett, Cynthia 146 Hardt, Michael 10, 21n. 4 hatred 45–6, 162, 169, 172, 176, 178, 182, 184, 187–8 haunting 15, 17, 38, 43, 60, 77, 85, 139, 143, 208 Heidegger, Martin 73, 192 Heister, Lorenz 196 Hemingway, Ernest 119, 151 Henke, Suzette 66, 68 Herman, Judith Lewis 185 heteronormative 4, 8, 9, 142 heterosexual 137, 141–4, 199 Hippocrates 195 HÖlderlin, Freidrich 107 Hollway, Wendy 179 Holtby, Winifred 90 honeymoon 153–69 Horkheimer, Max 99 humanism 148 humanist 102, 154 Hunter, John 195 idealization 125, 129, 138, 150 identity 5, 8, 10, 39, 46, 51, 55–6, 68–9,

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89, 136, 142–3, 157, 171, 173, 177, 182, 192–3 illness 3, 5, 6, 12, 55, 68, 85, 191–210 Illouz, Eva 4, 9 impersonal intimacy 9, 19, 153, 154, 159, 162, 164, 169, 171–3, 176–88 impersonal narcissism 174, 179, 181 impersonality of mothering 171, 179–82, 185 incest 11, 166–7 intimacy as address 174–6 see also endless talk Jakobson, Roman 121 James, Henry 24 Jamieson, Lynn 135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 144 Jarvis, Simon 96 Jonson, Ben 109 jouissance 31, 123–4 journal 3, 7, 18, 73–93, 193, 199–201 Joyce, James 11 Kafka, Franz 29, 103, 207 Kainulainen, S. 39 King, Michael 57, 69 kissing 43, 79, 84, 85, 87, 92, 141, 146, 161 knowledge 58, 61, 88, 102, 103, 104, 109, 111, 118–9, 137, 147, 150, 192, 199, 207 knowledge of the other 9, 118–9, 125, 128, 138, 150, 172–3, 180–1 Koivunen, Anu 21n. 3, 53n. 2 Kolnai, Aurel 198 Kristeva, Julia 123, 127, 193, 198 Lacan, Jacques 10, 18, 33, 116–31 Lacks, Henrietta 198 Ladkin, Sam 96–7, 98 Laing, R. D. 67 late modernist 103, 111 de Lauretis, Teresa 144 law 8, 11, 32, 191–3, 197, 199, 202, 206, 209 Lawrence, D. H. 11, 24, 28, 29, 31 Layder, Derek 172 Le Dran, Henri 195–6 Leader, Darian 133n. 1 lesbian 5, 28, 135–52 letters 3, 73–93, 99, 172, 202, 205 Levinas, Emmanuel 129

214 Index Liljeström, Marianne 10 Lish, Gordon 18, 115, 119–23, 125, 127, 128 Locke, Jill 39 longing 65, 79, 83–5, 88–9, 159, 183 Lorde, Audre 19, 199–201, 204 loss 12–17, 26, 59, 61, 63, 65–7, 69, 84–6, 89, 117, 121–3, 162, 165, 176, 178, 185, 194, 201–3 loss (of honour) 44, 45 love 5, 7, 10, 12, 18–19, 24, 73–5, 77–9, 81–2, 84–7, 89–92, 95, 97–103, 106–7, 115–33, 136, 138, 144, 153–4, 156, 161, 165, 168, 174–6, 178, 182, 187–8, 200–1, 203, 205 lymph nodes 195, 196, 205, 208 Lynch, Dorothea 19, 193, 206–9 MacKinnon, Catherine 142 madness 25–6, 65–9, 82, 97, 156, 163, 205 Mahler, Gustav 99, 103, 113n. 3 male dominance 173, 185–7 male violence 38, 41, 179, 183 Mamet, David 147 de Man, Paul 107–8, 122 Mandel, Naomi 194 Manson, Peter 113n. 1 marriage 8, 41–5, 48, 53n. 5, 82, 90, 136, 153–8, 160–2, 167, 177 Marsden, Dennis 135 Marson, Una 39 Marxism 96–7 Marxist 95, 97, 101 mastectomy 196, 199–201, 207–8 masturbation 156 McDermott, J. D. 146, 147 McEwan, Ian 18, 153–69 McGurl, Mark 146 McLane, Maureen 175 McLaughlin, Kevin 106 Meares, Russell 183 medical profession 200–1 medical treatment 4, 202 Melville, Herman 24 memory 7, 10, 13–14, 18, 27, 38, 59, 61, 62, 77, 87, 91, 106, 110, 139, 157, 166–7, 174, 176 Mengham, Rod 96 Milne, Drew 96

Minimalism 115, 122, 146–8, 150–1 Minot, Charles 197 misery 148, 168 Moon, Michael 142 de Moor, Katrien 150n. 1 Morel, Geneviève 130 Morrison, Blake 119, 121, 123 Morrison, Toni 37 Morton, Timothy 24 mother 5, 6, 17–18, 37–8, 41–8, 53n. 5, 57–64, 69, 77, 83–5, 90–2, 106, 109, 110, 136, 146, 171, 173–6, 178, 179–88, 189n. 3, 191, 207 mourning 12–17, 18, 194, 201–2, 207 Muños, José Esteban 151 murder 53, 97, 105, 175, 178 Murray, Les 28, 29 mutual transformation 173, 179, 181, 187–8 myth 53n. 5, 56–7, 70, 91, 129, 136–7 Nachträglichkeit (deferred action) 167–8 narcissism 89, 101, 130, 174, 179, 181 narcissistic pleasure 171, 174, 176 Ngai, Sianne 10 Nietzsche, Friedrich 145, 153 nodism 23–6 O’Callaghan, Evelyn 37 O’Hara, Frank 12, 101–2 O’Sullivan, Maggie 29 object a 125–6, 130 Oedipus complex 26 Olson, Charles 104, 109 Olson, James 195–6, 205 orgasm, 85, 160, 166–7 Osama (bin Laden) 172–9, 182, 184–5, 187 otherness 31, 57, 116–19, 125–6, 128–31, 159, 173, 180–2, 187, 193 overproduction 197–8, 206 Paasonen, Susanna 10 pain 5, 6, 40, 45, 48–9, 66, 78–9, 85, 87, 102, 106, 122–4, 148–9, 193, 199–201 patriarchy 8, 41, 47–9, 53n. 5, 142, 199 Patterson, Anita Haya 39–40 Pattison, Neil 102, 106 Pearce, Lynn 39, 53n. 2

Index Phillips, Adam 9, 19, 171–2, 174, 176–80, 188 philosophy 28, 163, 171, 187 photograph 13, 27, 29, 108, 206–9 Picardie, Justine 203 Picardie, Ruth 19, 193, 201–6, 208 Plato 107, 174 pleasure 31, 39, 82–4, 97, 122–5, 162, 171, 174, 176, 201 poetry 3, 12–15, 18, 28–9, 39, 55, 64, 73–113, 116 Ponge, Francis 28 pornography 108 Porter, Roy 195 postcolonial 5, 17, 145, 173, 192–4 post-traumatic 173, 182, 185 pregnancy 47, 179 premature ejaculation 160, 166–7 privacy 73, 110, 185, 191–2, 202–3, 206–7 Probyn, Elspeth 10, 38, 40, 45–6 property 44, 69, 191–3, 206 Prynne, J. H. 96–7, 100, 102–4, 109–11 psychoanalysis 8, 10, 21n. 4, 27, 115–33, 171, 173, 187 public and private (or private and public) 173, 185, 193, 206 pure relationship 9 Purves, Robin 96, 97, 98 queer theory 5, 8–10, 21n. 4, 69, 137, 142–3, 173 queerness 30 racism 37, 50, 173 rape 11, 38, 41, 43, 47, 53nn. 4, 5, 109 Raworth, Tom 96 reader identification 146–50 reading 3, 7, 10, 12, 24, 25–7, 38–40, 48–51, 52–3n. 2, 75, 97, 104, 122, 124, 130–1, 151, 207 relationality 9, 40, 172, 176, 178, 180–2, 187–8 Reagan, Ronald 30 real, the 33, 116–7, 124, 130 Reimann, Renate 136 Rembrandt 195 Richards, Eugene 193, 206–9 Rilke, Rainer Maria 113n. 5 ritual 48, 50, 57, 59, 60, 69, 156, 162

215

Robbins, Ruth 192, 195 Robinson, Sophie 12–17 Rorty, Richard 145, 147–9 Rose, Gillian 19, 192–4, 202 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 107 Roychoudhury, Suparna 194 Royle, Nicholas 7, 10, 16–17, 23–34 sacrifice 87, 107, 159, 162–3, 169 Sade, Marquis de 95, 99 sadomasochism 141–2 Salecl, Renata 117 sameness 77, 79, 136–8, 153, 157, 172–5, 179–81, 187–8 same-sex relationship 11, 135, 136–45, 150 schizophrenia 5, 17, 55, 67–8 Schumann, Robert 113n. 2 Scott, Helen 41, 43–5, 53n. 3 Seaton, Matt 202–3, 206 secret 6, 27, 75, 83, 156, 166, 177, 186 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 10, 32, 39, 40, 48, 50, 53n. 2, 137–8, 142–4 self-censorship 56 self-expression 58–9, 61, 63, 172, 175 self-forgetfulness 172, 177, 179 self-harm 38, 44–5, 102, 108 self-intimacy 21n.1 self-knowledge 104, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 145 Seneca 195 sex 3–7, 9, 11, 18–19, 42, 46, 58, 84–5, 100, 135, 136, 137, 140, 141, 143–4, 155, 161, 167, 169, 172–3, 176–8, 183–5 sexual assault 178, 184–5 sexual violence 37, 38, 41–3, 45, 47, 50, 173, 186–7 sexuality 5, 9, 11, 18, 37–9, 41, 95, 135–52, 162, 173, 176, 187, 199 Shakespeare, William 24, 26, 27, 30 shame 5, 7, 10, 17, 37–53, 143, 160, 161, 166–7, 186, 199 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 64, 107–8 short stories 18, 55, 140 silence 4–6, 10, 41, 75, 153, 185, 199, 203–4 Simone, Nina 85 sister 37, 58, 64, 109, 146, 202–3, 205 Skloot, Rebecca 198

216 Index Smith, Faith 37 Smith, Sidonie 56 Socrates 174 Soler, Colette 117 son 6, 30, 41, 53n. 3, 78, 79, 87, 172–3, 175–6, 179–80 sonnet 18, 76–6, 92 Sontag, Susan 93, 208 spectrality 10, 33, 208 Spigel, Sigal 189n. 3 Stadler, Matthew 148 Stein, Gertrude 13 Stevens, Wallace 126 Stoffels, Hendrickje 195 Stratchey, Lytton 29 Stull, William L. 115 subjectivity 8, 19, 38, 46, 117, 159, 165, 180–1, 191–4, 199 suicide 47, 50 66, 79, 92, 126, 172, 178, 187, 192, 205 Sullivan, Gary 74 surgery 99, 196, 199–200, 207–8 Sutherland, Keston 18, 95–113 symbolic, the 117–18, 120–1, 124, 130 taboo 11, 27, 135, 137, 150 195 talk 5–6, 27, 115–33, 136, 138, 144, 173, 174–8, 181, 187, 208 telepathy 23–5, 29 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 82 terror 41–2, 192 Terror, war on 175 terrorist 19, 172 testing 37–8, 41–8, 49, 52n. 1, 53n. 5, thanatography 192 theatrical 6, 60–1, 101, 106, 107 time 14, 17, 24, 26, 46, 63, 74–5, 81, 83, 89, 95, 104–5, 107, 139–40, 142, 153–7, 159–69, 198, 201, 208 Todd, Daphne 191 Tomlinson, Charles 109 Tompkins, Silvan 10

transgression 21n. 2, 45, 95, 99, 144, 157, 202, 207 trauma 10, 37–8, 41, 43–5, 47–8, 50, 118, 120–1, 123, 154, 167, 171–3, 176, 178, 182–3, 185, 188 traumatized 19, 169, 178, 185 Tronto, Joan 149, 151 tumour 90, 195–6, 198, 203, 205–6, 208 uncanny 23–5, 30, 32–3, 110, 126, 209 violence 5, 7, 21n. 5, 28, 37–8, 41–3, 45, 47, 49–50, 75, 107, 109, 121–2, 126, 136, 141, 144, 150, 153, 160–4, 169, 171–4, 176, 178–9, 182–8, 192, 199 virginity 37, 42–4, 53n. 5, 154 Vogler, Candace 4, 9, 136, 138, 171–2, 175 Wagner 95 war 89–90, 97, 107, 175 Warner, Michael 142–3, 150 wedding 18, 153–7, 159, 165, 167 wedding night 159, 160 Weeks, Jeffrey 9, 136–8, 142, 144, 150 Weir-Soley, Donna 37 Weston, Kath 142 Wilkinson, John 96, 99 Williams, Melanie 194 Williams, Raymond 23, 25 Winnicott, D. W. 106 witnessing 17, 32, 38, 40, 49–50, 66, 74, 150, 164, 192, 194, 202, 206–7, 209 Wood, Gaby 121, 123 Woodward, Kathleen 37–40, 43, 49, 50 Woolf, Tobias 146 Woolf, Virginia 29 Wordsworth, William 24, 29, 93, 103–4, 109 Žižek, Slavoj 117