The Persistence of the Human : Consciousness, Meta-Body and Survival in Contemporary Film and Literature [1 ed.] 9789004323674, 9789004323629

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The Persistence of the Human

Consciousness, Literature and the Arts General Editor Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe (University of Lincoln, uk) Editorial Board Anna Bonshek (Prana World Group, Australia) Per Brask (University of Winnipeg, Canada) John Danvers (University of Plymouth, uk) Amy Ione (Diatrope Institute, Berkeley, usa) Michael Mangan (Loughborough University, uk) Jade Rosina McCutcheon (Melbourne University, Australia) Gregory Tague (St Francis College, New York, usa) Arthur Versluis (Michigan State University, usa) Christopher Webster (Aberystwyth University, uk) Ralph Yarrow (University of East Anglia, uk)

VOLUME 48

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cla

The Persistence of the Human Consciousness, Meta-body and Survival in Contemporary Film and Literature

By

Matthew Escobar

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: painting by Victoria Rivera-Cordero, 2016. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Escobar, Matthew, author. Title: The persistence of the human : consciousness, meta-body and survival in contemporary film and literature / by Matthew Escobar. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill Rodopi, [2016] | Series: Consciousness, literature and the arts, issn 1573-2193 ; 48 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2016029178 (print) | lccn 2016039214 (ebook) | isbn 9789004323629 (hardback : alk. paper) | isbn 9789004323674 (e-book) Subjects: lcsh: Identity (Psychology) in literature. | Identity (Psychology) in motion pictures. | Self-perception in literature. | Self-perception in motion pictures. | Human body in literature. | Human body in motion pictures. Classification: lcc PN56.I42 E783 2016 (print) | lcc PN56.I42 (ebook) | ddc 809/.93353--dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029178

Want or need Open Access? Brill Open offers you the choice to make your research freely accessible online in exchange for a publication charge. Review your various options on brill.com/brill-open. Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1573-2193 isbn 978-90-04-32362-9 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-32367-4 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

For my parents, my wife and my children Luc and Emma

∵

Contents Acknowledgements ix List of Figures x Introduction 1 1 The Human, Consciousness and Its Temporality 13 Humanism 14 Human Freedom 17 What Makes One Human? 18 Consciousness 21 Daniel Dennett on Consciousness: The Human as Virtual Machine 24 Temporality, Consciousness and Ethics 28 Immersion and Framing: The Experience of Film and Literature 31 Embodied Drafts 37 2 Testing the Human: Trauma, Memory and Consciousness 40 Trauma and the Temporality of the Self 51 Memento 55 The Spectral Past Self 64 Memory, Identity and Ethics 66 Rendering Pain Visible in Memento 72 Eliminate the Past, Control the Future 77 3 The Phantom Limb: Specters, Trauma, and Meta-body 81 Meta-body 82 The Body Artist 88 Projecting the Self into a Different Emptiness 96 Erasing the Self 98 You are Made out of Time 101 Recovering the Self 101 The Bird and the Strand of Hair 102 Sous le sable 104 Water 105 Time Lets Fall Its Drop 108 Meta-body in Sous le sable 112 Naissance des fantômes 115

viii 4 Survival: Human and Posthuman 139 The Temporality of the Paralyzed Body 149 Starting with “I” 151 Correcting the Past 153 Destroying the Self to Save It 157 Posthuman Consciousness 162 Parfit on Transpersonal Survival 165 Postpersonal Identity 179 The Absent Machine 180 The Machine Speaks 185 Involuntary Immortality 189 The Recuperative Project 190 Self-possession 199 Conclusion 201 Pain and the Clean Slate 202 The Other Penetrating / Occupying the Self 204 Bibliography 209 Index 217

Contents

Acknowledgements I would like to thank my wife and colleague Victoria Rivera-Cordero for her ­unwavering support and for having read and commented on several drafts of the manuscript. Many thanks go to my friend and colleague Jeffrey Gray for having read the introduction and for offering his advice. My sincere thanks to Professor Lynn A. Higgins for her insightful comments on an early draft of this book.

List of Figures 1 Leonard in an anonymous motel room on the phone 60 2 Leonard’s tattooed body 72 3 Leonard holds a photo of his spectral past self 77 4 Marie stares straight ahead in the pool (from right) 106 5 Marie stares straight ahead in the pool (from behind) 106 6 Marie stares straight ahead in the pool (head-on) 107 7 Marie face up in bed staring at the ceiling 110 8 Three sets of hands on Marie’s ecstatic face 111 9 Marie’s shocked expression at the morgue 113 10 Jean-Do deep in his tethered diving suit 144 11 Jean-Do’s right eye is sewn up 146 12 Jean-Do’s hybrid meta-body (therapist and patient together) 151 13 Ramón’s meta-body (past and present) 159

Introduction On 10 January 2012 as Alan Gilbert led the New York Philharmonic in the fourth movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, a sublime moment of near silence, the concert was interrupted by the unmistakable sound of an iPhone’s marimba ring tone. Faced with the seemingly endless ringing, the conductor took the unprecedented step of stopping the concert.1 Among emotional calls from elegantly clad audience members to remove the offender and fine him, Gilbert asked the perpetrator to turn off his phone – he was easily identified as he was sitting front and center. When the slow-reacting spectator (later dubbed “Patron x” by the New York Times) finally did stop the phone’s ringing, the exasperated conductor inquired in a scolding tone “Is it going to go off again?” The only response from the patron was to turn his head from left to right and back signifying that it would not. It was reported that no concert had ever been stopped in this manner in the 170 year history of the New York Philharmonic.2 In those years, an estimated 14,000 performances had taken place before it was deemed necessary to halt one in this manner. As it turns out, again according to the New York Times who interviewed the anonymous patron in question, this was no case of blatant disregard for the solemnity of the hallowed Avery Fisher Hall,3 the celebrated conductor or the great composer, rather this awkward moment resulted from an understandable confusion. The hapless patron, described as being between sixty and seventy years old and the ceo of two businesses as well as a twentyyear subscriber to the orchestra, had just received a new cell phone at work the day before and claimed to have no idea that phones had alarms – the ringing was not a phone call but rather an alarm whose ring goes off even when the phone is silenced and does not stop until the user switches it off. Barring an undisclosed hearing disability, the fact that Patron x let his phone ring for several minutes even after there had been loud calls to shut it off, demonstrates 1 As reported on the following blogs: Superconductor (http://super-conductor.blogspot. com/2012/01/mahler-interrupted.html), thousandfold echo (http://thousandfoldecho.com/ 2012/01/10/concertus-interruptus/), ArtsBeat Blog (http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2012/01/11/new-york-philharmonic-interrupted-by-chimes-mahler-never-intended/). See also, Wakin, Daniel “Ringing Finally Ended, but There’s No Button to Stop Shame” The New York Times. 12 Jan. 2012. Web. 12 Jan 2012. 2 See the following efe dispatch, “Un móvil interrumpe por primera vez un concierto de la Filarmónica de Nueva York” El País. 12 Jan 2012. Web. 12 Jan 2012. 3 Renamed David Geffen Hall in 2015.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004323674_002

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at the very least that he was not skilled in dealing with such technology.4 The conductor later admitted to being shocked by the incident, especially by the fact that the ring was allowed to go on for so long. After all, the ring ripped the musicians and the audience from a sublime “very far away, spiritual place”5 in which they had been immersed. Needless to say, the wealthy patron was deeply humiliated and repentant; he agreed to an interview on the condition that his anonymity be protected.6 I open with this story because this minor, yet historic event is revelatory of several points that this book explores. In a famed concert hall and at one of the most transcendent moments of a highly celebrated symphony by a late Romantic composer, a cell phone alarm not only interrupted the music (in i­ tself not a new occurrence) but continued for so long that the concert had to be stopped. The audience, the musicians and the conductor who were immersed in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, which is known for its narrative power,7 reacted with anger and dismay at the interruption. The composer’s work was fiercely defended, as the patron’s castigation was resoundingly applauded.

4 “Actually, Patron X said he had no idea he was the culprit. He said his company replaced his BlackBerry with an iPhone the day before the concert. He said he made sure to turn it off before the concert, not realizing that the alarm clock had accidentally been set and would sound even if the phone was in silent mode. ‘I didn’t even know phones came with alarms,’ the man said” (Wakin, nyt 12 Jan 2012, Web. 12 Jan 2012). 5 “Mr. Gilbert, in the interview, said: ‘It was so shocking what happened. You’re in this very far away, spiritual place in the piece. It’s like being rudely awakened. All of us were stunned on the stage.’” (Wakin, nyt ArtsBeat blog, 11 Jan 2012, Web. 11 Jan 2012). 6 “‘You can imagine how devastating it is to know you had a hand in that,’ said the man, who described himself as a business executive between 60 and 70 who runs two companies. ‘It’s horrible, horrible.’ The man said he had not slept in two days.” (nyt, 12 Jan 2012, Web. 12 Jan 2012). This story, which began on the New York Times ArtsBeat blog was kicked up the following day to the main online edition due to its international importance. It was immediately picked up by cnn and the leading Spanish daily El País as well as numerous other web based news services. 7 “For [Anthony] Newcomb ‘the narrative quality of Mahler’s music comes most powerfully from the intersection of formal paradigm, thematic recurrence and transformation, and… plot archetype,’ which together produce a ‘quest paradigm’ characteristic of the Romantic Bildungsroman” (Micznik, 196). Micznik in her extensive and detailed overview of narrative theory and its applicability to music states the following: “Thus, the more numerous basic materials in Mahler by comparison with Beethoven, the diversity of themes and motives and their syntactic and semantic autonomy, as well as the heterogeneous juxtaposition of the many worlds invoked (as opposed to the single world in the ‘Pastoral’), reinforce the degree of narrativity in Mahler” (218).

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As I see it, this incident highlights in dramatic fashion both the power of narrative immersion and the consequences of interrupting it – both of which illustrate a central premise of the book: namely that despite decades of artistic experiments (and omnipresent technological advances), contemporary readers and spectators still seek the kind of narrative immersion that the embodied mind craves. It is also my contention that recent narrative fiction and film increasingly exploit, explore and thematize the embodied mind, revealing the tenacity of a certain brand of humanism. The presence of narratively based concepts of personal identity even in texts which explore posthuman possibilities is strong proof that our basic understanding of what it means to be human has, despite appearances, remained mostly unchanged. This is so even though our perception of time has been greatly modified by the same technology which both interrupts and allows for the reconfiguration of our experience of time at a rate and a level of ease which, until recently, had never been possible. Basing my views on a long line of philosophers and literary theorists such as Paul Ricœur, Daniel Dennett and Francisco Varela, I maintain in this book that narrative plays an essential role in the process of constituting and maintaining a sense of self. It is narrative’s effect on the embodied mind which gives ­stories such force. Narrative projects us into possible spaces (such as Mahler’s “far away place”), shaping a temporary corporeality which I term the “meta-body,” a hybrid shared by the lived body and an imagined corporeality. The metabody is a secondary embodiment that we inhabit for however long our narrative immersion lasts – something which, in today’s world, may be a question of milliseconds or hours. The more agreeable the meta-body is, the less happy we are upon being abruptly removed from it, though the return is essential. We want to be able to slip back and forth between this secondary embodiment and that of our lived body; each move entails both forgetting and remembering different subject positions (loss and recuperation being salient themes in the works which highlight this process). The negotiation of the transfer between these states is shaped by culture and technology and this is something which is precisely in flux now as multiple, ephemeral, fragmented narrative immersion experiences are created by the different screens we come into contact with.8 8 While David Rushkoff’s Present Shock (2014) argues that we are in a moment of “narrative collapse” fueled by the excessive fragmentation and distraction different media afford us, I would argue to the contrary that media overwhelm us with an excess of narrative and that we are constantly encouraged to package and present our lives (re-present them) through photography (the much reviled “selfies”), video and text in ways that, though they may reject meta-narratives, are no less narrative. When a person posts a photo of him or herself at a café, bar or in some exotic or impressive local (or in a banal one for that matter), he or

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Introduction

The lived body is most often experienced as an apparently transparent tool, mainly opaque and distracting when in pain, while narrative immersion offers a different kind of corporeality, one that effaces the lived body. There is real pleasure in being “transported” by narrative. Being torn from an agreeable state of narrative immersion or meta-body and thrown back into the lived body – because of the gap between the two – can be enough of a surprise in itself to cause annoyance or even anger (as in the irate fracas caused by the neophyte iPhone user discussed above, a reaction not uncommon in children whose television show or video game has just been abruptly turned off). The pleasure of the meta-body, found in an immersive reading, listening or viewing experience lies precisely in “losing” oneself while retaining control over when and how to “find oneself” again. This desire to slip at will between “lived” and “meta” bodies is fulfilled not only by active immersion in the virtual spaces of narrative works but also by building complex relations with other beings and real spaces. This means that we also create extended versions of the meta-body in the lived narrative which plays out in our relations with others and in the real spaces we inhabit. The impairment or interruption of that crucial capacity can be traumatic depending on its severity. Having said this, in addition to the question of narrative embodiment, one can see something else of interest to this study coming to the surface in the January 2012 mini scandal at Avery Fisher Hall. The indignation at the concert’s interruption is symptomatic of an ever stronger clash between two distinct, yet overlapping categories of being: the human and the posthuman. Later, I explore both humanism9 (in Chapter 1) and posthumanism10 (in Chapter 3) in greater detail but for the time being let’s consider the following elements of this conflict as they manifested themselves in the famed concert hall. On the side of humanism there was an audience immersed in narrative music, practicing silent self-control and above all demonstrating admiration for the artistic mastery of unique human artists (Gustav Mahler but also the orchestra and its conductor). On the side of a growing posthuman reality, there was a smartphone (an extension or prosthesis of the mind with memory, communications,­

9 10

she asks us to accept a certain story they are telling about themselves. Far from deterring or eliminating this tendency to narrate one’s life, to emplot and thus define it, smartphones have increased our ways of doing so and rendered such practices omnipresent. I will provisionally define this term as the privileging of human values, capacities (especially mental and emotional depth) and artistic production as the sign or proof of these capacities. A multivalent term generally defined as the project to either extend or move beyond the concept of human nature, or enhance basic human capacities through a melding with technology. This term thus suggests either a step beyond the paradigm of the human or a radical extension of the same.

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5

recording and command capabilities11) and the interruption of narrative immersion by an electronic, unwanted noise. In sum, this was a case of the technology running the human rather than the other way around. When the silicon controls the flesh so to speak, we are firmly in the realm of the posthuman. I’d like to suggest that (for those of us who were not there) this constitutes a particularly humorous, if innocuous, example of the collision between an exalted humanism and what is viewed by many as the threat of the posthuman to humanist values.12 The humanist paradigm which posits a singular, valued, rational human defined by the possible (i.e. the free or liberal humanist subject), ideally characterized by self-mastery, is a model which the posthuman paradigm challenges in several ways. I’d like to suggest that liberal humanism will not be relinquished quietly – in fact its central tenets continue to inform nearly all mainstream literature and cinema. Its persistence as a foundational paradigm in the narratives that I examine in this book reveals that despite the fact that billions of people have developed a need for constant connection to a network which serves as an external appendage to our minds, we still cling fiercely to a 11

12

In his preface to Andy Clark’s Supersizing the Mind (2011) on the extended mind theory I have just referred to, philosopher David Chalmers writes “A month ago, I bought an iPhone. The iPhone has already taken over some of the central functions of my brain. It has replaced part of my memory, storing phone numbers and addresses that I once would have taxed my brain with. It harbors my desires: I call up a memo with the names of my favorite dishes […] The iPhone is part of my mind already” (ix). The book is a further exploration of the “extended mind” thesis as explicated in Clark’s and Chalmers’ article “The Extended Mind” (1998). In this article the authors state: “We advocate a very different sort of externalism: an active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes” (10). Ben Lerner’s novel Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) takes a very funny jab at the discourse surrounding “profound experiences of art” (as he calls them) in which the ironic narrator/protagonist, a poet on a prestigious fellowship to do research in Madrid who is incapable of such experiences, witnesses one such experience in the Prado museum and finds it horrifying. Seeing a man crying inconsolably while standing in front of Weyden’s Descent from the Cross, the protagonist is amazed, worried even by the thought of the other man’s possibly dangerous mental state. The art lover is presumably in a “far away, spiritual place,” so immersed in the narrative surrounding Christ’s death, and affected by the weeping mourners depicted in the painting that his lived body mimics the state of his meta-body. This extreme portrait of immersion, though of course neither impossible nor unheard of, is not what I refer to in this study as I conceive of the relation to narrative as ideally one which allows greater freedom to enter and exit the state of immersion. Here, I am not interested in an exalted state of admiration or transport via high art, but rather the experience of the traumatic interruption of narrative identity.

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“liberal humanist” model which emphasizes each person’s status as a free, rational subject. I argue that this is so even for those theorists, novelists and filmmakers who argue that the self is a fiction and that our days as “natural born humans” are numbered. In their works one sees both how closely the humanist model is bound to consciousness and its workings as well as the effects of its disruption on personal identity – as caused by trauma. Increasingly, contemporary novelists and filmmakers alike are exploring the complexity of embodied consciousness. The reason for this, I argue, is clearly revealed by cognitive science, philosophy of mind and literary theory (all of which have focused much more on embodied approaches in the last twenty years): narrative emplotment creates a sensation of lived time which, despite our faster paced, more fragmentary existences, remains crucial to our sense of self.13 I maintain that the centrality of consciousness has not been abandoned by narrative literature or film even when these works are set in self-­consciously postmodern or posthuman contexts. If anything, its centrality has been increasingly emphasized. The role of consciousness in narrative immersion, has also become a focal point of narrative theory. Narratologist Marie-Laure Ryan, whose pioneering work on narrative across media is increasingly influential in the realm of narratology, explains in “Beyond Myth and Metaphor: Narrative in Digital Media” (2002) what she sees as the role of narrative: As a cognitive structure, narrative has such a grip on the mind that the popular success of a genre or medium involving language is crucially dependent on its ability to tell stories. It is because knowledge was encoded as tales that it was effectively transmitted and remembered in oral societies; it is because of its narrative power that the novel emerged as the dominant literary genre of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and it is because it gave new narrative dimensions to the novel and to the theater that cinema became ‘the art of the twentieth century.’ (582) Because narrative is so crucial to cognitive development, my analysis takes into account other areas in which cognitive science is now being used to

13

The power of narrative immersion does not require long-term immersion and concentration of the sort that the Mahler symphony encourages. Meta-fictional, modernist narratives (which this study does not concentrate on) also produce – in their own way – by the play upon the inner and the outer levels of the fictional world, a sense of spatio-temporal situating of the self, which is key to narrative identity.

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investigate literature and film. For example, Theory of Mind,14 a field of philosophical inquiry which has recently gained currency in literary studies uses findings in cognitive science to show that developing a mental representation of the contents of another person’s mind not only is characteristic of humans but serves a crucial purpose in training the mind to interact successfully in the social world. Theory of Mind (often referred to as ToM) may be seen as a capability of consciousness. It is metacognition (thought about thought) in the same way that each of us not only has thoughts and mental representations but is capable of mentally standing back from this creative and analytical process to view it as from a distance. This play between distance and proximity, self and other, sameness and difference, appears at several levels and under different guises in this study, especially with respect to questions of temporality and the meta-body. The Persistence of the Human examines literary and cinematic works that focus on personal identity and human consciousness, taken in its widest sense to mean the relations of the senses and the mind as embodied. Emphasis is placed here upon characters who have undergone different types of crises and who rely on the senses, the body, memory and the other (often a spouse) to recuperate a lost or damaged sense of continuity and personal identity; this is an effort which is sometimes explicitly expressed in the works examined as a desire to retain one’s “humanity.” As I examine instances in which personal identity is challenged and the question of “the human” arises, the narratives I have selected often present situations of trauma focusing above all on the process of rebuilding the self (or survival). As part of the embodied mind approach, I also show how contemporary literary and filmic works privilege pain as the mark of the human. In these narratives characters dream of a recuperative correction of past pain in ways that suggest that despite the new instantiations in which the body and the human/ posthuman subject appear, traces of humanism remain vital. Chapter 1, entitled “The Human, Consciousness and its Temporality” explores the theoretical underpinnings of humanism (concentrating on Tzvetan Todorov’s “space of human beings and of them alone”), the human’s rapport with the nonhuman (Stiegler’s “originary prostheticity,” a concept I extend to the self’s vital connection to the other as “originary prosthetic”), and the embodied consciousness proposed by Antonio Damasio and Francisco Varela. 14

Theory of Mind is also called Mindreading; this concept is defined by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy in the following manner: “Mindreading is the activity of attributing mental states to oneself and to others, and of predicting and explaining behavior on the basis of those attributions.” http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/imagination/#ImaMin.

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I argue here that not only must we accede to the key role of the body in perception and cognition, but we also need to view the corporeal envelope as a porous two-way cloth – which filters and categorizes the information that it receives while adapting to the structures and images that it comes into contact with. As my central argument relies upon the notion that the rapport between the self and the world gains its coherence through the construction of a temporally marked narrative, this chapter goes on to examine philosopher Daniel Dennett’s “Multiple Drafts” model of the mind and his concept of the self as “center of narrative gravity” which, despite his theory’s “computational” approach to mind, I integrate into my own embodied approach. Having discussed the narrative structure of the self, I turn to Francisco ­Varela’s theories on the “temporal horizon” of consciousness (and his theory of the self as “situated embodied agent”). I argue that the importance of temporal positioning for the self cannot be overstated. Indeed, the theme of the self’s temporality is key in nearly all the works discussed in this book. Approaching consciousness as central to the human, and realizing its embodied nature leads to the question of how to trace the borders of a self which, though a trajectory not a thing, is constructed and changes according to metaphorically imagined limits. Here both the concepts of narrative immersion and framing come into play. Marie-Laure Ryan’s writings on the active nature of narrative immersion (the ability to step back and experience immersion on two levels) and Christian Metz’s theory of photography as death both inform my approach to the experience of reading and viewing film as well as what I refer to as the meta-body. Chapter 2, entitled “Testing the Human: Trauma, Memory and Consciousness” begins with the analysis of memory, violence and the human in British novelist Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow. Here an ironically detached narrator tells in reverse the life of a Nazi doctor who dies after spending years living incognito in the United States. The reversal of perspective as the reader follows the protagonist’s story (and his multiple name changes) disrupts the interpretive process and makes the atrocities of the Holocaust appear to be the only events that “make sense” to the narrator who believes that the murders he sees in reverse are magical acts of creation. Here, I argue that the narrator’s lack of comprehension is linked to his lack of visceral engagement which allows him to watch and comment on the events of the protagonist’s life as though from the safe distance of a bird’s eye view. The instability of memory and the role it plays in the cognitive processes necessary to maintain a clear sense of self is explored as a central theme in Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2000). As in Time’s Arrow, here trauma is crucial to the temporal structure of the self whose potential for modification

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appears in the visceral link between writing and the body as the main character must tattoo crucial information about himself on his own body in order not to forget it. Questions of access to the mind, self-mastery and the rapport between writing and the body dominate my discussion of this reversed narrative. The viewer’s detective-like role in attempting to overcome the same confusion the character feels is one that stimulates a different kind of viewing, highlighting the mind’s drive to reconstruct a linear temporal trajectory from fragmented or confused narrative elements. Nolan’s film is particularly fascinating as it is not simply a reversed narrative. It intercuts scenes from a parallel narrative on the same character (filmed in black and white) that run forward with those scenes from the central, reversed narrative. In this way, Nolan highlights the cognitive dissonance of a main character who is himself confused about his identity and purpose in life while frustrating the viewer’s attempts to do the same. As a result, the disorienting experience this film produces changes the way we view film and ourselves. These first two works which present murderers whose crimes are buried by self-ignorance argue that abuse of power and violence are both justified and perpetuated through selective forgetting, yet they also suggest that the inability to forget is equally disruptive. Indeed, it is viewed as inhuman. Seamlessly sliding into and out of the meta-body requires a skillful balance between remembering and forgetting, one which is both fragile and ­potentially problematic; yet, the inability to navigate such narrative immersion also comports serious risks. The theme of the inability to forget as a traumatic and ­potentially dehumanizing state is recurrent in the narratives studied here. I suggest that the omnipresent and increasingly powerful forms of external memory (in the “cloud,” but also in smartphones, thumb drives and many other storage devices) have both eroded the general state of the average person’s mnemonic abilities and contributed to a feeling that one can no longer escape past foibles as in pre-Internet days. While the enhanced memory capabilities are a boon in many ways, they also make one’s past increasingly accessible in ways that can be damaging (e.g. today employers regularly use internet searches to see what ­applicants have done and others have posted about them). This link between technology and the seemingly limitless extension of memory remains metaphorical in most of these narratives; they come to the fore most explicitly in the posthuman stories of Amenábar, Jones and Piglia which are explored at the end of this study. In Chapter 3, entitled “The Phantom Limb: Specters, Trauma, and Metabody,” I examine how a spectral other appears as a palliative to traumatic loss. Each of the first two works treated in this chapter presents a case of potentially supernatural spectrality of an other as phantom limb generated as a means of dealing with the loss of a loved one. In American novelist Don DeLillo’s The

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Body Artist (2001), a female performance artist who must deal with the sudden loss of her husband perceives an apparently imaginary version of him who she hopes will help her recover her sense of self. French director François Ozon’s film entitled Sous le sable (Under the Sand, 2000) also deals with a woman’s loss of her husband. Here the spectral nature of the husband, whom the protagonist’s mind continues to place in her home after his disappearance (and probable death), is effaced by a naturalistic depiction of his ghostly presence. As do many of the works studied here, this film makes a strong argument for the key role of fiction in the very substance of the self, and its role in survival. Having explored DeLillo’s novella and Ozon’s film, I turn to Marie Darrieussecq, a French Basque writer who preceded these works with a novella exploring similar terrain though with a different – and in many ways more overt – focus on cognition and the concept of the lost loved one as phantom limb. Her second novel entitled Naissance des fantômes (My Phantom Husband, 1998) sets in motion the drama of a wife who must cope with the abrupt and inexplicable disappearance of her husband. Mixing the fantastic genre with that of a scientifically tinged cognitive realism, Darrieussecq creates a narrative of Darwinian humanism15 which functions on two primary levels: the biological (both micro and macro) and the imaginative. That is, on the one hand the scientific and, on the other, the poetic. Yet these levels also correspond to those of the brain (body) and the mind. Darrieussecq’s use of metaphor mimics the process by which the data of the body is turned into narrative by the mind. For each of the female protagonists of the three works examined in this chapter, the question will become whether they can see themselves as newly autonomous after the loss of their spouse or whether their newly solitary identities will lock them in a stagnant temporality. In each instance, the temporality and the direction of the self are crucial. After these three explorations of the tension between competing views of the self as either autonomous or relational, I examine in depth the concept of the meta-body. Building upon the concepts of the embodied mind, the relational self, narrative identity, immersion, Dennett’s theory of the self as “center of narrative gravity” and Theory of Mind, I present the meta-body as a dynamic which results from the interplay of one’s lived body, the images and spaces it encounters and the trajectories it follows. The meta-body is at once temporal, directional and narrative (since narrative is our means of “feeling time”). Though not coterminous with the self, the meta-body functions as a kind of 15

By this term I mean an approach that posits the difference between humans and animals as one of degree not of kind and which emphasizes the similarities of human and animal cognition.

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space for the self, one that remains in movement. It is modified each time we project our selves into the difference between actually lived spaces and virtually lived spaces. It is enacted when we look into the face of the other whose presence is crucial to our selves (with whom we make plans for the future and share memories of the past) and when we plunge into virtual, cinematic or textual space. Chapter 4, entitled “Survival: Human and Posthuman,” examines the question of the self’s reconstitution and survival from a different angle. The first three works I discuss in this chapter present the question of personal identity as it is challenged by physical paralysis. I begin with an extended analysis of American painter and director Julian Schnabel’s film Le scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, 2007) about a French tetraplegic’s humanist fight for survival through writing, followed by a brief discussion of Spanish/ Chilean writer/director Alejandro Amenábar’s controversial film Mar adentro (The Sea Inside, 2004) about real-life tetraplegic euthanasia activist Ramón Sampedro. I argue here that Schnabel’s reworking of the memoir (by JeanDominique Bauby), on which his film is based, emphasizes a trajectory of recuperation that is characteristic of redemptive humanist narrative. Amenábar’s film, I argue, also highlights humanist values, though here the main character attains the objective of preserving his authentic self principally by destroying his body rather than attempting to assure his survival through a work of art (as in Schnabel’s film). In both cases, the theme of recuperation of a lost self and its survival lead my study back to the definition of the human and toward an analysis of posthuman survival. This chapter then moves on to an examination of several other works which all engage with the problem of posthuman survival from different generic and ethical standpoints. After discussing the basic tenets of theorist N. Katherine Hayles concerning the category of the posthuman (a term whose meaning remains in flux – Cary Wolfe’s reading of it, which I also discuss briefly, differs greatly from that of Hayles) I turn to three films and a final novel, all of which present a future world where cloning, computer simulated dreams, and life extension (and suspension) are possible. Amenábar’s Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes, 1997) tells a story of survival by downloading the brain’s contents into an advanced computer. The ethical choice that the main character is faced with at the end of the film (either to become an embodied human again or to remain in the virtual world of the computer) is explored as emblematic of the dilemmas that the posthuman forces us to confront. Spanish writer/director Nacho Vigalondo’s Cronocrímenes (Time Crimes, 2007) places the problem of posthuman survival somewhere between horror and science fiction – positing the problem of multiple, cloned selves coexisting­

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and the macabre solution each avatar comes to. British director Duncan Jones’ Moon (2010) presents a different solution to this dilemma for personal identity. When cloning becomes a reality for these protagonists, the question becomes how personal identity may be defined and preserved as well as whether it should be preserved. I examine these films in light of British philosopher Derek Parfit’s “reductionist” concept of personal identity (which states that personal identity may be “impersonally described”), arguing that Jones’ Moon is the most radical work in the study as it best presents the possibility of transpersonal survival. Finally, this chapter takes an extended look at Argentinean novelist Ricardo Piglia’s novel La ciudad ausente (The Absent City, 1992) and the ways in which he explores what posthuman survival looks like when it is imagined as a disembodied networked consciousness. This text, whose political resonance and narrative innovation make it one of the most significant post-dictatorship novels to come out of Argentina, equates posthuman survival with suffering, loss of self and the search for authenticity (in the form of a lost original language). Here I argue that the liberal humanist paradigm (of the autonomous self), which most critics see the text abandoning is ironically reinscribed by the recuperative project to extend the life of the central character called “La máquina” (the machine), which consists of a recording and broadcasting device stocked with the memories of a woman whose husband could not bear the thought of her untimely death. The reasoning behind this study’s title The Persistence of the Human should now be clear. I chose this expression to highlight two central aspects of the representation of consciousness and personal identity in contemporary film and literature (not just as a nod to Dalí’s “Persistence of Memory” or Bergson’s durée). First, persistence is meant to emphasize the temporal aspect both of the concept of the human (as a narratively constructed, unfolding, self-aware being) and secondly, the continued presence of the humanist paradigm in both humanist and posthumanist narrative. In the final section of this book I argue then that in many posthuman narratives the human remains a key principle even if only as a nostalgic longing for the anticipated loss of humanity in the coming posthuman era.16

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By “posthuman era” I refer to the increasingly tight mesh between flesh and technology by which human capabilities (both physical and mental) are being transformed and extended as well as the attendant philosophical questions regarding probable changes in personal identity.

chapter 1

The Human, Consciousness and Its Temporality As philosopher Bernard Stiegler argues in Technics and Time, the human arises and constitutes itself through its appropriation and transformation of “organized inorganic matter.” If with paleontologist Leroi-Gourhan, upon whose work Stiegler bases much of his analysis, we view the emergence of human society progressively in accord with its increasingly sophisticated usage of technics, we easily see how each shapes the other while the Rousseauist “natural man” shorn from its reciprocal technical transformation of the world falls away as an illusion. This interdependent relationship between the human and the technical is what Stiegler calls “originary prostheticity.” The fact that the human is defined precisely by its relation to the virtual and the prosthetic tends to blur the dividing lines between the “natural self” and the “technological self” to which some humanists have been opposed – especially in its currently fetishized forms.1 At the heart of this argument on the construction of the human is an image of the self as porous and dependent on reciprocal support that is internalized to such an extent that this reciprocity defines the self. As we will see in our discussion of cognitive science and philosophy of mind’s approach to the self as floating subject position in need of temporal, spatial and affective markers to situate itself, there can be no self without a working through of the movement between self and other (both nonhuman and human). But this is normally a transparent or invisible process, one which we are not aware of, such that when the other’s radical change or absence makes the necessity of this rapport clear, the self attempts to replace, reconstruct, or somehow return to this changed or missing other. This sense of loss of the newly discovered other in the self, the other as self (and the “self as other” as Paul Ricœur convincingly argues in Oneself as Another) is what triggers the classic humanist move to recuperate a past state which appears as somehow more authentic than the present one. Thus the view of the relationship between the human and what lies ­beyond it may be applied to the process by which the self’s narrative ­relies on an ­other

1 For a powerful rebuttal to those (specifically Jean Baudrillard) whom Vivian Sobchack sees as glamorizing the technologized, posthuman body – a model to which she opposes the natural body capable of feeling pain – see “Beating the Meat/Surviving the Text, or How to Get Out of the Century Alive” in Sobchack (2004).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004323674_003

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as “prosthetic”2 a crucial rapport by which the self is both invested by and invests the mental representation of a vital other. As Ángel Loureiro writes in the preface to his Levinassian study The Ethics of Autobiography “There is no self without an other who listens constantly, even in the midst of the deepest silence or the greatest solitude” (xvi). I explore this concept in greater detail in my discussion of the prosthetic other in Chapter 2. For now, I would like to emphasize that taking embodied consciousness as the motor of the sense of self has several consequences, especially when the self is viewed as f­ undamentally relational. This is apparent in the basic struggle present in much of contemporary literature and film between a desire to see the self as autonomous and the realization that it is relational. I turn now to a brief discussion of some of the concepts that historically have helped define the notion of the human and the attendant ideology of humanism. Humanism There are many brands of humanism, a term which is notoriously difficult to define,3 but which, in its various incarnations, generally holds subjective human experience (and especially consciousness or the mind) as central, while 2 For the uses and misuses of the metaphor of the prosthetic see Smith and Morra eds. (2006). See in particular Vivian Sobchack’s chapter entitled “A Leg to Stand On” where she decries the usage of this metaphor where it implies a pleasurable and powerful relationship between the human and nonhuman: “the scandal of the metaphor is that it has become a fetishized and ‘unfleshed-out’ catchword that functions vaguely as the ungrounded and ‘floating signifier’ for a broad and variegated critical discourse on technoculture that includes little of these prosthetic realities” (21). In defense of my own usage of the metaphor (following that of Stiegler) I would say that it adheres to Sobchack’s description of the phenomenological experience of an actual prosthesis (her own): “in most situations, the prosthetic as lived in use is usually transparent; that is, it is as ‘absent’ (to use Drew Leder’s term) as is the rest of our body when we’re focused outward to the world and successfully engaged in the various projects of our daily life” (22). In the sense that Sobchack suggests that an actual prosthesis should be considered “incorporated not ‘into’ or ‘on’ but ‘as’ the subject” (22), I suggest here that the mutual investing of self and other is a normally transparent, integrated experience which becomes opaque (i.e. visible) in moments of crisis when a disruption of the self’s narrative trajectory points either to its absence or radical change. I would argue that this usage is free of the “techofetishism” that Sobchack rightly criticizes. 3 In Humanism (1997), Tony Davies states that “It [humanism] is one of those words, like ‘realism’ or ‘socialism,’ whose range of possible uses runs from the pedantically exact to the cosmically vague. Like them, too, it carries, even in the most neutrally descriptive contexts,

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conferring the greatest importance upon human dignity and potential. Some of the most influential forms that humanism has taken include Christian humanism (in which all humans derive their value from their origin as creatures of God, with Christ as the model of the “perfect man”), socialist humanism (which posits that by eliminating class divisions each person may benefit and be protected equally in society), liberal humanism (the free subject who owns herself and whose stable identity and agency are defined by a rational mind) and secular humanism (which defends the essential value of human life without reference to a divine origin). These last two models which overlap and which I will refer to interchangeably as humanism and liberal humanism, propose essentially an optimistic view that human rationality will ultimately afford the answers to the key questions of our society. Because it posits, implicitly or explicitly, an essence to “the human” which must be protected, humanism, in its many forms, has opened itself up to the same criticisms as other universal concepts (such as Classical Liberalism and Marxism). Theorists and philosophers regularly defend some form of humanism (be it secular, scientific or other) in an attempt to build a moral system based upon the philosophy that human life and society are inherently worth preserving and perpetuating indefinitely. Tzvetan Todorov and Kwame Anthony Appiah constitute two prominent examples of thinkers who have recently defended their own brands of humanism. To this list one might add Edward Said and Amin Maalouf among many others.4 Poststructuralist philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard have all questioned the assumptions of this humanism while insisting upon its discursive status.5 In The Imperfect Garden, Todorov begins with a wide-ranging discussion of what he sees as the foundations of humanism and liberal humanism (as a pillar of the liberal democratic state):6 powerful connotations, positive or negative, of ideological allegiance, its very imprecision making it all the more serviceable as a shibboleth of approval or deprecation” (3). 4 See Todorov (1993/1989, 2002/1989) and Appiah (2005). To this list one might also add essayist and novelist Amin Maalouf’s In the Name of Identity (2001), which posits the need for a “dual identity” based on multiple belongings so as to avoid the deadly consequences of nationalism and ethnocentrism. See also Said (2003). 5 See for example Foucault (1973), Derrida (1982) and Lyotard (1991). 6 Hans Bertens summarizes in a succinct way the general components of “liberal humanism” which he calls a “philosophical/political cluster of ideas in which the ultimate autonomy and self-sufficiency of the subject are taken for granted” (6). Here is how Bertens defines the term: “Liberal humanism assumes that all of us are essentially free and that we have at least to some extent created ourselves on the basis of our individual experiences. […] Because of

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The word humanist has at least three quite distinct, if significantly related, meanings. The oldest, imposed by the Renaissance, corresponds to people who devote themselves to the study of the humanities, in particular to history and the literature of Greek and Latin antiquity; hence they valorize this study or its subject. The most recent is a purely affective meaning: “humanists” are those who behave humanely toward others or who tell us that we must treat human beings decently; in short, they are philanthropists. But I am using the word in neither its historical nor its moral sense; I am using it to designate a doctrine that grants the human being a particular role. Just what is this role? It consists, first of all, of initiating one’s own acts (or some portion of them), of being free to accomplish them or not – therefore of being able to act at one’s will. The distinctive feature of modernity is constitutive of humanism: man also (and not only nature or God) decides his fate. In addition, it implies that the ultimate end of these acts is a human being, not suprahuman entities (God, goodness, justice) or infrahuman ones (pleasures, money, power). Humanism, finally, marks out the space in which the agents of these acts evolve: the space of all human beings, and of them alone. (Todorov 29) Note here the distinction that Todorov draws between the suprahuman and the infrahuman, a distinction which relies implicitly on a certain view of what constitutes a “natural human.” He also attributes to humans a “particular role” which elevates and specifically separates them from the rest of the animal kingdom (as they occupy an exceptional “space of all human beings, and of them alone”). This hierarchy (infrahuman, human, suprahuman) assumes that the truly human exists exclusively outside the other two categories, that it can be “purified” of them (in short, this is a moral “human” who is, in particular, free from base desires and who enjoys an effective agency “being able to act at one’s will”). Yet, “the human” must be thought in its relationships not only in the social sphere but also in the technical and artistic spheres whereby exteriorization (in Stiegler’s terms) and projection of sentience (in Elaine Scarry’s terms) establish mutual ties of embodied influence. This means that “external” influences­

that freedom, we ourselves are supposedly the source of the value and the meaning we attach to things. As liberal subjects we are not the sum of our experiences but can somehow stand outside experience: we are not defined by our circumstances but are what we are because our ‘self’ has been there all along and has, moreover, remained remarkably inviolate and stable” (6).

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and “infrahuman” (or “superhuman”) desires can never be truly separated from the human as they shape it constantly. As we will see, these mutual ties are played out in artistic production and reception in the act of immersion in narrative embodiment. This embodiment, which I examine under the concept of the “meta-body,” is – much like the human itself – a hybrid that brings into play the lived body, the imagined body (including how it interacts with other bodies and the world) and their temporality. The “human” (understood as the core of what makes one human which humanism defends and “posthumanism” is often feared to do violence to) is not an easily separable, isolatable “natural” core.

Human Freedom

According to Todorov, whose recuperative project aims to save humanism from the misdeeds of universalist thought, the exaltation of human freedom at the heart of humanism does not necessarily lead to the abuses with which history is replete: one of the most famous formulas connected to the origin of humanism, Descartes’ promise to “make ourselves [like] the lords and masters of nature” (Discourse on the Method, pt. vi, Philosophical Writings, i, pp. 142–143), refers less to humanist doctrine itself than to this prideful perversion: Humanists affirm that man is not nature’s slave, not that nature must become his slave. This Cartesian promise, which is located in the tradition of Ficino or of Francis Bacon, belongs rather to the tradition of the scientistic family. Humanists do not claim the omnipotence of man but deny the omnipotence of God or nature; they claim that alongside the given there is a place, and a considerable place, for the chosen. Nor are we to conclude that the possibility of intervening in our fate leads inevitably to an infatuation with utopias, the desire to build paradise on earth – which, as we know from the experience of the twentieth century, is more likely to resemble hell. The utopian temptation is more closely related to scientism than to humanism; it rests on the conviction that total mastery of historical processes is possible – which contradicts the hypothesis of liberty. By affirming the role of liberty in man, the humanists know that he can use it in the service of good – but also of evil. The construction of a city in which evil would be excluded plays no part in the humanist project. (37)

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Thus, for Todorov, human freedom does not necessarily imply a desire for total mastery, and in fact is opposed to it since one person or group’s total mastery signifies the loss of what is centrally human for another (freedom). This is a brand of ethical humanism that is centered on the principle that one’s liberty ends where another’s begins.7 Let us note, however, that liberal humanism exalts art as the sign of the inner depth and freedom of a conscious, unified self (often referred to as the “liberal humanist subject”). This view carries with it assumptions concerning the stability of the “inner self” and personal identity which are bound up with the notion of conscious autonomy – an ability to act in the world which, while not necessarily leading to attempts to control others, nonetheless posits a separation of self and other which can be used to justify the same.

What Makes One Human?

Elaine Scarry’s influential work The Body in Pain traces the history of human creation as a series of projections. Scarry maintains that art is valued essentially because it is seen as the embodiment or receptacle for the projection of the “sentience” of the human subject who made it. The sentience projected reflects a subjectivity inherent in consciousness. This disembodying tendency in human creation (which Scarry follows in the move from “weapon” to “tool” to “object” to “commodity” to “capital,” each being further detached from the embodiment of the previous element) reflects a desire to express, capture and protect what is viewed as the core of humanity within the self. The desire for survival is carried forth upon the strength of a hopeful belief in human perfectibility (the ability to both master the self and assure its survival – or its downfall – as famously formulated by Rousseau, whose vision of this faculty was highly ambivalent).8 7 The same basic principle that John Stuart Mill states in Chapter 1 of On Liberty: “The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it” (28). 8 The neologism “perfectibilité” first appeared in Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755) as what distinguishes “civilized” humans from animals: “Mais, quand les difficultés qui environnent toutes ces questions laisseraient quelque lieu de disputer sur cette différence de l’homme et de l’animal, il y a une autre qualité très spécifique qui les distingue, et sur laquelle il ne peut y avoir de contestation: c’est la faculté de se perfectionner, faculté qui, à l’aide des circonstances, développe successivement toutes les autres, et réside parmi nous tant dans l’espèce que dans l’individu; au lieu qu’un animal est au bout de quelques mois ce qu’il sera toute sa vie, et son espèce au bout de mille ans ce qu’elle

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Current “posthumanist” movements can be closely linked to this strain in the humanist tradition first because they deepen the already fundamental relationship between the human and the nonhuman (technics) and because they represent the (radical) extension of the original project of human perfectibility (by which scientific and social efforts are harnessed ostensibly to “perfect” and extend human capacities). The notion of perfectibility, as Rousseau sees it, itself points to what is widely agreed to be a fundamental human characteristic: that of potential. Cognitive science has attributed this potential for adaptation to the capacity of the human brain to make new neuronal connections (neuroplasticity). But this very adaptability of the brain also supports other faculties (such as empathy) that art and politics celebrate as distinctively human. Coupling empathy as one of the exalted capabilities of the human mind with the basic humanist tenet that human life must be preserved demonstrates the centrality of a certain ethics to humanist thought. Yet, it is not only the brain’s strengths but its potential fragility, as psychology and cognitive science have shown, which is an essentially human feature. The brain’s neuronal complexity, at the heart of our capacity for metaphor, both vastly increases our cognitive abilities (for example to see the world as possibility and thus material for fiction and innovation) and opens us up to psychological attacks that the “lower” animals are immune to. Thus, “the human” may be defined as much by its strengths and potential as by its characteristic limits. Yet it can be argued (as it has been by Michel Foucault and more recently by N. Katherine Hayles among others) that the concept of “the human” is essentially a social construct that evolves over time and is now undergoing a moment of historical adaptation. In Sources of the Self, his classic study of the modern concept of the self, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor explores how the notion of interiority (the idea that we have an authentic self buried deep within us) and affect were, from the late 17th century, increasingly associated with what it meant to be était la première année de ces mille ans.” For Rousseau, it is this very perfectibility which risks turning one into a tyrant: “Pourquoi l’homme seul est-il sujet à devenir imbécile? N’est-ce point qu’il retourne ainsi dans son état primitif, et que, tandis que la bête, qui n’a rien acquis et qui n’a rien non plus à perdre, reste toujours avec son instinct, l’homme reperdant par la vieillesse ou d’autres accidents tout ce que sa perfectibilité lui avait fait acquérir, retombe ainsi plus bas que la bête même? Il serait triste pour nous d’être forcés de convenir, que cette faculté distinctive, et presque illimitée, est la source de tous les malheurs de l’homme; que c’est elle qui le tire, à force de temps, de cette condition originaire, dans laquelle il coulerait des jours tranquilles et innocents; que c’est elle, qui faisait éclore avec les siècles ses lumières et ses erreurs, ses vices et ses vertus, le rend à la longue le tyran de lui-même et de la nature” (90).

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human. The artist, it was thought increasingly beginning in late 18th and early 19th century romanticism, was that special person whose key strength lay in the ability to communicate to others a more deeply felt and better expressed humanity (ostensibly by first exploring his or her “inner self”). Thus, for ­Taylor, the modern concept of humanity, or “the human” is built upon a sense of unique inwardness, what he calls an “orientation toward the good” (that is, a moral sense) and the placing of our lives into a narrative (a sense of where we have been, where we are and where we are headed – especially with respect to an ethical ideal). Narrative’s role in identity formation is key for many theorists and philosophers, including the French philosopher Paul Ricœur who in Time and Narrative posits a theory of “narrative identity” summarized later in Oneself as Another9 a work in which he examines the way that action and narrative interweave creating a “sediment” of the self. This sediment is character, created through a repetition that combines the simultaneous presence of two seemingly opposed ways to conceive of personal identity: as ipse (uniqueness or selfhood) and idem (identity as sameness). In Oneself as Another Ricœur insists upon the temporal dimension of the self since “the person of whom we are speaking and the agent on whom the action depends have a history, are their own history” (113). He goes on to state categorically that “personal identity, […] can be articulated only in the temporal dimension of human existence” (114). It is via a theory of narrative that Ricœur approaches a theory of the self. On this view, it is narrative emplotment that allows for “character and keeping one’s word” (118). This latter concept, that the self as idem (or sameness) may be reconciled with a dynamic yet unique self (or ipse) by keeping one’s word, is derived from the temporal aspect of the self. It is as a relation to itself and to others (to one’s past self as an other) that the ethical effort to keep a promise plays out, not as repetition of the same but as repetition with difference (even if only temporal difference) allowing for the narrative substrate of the self to take hold. All of these temporal considerations are closely tied not only to the capacity to project oneself into a possible future (created by proffering the promise one must later keep), but also through memory.

9 In Oneself as Another Ricœur explains that the concept of “narrative identity” means taking “the following chain of assertions as valid: self-understanding is an interpretation; interpretation of the self, in turn, finds in the narrative, among other signs and symbols, a privileged form of mediation; the latter borrows from history as well as from fiction, making a life story a fictional history or, if one prefers, a historical fiction, interweaving the historiographic style of biographies with the novelistic style of imaginary autobiographies” (114).

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Descartes (in Discourse on Method, 1637) and John Locke (in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690) defined the self as essentially appearing to itself with clarity (positing a self-aware, or self-conscious subject), others in the twentieth century such as Charles Taylor and Paul Ricœur emphasize the situated, narrative and ethical aspects of the self. While Locke bases his concept of personal identity on memory and upon consciousness “extending backwards to unite thought and action”10 for Taylor and Ricœur personal identity is relational being constituted by relationships and narratives that help situate a life in a meaningful trajectory. What becomes clear is that the split between these two groups, both of which favor the role of the conscious mind in creating and maintaining the self, centers on the body. Yet, while the first group tends to favor the mind and rationality over embodiment as determining factors in establishing who one is and the second tends to emphasize embodiment, both agree that consciousness (defined both as first-person sensual perception and mental self-­ awareness) and memory are key to the self. Consciousness Consciousness has been famously defined by Thomas Nagel as “what it is like” to be someone, with a strong emphasis on the first-person perspective.11 The modernist interest in consciousness of writers such as Virginia Woolf, André Gide and James Joyce as well as the later experiments of writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar have given way, after many years of transformations which passed through the experiments in depersonalization of the 10 11

Locke (2004 [1690]) 276. The term consciousness is, of course, multivalent. The online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy outlines at least five main areas of investigation of consciousness: sentience, wakefulness, self-consciousness, “what it is like,” subject of conscious states and transitive consciousness. Here is how Nagel’s definition is presented: “Thomas Nagel’s (1974) famous ‘what it is like’ criterion aims to capture another and perhaps more subjective notion of being a conscious organism. According to Nagel, a being is conscious just if there is ‘something that it is like’ to be that creature, i.e., some subjective way the world seems or appears from the creature’s mental or experiential point of view. In Nagel’s example, bats are conscious because there is something that it is like for a bat to experience its world through its echo-locatory senses, even though we humans from our human point of view cannot emphatically understand what such a mode of consciousness is like from the bat’s own point of view.” For a detailed discussion of these different areas, see http:// plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/.

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nouveau roman, to a contemporary fascination with the body and the mind present on both sides of the Atlantic which takes consciousness again as the defining characteristic of the human. A similar move has occurred in cinema where films such as The Matrix series (Wachowski, 1999–2003), I, Robot (Proyas, 2004), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry, 2004), Avatar (Cameron, 2009), Inception (Nolan, 2011); even children’s films such as Inside Out (Docter, Del Carmen, 2015) among many others have examined the nexus between mind, identity and embodiment.12 In The Feeling of What Happens, a study of the neuroscience behind the phenomenon of consciousness, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio highlights essential features of the brain while insisting on the fact that it must be viewed as an “embodied brain” (one that is intimately dependent upon the feedback of the body whose physical structure must be taken into account): …it is easy to envision how consciousness is likely to have opened the way in human evolution to a new order of creations not possible without it: conscience, religion, social and political organizations, the arts, the sciences, and technology. Perhaps even more compellingly, consciousness is the critical biological function that allows us to know sorrow or know joy, to know suffering or know pleasure, to sense embarrassment or pride, to grieve for lost love or lost life. Whether individually experienced or observed, pathos is a by-product of consciousness and so is desire. None of those personal states would be known to each of us without consciousness. (Damasio 4) Thus, we can see how the very qualities that are identified as being quintessentially human are dependent upon consciousness which in turn is what produces our sense of self in the world. While distinguishing between what he calls “core consciousness” (consisting of fundamental perceptual capabilities and a basic sense of self) from “extended consciousness” (which provides “an elaborate sense of self” and greater temporal and spatial awareness), Damasio contends that consciousness is necessary for the human organism’s very survival. In Philosophy in the Flesh, cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson argue that the fact of the mind’s embodiment coupled with the fundamentally metaphorical nature of thought and linguistic expression 12

The growing mainstream obsession with the mind and cognitive science more generally may also be seen in the popularity of “brain game” websites such as Lumosity.com (whose motto is “Discover what your brain can do”) which claims more than 50 million users worldwide.

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mean that a rethinking of Western philosophy is in order. They point out (as does Elaine Scarry in different terms) that human embodiment is what serves as the first and most essential framework for perceiving, understanding and representing the world. Because the body’s perceptual faculties require a simplification and categorization process (rendered necessary, for example, by the excess of receptors in the eye which would otherwise send too great an amount of information to the brain), perceptual information must be canalized into a limited number of channels and categories. This is a process which requires the ability to group viewed objects into sets with specific characteristics rather than as completely unique items, thus freeing up the brain to notice only significant pattern changes (for example when a shelf of books appears in one’s peripheral vision, the brain will reduce the work of recognition to categorizing the shapes perceived simply as books rather than analyzing the characteristics of each book separately). In addition to the process of filtering and categorizing, the mind fills in gaps in information – assuming that an incomplete but familiar image may simply be completed with remembered or assumed data. The structure of the eye, for example, is such that the mind must compensate for its blind spot, by scanning the visual field through regular movements (which are so rapid that we do not normally notice them), rather than simply focusing on a single point. The brain must then piece together the overlapping visual information in each image it receives, filling in what is missing from each image and creating the illusion of a single, smooth, complete view – much like the work of the mind pieces together and fills in the blanks of our life stories to create the illusion of a cohesive, stable self.13 Yet, despite this ability to fill in gaps, the position of the eyes in front of the face necessarily colors one’s view of the world – through an awareness of larger gaps, such as the space behind one, that are less frequently filled or more difficult to fill. The mind is embodied but it only has direct access to, and full confidence in its capacity to fill in data about what lies in front of it. Assumptions must be made about other spaces, other times, other minds but we are nonetheless aware that greater doubt surrounds what we cannot see. The embodied mind uses the body it is in as a frame, and as a first paradigm against which to compare other objects. This is why, Lakoff and Johnson argue, one projects certain features, for example a front and back, onto objects that do not have them (such as trees).

13

On the mind’s ability to “fill in gaps” and the importance of subconscious awareness (roughly equivalent to Damasio’s core consciousness), see Mlodinow (2013).

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This focus on the body has had an impact on narratology, film studies and new media studies in which theorists are beginning to place the body at the center of the affective process whereby the possible worlds offered to spectators and readers are experienced through the embodied mind. Daniel Punday (Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology) has used some of Lakoff and Johnson’s insights on embodiment to argue that narrative texts should be seen as sharing the same marks of projection of corporeality as has David MacDougall in the area of cinema studies (Film, Ethnology, and the Image: The Corporeal Image). Also in Film Studies, Laura Marks (in The Skin of the Film) and Vivian ­Sobchack (in The Address of the Eye) both take an embodied approach to the experience of cinema spectatorship. In the field of New Media studies, the pioneering work of Marie-Laure Ryan (in Narrative as Virtual Reality and Narrative Across Media) and Mark N.B. Hansen (in New Philosophy for New Media) both insist upon the active role that the body plays for the receiver or viewer of artwork in the immersive process of interpretation. We will return to the work of some of these theorists at several points in this study; for the time being I would like to insist upon the fact that what emerges from the cognitive science, philosophy of mind and the narratology, film and new media studies mentioned above is that not only it is impossible to neglect the key role of the body in perception and cognition (i.e. in consciousness and reception), but one must take this primordial filtering tool as a porous twoway cloth – which filters and categorizes the information that it receives and adapts to the structures and images that it comes into contact with. There rages, of course, a complex debate around the specifics of how consciousness functions and how it is brought about. As we will see, too often, especially – but not only – in philosophy of mind and theory, otherwise compatible positions are radicalized in order to draw starker contrasts between them. In the face of this tendency, this study marshals insights from different theories of consciousness in order to show how central points common to all may help us better understand contemporary narrative works.

Daniel Dennett on Consciousness: The Human as Virtual Machine

One of the key voices in philosophy of mind debates for more than twenty-five years has been that of philosopher Daniel Dennett, whose multidisciplinary work has also had an impact on evolutionary psychology and other fields. At the end of Dennett’s convincing work combining insights from neuropsychology, cognitive science and philosophy of mind, provocatively entitled

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Consciousness Explained (1991), he negates one of the central tenets of what Charles Taylor has identified as the “modern self” (based on the concept of interiority and an inner, “authentic” self). Having argued extensively against the notion that consciousness is an ineffable process by which an inner self receives sensations and is shaped by them, a concept he calls the “Cartesian Theater,” Dennett proposes a model for consciousness that includes no core, but rather which is a process constantly renewed by the millions of interconnections between neurons in a dynamic information gathering system of the brain which he calls the “Multiple Drafts” model. In this model, the brain works like a team of editors, constantly revising and comparing the information it receives, yet never reaching a definitive text. His disembodied approach to consciousness, based as it is on a privileging of the process of content gathering rather than the corporeal aspect of its filtering and storage (unlike Francisco Varela, George Lakoff or Mark Johnson) leads him to assert that what we think of as the “self” is really nothing more than a “center of narrative gravity,” i.e. a fictional story we constantly revise – like the brain compensating for gaps in visual information. Here he focuses (like Locke before him) on the question of continuity in constituting a coherent sense of self. As we will see with D ­ erek Parfit, whose teleportation thought experiment imagines a “person” being teleported from one distant place to the next by the transfer of “psychological continuity,”14 Dennett concludes that this sense of self is simply information which as such is not intrinsically dependent upon the corporeal form it happens to take: If you think of yourself as a center of narrative gravity […] your existence depends on the persistence of that narrative […] which could theoretically survive indefinitely many switches of medium, be teleported as readily (in principle) as the evening news, and stored indefinitely as sheer information. If what you are is that organization of information that has structured your body’s control system (or, to put it in its more usual provocative form, if what you are is the program that runs on your brain’s 14 In Reasons and Persons, Parfit sets forth a “reductive” theory which posits that personal identity can be “impersonally described” (i.e. a third person, scientific perspective can catalogue all that is essential in a given person’s identity and theoretically transfer these elements once identified into another body without loss). The teleportation thought experiment to which Parfit refers is a reference to the original Star Trek television show, and posits that such a machine could theoretically copy, destroy and reassemble a person on another planet without loss of personal identity as long as psychological continuity has not been lost.

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computer), then you could in principle survive the death of your body as intact as a program can survive the destruction of the computer on which it was first created and first run. (Dennett 430) Yet Dennett does not abandon the essentials of what are usually recognized as characterizing humans: self-awareness (or consciousness), rationality, the capacity to suffer and the desire to survive. This is so despite the fact that he defines suffering as simply more information coupled with self-awareness (arguing that humans have a greater capacity for suffering simply because their more developed brains are better able than those of other animals to comprehend the import of having one’s life plans, or “narrative,” interrupted).15 Note that, though Dennett rejects metaphysical explanations for the self, such as those that posit a soul, he shares an immediate interest in the overall goal 15 In Kinds of Minds (1996) Dennett notes that with respect to the pain felt by animals, “to matter – whether or not we call them pains, or conscious states, or experiences – there must be an enduring subject to whom they matter because they are a source of suffering” (161). In What is Posthumanism? (2010) Cary Wolfe cites this as evidence that Dennett is in fact perpetuating the same Cartesianism that he explicitly rejects – as his theory ostensibly requires a “self” to be present for language’s representation (something Wolfe argues language cannot do). Yet the “center of narrative gravity” need not be formulated, as Wolfe seems to view it, as a separate instantiation tantamount to recreating the homunculus in the mind that Dennett rejects. What Dennett describes is an ongoing process, self as direction not substance (with no inner spectator), thus despite Dennett’s representational language, the concept of flow interruption which trauma constitutes fits well with the system theory that Wolfe defends. That is to say that what we call “suffering” (in the privileged sense of conscious awareness of pain as unexpectedly modifying life narrative) may be simply viewed as more information which human consciousness, taken as a system, deals with as interruption – i.e. a new element which redirects its systemic informational flow. Wolfe argues that Dennett’s use of the concept of “enduring subject” posits a difference between humans and nonhumans which is not simply of degree but of kind (suggesting a certain metaphysics). The difference here is explained by the way in which animals and humans perceive time (and thus their capacity to build up the fiction of an enduring subject). The human ability, the need, to emplot action in narrative time is what gives rise to the “center of narrative gravity.” Wolfe highlights in particular what he sees as the ethical problems that arise from the distinctions that Dennett draws: “And just as different forms of being human in the world are re-written, as they are [in Dennett’s work], in terms of a homogenous Cartesian ideal, so nonhuman beings, in all their diversity, are now rendered not as fully complete forms of life that are radically irreducible to such a thin, idealized account of what counts as subjectivity but rather as diminished or crippled versions of the fantasy figure called the human-the Cartesian cogito now rewritten as the user-illusion qua enduring subject.” (45).

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posited by ethical systems both religious and secular: the perpetuation of “the self” through its survival in some form. In the end, Dennett concedes that humans are characterized by the extent to which their brains are developed (i.e. their capacity for abstract thought and empathy), while highlighting the importance of narrative and “continuity” as crucial to personal identity. Though Dennett’s approach to consciousness is theoretically one which defends the thesis of the transportability of the model of mind he devises (thus rendering the mind’s instantiation in the body a contingent fact, not a necessary one), it is interesting to note that much of his theory is in fact compatible with an embodied approach. Thus, the key debate today between proponents of the embodied mind and philosophers like Dennett centers not so much on whether the brain is actually embodied but on (a) whether this embodiment renders impossible the objective or impersonal description of the first-person experience of consciousness and (b) whether consciousness as we know it requires human embodiment. I take an embodied approach to the mind and personal identity, one which emphasizes the role of the body in providing (and shaping) perceptual information to the mind but without making an argument as to whether or not human embodiment is the only means of producing consciousness – such an argument is beyond the scope of this work. Interestingly, one of the points I make in this book revolves around the ways in which the underlying humanistic views of the self privilege a discourse of an inner authentic self which may survive in non-corporeal or a different corporeal form (one which as pure idea may be preserved after the body’s destruction). Such narratives engage this possibility even though they also highlight the inherently embodied nature of the mind and the self as it is experienced by the characters. Thus, there is a clear tension in these works between an initially embodied state for the self and the possibility of some type of disembodied or other-bodied survival. Like the attempt to preserve and extend the home country’s culture in a far off colony – in a different space –, one detects in the texts and films examined starting in the next chapter the ancient hope that the essence of the self may be preserved even beyond the body’s demise. Narrative topoi, such as that of a stable if fictional self, the privileging of pain as the mark of the human and the dream of recuperative correction of the past (in order to preserve the self) continue to appear in contemporary literature and film suggesting that, despite the new instantiations of the body and the human/posthuman subject, the trace of the human remains vital. These topoi persist not only because of the force of inertia backing them but also because the reader/viewer’s brain is hardwired to seek out such narrative representations or even to construct them where possible.

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Indeed, narrative itself (and its concomitant projection of self in lived time) as Paul Ricœur argues, remains the fundamental means by which the mind situates itself. It is precisely because of trauma’s resistance to the emplotment of a logical narrative arc that it disrupts and undermines personal identity. For all the discussion about the radical nature of the current shift toward a melding of flesh and silicon in the cyborgs we are becoming, it is the narrative needs of the embodied mind that most distinguish it from the artificial intelligence capabilities of computers and robots. This need for temporally emplotted narrative is the result both of cognition’s link to the body and the fact that the contours of the self are sculpted by a story constantly being edited, checked and enhanced by the mind. When artificial intelligence improves to the point of creating a digital narrative identity (e.g. through simulated embodiment), and the networked consciousness of the apparatuses (such as robots) which deploy it gain a sense of lived past, present and future as well as spatial situation and bodily affect the difference between artificial life and human life will no longer hold. That will be the first true step into a paradigm which fully erases the difference between human and machine. Conversely, should humans develop a way of generating and maintaining a personal identity which does not rely in any way on narrative (irrespective of whether such narrative is linguistically or visually based, it is created as a function of embodiment) – a highly dubious p ­ ossibility – not only will creative works no longer need narrative but art itself may no longer be necessary. In such a case we will have essentially become computers ourselves.

Temporality, Consciousness and Ethics

The fictional works that I examine approach the question of consciousness and the human from the standpoint of the ethical questions that arise from the following three elements: the body (often suffering or traumatized), narrative, and consciousness. All three of these elements are connected in such a way that any break in a single element leads to a fissure in the two others. Trauma itself leads to a break in one’s capacities to narrate one’s life that endangers psychological continuity, producing changes in one’s sense of self. Indeed, psychological continuity is key to personal identity and cannot be separated from an embodied experience of the world. If consciousness always implies a double-layered structure (perception of the world through the senses and awareness of this same perceptive process), it is defined by at least two key aspects: intentionality (i.e. “focusing, directing the mind”) and temporality. The relationship between the self and

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its temporality plays a crucial role in the way that consciousness constantly constructs and verifies one’s sense of self. This temporality is threefold. While our consciousness would seem upon first consideration to be directed solely toward the present moment, it must in fact maintain a “temporal horizon,” including in addition to the present, both expectations for the future and awareness of the immediate past. This tripartite temporality holds, as has been recently argued,16 even in sleep. Making use of the insights of the philosopher Edmund Husserl, whose approach to ontology influenced generations of other phenomenologists,17 in The View From Within and The Embodied Mind neuroscientist Francisco Varela explores ways of understanding first-person present-time consciousness of “situated embodied agents.”18 As a neuroscientist, Varela takes into account the physical structure of the brain in his account of how it works, and his views, though coupled with those of continental philosophers such as Husserl, are essentially based upon scientific observation. Varela argues that the way in which we experience the present cannot be approached from a disembodied “computational” standpoint. Rather than being experienced as a line, time is “felt” (through the body) in all its texture: “[Time] does not present itself as a linear sequence but as having a complex texture (whence James’ ‘specious present,’ it is not a ‘knife edge’ present), and its fullness is so outstanding that it dominates our existence to an important degree” (112). This point about the present not simply being a punctual moment is essential because Varela is insisting here that our experience of time’s fullness, our sense of “lived time” includes our consciousness of future possibilities, the immediate past, and emotional information (affect) concerning what we are experiencing (seeing, thinking, feeling etc.). Varela wants us to see that because we are embodied, we cannot conceive of time, and specifically our experience of the present merely as a moving point on a line: In a first approximation this texture can be described as follows: There is always a centre, the now moment with a focused intentional content (say, this room with my computer in front of me on which the letters I am typing are highlighted). This centre is bounded by a horizon or fringe that is already past (I still hold the beginning of the sentence I just wrote), 16 17

18

See Macduffie and Mashour (2010). Phenomenology may be defined as the study of consciousness. This philosophical method of analysis of phenomena which appear to a consciousness was first launched with Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900–01). Quotes of Varela are from Varela (2002).

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and it projects towards an intended next moment (this writing session is still unfinished). These horizons are mobile: this very moment which was present (and hence was not merely described, but lived as such) slips towards an immediately past present. (Varela 112–113) Here Varela interestingly associates time and space (a moving horizon) in which the self is situated. This presupposes the crucial aspect of the body. Media theorist Mark B.N. Hansen (in New Philosophy for New Media) also situates the body at the center of our perceptual capacities, concentrating respectively on the way in which the body shapes our consciousness through the figures of the metaphor and the frame. Hansen shares Merleau-Ponty’s attribution of knowledge and consciousness to a precognitive capacity over which we do not have direct control and to which we do not have access. Key to Hansen’s work on new media is the notion, which he develops from French philosopher Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory and the work of Francisco Varela, that affect is what shapes our experience of temporality: “Affect, accordingly, must lie at the very origin of [lived] time” (253). Working with Varela’s findings concerning the three different scales at which humans incorporate and frame lived time (respectively 1/10 for “elementary events,” 1 for perceptual integration and 10 scale for “descriptive-narrative assessments”) Hansen sees in digital media’s capacity to slow down perceived time (by projecting ultra-high-speed film images at the standard video frame rate of 30 fps, thus revealing details in facial expressions which would otherwise remain beneath the threshold of conscious experience) a vital supplement to our perceptual capacities rendering visible precisely the affect which impacts the viewer without him or her being aware of it: What Varela’s analysis contributes to our understanding of the timeimage and machine time is a thematization of affectivity as a concrete constraint on the human temporal experience. By correlating the phenomenological category of affectivity with the temporality of the neuroprocessing underlying the emergence of the perceived now, Varela makes a strong case for linking the particular flexibility and limitations of the human experience of time – including any image of time – with the capacities and constraints of the more or less fixed “hardware” of our neural architecture and its sensorimotor embodiment. (Hansen 250) Essentially what Hansen argues is that, by taking into account the body’s perceptual structures and the hierarchy in which it integrates time, one subjectivizes time through corporeal affective filters. This vital connection between

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perception, lived time and affect as bodily filter helps explain the altered temporality of trauma as we will see in Chapter 2. Accepting the fact that affect frames temporal perception means placing the body at the origin of what Damasio has termed “core consciousness.” At the heart of the debate over consciousness is the question of whether perceptual information may be conceived of outside any receiving frame. As we will see, in Chapter 4, in our discussion of N. Katherine Hayles work on posthumanism, the approach one takes to the question of embodiment – whether it is viewed not simply as central to human information processing and consciousness, but also to the information itself – determines notions of whether the human may be replaced by the synthetic or the robotic. On the one hand, the disembodied, computational approach of Daniel Dennett (whose “multiple drafts” model for consciousness posits no central control mechanism to the brain) and, on the other, the embodied approach of ­Varela, Lakoff, Johnson and Hansen will serve as general markers for what we will explore under the rubrics of respectively “the posthuman” and the “human.” For, as Dennett readily admits, when human suffering can be reduced simply to “more data,” ethics becomes more difficult since pain loses its standing in the hierarchy of feelings (all of which are reduced to mere information) and humans are no longer fundamentally distinguishable from machines (humans minds are referred to by Dennett as “virtual machines”). Yet, despite these important differences, I will suggest that an embodied approach to consciousness, which benefits from the insights of Merleau-Ponty, Lakoff and Johnson, Hansen, Varela and others may profitably be combined with the approaches of Daniel Dennett and Derek Parfit. This is so because their views on the self as “center of narrative gravity” (Dennett) and on “what matters in survival” (Parfit) are especially useful in my discussion of a characteristically humanist desire for survival of the self that carries over into otherbodied selves. This desire is taken a step further in Duncan Jones’ film Moon, which I examine in Chapter 4. The latter imagines the possibility of keeping one’s word (in Ricœur’s terms) not personally but through a kind of transpersonal survival as embodied by a clone.

Immersion and Framing: The Experience of Film and Literature

Recognizing that one’s sense of self is linked to the body, its perceptual capacities and its relationship with other bodies and spaces, the act of reading or viewing a narrative work involves slipping from one narrative space into another (leaving one possible or actual world for another). Studying how

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immersive narrative reception affects one’s sense of self means taking a phenomenological approach (one that privileges the lived, embodied approach to consciousness). Marie-Laure Ryan’s pioneering studies into the phenomenology of the experience of reader and viewer with regard to both traditional narrative prose and “new media” (such as immersive video games and art installations that require wearing either special sensor gloves or entire suits designed to stimulate the body) are of great use here. In Narrative as Virtual Reality Ryan defends the immersive experience against criticism that it is essentially passive, maintaining that it in fact must be understood as an active process by which the mind is engaged in filling in the blanks: “As for the allegedly passive character of the experience, we need only be reminded of the complex mental activity that goes into the production of a vivid mental picture of a textual world. Since language does not offer input to the senses, all sensory data must be simulated by the imagination” (11). Ryan is concerned with “virtual reality” or vr. She argues that narrative constitutes a virtual reality while explaining the three separate meanings of the term “virtual”: “I have suggested here three distinct senses of virtual: an optical one (the virtual as illusion), a scholastic one (the virtual as potentiality), and an informal technological one (the virtual as the computer-mediated)” (13). It is precisely the element of the potential, or virtual (in its second meaning which Ryan calls “scholastic”) which most distinguishes human cognition from that of other sentient beings – that is, the human is in part built upon the various tensions running through the actual and the virtual (the lived and the meta-body). Thus the embodied self should not be conceived of only with respect to an actual lived body since what narrative does is play upon the difference between proposed spatial and bodily experience and actual lived experiences. Our “lived body,” that is our experience of embodiment, is itself not merely a discrete physical experience, but rather it is also the way in which this experience is received by our consciousness according to evolving paradigms offered to us by narratives, be they cinematic or literary. Each medium offers up to us the possibility of virtually penetrating a space and being immersed in affect other than our own (e.g. experiencing a fictional character’s emotions as one’s own). The ways in which those spaces are framed is thus crucial. Phenomenology in particular emphasizes frames since humans perceive reality and thus themselves through a first-person perspective (or frame) that provides one with a position from which to build a sense of self. It is precisely this singular position which posthumanism threatens to erase, for example, by outsourcing the mind to artificially intelligent computers. In contrast to this type of distributed posthuman blurring of the subject position, Erving

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Goffman explains that film essentially blocks out what lies beyond its frame, signaling that a new set of rules govern what lies within it.19 Paratextual studies, such as those of Gérard Genette,20 have shown that the same dynamic occurs in literature, where generic markers either explicitly set out in the designation “novel,” “essay,” “thriller” etc. below the title, or in the style in which the title is written, as well as cover art on a given book, tell the reader what to expect from the text before the reading process has begun. In so far as genres constitute a set of expectations, and therefore a more or less well-defined set of rules, they function as frames. In “Photography and Fetish” Christian Metz draws a distinction between photography and film which is generated precisely by the difference between the way in which the viewer experiences what is off-frame (outside the frame) in photography and cinema.21 The movement and thus temporal dimension of film, as well as the sheer size of the cinema screen are what constitute the fundamental differences between photography and film and have a direct effect on our understanding of what has escaped the lens in each case. For Metz (who refers to Dubois and Barthes’ comments in Camera Lucida in support of his contentions) the link between photography and death is clear: “The importance of immobility and silence to photographic authority, the non-filmic nature of this authority, leads me to some remarks on the relationship of photography and death. Immobility and silence are not only two objective aspects of death, they are also its main symbols, they figure it” (83). If we relate this study of the medium (film and photography) to the way it is perceived by the viewer, it is interesting to note that while the frame offered by the photograph represents an erasure of the subject of the photo, it enacts a new space into which to project the self. Usefully, for our study, Metz also links photography, via its rapport with death, to an act of erasure akin to forgetting since it effects an “abduction,” a removal of the living from its temporal trajectory: “the snapshot, like death, is an instantaneous abduction of the object out of one world into another world, into another kind of time – unlike cinema which replaces the object, after the act of appropriation, in an unfolding time similar to that of life” (84). He goes on to argue that “In film there is a plurality of successive frames, of camera movements, and character movements, so that a person or an object which is 19 20 21

See Goffman (1974). See Genette (1997/1987). According to Metz (1985), who opposes photography’s timeless character to the cinema’s generation of “lived time” which helps build one’s narrative identity: “The filmic off-frame is étoffé, let us say ‘substantial,’ whereas the photographic off-frame space is ‘subtle’” (86).

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off-frame in a given moment may appear inside the frame the moment after, then disappear again, and so on…” (86). Here, Metz makes a key point, by referring to the continuity enhancing function music and ambient sound provide film: “The off-frame is taken into the evolutions and scansions of the temporal flow: it is off-frame, but not off film. Furthermore, the very existence of a sound track allows a character who has deserted the visual scene to continue to mark her or his presence in the auditory scene […] If the filmic off-frame is substantial, it is because we generally know, or are able to guess more or less precisely, what is going on in it. The character who is out of frame in a photograph, however, will never come into the frame, will never be heard – again a death…” (86–87). This distinction between the two media is tenuous however since photographs may be displayed, as they often are, in sequences which include, exclude and then bring back the same character, much the way film can. In this case, even a single photo can suggest or cause the viewer to anticipate the presence of a character lying outside the frame. Additionally, what is off-frame in film not always necessarily easy to place for the viewer nor do filmmakers always want us to do so. Sound is not always used to remind viewers of what off-frame characters may be doing and being off-frame in both media can mean being “disappeared.” In as much as both photography and film may be narrative and therefore temporal, I would suggest that the distinction Metz makes between the two may be somewhat elided or at least nuanced. The most important of his points to retain here is that both media effect what he terms an “abduction,” one which I view as stimulating the viewer’s desire to invest other bodies and inhabit other spaces. While relating this curatorial practice of removal from “human time” into a protected, framed space, which he refers to as that of the fetish, Metz posits that this move carries the contradictory elements of loss (through “symbolic castration”) and “protection from loss.” This is so because the fetish and the photograph serve the dual purpose of removing the subject from danger (the ravages of time) and symbolic killing (through the negation of a temporal trajectory). For Metz, film does exactly the opposite, going as far as to say that “film gives back to the dead a semblance of life, a fragile semblance…” (84). We will return to this paradoxical tension between loss and protection from loss (effected in this case via suicide) in our discussions of Alejandro Amenábar’s film Mar adentro and Duncan Jones’ film Moon. This contradictory desire (to destroy and to protect, or to protect by destroying) is characteristic of the recuperative project in humanist narrative and one which we will uncover in many of the narratives examined here. Despite the sharp contrast that Metz draws between photography and film, the fundamental question of frames (what is included, and what is kept out) is

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problematic in these media as much as in literary texts. If the immersive experience that Ryan describes across several narrative media is one that requires complex mental activity, as the viewer or reader supplies content that the narrative elides, it is also specifically meant to be an experience of a “possible world” that removes us from our own. In this sense it is not just the subject cut out of the frame who is “abducted,” nor the one who is included, but also the reader or viewer herself. We read and view films as much with our bodies as we do with our minds, for, as I have been arguing, if the mind is embodied, then the visual and mental experiences of imagining a possible narrative world is also an embodied one. Ryan makes this clear with the following quote from Merleau-Ponty’s The Primacy of Perception: We grasp external space through our bodily situation. A “corporeal or postural schema” gives us at every moment a global, practical, and implicit notion of the relation between our bodies and things, of our hold in them. A system of possible movements, or “motor projects,” radiates from us to our environment. Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space (5)22 Both literature and film offer “possible worlds”23 in which to imagine another self and models with which to compare the lived self’s trajectory. Narrative serves as a mediating structure by which the human integrates the nonhuman and the self evolves by trying out possible selves. When we inhabit narrative space (applying Merleau-Ponty’s expression to virtual space) we are afforded the opportunity to imagine ourselves otherwise and temporarily leave behind the lived body. In the same way, though it is true that memory is key to maintaining the continuity necessary for a coherent sense of self, a certain amount of forgetting is also crucial. In fact, maintaining a proper relation to memory is central to the way in which the mind works and, as we will see, it is also key to ethical action in the world. 22 23

Quoted in Ryan (2001, 70). Inasmuch as the contemplation of a “possible world” involves accounting for various fluctuating parameters of action and ethical decisions as well as projecting the embodied mind into a possible self, it invokes key aspects of consciousness. This relates as well to the issue of “filling in the blanks” in reader response theory by which readers (and viewers for that matter) will, according to the rules established by the fictional world they are engaging with as well as the rules of the world they actually inhabit will provide whatever information is lacking in the narrative (i.e. they fill in the blanks). For more information see Eco (1984), McHale (1987), Pavel (1986), Ryan (1991) and Ronen (1994).

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Philosophers of mind have recognized the central aspect of strategic forgetting (or storing unprocessed data) as a kind of safety valve which allows the mind to avoid overload. In the same way, cognitive scientists have long shown how the mind is continually sorting and filtering data, registering the vast majority on a subconscious level, and only actively contemplating a small portion of it. Daniel Dennett discusses in Consciousness Explained just how difficult it would be to simulate on a computer the totality of sensory information that the brain is bombarded with each and every waking second, and which it must filter and necessarily forget in part. While narrative immersion24 constitutes one kind of voluntary forgetting (like Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief,” we suspend or bracket the outer phenomenal world which remains off-frame), it is also the opposite: a process by which something is learned through a repetition in which the embodied mind plays its part. Having argued that the corporeal first-person perspective constitutes a frame through which the world is experienced and understood and which is itself modified by that experience I will return briefly to Dennett’s disembodied multiple drafts model to argue that its key points are still amenable to my overall argument.

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For an analysis of immersion as a desire to jump across the dividing line of the frame (which the author terms “bleeding”), see Egginton (2001). Here, Egginton draws a distinction between what he terms “illusionism” and “realism” both present throughout the history of film. Using the “snuff film” as the paradigmatic example of realism, Egginton states the difference between the two techniques in the following manner: “The result of having distinguished the representational structures of illusionism and realism is the following thesis: whereas illusionism reinforces the viewer’s sense of his or her own space as ontologically distinct from the diagetic space of the screen, realism does the opposite, undermining this ontological security. This is because, as we noticed above, by presenting the medium as object, illusionism retains and even reinforces the original framing function of the medium, and the viewer continues to key the medium just as he or she had keyed the object via the medium before. In realism, however, in which the object is presented as medium, the framing function ceases to distinguish the viewer’s dimension of being from that of the object. The frame now serves solely to indicate a temporal or spatial distance between two objects: that which is present at hand, and some other to which it refers. No ontological distinction is produced” (212–213). Egginton defines “bleeding” in this way: “What enables cinematic realism to undermine the framing function supporting the viewer’s sense of reality is a technique I will call bleeding, in which the frame separating two or more levels of represented reality fails” (213–214).

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Embodied Drafts

Despite the arguments both from philosophers (such as David Chalmers and Colin M ­ cGinn) and from humanists who fear that Dennett’s computational, and fundamentally disembodied approach to consciousness is a threat to humanness itself, I believe that his theory can be combined with the embodied approach to consciousness that I have delineated above. Though Dennett does not insist on the point, and indeed he surrounds it with multiple qualifiers to make it clear that he is going out on a theoretical limb, he does argue that consciousness could conceivably do without the human form. This position actually takes him farther afield even than Derek Parfit whose teleportation thought experiment imagines a machine capable of allowing for human survival across galaxies by destroying the body and reconstituting an exact replica on a distant planet. This is so because Parfit does not envisage fully doing away with the body. Yet the view of the body as a frame is compatible with what is really at the heart of Dennett’s model: the “multiple drafts” hypothesis. This hypothesis states that there is no central processing unit in the brain which is responsible for giving a coherent unified viewpoint, no central self (imagined metaphorically as a homunculus situated somewhere deep within the brain) which pulls the levers of the outer self. As Dennett writes in Consciousness Explained: According to the “Multiple Drafts” model, all varieties of perception – indeed, all varieties of thought or mental activity – are accomplished in the brain by parallel, multitrack processes of interpretation and elaboration of sensory inputs. Information entering the nervous system is under continuous “editorial revision.” […] These editorial processes occur over large fractions of second, during which time various additions, incorporations, emendations, and overwritings of content can occur, in various orders. […] Feature detections or discriminations only have to be made once. That is, once a particular “observation” of some feature has been made, by a specialized, localized portion of the brain, the information content thus fixed does not have to be sent somewhere else to be rediscriminated by some “master” discriminator. (111–13) Thus, as Dennett states, the “Cartesian Theater” is eliminated from his cognitive model. Yet this anti-essentialist “multiple drafts” model, which posits the flow of perceptual information as it enters the brain through various routes, is in fact compatible with the embodied mind view, in the sense that it posits that the only consciousness we currently know of is that which we ourselves

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experience. Analytic philosophers who defend an embodied mind model (and the view that consciousness’s functioning is fundamentally unknowable) might object that one must accept either all or none of Dennett’s model of the brain. Yet, putting aside the question of whether or not the “multiple drafts” model arises in Dennett’s thought as the result of a disembodied approach, it is in fact fully compatible with the views of post-structuralist thinkers such as Jacques Lacan who insist on the mind being structured like a language – i.e., forever deferring the moment of stability when language fully captures what it expresses. Dennett’s “multiple drafts” theory is also compatible with that of those who, like Judith Butler, argue that identity is constructed precisely in the differential gap when repetition fails. The very fact that Dennett posits the notion of the illusory self as a “center of narrative gravity” betrays a certain awareness of the importance of some form of (perhaps contingent) embodiment. Human identity cannot be maintained without some form of subject position from which to operate and compare the self both to others and to itself – ­affectively, temporally and spatially. Though we may not have the only possible type of body that can produce a recognizably human sense of personal identity, the corporeal frame that humans currently have does filter and therefore affect the data which enter the brain. For consciousness to be explained as resulting from an embodied mind with the additional proviso that the information we receive is constantly shaped and categorized according to the body’s structure, we do not need a model that includes a central, unified self. Rather as Paul Ricœur, and other philosophers such as Susan Brison (whose first person analysis, in Aftermath, of the nexus between identity, narrative and trauma reveals the crucial role of narrative) have shown, identity is a narrative construction, built upon a striving to repeat models that are viewed and inscribed upon the body in a series of practices that attempt to “naturalize” them. This also means that when we speak of the body as framer of perception, we must add that the body frames data which the mind turns into a series of different models for the self and its situation, each being close enough to the next to ensure psychological continuity. The truth of this proposition can be seen easily in the well-documented phenomenon of “phantom limbs” whereby those who have suffered amputations “feel” the presence and movement (even sensations of hot and cold) in the limbs that they no longer have. The habituation process makes the frame feel necessary and essential, though it is not and can change – our psychological health requires that those changes not be too abrupt or drastic. The same goes for our conscious experience of film and literature that proposes conflicting narratives spaces simultaneously.

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When the differences among the metaphorical, temporal and visual paths along which one projects the self while immersed in narrative are too great they can produce a visceral discomfort. This applies most dramatically to 3D cinema because of the way it engages the body – by replicating more closely the visual cues our mind uses to judge the reality of space and our place in it. For this reason 3D films are post-edited by specialists whose task it is to tone down the physical shock of the 3D pull in sequences that may cause viewers to feel ill25 – something similar also occurs when one reads in a moving vehicle. The embodied approach to consciousness not only posits the importance of the body as a storage device for memories (tactile and otherwise) which help construct our identities, but it highlights two other factors which are often considered essential parts of what it means to be human: the body is literally an extension of the mind (inasmuch as it is a “perceptual, information gathering machine”) and it is the site in which pain is produced. This last point will serve as an introduction to the two works that the following chapter considers.

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The same problem exists in Virtual reality video games where it is even more pronounced since the immersion is greater. A recent New York Times article points out that fifty years after the first virtual reality headsets were created, motion sickness remains a serious stumbling block for massive adoption and use of such headsets. One experiment found eight out nine players of Halo had to stop playing after a short time because of motion sickness. “Many people become queasy after pulling [virtual reality] viewing devices over their eyes and slipping into an immersive world that blurs the line between physical reality and computer-generated imagery. Oculus Rift, the crowdfunded start-up acquired by Facebook for $2 billion in March, has been trying to correct this motion sickness. But it is a steep challenge. Nearly 50 years after the computer scientist Ivan Sutherland pioneered head-mounted computer displays, there are more than two dozen companies that have attempted to commercialize various forms of the technology, called near-eye displays, with little success.” Markoff, John. “Real-Life Illness in a Virtual World” The New York Times, 14 July 2014 (Web. 15 July 2014).

chapter 2

Testing the Human: Trauma, Memory and Consciousness Elaine Scarry’s wide-ranging study on the close connection between pain and creation entitled The Body in Pain: The Making and the Unmaking of the World offers useful insights on many aspects of the argument I develop in this book. She posits that pain is central as a subjective human experience, one that can never be fully communicated to others: “When one hears about another person’s physical pain, the events happening within the interior of that person’s body may seem to have the remote character of some deep subterranean fact, belonging to an invisible geography that, however portentous, has no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible surface of the earth” (Scarry  3). Thus pain traces a fundamental dividing line between the consciousness of the sufferer and that of the observer. The sufferer cannot doubt that she or he is in pain, whereas when this pain is not visible, the observer cannot avoid doubting the other’s pain. As Scarry explains …for the person in pain, so incontestably and unnegotiably present is it that “having pain” may come to be thought of as the most vibrant example of what it is to “have certainty,” while for the other person it is so elusive that “hearing about pain” may exist as the primary model of what it is “to have doubt.” Thus pain comes unsharably into our midst as at once that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed. (4) While pain confirms that we exist with certainty (like consciousness for Descartes), it is also what can separate us from others. The problem then becomes how to make pain something that unites rather than separates through doubt. Scarry argues that made objects project the central mark of the human which she refers to as “sentience.” The relationship between the body and the created object is, according to Scarry, in fact one both of projection and reciprocation. She highlights within this the twin movements of “bodily magnification” and “bodily evaporation” – the ultimate move, through the creation of objects, toward disembodiment. In the Old Testament, Scarry explains, the process of wounding and creating are conflated (the corporeal punishment that God inflicts is itself viewed not as immoral but rather as the basis for divine creation). In her view, this reversal

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(from seeing violence as wounding to seeing it as creation, from “unmaking” to “making” the world) is possible because of the mind’s inability to assimilate the newness of the event clearly for what it is. Essentially, its traumatic nature short-circuits our perception, thus causing the event to jump from one semantic category to the next. This, coupled with the linguistic problem of communicating suffering, opens the way toward manipulation: “In turn, the instability of our descriptive powers results from the absence of appropriate interpretive categories that might act as “perceptual stays” in moments of emergency: we enter such events uncompanioned by any pre-existing habits of mind that would make it possible to go on “seeing” what is taking place” (279). Yet, if pain defines a certain view of the human as unknowable (due to its incommunicable first-person character and our inability to explain how our perception of it functions) then how does the mind assimilate pain, and how does the experience of pain both inflicted and produced affect the self? We have seen that memory plays an essential role in the construction of the self, affording a scaffolding for the psychological continuity upon which to build one’s “narrative identity” (Ricœur). While pain can itself serve as a kind of marker, situated both spatially and temporally, and thus plays a role in narrative identity, the perceptual interruption that instances of excessive pain suppose risks disrupting the normal process by which our memories build and maintain our sense of self. Scholars such as Giorgio Agamben, Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra, Shoshana Felman and Geoffrey Hartman1 have explored the relationship between trauma, memory and identity principally in testimonial writings by Holocaust survivors. The interruption in the mind’s ability to register and assimilate the emotional impact, the quantity and depth of feeling generated by traumatic events is seen, in these studies, to disrupt the temporal trajectory that the mind needs in order to structure narrative and thus create meaning. Traumatic experience remains often in a repressed, unassimilated state, only to reappear uncontrollably, reinforcing the importance of temporality to the self. The fictional works that this chapter deals with approach the nexus of the human, trauma and memory from the perspective of characters who both suffer from and are guilty of causing trauma. These characters’ relationship to memory, pain and the practice of self-mastery point to ethical and political readings that problematize notions of history and identity.

1 See Giorgio Agamben (1999), Cathy Caruth (1995, 1996), Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1992), Geoffrey H. Hartman (1996), Dominick LaCapra (2001).

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Martin Amis’ short novel Time’s Arrow (1991) deals with the role of memory, consciousness and trauma in the construction of the self in a society built upon selective forgetting of its past. Time’s Arrow narrates, in its meticulously reversed trajectory, the life of a former Nazi doctor who has died after living for many years under an assumed identity in the United States (as he moves back in time his names changes from Tod, to John, then Hamilton and finally/­ originally Odilo). The narrative is presented in as literally a reversed fashion as possible both for comic effect (feces enters the bowels rather than being ejected from them, food exits the mouth instead of entering it) and, more ominously, to show how a twisted perception of atrocity may see it as making sense. The reader is given backwards insight into the main character’s life by a mysterious disembodied figure who narrates uncomprehendingly what he sees, adopting a biblical tone to describe Tod/Odilo’s magical capacity to create: “Around midnight, sometimes, Tod Friendly will create things. Wildly he will mend and heal. Taking hold of the woodwork and the webbing, with a single blow to the floor, with a single impact, he will create a kitchen chair” (54). By leaving the main verb nearly until the end of the sentence, Amis here heightens both the subsequently deflated sense of suspense and the action’s reversed character. In the face of the reader’s likely confusion about his ontological status, the narrator unhelpfully states “Into Tod’s mind, of course, I cannot see. But I am the hidden sharer of his body” (55). For the reader, who is constantly forced to read forward and think backward, the absurdity of everyday life as seen in its reversibility is unsettling.2 Though the satirical intent is quite clear, with good deeds coming off as misdeeds and crimes seeming like favors in this backward world, the narrator’s insistence that everything eventually turns out to be the same in the end takes on surprising force. The moral relativism produced by this detached point of view is typified by the narrator’s observation that: “We cry at both ends of life, while the doctor watches” (121). Immediately before this he proudly declares, characteristically confusing himself with the body he inhabits: “It was I, Odilo Unverdorben, who personally removed the pellets of Zyklon B and entrusted them to the pharmacist in his white coat” (121). It is precisely because time is not ­reversible 2 For a detailed discussion of the ways in which the diegesis has been reversed (or inverted) in Amis’ text as well as the difficulties that arise in deciding just what is going on in this novel see Chatman (2009). Chatman explains that reversed narratives, though they do not bear any necessary meaning, have been seen to serve the following three main purposes: (1) to destroy suspense (2) defamiliarisation (3) matching form to content. Chatman does not examine Amis’ text or its reversals from the standpoint of embodied consciousness or personal identity as this study does.

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that the viscerally disturbing narrative forces the reader to stand back from the narrator’s conclusions and resist the reversed narrative flow which inexorably moves toward a conclusion that is morally unacceptable. Focusing on its postmodern rejection of meta-narratives, it is this technique of temporal reversal which has most interested critics.3 In his study About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time Mark Currie briefly discusses Amis’ novel as an example of the confessional genre, one in which the standard distance between narrator and narrated in greatly exacerbated by this reversal.4 Suggesting that Amis’s reversals of history lead to its end or postmodern erasure, Richard Menke has argued that “Time’s Arrow offers a darkly thermodynamic vision of history” (961). Menke argues further that Amis’s novel suggests that art offers just the kind of solace that the narrator’s misreading of history offers, a kind of recuperative power of willful misreading: “Whether in the form of a painting or of a novel narrated backward, art can represent a world contrary to the arrow of history” (969).5 Yet Menke seems not to take into account the crucial distinction which Amis insists upon between the narrator’s misreadings and the reversed (corrected) reading that we as readers are supposed to restore to the text arguing that “Its carefully constructed narrative, almost impeccably mimetic, even carefully “realistic,” within its donnée of temporal reversal and narratorial powerlessness, treats history as the atrocityproducing situation that narrative, passenger or parasite, can only view as an image on the windshield: outside, overhead, upside-down” (974). This powerlessness characterizes the unethically disembodied narrator who, unlike the 3 See Neil Easterbrook (1995), Greg Harris (1999) and Dermot McCarthy (1999). 4 “There is always an element of self-distance in first-person narration in the sense that it creates a schism between the narrator and the narrated, though they are the same person, and in this schism, there is often a cooperation between temporal and moral self-distance which allows for the self-judgement of retrospect. In Amis’s Time’s Arrow, the disjunction between the narrator and the narrated, however, is not a difference of location in time, but one of the experience of the direction of time. This is self-distance taken to an extreme, and often seems to function as a parody of the more conventional temporal logic of confession. In confession there is a moral contrast between the narrator and the narrated, but when the narrator is travelling backwards through the same life that the narrated lived forwards, the moral distance could not be greater. In moral terms, this is true opposition, understood as the maximum of difference, since when cause and effect are reversed, everything that is good becomes bad and vice versa” (100). 5 “That Time’s Arrow considers potential contrariness to the timeline endemic to the work of art seems clear; visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the narrator notes that he can read visual art and texts in a way that harmonizes with his own view of time, that they offer a solace against the jarring movements of life and history as he experiences them” (969).

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reader it is hoped, is unable to feel pain and make sense of the world. It is this kind of detachment, Amis warns us, that has continued to fuel an almost implacable drive toward atrocities and even the destruction of human society.6 The protagonist’s relationship to pain (both as perpetrator and as sufferer) is central to this novel. Yet it is equally central to see that the pain itself, as it is constantly suggested, must be lived in the proper temporal direction in order for it to have any meaning. This is tantamount to saying that the pain must be properly embodied in order to have ethical impact (to “make sense” as the narrator would say). It is precisely disembodied thought that allows, it is suggested, for the kind of atrocity that the protagonist is guilty of, for though Tod/ Odilo suffers from feelings of guilt and fear of retribution for what he has done, the disembodied narrator who observes all the events in reverse is bemused by the meaninglessness of life. We might see Amis’ project here as a kind of eighteenth century absurdist tale which, by means of a conceit and exaggeration makes a larger point about human folly. In the tradition of Voltaire in Candide, Amis argues not just that certain ideologies can be dangerous (like those of Pangloss) but that ideology itself, when it permits one to detach oneself from viscerally lived consequences, is profoundly unethical (this is also the point of his evisceration of Stalinist Communism in Koba the Dread). As though seeking at once to insulate himself from the text’s horrific content and sharpen its cutting edge for the reader, Amis chose to doubly figure the unethical detachment of Nazism through the disembodied narrator and temporal reversal. Amis’ text illustrates the following formula which may be derived from what I have so far argued in this book: narrative offers a path to embody time which in turn molds personal identity and ethics. Without narrative embodiment consciousness is altered and ethics distorted. In fact, a certain dualism lurks in this text which sets up, on the one hand, the promiscuity and ethical detachment of the mind as symbolized by the disembodied narrator, and the visceral engagement of the lived body (of the protagonist but also of the reader) on the other. What is interesting in this respect though is that, for the reader to generate an ethical reading of the text it is necessary to move against the temporal and narrative flow in favor of a mentally agile, reversed reading which reorders the events described. Implicitly, Amis’s novel seems to suggest that ethical action often requires one to engage the mind-body otherwise, against the grain. In so doing, the text forces a specifically ethical reading which is here also a reading otherwise. In terms of 6 Several critics have pointed out that Time’s Arrow is not merely concerned with the past crimes of the Nazi regime but beyond that it displays deep anxiety, rage even with what Amis saw as the impending nuclear Holocaust (McCarthy).

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embodied reading, the visceral tension between the temporal and semantic flow of the text and that of the reader who is obliged to frequently interrupt the reading process (either to check comprehension of its reversed contents, to reorder events or resist their conclusions), produce a cross-grain e­ mbodiment – one which forces the reader to immerse herself in the narrative only for brief periods, regularly stepping out to “correct” it mentally. The passage quoted above in which Tod destroys a kitchen chair is as good an illustration as any of the reversed process of interpretation (one which also fosters distrust between the reader and the narrator who one quickly sees as reliably wrong) : “Around midnight, sometimes, Tod Friendly will create things. Wildly he will mend and heal. Taking hold of the woodwork and the webbing, with a single blow to the floor, with a single impact, he will create a kitchen chair” (54). Interestingly, since any given moment of time may be seen essentially as a dot on a line (as opposed to the flow of embodied or “lived” time), when the narrator says that the event occurred “around midnight,” he may be trusted and one may read all the way up to the verb “create” at which point the reader, who by page 54 is used to this reversal, will substitute the verb with “destroy,” yet the contradiction will linger in his mind (creating an ironic play between contraries). This example of the tension between one’s resistant reading of the text (we think we know better than the deluded narrator) and the narrator’s insistence is especially significant because it concerns here an act of destruction which is seen as one of creation. This exact reversal will return in the text in a much less innocuous form as the confusion over the meaning of the Holocaust which the narrator views as a series of acts of magical creation. Scarry’s analysis of the Old Testament may be of some use here as Amis’ novel presents the violence of the main character (i.e. Tod/Odilo, not the narrator) as the direct consequence of his involvement in the Holocaust. It is in both cases because lived or embodied time has been disrupted that violence has been miscategorized, causing destruction to be seen as creation. Because the narrative flow of lived time has not followed a viscerally comprehensible path, its meaning has been corrupted (that is, it has been reversed). This temporal disruption appears here as the contrast between human time (unidirectional) and a kind of divinely detached temporality (that of the disembodied narrator). This secondary, detached temporality is akin to the excessive scale of Nazi time (modeled on the thousand year Reich) – in both cases the unidirectional, finite body of individuals is negated. It is precisely this embodiment, Amis seems to argue, which ethical action requires. In her analysis of the meaning of pain in the Hebrew Bible Elaine Scarry asserts that God makes himself known in the world principally through acts of inflicting pain (causing plagues, floods, making childbirth painful etc.). It is her

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contention that this creates a conflation between pain (unmaking the world) and creation (making the world). “Man can only be created once, but once created, he can be endlessly modified; wounding re-enacts the creation because it re-enacts the power of alteration that has its first profound occurrence in creation” (183). For Scarry, the Hebrew Bible presents pain as a profound link to God as creator and in so arguing she highlights the tremendously asymmetrical power relation between man and God in the Old Testament. Since man is embodied he may feel pain, whereas God as a disembodied, atemporal being does not (this is before the coming of Christ and the revolution of his embodiment of pain and the concomitant meaning that it takes on). Rather He is the one who inflicts pain bringing meaning into the world (creating it) by destroying it. Scarry’s analysis of embodiment, agency and meaning in the Hebrew Bible informs my reading of Amis’ disembodied narrator who occupies a kind of God’s eye view (though he enjoys no godlike power). Implicitly then, there is a criticism in Amis’ work not only of the human beings who carried out genocide on a massive scale but of God who let it happen. Without proper temporal direction and the embodiment required to feel time, ethics is evacuated. Thus Amis’ ostensibly anti-humanist satirical novel of man’s cruelty to man still retains a key tenet of humanism: that of the embodied human’s ability to engage in ethical behavior. This key capacity for ethics validates human exceptionalism, a fact which philosopher Kate Soper has identified as an important weakness in the ethical basis for defending a posthumanism which places all animals (including humans) on the same plane. Soper argues that such pro animal rights posthumanism is informed by an ethical approach which no animal other than a human could conceive of or understand.7 Amis argues that even in the worst human beings, the ethical drive is closely linked to our embodied sense of time. To drive home this link between embodiment and ethics Amis insists constantly on physicality in his novel – frequently highlighting the protagonist’s visceral disgust with himself. Time’s Arrow is rife with references to unpleasant embodiment, beginning with the physical weaknesses engendered by old age, and including graphic descriptions of bodily functions all of which occur in reverse, thus adding to their violence and ugliness. In contrast to the indignities that the protagonist must undergo (such as removing food which appears in his mouth with a fork, or ingesting excrement through his anus) the narrator neither feels nor 7 See Soper (2012). This tendency to promote a “posthumanist” standpoint while implicitly clinging to much of the humanist project constitutes an example of what this study attempts to show, namely that even when one jettisons the excesses of human exceptionalism, humanism continues to inform (even if silently) posthuman discourse.

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experiences embodiment – though the reader cannot escape it. This contributes to a visceral uneasiness for the reader, beyond the initial laugh of surprise. The narrator, whose ontological status remains a mystery both to the reader and to himself,8 is hopelessly ill-informed about the world he sees through another’s eyes. The narrator acknowledges that his key failing is the lack of a body, one which he tellingly conceives of as a passive instrument: “I wish I had a body of my own, one that did my bidding. I wish I had a body, just an instrument to feel weary with or through, shoulders that slump, a head that tips back to face the sun, feet that drag, a voice that groans or sighs or asks hoarsely for forgiveness. […] I have a heart but I don’t have a face: I don’t have any eyes to cry. Nobody knows I’m here” (92–93). The narrator’s distress at the way the world works (its perplexing reversals) is coupled with his interest in and fear of Tod/Odilo’s recurring nightmare about dead babies. The connection between the narrator and the baby becomes clear throughout the novel as both are stuck at what Damasio terms “core consciousness” without any developed sense of “extended consciousness” which would afford them both with an embodied sense of self and the agency that goes with it (in fact, the narrator constitutes a special case because he seems to be limited to the senses of sight and hearing like a filmgoer). In another of the text’s ironies, this similarity of helplessness suggests that both the baby and the narrator are victims, unwillingly swept along by the strong. In fact, even the main character Tod Friendly/ John Young/ Odilo Unverdorben (whose names suggest a certain innocence) is compared to a baby in the innocence of his sleep, at which point the narrator takes on the role of benevolent – though powerless – parent: “Thank God. He’s out. Like a baby. Though naturally I’m still here: even in the darkness I keep watch upon the world. Sometimes – now, for instance – I look down on Tod, on John, as a mother might (mother night), and try to find hope in the innocence or neutrality of his sleep” (69). Though the sleeping state is not a secure refuge from guilt (since the main character is tormented by his recurring nightmare), it is fundamentally opposed to the horrors of waking life in which one is conscious of who one is and what one has done. In Time’s Arrow, pain derives for the protagonist Nazi doctor Tod/Odilo principally from embodied consciousness, though Amis is interested here in the trauma not of the victim but of the executioner. Expecting the peaceful state of sleep to carry over into a new state of tranquility symbolized by the main character taking on the name “John Young” (leaving “Tod Friendly” behind), the narrator is surprised to see that he is still a miserable alcoholic stuck to an 8 Though Amis states in his memoir Experience (289n) that the narrator is Odilo’s “soul,” it is not clear what exactly he means by this.

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overflowing toilet bowl: “The premise for alcohol abuse, one gathers, is that consciousness, or selfhood, or corporeality, is intolerable. But it is intolerable. Certainly when you’re chockfull of gangrene. Here it comes again, consciousness, weary, multiform, intolerable” (69–70). Here consciousness, in the awareness of the body and the capacity to maintain a proper temporal horizon (projecting the self into the future while remembering the past) that comes with it, i.e. the human condition, is presented by the narrator in its limitedness and absurdity, as repulsive and senseless. Note that the narrator joins consciousness, selfhood and corporeality, linking them directly to self-abuse and suffering. This is another example of the narrator’s limited interpretative capacities, for he can only judge based upon what he sees out of Tod/Odilo’s eyes. In his waking state, it is Tod/Odilo’s body which registers the abuse and the effects of the awareness of his crimes. He will only achieve a level of peace at two moments: in his sleep, bathing in undifferentiated calm – when he is not having nightmares – and in the placid, superficial American society that he seeks to hide in – which in its own forgetfulness resembles this state. In order to drive this point home, Amis concentrates in particular on the image of generalized acceptance which the “I’m ok, You’re ok” mentality of 1970’s and 1980’s American society projects of itself. Deep down though, Tod/Odilo’s hatred burns on in his feelings toward those who are ethnically or sexually different from him.9 At this point the irony surrounding the narrator is deepened, since in addition to his connection to the innocence of the children who are victims of Tod/ Odilo, his repeated denials of willpower are a clear reference to the claim made by many Nazis after wwii that they were simply following orders. Yet, the babies of Tod/Odilo’s nightmares are not the completely helpless creatures that one would assume them to be. In another reversal, these babies are a threatening presence for the doctor and a source of terror: You naturally associate babies with defenselessness. But that’s not how it is in the dream. In the dream, the baby wields incredible power. It has the power, the ultimate power of life and death over its parents, its older brothers and sisters, its grandparents, and indeed everybody else who is gathered in the room. There are about thirty of them there, although the room, if it is a room, can’t be much bigger than Tod’s nook of a kitchen. 9 “Tod has a sensing mechanism that guides his responses to all identifiable subspecies. His feeling tone jolts into specialized attitudes and readinesses: one for Hispanics, one for Asians, one for Arabs, one for Amerindians, one for blacks, one for Jews. And he has a secondary repertoire of alerted hostility toward pimps, hookers, junkies, the insane, the clubfooted, the hairlipped, the homosexual male, and the very old” (41).

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The room is dark. More than this, the room is black. Despite the power it wields, the baby is weeping. Perhaps it weeps precisely because of this sinister reversal – the new and desperate responsibilities that power brings. In the faintest of whispers the parents try to give comfort, try to quieten: for a moment it seems that they might even have to stifle. There is that excruciating temptation. Not its fat fists, its useless legs, but its voice, the sounds it makes, its capacity to weep. As usual, the parents have the power of life and death over the baby, which all parents have. Now, though, in these special circumstances and in this special room, the baby has the power over them. And over everybody else who is gathered there. About thirty souls. […] In here the baby is not a weapon. In here, the baby is more like a bomb. (45–46) Later we learn that what the narrator calls the “bomb baby” was an infant whose cries revealed the hiding spot of thirty Jews who were subsequently killed by Nazis – an act in which Odilo participated. The key here is the baby’s suffering which, while revealing the spot where the Jews are hiding, is also an unmistakable mark of humanity. Again, in a double reversal, the reader realizes (though only upon a second reading once the novel’s end has been read) that, in an unexpected way, the narrator’s absurd misreading of the babies cries (as a sign of power) can be construed as valid, if in a way which the narrator does not intend. If we consider that the narrator plays the role of the protagonist’s consciousness (that is, in its self-reflexive function), his inability to understand anything about the self that he analyzes is a signal of Tod/Odilo’s incapacity to function as a moral being. Tod/Odilo is left with only vague feelings of sub-conscious remorse (thus the nightmares). His visceral self-loathing, short-circuiting the mind’s ability to delude itself, appears as a kind of ethical brake, an inescapable truth which, though not understood, still jabs the protagonist with its painful reminders of past and future misdeeds. If only he were willing to recognize these pains as the nascent signs of humanity, Amis seems to suggest, he might be able to reform himself or repent. This suggestion, this hint of a minimal, if ignored, underlying humanity to the protagonist may itself be a sign of uncharacteristic wishful thinking on the author’s part. Yet, it is not a path that Amis pursues; there is to be no reform, no recuperation, no absolving this war criminal, except via the most absurd inverted logic. The baby, whose cries reveal precisely its humanity in two respects – as a signal of its helplessness and as the pre-linguistic sign of pain10 – is in fact 10

Scarry points out that pain destroys language: “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned” (4).

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powerful, though not in the way that the narrator believes. The baby, in its suffering, remains the universally understood figure not simply of innocence but of a humanity which can neither be ignored nor argued away. While the Nazis dehumanized those they designated as subhuman others (desensitizing a large portion of the population to the suffering of these individuals), a baby cannot be dehumanized so easily. It is, in the end, the visceral guilt that Tod/Odilo feels at having facilitated the killing of the baby, as well as the impact that this image has on the reader, which reveals its inherent power. What humanizes the baby is not “extended consciousness” (i.e. selfreflexivity),­nor any type of linguistic or mechanical capability, but rather the most basic level of embodied consciousness which is here revealed through its suffering. The reversals that the reading of the text forces one to undergo here have an oddly defamiliarizing effect not only on the reading process but as well upon one’s ethical views, for the narrator suggests that reversals can lead not to contrary conclusions, but rather to the same ones. What can be recognized as valid, what survives the reversal process appears by this fact to be somehow less dependent on perspective, less a result of biased interpretation and thus more universal. Here, whether we view the baby’s cries as a sign of helplessness or power, whether one feels that the child has the power of life or death over the other people hiding with it (a power which resides with their Nazi executioners), its cries do have power. This realization, in the context of such atrocities, is almost as reassuring as it is disturbing. It is reassuring because the novel suggests that at the heart of the worst atrocities the human, in its simplicity, surges forth and pierces those who witness it (even its executioners). The image of the mother preferring to die rather than suffocate her child, essentially choosing to die with rather than after her child thus extending its life if only for a moment or so (had she stifled the child’s cries, it is suggested, she herself may not have been discovered and might thus have survived for a while longer) is an equally reassuring example of humanity responding to suffering – even in the face of the worst inhumanity. And we have here a key theme that will appear in nearly all the works this study examines: that of the choice to either extend human life as long as possible or end it voluntarily. Though it may not appear to be obvious at first, both choices offer survival through the protection of what is essential to personal identity – in this case it means preserving one’s identity as a mother by not stifling one’s baby. We will often return to the theme of survival, or preservation of what defines the self. This choice may in fact mean the destruction of the self, as it does in this case since the mother’s preservation of her child ensures their mutual destruction. To have acted otherwise would have meant a more significant destruction of the self – by betrayal – beyond its physical

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elimination.­This loyalty to the self indicates a continuity which Ricœur defines as character. For now, I would simply like to posit humanism’s insistence upon the transcendent importance of a certain kind of survival and the differing ways that it can be conceived. Switching from the initial feeling of repulsion to the narrator’s nonchalant description of the final moments of a crowd of innocent people soon to be slaughtered and the grotesque attribution of power to a helpless, condemned baby, the reader begins to realize that beyond these initial points, other deeper points concerning what makes one human (the mother’s sacrifice/­preservation of self, the power of the child’s suffering, the visceral effect that this memory has upon Tod/Odilo years later) surge forth, suggesting that the baby does have power. Finally, the “universal” character of the child’s suffering appears to be precisely the reverse of an abstract universal. What the narrator sees in this scene is, in the end, fundamentally different from what the reader sees. This is the final ethical point that Amis seeks to make: the order in which events occur is crucial: neither the start nor the finish alone carries meaning out of context. The visceral nature of the baby’s cries render it an excellent example of embodiment. Both the source and the means of its cries lie within the body. Thus, the narrator’s conclusion that the baby’s crying reveals its power is wrong not because the baby is in fact powerless, but because of the false reasoning that he goes through in order to arrive at it. Essentially, Amis is saying that the ends do not justify the means. This is, at heart, an argument that relies, not only on an embodied view of the self, but on its temporality and directionality (“time’s arrow”). Reversing time, Amis shows, compromises not only ethics but personal identity itself. Yet, if time is to be conceived as moving in one direction alone (from past to future) and we have seen that memory is essential to personal identity, then memory itself must function properly for one to maintain oneself correctly situated in time. Like the crying baby, memory, in many cases serves the ethical purpose which Scarry insists upon as a necessary element to avoid torture and war: to render suffering visible.

Trauma and the Temporality of the Self

Though the narrator knows what the doctor protagonist Tod/Odilo does not (i.e. the future he has just left behind), he has almost no idea toward what past he is headed and does not comprehend much of what he sees. Or rather he understands everything backward. Here I would like to draw a key distinction between Amis’ narrative and Derek Parfit’s teleportation theory in which the self jumps intact across great lengths of time and space – much as hyperlinks allow

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a computer user to seem to skip the connecting conduit between web links and simply arrive at the next web page no matter how distant its server may be. In Amis’s text the process of time transport is much like a horrific reversal of the power dream of the unified autonomous self. Rather than traveling back in time as a wiser better-equipped later self, Odilo is stripped of any knowledge of his future as he moves back in time – this is literally a process of forgetting that is more complete and total than it normally would be. (In this way it would seem initially to be potentially more cleansing, though this is exactly what it is not.) It is also a satirical reversal of precisely such exalted dreams of extending human capabilities. (After all, what was the dream of the Third Reich, if not a grotesque, inhuman view of human perfectibility?) Though Odilo does not have the capacity to remember where he will go, and despite his efforts to escape where he has been, one image does haunt him. This is a recurring image to which the narrator has access through Odilo’s terrifying dreams. He is aware that this image (of a doctor in a white coat and black boots) is the source of Odilo’s constant fear, yet he does not know what the image signifies and will misread it when he finally discovers what it is. As we later learn, Odilo is in fact this very doctor. This is an image of him from his Auschwitz days.11 Thus, it becomes clear that Odilo is running from himself while the narrative is implacably forcing him back to this earlier criminal identity. In this sense, the text frustrates Odilo’s dream of erasing his past and takes a stab at recuperative vengeance on such Nazis who successfully escaped punishment for their criminal acts.12 Yet even this ideal of vindictive justice is, as we will see, complicated by the subsequent swing of the temporal pendulum at the end of the novel. 11

12

“The enormous figure in the white coat, his black boots straddling many acres. Somewhere down there, between his legs, the line of souls. I wish I had power, just power enough to avert my eyes. Please, don’t show me the babies… Where does the dream come from? He hasn’t done it yet. So the dream must be about what Tod will eventually do” (39). Arthur Bradley argues that Amis, whom he identifies as a “New Atheist Novelist” (along with Ian McEwan both of whom he sees as followers of “The New Atheists” viz. Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens), has turned to the power of narrative as a new kind of religion offering redemption (Bradley, 2009, 4). For ­Bradley, narrative has become for these New Atheist writers a replacement for religion with its own basis in a deep-seated faith in the “redemptive power of the aesthetic imagination” (38). I argue later in this chapter that Amis’ anti-humanism allows him to provocatively flirt with the narrative of redemption – only to crush it at the end of the novel. Yet this lurking desire for redemption remains, for Amis, a central concern, precisely because it can be dangerous.

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The narration itself, despite the horrifying effect that it has upon the reader whose backward and forward readings allow a very different understanding of events from that of the narrator, seems to be a reversal of the way that traumatic memory works, since here the memories flow forth in an unbroken reverse line. This is possible precisely because they are disembodied memories which the narrator sees as though projected upon a screen. They are not fragmentary, nor do they lead the narrator to suffer, rather they generate a bizarre absurdist calm. Here it would seem that Odilo’s greatest fear is simply that of being found out. He lives in fact in constant fear of it and avoids any reflection upon himself including that afforded by mirrors. Amis reduces the self-­ conscious narrative to a nonchalant, if inhuman tale which precludes any ethical standard for either Odilo or his “watcher.” Yet, the effect upon the reader is precisely the opposite of that upon the narrator, as the backward narrative only serves, through defamiliarization, to force the reader to reflect upon the actions which are temporally deconstructed in the novel. The horrifying, redemptive movement from Tod Friendly’s harmless old age to Odilo Unverdorben’s murderous youth is a direct stab both at the Christian doctrine of redemption and at the American ideology of “starting over with a clean slate.” Nor should we forget that in mocking the common desire to go back and “fix” one’s past which stems from a positivist rejection of absolute, irrecuperable loss Amis is positing a certain negative humanism based not on progress, nor recuperation, nor messianism, but rather on recognition and remembrance. In Tod/Odilo’s backward journey Amis offers no exaltation of the human, nor any fantasy of righting wrongs. The novel begins with an elderly Tod Friendly in the “feel good,” America of the nineteen eighties. It is a country in which a last name like “Friendly” actually seems to fit. It is suggested that for a man as empty within, as soulless as is Odilo (or “Tod” in his American incarnation) suburban America is the most logical place. The irony of the apparent disconnect between the preppy name “Tod” (spelled here with one “d”) and its sinister meaning in German (“death”) is another hint from the British writer that what lies beneath the surface of a certain suntanned culture is less appealing than may appear. Amis seems to be suggesting that the distance between these two connotations for the name Tod is not as great as it may seem. Yet, a more frightening reading lurks behind that of the satirical reversals. This second reading suggests, as when the narrator claims that life begins and ends in the same way, that ethical engagement is useless and that no matter how one looks at things, they come out the same in the end. Worse still, there is a hint at the very end of the book that this absurd journey in reverse will be

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followed by another in the “correct” direction, the pendulum swinging back again as the world gets set to relive the same horrors: When Odilo closes his eyes, I see an arrow fly – but wrongly. Point first. Oh no, but then… We’re away once more, over the field. Odilo Unverdorben and his eager heart. And I within, who came at the wrong time – either too soon, or after it was all too late. (165) This final reversal at the end of the narrative sets up a seemingly neverending pendular swing between opposing movements: unethical forgetting and inhuman totalizing memory. This is, I would argue, another of Amis’s central points in the novel, namely that the fragmentary nature of traumatic memory, its fixation on a single image or set of images, and the ethical remembering of our violent past (requiring selection and comprehension skills which the narrator lacks) are all characteristic of “the human.” The tension between these two models (ethical vs. selective memory) is one of the pitfalls in the difficult domain of History. It is essential to see that what makes subsequent violence possible – inevitable even – is today’s unethical forgetting. Time’s Arrow is meant to shock the reader, because it is an example of inhuman memory, that is, one that is emotionally detached, uncomprehending and at the same time totalizing. Recalling Borges’s cartographer’s fantasy of perfect mapping, the narrator states “I can remember it all. To remember a day would take a day. To remember a year would take a year” (100). Here we have an inhuman relationship to memory which is incapable of being traumatized. The narrative voice’s limited view figures a society’s forgetting its traumatic past (Odilo’s trajectory) while it paradoxically reverses the forgetting (through the narrator), for the reader, by driving the story back to the horrors of the Holocaust. Amis’ narrative literally shows how forgetting the past leads to its repetition. Yet, these horrors will be the only events that truly “make sense” to the narrator as he sees the murderous Nazi doctors as magical healers, literally creating humans from dust in the air (the air that has in fact escaped from the ovens of Auschwitz).13 By moving to the United States and changing his name, Odilo seems to escape his past as a murderer, though unlike the narrator according to Cathy Caruth’s definition, Odilo has not escaped the trauma for which he is responsible generating a haunting return: “Trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or 13

Before re-entering Auschwitz, here is how the narrator sees the world: “I keep expecting the world to make sense. It doesn’t. It won’t. Ever” (82). Once he is in the camp, he changes his tune: “The world, after all, here in Auschwitz, has a new habit. It makes sense” (129).

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original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature – the way it was precisely not known in the first instance – returns to haunt the survivor later on.”14 Yet, unlike the protagonist as he coasts through time in reverse, Amis’s unnamed narrator is incapable of suffering from such a haunting. This portrayal of the Nazi murderer’s trauma is not intended in any way to minimize his guilt. As the entire narrative is designed to punish him – by repeated physical humiliations, the revelations of his own attempts to flee his guilt rather than face it and especially the portrayal of the disembodied, freefloating narrator who represents the result of the act of mental dissociation which allowed the Nazis to perpetrate their inhuman acts. In Time’s Arrow, there is a sense in which the body “knows” what the mind chooses to ignore, the precognitive repetition of traumatic imagery and the corporeal humiliations visited upon the protagonist are meant to show that, though one might lie to the mind, embodiment means never fully escaping guilt.15 In the next work I examine, consciousness’s doubling is no longer divided up between two different characters. In Christopher Nolan’s film Memento, narrator and main character (mind and body) are joined yet his relationship to time (and thus identity) is problematic and precisely subject to the haunting of trauma.

Memento

Proust dramatizes the effect of the absence of psychological continuity at the beginning of A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) by placing his narrator in a darkened room; the moment of awakening becomes not a moment for regaining one’s bearings and instantly resituating the self (or “picking up where one left off”), but rather a moment of spatial disorientation 14 15

Caruth (1996, 4). Dominick LaCapra envisions the possibility of perpetrator trauma clearly rejecting any equivalence between the trauma of the perpetrator and that of the victim: “There is the possibility of perpetrator trauma that must itself be acknowledged and in some sense worked through if perpetrators are to distance themselves from an earlier implication in deadly ideologies and practices. Such trauma does not, however, entail the equation or identification of the perpetrator and the victim. The fact that Himmler suffered from chronic stomach cramps or that his associate Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski experienced nocturnal fits of screaming does not make them victims of the Holocaust” (1999, 723). For recent studies of “perpetrator trauma” see Tsutsui (2009) and especially Morag (2012, 2013).

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which temporarily throws the narrator into confusion regarding just who he is. This is a feeling that the narrator compares to the mental state of a “caveman” (l’homme des cavernes) stripped of any contact with culture and reduced to an animal state. As Proust’s narrator explains, not knowing where he was meant that he did not know who he was. This moment of awakening and the effort to situate the self that ensues is a constant source of difficulty for the protagonist of Memento a film which has, above all, attracted the attention of critics for its reversed narrative and exploration of time and memory.16 The instability of memory and the role it plays in the cognitive processes necessary to build and maintain one’s self is explored as a central theme in British director Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) a film based on a short story by his brother Jonathan Nolan entitled “Memento Mori.” Here the traumatized protagonist attempts to maintain a sense of self through a visceral link between writing, pain and the body as he tattoos crucial information about himself on his skin in order not to forget it. Like Time’s Arrow, Memento’s main narrative plays out in reverse as it follows the search for identity of an uncomprehending narrator. In both cases there is an original, defining trauma that each protagonist wishes to escape, while the narrative relentlessly, if confusingly pushes back to this “lost” moment. The protagonist and narrator of Memento is Leonard Shelby, an ex-­insurance claims investigator from San Francisco who, upon being attacked in his home and witnessing what he claims was his wife’s murder, suffered a blow to the head which left him incapable of generating new memories. Now Leonard (or Lenny as the dirty cop he has teamed up with calls him) is on a desperate search for the man who murdered his wife, through the fog of his life in which he is never sure what is and what is not true. Memento is made up of three separate narrative temporalities: the main narrative stream (shot in color) runs chronologically backward, yet, unlike Time’s Arrow, each of its scenes plays forward – with the exception of the very first scene, in which we see in reverse the protagonist shoot a man in the head. The second stream (in black and 16

Filmmaker Diran Lyons, for example, uses Deleuze’s theories to approach Memento as “an image relentlessly exploring time without penitence” (2006, 129) and cinema as a lie, exploring the multiplicity of time: “filmic narration devoted to the time-image is a pitcher that keeps the batter guessing, keeping pace with the temporal world of appearances, which is one of metonymy, false representation, unabashed lies” (130). Lyons asserts that “Time is therefore not singular but infinitely multiple” (131), yet Nolan’s meticulous representation of the reversed narrative would seem to belie this conclusion. The final section of the article condemns vengeance proposing that it be replaced with “creativity” as a reaction to atrocities.

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white) runs chronologically forward and represents moments that occur before the events in color. The third consists of brief flashbacks from the time before the protagonist’s memory is severely impaired by an injury to the head. This third stream is not as reliable as it might first seem since even these earlier memories, which would ostensibly be safe from the fragility which fragments and eventually erases all of the main character’s new experiences, are susceptible to influence and manipulation. The color scenes which we view in reverse chronological order, interspersed with the black and white scenes, are thus intended to put the viewer in the same position of ignorance as the protagonist, much like Time’s Arrow does. While both stories play upon the detective genre, a determining factor in the way in which each narrative is experienced by the reader / viewer is that while Time’s Arrow deals with historical facts which the reader is familiar with (we know toward what cataclysm the story is headed), Memento does not. In both cases the body of the reader or viewer is engaged by disturbing depictions of bodily functions (in Time’s Arrow) and violence (in both). Memento’s very first scene – the only one which plays backwards – shows the protagonist Lenny flipping back and forth a Polaroid photo of a man he has just murdered. In the photo, we see the man lying face down on the floor in a pool of blood with much more blood spattered on the wall in front of him. Next we see Lenny actually shoot him in reverse. But first we see Lenny put the Polaroid back in the camera and pause as he stares at what he has done. The emotional, oneiric synthesizer music playing as we see his gaunt, blood spattered face contemplate his handiwork is meant to convey not the tragedy of the other’s man loss of life, but the traumatized face of a victim who is now a murderer. Curiously, the protagonist’s inability to make new memories as well as the dream of recuperation of self that the memory he cannot access would otherwise afford him are both metaphorically figured by this initial scene. The first few images in which we see the Polaroid photo’s reverse development figures Leonard’s inability to remember – as we see it fade just as his memory does. In this sense, his hand that flips the photo back and forth producing not the photo’s development as the viewer expects but its fading, figures the futile mental efforts he makes to recall his most recent actions. The fact that this scene plays backwards (showing the blood running back into the victim’s head, the gun he has thrown down flying back into Leonard’s hand and the bullet gliding back into its chamber) offers up a somehow satisfying image of recuperation, one which is analogous to perfect recall – exactly the kind of recall, involving putting things back into place, that Leonard is denied. Ironically this literally backwards scene is more immediately comprehensible than the fragmented forward playing scenes which depict a reversed temporal trajectory. Here it is

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not simply the reversal that produces confusion in the viewer (as in Time’s Arrow) but the fragmentation added to the temporal reversal. Memento constitutes an unusual investigation of the mindset of a mentally impaired killer; one who isn’t quite sure who or what he is. In contrast to Amis’ wrenching portrait of a Nazi murderer, Nolan’s protagonist successfully escapes the trauma of his own actions, suffering only that which was earlier perpetrated on him (in the attack on him and his wife). This is possible, Nolan shows, by manipulating the peculiar state of ignorance which Lenny, the protagonist, is subjected to by his inability to form new memories. Lacking any mental storage of his subsequent crimes he feels no guilt for them – in this sense he has become the perfect killing machine (as the dirty cop tells him “You’re not a killer. That’s why you’re so good at it.”). In Memento, Lenny’s position of ignorance is conveyed by a restricted field of vision as the main characters are often filmed in close-up and in anonymous spaces. Coupled with the reversed order of events, the usage of (sometimes extreme) close-ups limits the viewer’s understanding both spatially and temporally, constituting an elimination of context akin to forgetting which breaks the normal temporal arc of what Paul Ricœur calls “narrative identity.” This film shows that it is not enough to have a past (as Lenny does since he can remember what happened before his injury) but narrative identity, in order to gel, needs a contextual present and future as well. In this film, the framing of the shots mimics the way in which affect modifies temporal perception as it narrows along with Leonard’s temporal and affective focus. Yet, since the elements central to personal identity (body, narrative and consciousness) are so closely bound up with time and affect, one can see how the close-up here is not just a method for limiting the viewer’s ability to put the narrative in a larger context as I have suggested, nor is it simply a way to highlight the importance of the body. Nolan also uses close-ups in this film as a way of cutting off the protagonist from the world and foreshortening the scope of his own consciousness as it closes down and focuses exclusively on himself (or rather on parts of his body where he has tattooed information). Several scenes highlight how Lenny’s memory problem irks other characters who cannot believe that he does not remember them. Furthermore, Leonard is so consumed by his quest to find and kill his wife’s murderer that he literally cuts the rest of the world out of his frame. The violence attributable to such an attitude is a byproduct of Leonard’s incapacity to put the story of his life into a larger narrative. As I will show later, this is because his affect has been cut off from his time-consciousness – something which he laments as an inability to “feel time.”

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This restrictive framing has a direct impact as well on the spectator’s embodied viewing experience, a notion that Vivian Sobchack has explored. Basing her approach on Merleau-Ponty’s embodied phenomenology and his concept of the “lived body” (corps vécu), in The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience Sobchack defends a view of cinema’s uniqueness as an “expression of experience by experience” (that is, the camera places the spectator within its “perspective” both showing and integrating her – thus rendering experience directly through a play of distance and proximity which includes immersion): “Insofar as the embodied structure and modes of being of a film are like those of filmmaker and spectator, the film has the capacity and competence to signify, to not only have sense but also to make sense through a unique and systemic form of communication” (5–6). Occupying the “first-person” perspective of the camera allows the viewer to share in acts of perception and expression (recording and showing) which are embodied positions that sculpt consciousness. According to Sobchack: the film experience is a system of communication based on bodily perception as a vehicle of conscious expression. It entails the visible, audible, kinetic aspects of sensible experience to make sense visibly, audibly, and haptically. The film experience not only represents and reflects upon the prior direct perceptual experience of the filmmaker by means of the modes and structures of direct and reflective perceptual experience, but also presents the direct and reflexive experience of a perceptual and expressive existence as the film. (9) Thus, film is a medium that is particularly well suited to the study of consciousness, embodiment and concepts of personal identity (for it reflects, constructs and includes these elements in a narrative).17 In the same way that Leonard sits in a darkened room isolated from the world (in the black and white scenes), the filmgoer sitting in a darkened theater must make judgments based on partial knowledge, a process which is rendered more difficult precisely by the backwards movement of the film at hand. It is in this context of embodied viewing that the division of the film into two sets of main narrative strands (one black and white and the other in color 17

Sobchack’s approach to the phenomenology of film is significantly more convincing than that of Colin McGinn whose study The Power of the Movies (2005) argues that the structure and experience of cinema is nearly identical to that of dreams. Reducing phenomenology to a purely mental and visual experience, McGinn’s study does not adopt a fully embodied approach.

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in addition to the third category of images which represent memories from before Lenny’s injury) provides the viewer with two different approaches to Leonard’s consciousness. In the color scenes, we see and hear Leonard interact with other characters while the sound track provides us with his hesitant, inner voice-off narrating what is happening to him and what he is doing. In contrast to this, the black and white scenes are occupied almost exclusively with Leonard alone in a room speaking on the phone to an unknown interlocutor. These telephone conversations are akin to Leonard speaking to himself as the viewer does not know who the mysterious caller is (nor does Leonard) as he sits alone in a nondescript motel room which he does not recognize. The fact that the room is a non-space, unconnected with any specific geographic location or other identity indications (i.e. it contains nothing which refers directly to Lenny or belongs to him) reinforces the impression that we have attained Leonard’s inner space, we have gained access to his mind – and found it blank (Figure 1).18 Here we are presented with a close-up of Leonard’s face as he thinks to himself “So, where are you? You are in some motel room. You just wake up and you’re in… in a motel room. There’s the key. It feels like maybe it’s the first time you’ve been there but perhaps you’ve been there for a week, three months. It’s kind of hard to say…” Like Proust’s narrator, the inability to identify the space he is in makes it hard for him to know who he is, yet for Leonard this is not a temporary state but a permanent one.

Figure 1

18

Leonard in an anonymous motel room on the phone. © Newmark Capital Group, Team Todd, I Remember Prod.

This first black and white scene is the second scene of the film (after that of the backwards murder scene in color).

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In these static black and white scenes Leonard does none of the running, killing or photographing that he engages in in the color scenes. Rather, in the black and white scenes Leonard sits, explains and examines himself. Leonard’s revelatory comments in these scenes afford the viewer some insight into what is happening in the color scenes. It is, after all, in the motel room on the phone that Leonard admits that he should not be trusted because of his condition – he also explains what his insurance job consisted in as well as the details of his injury. These black and white scenes provide then a break from the confusion of the color world – both for Lenny and the viewer. By temporarily stopping the reverse motion of the narrative the author/screenwriter is giving the viewer a respite,19 like the 3D post-editor, he takes into account our embodied reading/viewing. The close-ups, in particular in these scenes (especially that of Leonard looking at himself in the mirror while speaking on the phone), afford the highly talented Guy Pearce (who plays Leonard) a chance to communicate a mix of terror and bewilderment. His central fear though, as with Odilo in Time’s Arrow, is not fear of the other, but rather fear of discovering who he is and what he has done. By their sense of isolation and the temporal discontinuity with the color scenes, these black and white scenes allow Nolan to make a central point about the fragility of the self, which appears here stripped of its temporal bearings as a mindless zombie taking instruction. Finding a bold lettered tattoo on his arm positioned so that he can read it, by glancing down at it, which says “NEVER ANSWER THE PHONE,” Leonard realizes that he does not know to whom he is speaking and fears that he may be revealing too much. He hangs up and refuses to answer the phone – only to be prompted by an envelope which is pushed under his door and which reads “Take my call.” This moment in particular recalls a famous thought experiment, analytic philosopher John Searle’s “Chinese Room,” which was meant to show that the mind could not be conceived as a simple data processing unit since it has to actually grasp what information means – equivalent to situating consciousness in temporal and corporeal context. In Searle’s experiment, a person is confined to a room and receives slips of paper that have Chinese characters on them. Though the person does not understand Chinese, he has a rulebook that allows him to feed back prepared responses in Chinese to the questions he is being asked. This means that though the person in the room knows no Chinese he will appear to. This simple preprogrammed response to commands is what a computer is capable of and shows for Searle that consciousness must include some further step. In the case of Leonard, the isolation into which his memory loss has placed him reduces him to the state of a zombie (like the man in the 19

As in the moments in Time’s Arrow when Tod/Odilo dreams.

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Chinese room), vulnerable to simply following the commands he is presented with. Thus, even though he has just seen his tattoo warning him not to answer the phone, after seeing the envelope command to do so, he picks it up again. This is because he has already forgotten what the tattoo says. Thus, these black and white scenes in the motel room clearly demonstrate the capacity to manipulate the self by isolating it. Each command, each bit of information that comes in through perceptual means (in this case the tattoos and the envelope) must be evaluated in turn, but without the “center of narrative gravity” that psychological continuity provides through memory and the body the mind is left to fend for itself, generating new identities as it goes along. Nolan suggests that the only reason why Leonard has developed in any kind of a coherent fashion at all since the attack is because he uses a disciplined system of self-mastery through repetition and constant reminder. This does not mean that he is not open to suggestion, however. Though it is later hinted that Teddy (the dirty cop who claims to be helping him) is the person with whom Leonard is speaking,20 his telephone conversations also reflect the relationship that he has with himself: one of manipulation. Everything in these scenes is calculated to convey the atmosphere of a psychological test for Leonard. Here is the black box of Leonard’s mind where, depending on which stimuli he receives (tattoos, photos, notes slipped under the door), he will react in a predetermined fashion. This is a view of Leonard as essentially a zombie, a person who lacks the proper psychological continuity to maintain precisely the control over his identity that he wishes to maintain. He has been reduced to being a puppet (both for Teddy and for himself – for his memory deficiencies make him a victim not just of others, but, as we will see, of his own future and past selves who, in their detachment, are able to manipulate him). Leonard can only remember events that occurred before the attack, anything that occurred afterward he can retain only for very short bursts of a few minutes. What the viewer notices first then are the limits of Leonard’s attention span, and the ways in which he attempts to compensate for his condition (for example, by repeating to himself over and over again that he must write down what has just occurred to him so that he may remember it). The music’s at times rhythmic beating suggests both the beating of Leonard’s heart and the movement of his mind, first racing when he is presented with a confusing and exciting predicament, then slowing as his attention begins to fade out and he nears a blackout moment. Since, as Sobchack points out, film is the “expression of experience by experience” the music puts the viewer on Leonard’s u ­ nceasing 20

Leonard states that he will only take calls from Teddy and Teddy tells him early on about another dirty cop who has been pushing envelopes under his door to manipulate him.

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psychological roller-coaster ride from a state of heightened awareness to loss of consciousness and back again. Since the attack on his wife, Leonard’s varied traits have been collapsed into the single, obsessive identity of a man whose only reason for living is to search for her killer. This means that the methods he uses to gather information for his hunt apply as much to the task of remembering who he has become (as opposed to who he was) as they do to his search. Leonard is now essentially the wounded man who seeks revenge and, to the extent that this defines the entirety of his identity, he is highly vulnerable because it means that he must always be the wounded man and he must always seek vengeance – even after he has ostensibly found and punished his wife’s attacker. We see in both comic and dramatic moments how dangerous the identification system he uses (involving written notes, tattoos and Polaroid snapshots) can be, since when seemingly perfect matches between what he has written and what he sees can lead to grave errors. Since Leonard fully trusts what he himself has previously written down as a clue in his search for his wife’s killer, he becomes a slave to literal and narrow interpretation of these same short notes many of which were the result of manipulation and misunderstanding.21 The temporal loop in which Leonard functions (short bursts of awareness lasting for a few minutes only to fade away) and the excessive, literal readings he constantly performs of his own body – conditioning himself, as he says, to remember – leave him no room to step outside his new identity and imagine the self otherwise. This ever narrower sense of self is the result of an ever greater sense of desperation at the fear of what he may find out about himself, and will push him to consciously lie to himself facilitating his guilt-free murder of the cop who has been using him. While in the color scenes Leonard appears as the investigator or the vigilante out for revenge, in the black and white scenes the tables are turned and he is the one being interrogated over the phone. What this juxtaposition dramatizes is the tension between Leonard’s search for his wife’s killer (a task 21

One example of the kind of problems that Leonard gets into as a result of his inability to interpret signs beyond completely trusting their face value occurs when, looking for Dodd (a man whom he has been manipulated into chasing), Leonard kicks open a motel room number 9 based on a written note indicating a 6 which he has read upside down. By the time he reaches the door he no longer even knows why he is searching for Dodd. He ends up kicking the motel room door open in the face of the unsuspecting inhabitant of room number 9 (who is not Dodd). Lenny has been sent on this violent fool’s errand initially because he seeks to defend and avenge a woman whom he thinks had been abused by Dodd. This scene shows that despite now being a hardened killer, Leonard is a vulnerable character never far from being made a fool of or the victim of his own excessive trust.

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of revenge which builds his identity and gives him a narrative flow to follow however choppy and disconnected), and his own doubts about who he really is. The split-consciousness of the film reflects the dual layer of consciousness itself as it addresses the world (color scenes with narrative commentary) and turns inward to address itself (black and white scenes on the phone).

The Spectral Past Self

Upon opening the envelope that is slid under his motel room door, Leonard finds in it an oddly spectral photo of himself surrounded by complete darkness. In this Polaroid snapshot (the only one in the film which is of him) Leonard has a wide, otherworldly grin indicating an ecstatic happiness (in sharp contrast to the deeply worried expression he now has). Finding this unexplained photo, taken on an occasion which he does not remember but which worries him (doubtless because, in the photo, his hand which is pointing to his naked left breast is covered in blood), sends him back to the telephone. The fact that someone else used his camera to take the photo is also upsetting to him since it is a sign that his system of self-mastery has been turned on its head. After all, if a photo can be taken with his camera by someone else, then other photos he has may also be by an untrustworthy hand – something his lack of memory makes impossible to verify. This also means that someone else knows what the explanation is for the blood on his hand, and this other person is able to make use of his camera to control him. Here the connection between photography and death, which Christian Metz argues is central to its effect, dramatizes the disruption in Lenny’s narrative identity. First, as we later learn, the snapshot of Leonard depicts a triumphal moment of revenge when he has just killed a man who he believes murdered his wife. Secondly, the photo is, by its very composition (the isolated spectral gaze of Leonard partially emerging from the darkness), an evocation of a ghost-like presence. Third, this moment which Leonard cannot remember and which frightens him reveals a past self, to which his present self has no access and which is thus for all intents and purposes dead – yet Leonard fears it may very well be that this past, inaccessible self holds the key to his identity. Here, the question of survival becomes key. Indeed, to what extent can one affirm that the Leonard that we see sitting in the nondescript motel room is the same person as the Leonard in the photo? If personal identity, according to Locke, Parfit, Dennett and others is based essentially upon psychological continuity, then he is in fact not the same person. William Little has argued that Leonard’s repetitions (such as when he hires a prostitute to pretend to be his

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wife, sit in the bathroom and slam the door once he has fallen asleep in order to wake him in an attempt to relive the moment of the attack) make him “the portrait of a failed survivor” (74).22 In other words, the distance between who he is and who he was signals an impossible cohesion of the self. This loss of self dawns on Leonard who is prompted to explain, over the phone, his condition to someone he believes is a policeman: “You know the truth about my condition, officer? You don’t know anything. You feel angry, you don’t know why. You feel guilty, you have no idea why. You could do anything and not have the faintest idea ten minutes later.” The camera captures his expressions in close-up as we watch Leonard say these words, then it shifts to his own perspective as we see his hand with the tattoo “Remember Sammy Jankis” on the flesh above and between the thumb and index. Seeing this tattoo launches Leonard once again into an explanation of the importance of Sammy Jankis who suffered from the same memory deficiencies as Leonard now does. In order to avoid the same suffering that Sammy experienced, Leonard decides that he must force himself to learn from repetition. This imposed self-mastery (which involves the practiced embodiment which Merleau-Ponty refers to as incorporation), he hopes, will help establish a meaningful trajectory, a narrative arc to his otherwise fragmented and meaningless existence. Here Bernard Stiegler’s claim in Technics and Time concerning the “originary prostheticity” of the human may be brought into play with what Elaine Scarry states concerning both tool making and the “usage” of pain (i.e. its political instrumentalization). In tattooing his body (both by himself with a needle and a bic pen, and in tattoo parlors) Leonard is not attempting simply to exteriorize his memory through an object (as Stiegler argues is central to the human). Rather, the state to which he has been reduced by his lack of short term memory forces him to instrumentalize and objectify his own body by making the present state of his (partial, untrustworthy) knowledge visible for later selves. This combination of human and nonhuman (skin and ink) in an attempt to link pain, loss and identity essentially turn him into a memory machine. This combines the human with a nonhuman storage capability, thus illustrating in a sense the originary prostheticity that Stiegler refers to, though this time not in an exterior object, but in and on the lived body. This constitutes both Leonard’s greatest asset and his greatest weakness. The project of mental selfmastery, which begins through the writing of a motivational journal (revealed in the website dedicated to the film : otnemem.com) is now extended to the lived body both the site of his original trauma and the instrument with which he traumatizes others (the “suspects” that he kills or attacks) in an attempt to 22

Little (2005).

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recuperate the self he has lost. Thus, upon each awakening, when every few minutes the clock has run out on his short term memory retention capacities, Leonard is confronted with an opportunity to redefine himself again often choosing to brutalize his own body in order to better brutalize those of others both of which have literally become a way for him to punctually “feel time” – precisely what his lack of psychological continuity prevents him from doing in a fluid and stable fashion (“How can I heal if I can’t feel time?” he complains). Both Time’s Arrow and Memento vividly demonstrate the extent to which human beings are dependent on a linear relationship to time in which their lives may be emplotted. It is, however, this very storyline that the self requires which also makes the lies possible as long as one decontextualizes experience (this is why, though necessary, neither embodiment nor narrative can guarantee ethical behavior). We have already seen in Time’s Arrow that directionality, embodiment and context are essential to the production of meaning as well as to the production of the self. The human, even in its seemingly “universal” aspects (such as suffering) cannot be understood when temporal context is eliminated. Thus, the Polaroid photographs that Leonard uses as a support to his system of notes and tattoos are useless without the note that he must write on each photo, for the photo itself is incapable of telling a contextualized story. It is simply a moment out of time – Metz’s deathly museum image – the disembodied point that Varela rejects as a model for one’s sense of the now. Without the narrative context that is woven through past, present and anticipated future relationships, the photos themselves cannot tell him anything about who the people in them are (and more importantly for him, whether or not he can trust them). Like the man in Searle’s “Chinese Room” he can do no more than mechanically react to stimulation, without understanding the meaning of his actions. The narrative character of these notes is perhaps most clear in the one that Leonard writes on the back of Natalie’s photo: “She has lost someone too. She will help you out of pity.” The note tells a (misleading) story not only about Natalie’s past but also about her shared future with Leonard. The problem with this note is its source: Natalie, who is a manipulative liar. Natalie is in reality using Leonard just as Teddy is.

Memory, Identity and Ethics

As we saw in Chapter one, philosophers and theoreticians have defined personal identity as “continuity over time” though the content and structure of this continuity remains a subject of debate. It has been equally recognized that the faculty of “feeling time,” through the combination of consciousness,

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embodiment and memory (that is, not only recall, but also awareness and control of recall) is something that distinguishes humans from other animals. Without the capacity to “feel time” and to recall the past, one would be bereft of the psychological continuity which is necessary for the self to exist as an identifiable entity. These are precisely the faculties which the narrators of Time’s Arrow and Memento lack. Both works place the reader/viewer in the position of a first-person investigator whose embodied reading is disrupted through distortions in narrative temporality and reliability. In both cases, the disconnect between identity and temporality serve to make violence possible. The detached narrator of Time’s Arrow is meant to symbolize the split consciousness which Robert Jay Lifton identifies in The Nazi Doctors (which Amis cites at the end of his novel as one of his primary sources of information on the German regime). This is how Lifton explains what he terms the “doubling” of the Nazi doctor mind: The way in which doubling allowed Nazi doctors to avoid guilt was not by the elimination of conscience but by what can be called the transfer of conscience. The requirements of conscience were transferred to the Auschwitz self, which placed it within its own criteria for good (duty, loyalty to group, “improving” Auschwitz conditions etc.), thereby freeing the original self from responsibility for actions there. […] There is an inevitable connection between death and guilt. […] The double is evil in that it represents one’s death. The Auschwitz self of the Nazi doctor similarly assumed the death issue for him but at the same time used its evil project as a way of staving off awareness of his own “perishable and mortal part.” It does the “dirty work” for the entire self by rendering that work “proper” and in that way protects the entire self from awareness of its own guilt and its own death. In doubling, one part of the self “disavows” another part. (Lifton 421–422) Greg Harris argues that much of Amis’s project is bound up with Lifton’s book and is a demonstration of how Nazi logic (informed by militarism and a certain idea of progress) distorted medical ethics.23 For this split to become effective, embodiment must be separated from mind and from consciousness, thus allowing the body to commit atrocities while the mind does not register them as such. The above passage from Lifton can, in fact, be applied to both works being examined here, for Leonard is equally guilty of using – through his tattooed directives – a future self (the reading self), in order to do his “dirty work” 23

Quoted in Harris (1999): 489–505.

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of violence meant to stave off the already consummated death of his past self (the writing self). Essentially, Leonard is a zombie being driven by the commands of a dead man who happens to be himself. Thus both works bind identity, embodiment and time to ethics. In each case, the triple temporal horizon (past, present and future) necessary to consciousness, as Varela has shown, is key to identity and ethics. But there is another pressing ethical issue in Time’s Arrow which the apparently flippant, ironic tone of the narrator does not make any easier and that is the problem of how to represent the Holocaust.24 This issue has been much debated in recent years and problems of historical truth, testimony and fictionalization are all confronted with the ethical difficulties of how to account for the gaps and errors in memory that occur naturally either through the trauma itself (an unnarratable moment) or those produced by the distance in time between the moment of the trauma and its recounting.25 For some, the errors which occur in survivor testimony (and this is the case in all types of witnessing) lead to fundamental questions of truthfulness and render the ethical imperative of accuracy impossible to satisfy. The problem facing those fiction writers who, like Amis, have no personal experience of the Holocaust and write stories concerning these events is all the more daunting. Some of these writers have recourse, as does Amis, to the defensive strategy of citing the documentary sources that informed and inspired their writing.26 In Amis’s case this inspiration and information came essentially from Primo Levi and Robert Jay Lifton (as he states in the afterword to Time’s Arrow). Here, the duty 24

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Amis was roundly criticized in the u.k. for this novel, considered by many to have been in bad taste – though it also received some very positive reviews and was short-listed for the Booker prize. Publishers in several countries, including Germany, have refused to publish his latest novel entitled The Zone of Interest (2014) that also deals with the Holocaust – this time depicting a romance in a concentration camp from several perspectives. Again, it is Amis’ acerbic style and sarcasm when dealing with this highly sensitive topic that has caused a stir. For other analyses of how Memento constitutes a commentary on ways of reading and presenting history (especially as regards the tensions between modern and postmodern readings of the same) see Sibelski (2004) who claims that “The narrative and thematic concerns at the center of Christopher Nolan’s film Memento […] reflect the postmodern rejection of the foundational discourses at the heart of Enlightenment modernity” (83) and Gallego (2010) who examines “the postmodern tension between memory and forgetfulness” (39) in the film. A notable recent example of this was Jonathan Littell’s controversial 2006 multi prize winning novel Les bienveillantes (later translated as The Kindly Ones) which presents in the first person the life and atrocities of an s.s. commander.

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to remember and depict the Holocaust runs up against the oft-repeated impossibility to do so (or at least to do so authentically and thus ethically). Robert Eaglestone, in an essay27 which examines this question with reference to Emmanuel Levinas’s reluctance to make the Holocaust more explicitly present in his own writings states the problem in this way: Does this mean that we – who cannot remember the Holocaust – should follow Levinas and not represent the Holocaust? We are trapped in an aporia: we are unable satisfactorily to represent (re-present) the Holocaust but we cannot let it go unrepresented. If art and history – the only modes of representation open to us – will always betray the suffering of the Holocaust, how can we speak, or at least justify our speech? How can we deliver a message about the victim’s humanity which, from behind the bars of quotation marks, will come across as anything other than monkey talk? (103) Eaglestone suggests that fictional representation of the Holocaust be taken as a conversation filled with the kind of interruption that Levinas’ ethics requires in order to avoid totalization: “the openness of an infinite discussion” (104). This implies that texts which represent the Holocaust participate in the levinassian double movement of “saying” (dire) and “unsaying” (dédire) by which the restating otherwise of a proposition allows for the ethical gaps between each statement to remain vibrant. I would like to suggest that Amis’s text embodies the kind of ethical saying and unsaying that Levinas argued for in at least three ways, the first of which is its reversed temporality which produces a highly aware, against-the-grain reading process, secondly, the way in which it induces a viscerally disturbing movement between distance from and proximity to the ironic narrative discourse it weaves and lastly the suggestion it ends with that the narrated must now be undone by yet another directional reversal (the arrow shot anew). In this way, it may be seen as a, necessarily imperfect, attempt at revealing the human through a differential reading process which relies upon resistance, distance, proximity and repetition. The ethical questions in Nolan’s film are of a different sort. We learn at the end of Memento, which for the protagonist is the beginning, that he has in fact been manipulating his own memory (deciding that he will “lie” to his future self by tattooing a man’s license plate number on his body so that he will later believe that this man is his wife’s murderer – though he knows this to be false when he tattoos the information on himself). As viewers, we also realize at this 27

See Eaglestone (2000, 97–108).

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moment that we have been manipulated by the film into believing that L­ eonard was essentially a victim seeking justified revenge, rather than also a perpetrator of unjustified violence. Here the revenge narrative which fuels the story, a staple of cinema (as in Tarantino’s Kill Bill films [2003, 2004] and Noé’s Irréversible [2002]28) which ranks among the most widely accepted motivations for killing among the American movie going public, is implicitly questioned in its seemingly unassailable legitimacy. (The fact that such invented revenge motives have often been used to justify wars is an inescapable meta-reading of the film.) Here the question becomes whether we can really know the past, the reading of which motivates present and future action. Yet, if we cannot, how then can we (a) behave ethically and (b) maintain our identity? By provoking a visceral discomfort with the temporality of the narration, both Amis and Nolan are engaging an embodied, ethical reaction without which the traumatic events narrated would fall into a seemingly “logical” and thus detached flux – precisely the narrative coherence that Leonard seeks to provide himself with. This fact suggests yet another important question surrounding time, narrative and ethics. If linear time is precisely what lulls the reading self (that descendant self which must interpret its own past as having been “written” by a past self) into a false sense of hermeneutic security (the origin, if found, will explain all), then is not the disruptive, contradictory or reversed narrative, as bodily and psychologically unsettling as it is, the potentially more ethical approach? With Amis and Nolan, the reader/viewer is in a privileged position, not because she is privy to knowledge hidden to the characters (as traditionally is the case in literature) but rather because she is explicitly shown that linear narrative can be misleading in significant ways. Yet, it is again the split-level narrative immersion that Marie-Laure Ryan so convincingly defends, that allows us readers to best navigate such a confusing succession of scenes. Precisely because she can seamlessly switch subject positions between her lived body and meta-bodies afforded by the narrative, a keen reader can find her way through to an ethical reading. The necessity of a tripartite temporality to maintain the narrative self then must not be made into a trap for seeing linear narrative as the way to the “truth” of the self. Though Lenny’s manipulation of his self becomes evident in Memento, it is

28

A cursory list of revenge films would also include the following: Sin City (Miller and Rodriguez, 2005), The Patriot (Emmerich, 2000), Baise-moi (Despentes, 2000), Unforgiven (Eastwood, 1992), Mad Max (Miller, 1979), Carrie (De Palma, 1976), Straw Dogs (Peckinpaw, 1971) and countless other B action movies (and vigilante films) from the us, Hong Kong and Latin America.

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never made clear just who Lenny was before his accident, nor even whether he himself was responsible for it. Yet the lack of a solid unitary or essential self does not obviate the need to constantly create the fiction of just such a self as scaffolding for our “center of narrative gravity” – and this is done, as Nolan’s film shows, through narrative. Indeed, throughout the film the protagonist Leonard Shelby repeatedly tells the same two stories, both of which shape the person that he has become. The first is the story of how he lost his capacity to generate new memories (the attack he and his wife suffered). The second story is that of someone else, an ex-client of his named Sammy Jankis, who Leonard believed at the time was faking an inability to generate memories in order to collect an insurance claim. As an insurance claims inspector, a kind of detective for the insurance agency, it was Leonard’s job to determine the truth of the matter. He finally concludes that Sammy’s injury is not due to a physical injury but is rather psychological and on that basis Leonard denies his claim. As a result, Sammy’s wife, who is diabetic and who must live with Sammy (who does indeed suffer from the condition he claims to suffer from) becomes despondent, believing that Sammy is lying to her as well. In order to test Sammy, she asks him to inject insulin into her far too often – the idea being that if Sammy is faking, he will refuse to give her insulin because he will remember having already done so – but he does not refuse, and she dies. Subsequently Sammy is institutionalized without being able to comprehend why or what has happened (since he quickly forgets what he has done). Leonard now realizes that Sammy was not lying and that he became a victim principally because he did not have an artificial memory system in place that would (a) allow him to learn certain tasks and habits that were both new and necessary and (b) allow him to recall what has happened in his life since he lost his capacity to generate new memories. Yet, according to Teddy, the policeman who has been using Leonard, the story that Leonard constantly repeats about Sammy Jankis accidentally killing his diabetic wife is not true. He maintains that it was Leonard whose wife was diabetic. Thus the possibility that Leonard was in fact responsible for his own wife’s death arises. This information puts his manic, violent quest to find his wife’s killer, one that leads him to mistakenly kill more than one innocent person, into a whole new light, and suggests that his convenient erasure of this memory is what makes his violence possible. As Teddy explains, Leonard’s reason for living is revenge. If he were to accept that he had found and killed the murderer (whom Leonard has identified as “John G.”) then he would no longer have any reason to live. It is when Teddy confronts Leonard with the truth that he has already killed his wife’s murderer (which is also, significantly, the moment when Leonard

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realizes that he has been used) that he decides to kill Teddy by lying to a future self. The fact that Leonard does this through indirect means (the manipulation of a future self through false information) shows that he also wishes to erase any possibility of feeling guilt for this action – exactly the kind of doubling that Lifton describes. Were he simply to turn around at that moment and kill Teddy it would be with the realization that he has murdered an innocent man (or at least a man who is innocent of the crime he is being punished for). The temporal and ethical side-step that Leonard takes is key to the political reading of the film as it posits a central aspect of today’s technological and media driven warfare, the proxy nature of violence (with its drones and viral propaganda videos). What Leonard has done by sending a false message (from a trusted source, i.e. himself) to a future self is to separate the actor from his own conscience, to use a proxy self to commit an unethical act. This is a way of disembodying the conscious self temporally.

Rendering Pain Visible in Memento

The mnemonic system that Leonard develops requires him to render his pain visible, since the story of his life since the attack in which his wife died and he lost his short term memory is one that is marked by trauma and pain (­ Figure 2). This rendering visible of pain is reinforced by the practice of tattooing the essential elements of his past directly on his body. It is interesting to note that, much as Scarry connects pain and creation in the Bible, Nietzsche had already shown how pain and religious practices are linked to memory:

Figure 2

Leonard’s tattooed body. © Newmark Capital Group, Team Todd, I Remember Prod.

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[m]an could never do without blood, torture, and sacrifices when he felt the need to create memory for himself; the most dreadful sacrifices and pledges (sacrifices of the first-born among them), the most repulsive mutilations (castration, for example), the cruelest rites of all the religious cults (and all religions are at the deepest level systems of cruelties) – all this has its origin in the instinct that realized that pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics.29 As Lutz Koepnick points out, Walter Benjamin likens the pain inflicted through torture to the temporal disruption enacted by the taking of a photograph: Photographic images – Benjamin suggested – administer mutilation and castration, cruelty and torture, not to the body of the photographed but to the time in which it once manifested itself. They aid or even produce memory by exhibiting the mortality, the painful finitude, of all that is living. As they break historical time into a discontinuous set of seemingly self-enclosed moments, photographic images – like the cruel ceremonies of religious cults in Nietzsche’s view – define and transfix past, present, and future as nights of the living dead. In Benjamin’s understanding, the photographic shutter extends a virtual shock to the photographed in order to prepare the object’s afterlife. (105) Leonard’s storytelling about his own life (the elements of which are contested as we have seen by Teddy and manipulated by Leonard himself) is an endlessly repeated attempt to narrativize the non-narratable traumatic event that has both severed him from his past life and founded a new one. Nolan emphasizes Leonard’s suggestibility (with respect to facts that relate to both pre and post attack time periods) by repeating a previously seen sequence of Leonard pinching his wife’s thigh with the quickly flashed difference that Leonard is now seen to inject his wife with insulin in the same thigh. The viewer does not in fact know from the film which version of the story is correct, though an interesting web site set up by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan settles this question (thus the investigative viewer learns that Leonard’s wife did die from the attack). Here the filmmaker gives us access to Leonard’s mind as it flashes images suggested by others to cobble together and consider a possible narrative about his past in order to understand what it may mean about him now. It is interesting to note that this purely visual representation of mind shows both the mind’s tendency to “fill in the blanks” (since it is here c­ reating 29

Nietzsche (1969, 61) quoted in Koepnick (2004, 105).

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a sequence of images which it has in fact not perceived) and the apparent equivalence for the mind of actual past and merely plausible past. The question which lingers in the consciousness of the attentive viewer is not simply whether this moment actually occurred, but how much difference it makes for the mind since recalling actual memories requires the same capacity to fill in the blanks. We are constantly cobbling together images of who we are based on who we think we have been, and some, if not many, of these images and memories are invented. Stripped of the context which only a properly functioning memory may provide, the photographs and tattoos that Leonard uses constitute an attempt to achieve a level of self-mastery which, in the end, simply leaves him more vulnerable to manipulation. These crutches constitute an external memory much like that which today’s smartphones provide.30 Leonard’s usage of his own body as part of his prosthetic memory system, beyond its practicality, betrays a belief in the fundamental or essential quality of the body as vehicle of prelinguistic authenticity – yet the film clearly questions this since the body does not serve as a refuge of truth in the protagonist’s cloudy existence. Indeed, his insistent attempts at physical self-mastery belie this very possibility, since that which can be manipulated is by definition untrustworthy. It appears therefore that, in order to maintain a coherent sense of self, mastery of two different narrative temporalities are necessary: both contextualized access to one’s past (retention) and future oriented protension (a forward trajectory of the self which is itself dependent on memory). Traumatic experience lies beyond these two categories for it breaks with the flow of narrative time and yet its fixity is not one that allows for comprehension or analysis. In this way we may say that trauma is like the state of insomnia in Maurice Blanchot’s writings: both too near and too far to be grasped, a state out of time linked to suffering. The temporal difficulties that narrating such trauma engenders are often thematized in the detective genre and revenge narratives (both of which are present in Memento). Traditionally in the detective genre, an investigator of some kind must piece together past events to understand the events that led to a given crime in order to subsequently capture a criminal and thus reaffirm society’s faith in the justice system. These themes can be identified easily in 30

When the film was made (1999) cell phones were in wide use but not smartphones. Were the film to be (re)made today, one could easily imagine the protagonist using a smartphone for this purpose. He might in that case, only need to tattoo its password on his body – though fingerprint authentication would be even better. That and social media sites would doubtless be key parts of his mnemonic repertoire.

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both Time’s Arrow and Memento though they are clearly problematized. The second genre, that of the revenge film, is even simpler: it involves a protagonist chasing down someone who has wronged someone in order to “bring them to justice”; that justice is often meted out in an extrajudicial fashion. The point of such revenge narratives, especially in American cinema, is that the survival of the judicial system and society itself often requires extralegal, normally unacceptable, violence (akin to the logic which prevails in wartime scenarios where it is argued that a village must be destroyed in order to “save” it). These related genres both entail an act which intends to give meaning to the present and future by correcting the past (i.e. by attempting to modify the meaning of that past by not allowing an injustice to go unpunished – again the military context springs to mind, such as when it is asserted that a soldier “cannot have died for nothing”). This is Leonard’s very task. Yet, in Memento, embodiment (which is always both spatial and temporal, mental and physical) has been foreshortened. Though Leonard can plan for the future in the very short term, his inability to “grasp” the immediate past for longer than a few minutes forces him to overdetermine his body’s relation to time and personal identity. What he has inscribed on his body is information that is narrative and therefore temporal (one reads “John G. raped and murdered my wife.”) and it is designed to orient his action in the world (including direct commands: “Find him and kill him,” “Learn by repetition”) while giving it meaning. His body writing narrowly defines his past and future, reducing them to a caricature of what they may be. During the initial sequence of the film, the camera occupies Leonard’s point of view. What we see is the Polaroid snapshot of Teddy’s murdered body face down in a pool of blood. Upon the tight close-up of Leonard’s hand holding the photo (then of his hand shaking it as the scene is played in reverse such that the photo eventually dissolves) the title, then the credits appear. Here the fading Polaroid image clearly establishes the theme of Leonard’s fading memory while immediately associating the concept of the memento with the photos that he takes. I have already suggested, as well, that the reversed initial sequence offers the viewer a perverse sense of completion and a certain satisfaction illustrating a kind of recuperative perfect recall. This will to recuperation which I have associated with a humanist desire to preserve and protect a past, and thus a more “authentic” self, may also be seen to underpin the desire for revenge. Revenge appears here then as the dark side, or a perversion of the liberal humanist subject convinced of who he is and the righteousness of his action in the world. While it is may be deemed necessary to conceal certain sources of pain (as Scarry argues), political regimes often seek to render others permanently

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visible. The fading of human memory and its malleability makes this political usage easier. Thus, pain is rendered visible often through the use either of symbols (the color red appearing on flags may recall the blood shed for the given country’s liberation) or even statuary (representing figures or events).31 The widespread usage, very soon after the 11 September 2001 attacks, in the United States of bumper stickers of the Twin Towers with commanding mottos such as “NEVER FORGET,” though not necessarily the result of a concerted effort on the part of any political party clearly dovetailed with the Bush administration’s desired reading of those events. Their purpose was both to render visible a reductive reading of what occurred in the past (thus the towers themselves are often depicted in both a show of defiant strength – as though they were still standing – and to remind one of what has been lost) and to orient and preserve a certain pain.32 Leonard’s tattoos function much in the same way: they are partial, reductive (and at times false) readings of past pain that are graphically inscribed in the flesh – through the painful process of tattooing – in order to stimulate a future violent purpose which directly engages his identity. Peter Thomas has suggested that the doubts that Memento fosters in the viewer concerning the facts of Leonard’s past point to the inherent difficulties encountered by historians: “the film’s key metaphor, is to trace the impossible backward look of the historian from text to referent” (204).33 If this is so, then 31

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This visibility is akin to what Scarry would term its erasure since she specifies that in order to render pain truly visible, it cannot be dissociated from the body – specifically into symbols or other objects – a process she terms analogical verification and analogical substantiation: “It is also possible, however, for the felt-attributes of pain to be lifted into the visible world but now attached to a referent other than the human body. That is, the felt-characteristics of pain – one of which is its compelling vibrancy or its incontestable reality or simply its “certainty” – can be appropriated away from the body and presented as the attributes of something else (something which by itself lacks those attributes, something which does not in itself appear vibrant, real, or certain)” (13–14). One might note however that the standing towers of the bumper stickers, posters and other such memorials are to be juxtaposed with the opposite and more common American rejection of the merits of hindsight by which plans were immediately made to rebuild the towers, possibly making them even larger. Compare this to the KaiserWilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm which was left as is after having been bombed in World War ii. These choices have everything to do with acceptance or rejection of guilt, and a given nation’s reading of the past as defining its future. Peter Thomas claims that “Leonard’s most important trauma is that he accidentally killed his wife, who had survived the attack in which they were both injured” (2003, 206). Yet the film does not allow the viewer to decide this definitively. As mentioned earlier, the website (otnemem.com) which includes newspaper clippings explaining the events of the attack and even entries from a diary that Leonard keeps after the attack detailing his

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the ways in which this history (Leonard’s “past pain”) is recalled is crucial to the manipulation of the future. How am I supposed to heal, if I can’t feel time? leonard to natalie



Eliminate the Past, Control the Future

The manipulation of memory in order to master a future self leads Leonard to desperate attempts to erase his real past. When this past surges back into his view he is deeply disturbed by it and does what he can to eliminate it (by burning photos, and by murdering Teddy, the dirty cop – his last link to the truth of his past). The first indication we have of this movement on Leonard’s part occurs near the beginning of the film when he finds the photo of himself after killing his wife’s murderer (Figure 3). Leonard will later defend his graphic and pictorial mnemonic system to Teddy:

Figure 3

Leonard holds a photo of his spectral past self. © Newmark Capital Group, Team Todd, I Remember Prod.

efforts at self-mastery as well as doctor’s and police reports which make clear that his wife did actually die in the attack. Thus, Leonard cannot be guilty of her death. Yet, the deeper point which Leonard makes while he is on the phone, is that it may as well be the case, since as far as he knows, he may have committed any of a series of acts of which no trace would remain in his mind.

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Memory’s not perfect. It’s not even that good. Ask the police, eyewitness testimony is unreliable. The cops don’t catch a killer by sitting around remembering stuff. They collect facts, make notes, draw conclusions. Facts, not memories: that’s how you investigate. I know, it’s what I used to do. Memory can change the shape of a room or the color of a car. It’s an interpretation, not a record. Memories can be changed or distorted and they’re irrelevant if you have the facts. Leonard claims here that human memory in its fallibility is to be replaced by the solidity and certainty of “facts.” There are two salient points about this which the film makes; the first, which I have already touched upon, concerns Memento’s questioning of the status of this “solid” world that Leonard claims to base his identity upon (stating that his actions must have meaning even if he himself will be unable to remember them or situate that meaning). Since the meanings that we attach to action in the world are dependent upon context and built upon our interpretation of it, they cannot be accepted as unequivocally straightforward and unproblematic. The second point relates again to the dangers surrounding the positing of the self as autonomous source of meaning. Finally, Leonard is seen at different moments burning his wife’s possessions stating: “I can’t remember to forget you.” This again reflects his desire to master himself by mastering the way in which he relates to his past – a past that may better be controlled if no objective reminders of it remain. He is at the same time attempting to master the narrative around the relationship which most defined him: the one he had with his wife. Both Time’s Arrow and Memento’s protagonists are fleeing their pasts and both may be seen as functionaries of a sort. Though Leonard worked for a private insurance company, the declared purpose of this industry is to protect people against loss and to help repair damage, and in that way they are akin to a government service. Odilo, as a Nazi doctor, both was a state worker and in a profession whose Hippocratic oath (quoted in the novel) expressly prohibits practitioners from harming patients and requires them to help those in need. Yet both characters were in the regular practice of denying this aid. For Odilo, cruelly administering death was his principal activity, including acquiring and using the tablets for the gas chambers. Leonard’s remunerated activity consisted in denying payments (and thus aid) to clients who deserved to receive them. Both are protectors who fail to protect and both administer violent “justice” which is clearly unjust. Neither pays for his crimes. Both point to the ways in which forgetting is a useful concomitant to violence. In the same way, the ideal of the freedom of the potential self, the self that can be sculpted and mastered, is shown in both works to be a potential

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danger to the concept of responsibility and humanity itself. According to Locke’s theory, if Leonard as we see him in his current state can be shown to share no psychological continuity with the man who killed his wife, or even with the one who later killed others, then he must be said to be a different person thus positing the question of his responsibility.34 Leonard’s conscious decision to lie to a later self occurs in a moment of anger, when he realizes that Teddy has turned him into a murderer using him to kill drug dealers so that Teddy might profit. Both Natalie and Teddy take advantage of Leonard’s condition and manipulate him. When Leonard realizes this he decides that he will do the same himself in order that he might continue to hold the same chivalrous image of himself as avenging angel saying: “Do I lie to myself to make myself happy? In your case Teddy, yes I will.” The final dramatization of the split between the mind and the world that it exists in occurs at the end of the film when Leonard is driving toward the tattoo parlor to get the tattoo that will lead directly to his killing Teddy. Here, he repeats that he must rely upon the solidity of a world that he can never fully know. He must have faith that the world continues to exist and function as it did when he also functioned properly. The camera switches between a tight shot of Leonard’s pensive face (as we hear his thoughts and the sounds of the road), the road ahead and cars that occasionally speed by. The suggestion is that Leonard has become an eternal vagabond, heading out on a journey that lacks the teleology he wishes to impose upon it. Leonard says: “I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can’t remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world is still there. Do I believe the world is still there?… Is it still out there?” This fear as to the possible irreality of the world outside his temporally foreshortened consciousness is directly assimilable to that which hovers around the concept of the stable self. (Many of the protagonists of the works I study here may as well ask analogously: “Is there anyone in there?”) As Leonard asks this question we see a flash of a fantasy scene in which he lies in bed with his wife who has survived her attack. She lies against him stroking the words “I’ve done it” which he planned to tattoo on his chest over his heart after killing his wife’s murderer. Having received the imagined confirmation that his revenge quest (no matter how fictional) still has meaning, Leonard abruptly abandons his moment of doubt saying “Yeah. We all need mirrors to remind ourselves of who we are. I’m no different.” The car screeches to a halt in front of the tattoo parlor, as Leonard says “Now, where was I?” His 34

For a detailed exploration of this hypothesis see Basil Smith (2007).

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pathological desire and faith in the transcendent meaning of his actions as well as the mendacious way that his own consciousness provides the narrative material (in the image of an impossible marital bliss combined with triumphant revenge) suggests that by restricting one’s mental horizon and eliminating memory, it becomes easy to manipulate past trauma, especially when one has been the perpetrator and not the victim. The lesson, as regards current and past military engagements is not lost on the viewer. The next chapter focuses on how the relational self is interrupted by the loss of the loved other. I look in particular at how the temporal situation of the self is closely bound up with both embodiment and the tension between differing meta-corporeal images. Forced to retrace the borders between the self and other in a suddenly isolated existence, the three female central characters I examine resort to similar conscious ruses but travel along highly different paths ending up far removed one from the other.

chapter 3

The Phantom Limb: Specters, Trauma, and Meta-body the birds so sunstruck they were consumed by light, disembodied, turned into something sheer and fleet and scatter-bright. The Body Artist, 15

Les martinets zigzaguaient encore, certains passaient au ras de ma fenêtre, les flancs bleus, la gorge gonflée, leur corps n’était qu’un sifflet plein de vent, deux ailes creuses autour d’un cri.1 Naissance des fantômes, 16

For the female protagonists of the works which this chapter focuses on, Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist (2001), François Ozon’s film Sous le sable (Under the Sand, 2000) and Marie Darrieussecq’s Naissance des fantômes (My Phantom Husband, 1998), the body is at the forefront of the attempt to repair a damaged sense of self upon the sudden, inexplicable loss of a husband. These disparate works (both in style, origin, medium and trajectory) present strikingly similar initial circumstances for their female protagonists. In both of the first two works a middle-aged couple vacations in a house near the sea, the husband’s disappearance (a suicide in DeLillo’s text and a drowning, possibly a suicide, in Ozon’s film) is not witnessed by the wife. Darrieussecq’s novel shares many of these elements as well, including the bereft wife whose husband’s ­disappearance remains a mystery. After this initial event, the bulk of the story in each case is dominated by each wife’s attempt to reestablish a lost sense of self by interacting with a phantom-like replacement for the missing husband.

1 “The swifts were still zigzagging, some of them skimmed so close to my window, their sides blue, throats ruffled, their bodies no more than a whistle full of wind, two hollow wings around a cry” (6). All translations of Naissance des fantômes are taken from Esther Allen’s translation entitled My Phantom Husband. Each instance in which the translation has been modified is noted.

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While the second chapter dealt with works which in their exploration of consciousness and personal identity focused on memory, the temporality of the self and the body of the subject, the works examined here focus more heavily on the nexus between the real and imagined body especially as it is constructed in relation to another body, another subjectivity. However, temporality and narrative remain crucial elements of our analysis. Each of the works considered here investigates survival strategies put into motion by traumatized women who are forced to reconsider their identities in their abruptly solitary existences. Yet, the trauma occasioned by the loss of the other does not inhere exclusively in the other’s absence nor does it reside for these three characters in an extended empathetic exploration of who the lost loved one was. In fact, on key occasions the protagonists reject or deflect new information about their lost husbands which is offered up by those who seemingly knew them better (an ex-wife in DeLillo’s novel, and mothers-in-law in Ozon’s film and Darrieussecq’s novel). Though secrets are indeed revealed about each husband (mainly concerning a depressive state which went unnoticed by their wives) these are not the most hurtful nor the deepest mysteries the protagonists must grapple with. The most profound mysteries reside in the fragile, damaged sense of self of the main characters who must now decide who they are – but who, unlike the protagonists of Time’s Arrow and Memento, refuse even the pretense of a detective-like search for self. Though we have seen that Amis’ novel and Nolan’s film present deluded searches by protagonists who actually fear finding themselves, for the women in these next three works a return to self, which requires a return to the other, is in order – which does not mean that they are any less deluded. I will however argue that there is a marked absence of violence on the part of the women in these narratives as they seek not to reinforce the powerful image of an autonomous self but rather a return to a relational self – even if it means returning to a self which must relate to an absence rather than a presence. The point at which the two bodies (real and imagined) meet is the meta-body. Meta-body The concept of “meta-body” as I am using it here is neither simply the lived body in its actual material form, nor the body image that we carry with us (though these are among its constitutive elements). The meta-body is a dynamic which results from the interplay of our lived body, the images and

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spaces we encounter in the phenomenal world (our spatial self) and the temporally, spatially and affectively marked trajectories of the self which help shape not only how we see ourselves but what we believe, fear, or wish we have been and crucially what we plan, fear or wish to become. Thus the meta-body is always at once temporal, directional and narrative (since narrative is the way that we “feel time” and give our lives direction). The meta-body is a flickering movement which comes into play by projecting the self into the difference between actually lived spaces and virtually lived spaces proposed by narrative and the bodies we imagine inhabiting therein. To the extent that other bodies and subjectivities play a role in our view of ourselves the meta-body is also a product of our relations with others. Thus the face of the other is equally important in tracing what the metabody can be. When, as in the examples I explore in this chapter, one considers couples who have spent many years living together, the body, the face of the other becomes an integral part of one’s meta-body. After all, one sees the other’s face much more often than one’s own. Who do I become when I have spent five, ten, twenty years looking at another face which is not my own? This other face, this other body, which reacts to my own and to which I react, which I view from the outside as though I were looking from within, becomes an integral part of my own. Yet the meta-body is not a static shell into which one steps. It is the result of an ever changing narrative, one to which several voices contribute. One aspect of the meta-body I explore here is the tension it engenders between an autonomous self (singular, self-sufficient) and a relational (or hybrid) self. In this sense the pain that one feels in a limb which has been amputated is situated in the meta-body – that body which, partly made up of memories, partly of desires and beliefs about the self, more fully fleshes out our embodied consciousness. In this sense, the mind thinks through the body while the metabody shapes and orients the mind. The work of feminist theoretician Elizabeth Grosz – based, in part, on her reading of Paul Schilder – on the “body image” is useful as a basis for understanding how the meta-body works. Grosz describes a very wide range of elements which go into the “body image” (the mental projection of the body) with an emphasis on habit and incorporation. Additionally, as Paul ­Schilder’s succinct definition in Appearance and Image of the Human Body shows, the “body image” closely melds the lived body to its physical prostheses: “The image of the human body means the picture of our own body which we form in our mind, that is to say, the way in which the body appears to ourselves” (11).

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Elizabeth Grosz’s explication of Schilder’s concept (in her influential study Volatile Bodies) is highly illuminating, though it adheres much more closely to material accoutrements and social connotations (clothing, jewelry, physical form, habits, presentation) than what I am proposing here: Anything that comes into contact with the surface of the body and remains there long enough will be incorporated into the body imageclothing, jewelry, other bodies, objects. They mark the body, its gait, posture, position, etc. (temporarily or more permanently), by marking the body image: subjects do not walk the same way or have the same posture when they are naked as when they wear clothing. […] External objects, implements, and instruments with which the subject continually interacts become, while they are being used, intimate, vital, even libidinously cathected parts of the body image. These objects and implements need not be small: objects ranging from the smallest tools to jets, ships, and cars are all capable of becoming part of the body image. Part of the difficulty of learning how to use these implements and instruments is not simply the technical problem of how they are used but also the libidinal problem of how they become psychically invested. In driving, the car becomes part of the body image, a body shell for the subject… (79–80) .

Of particular relevance here for the meta-body concept is the concentration on the process of “psychically invest[ing]” objects and spaces and the interest in the “spatial self” (such as vehicles which become “body shells” for the body image).2 The meta-body incorporates this focus on embodied space while applying it to the other as phantom or prosthetic – both an extension, a palliative to the self and an internalized, integral part of it.3 Other aspects which 2 While a crucial aspect of Grosz’s project focuses on the importance of the social construction of sex and gender a view which along with Judith Butler and others has gained much currency in the past twenty years this key determining factor is not the focus of either the works I write of here nor of my own approach. In a sense it is true that though a gender studies approach to these works would doubtless yield significant results, my main interest is in uncovering how each author and filmmaker approaches the depiction of embodied consciousness. The very narrow focus of each of the works in this study on either an autonomous or relational subject principally represented in his or her relations with himself and others is itself indicative of my overall argument concerning the survival of certain key humanist tropes which, in their universalist scope, elide important factors such as social marginalization. 3 As in chapter one I refer the reader to Vivian Sobchack’s critical examination (2004) of the usages and abuses of the metaphor of the prosthesis. As she suggests that a prosthesis is “incorporated not “into” or “on” but “as” the subject” (22), I argue here that the mutual

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distinguish­the “meta-body” from the “body image” are the narrative and temporal qualities of the former. In the same way that the self is viewed to have past, present and possible future forms, the other is endowed with a temporally marked embodied consciousness. Thus when this narrative temporality is interrupted, the meta-body is called into question. The meta-body4 includes, for example, the network of meanings that Leonard (in Memento) creates for his own graphically inscribed body as well as the temporal connotations that these modifications hold with respect to his personal identity (commanding him to catch and kill his wife’s murderer, for example). The tattoos on Lenny’s body are not simply a roadmap for who he wishes to be (presenting him with a purpose in life and a prosthetic visible memory) but as they modify his body, they also dictate what his body will be used for (violence against randomly chosen victims). In Time’s Arrow Tod/ Odilo’s meta-body is set in a reverse trajectory which seems to telescope different spatio-temporal selves. Since Tod/Odilo’s reversed life is told through the eyes of a disembodied narrator who understands nothing of what he witnesses, the protagonist appears much like the crying baby that so haunts him: both helpless (in his flight back in time) and excessively powerful. Yet Tod/Odilo’s corporality (the grotesquely suffering body he is trapped in), his attempts to erase the past (by changing identities and names), the forced return to the site and time of his crime and the way that he is unwillingly bound to the other (the baby who is both his victim and his judge) all point to the tortured metabody of a torturer. I would like to insist, then, upon the triple nature of the meta-body: at once mental, spatial and temporal. The rolling now of consciousness depends upon the fiction of a stable sense of self. This means that the meta-body, to function properly, must be based on the interplay between stable material elements (the lived body of self and other whose transformations are slow unless trauma or illness radically changes this pace) and imagined elements (the body as projected into different spaces and times, including the bodies of others). While the lived body bears the marks of past activity and pain which help define investing of self and other is a normally transparent, integrated experience which only becomes opaque when a disruption of the self’s narrative trajectory points either to its absence or radical change. This is not therefore at all about an instrumentalized relationship with the other – rather it is meant to convey a relation of mutual inscription and dependence. 4 Meta-body as it is used here is also to be distinguished from Foucault’s “meta-body,” a term used to critique the way that the field of genetics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries imagined the multipersonal ties between an individual and ancestral and contemporary others who are genetically linked to him. For a more complete discussion of Foucault’s concept of “metabody” see Mader (2010).

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who we believe we are, the extended meta-body offers us an immersive path to reimagine past and future selves. In our relations with others we do not simply interact with bodies and behaviors, we constantly attribute intentions and explanations to these behaviors and “read” other bodies and minds (“mindreading”). The reciprocal nature of self and other reading one another means that the other’s mind is also of tremendous importance to the self. In Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, Lisa Zunshine’s pioneering work on literature and Theory of Mind (ToM or “mindreading”) the author argues that the mind’s natural tendency to deduce the contents of another’s thoughts, beliefs and desires explains the pleasure which is derived from reading novels since we enjoy figuring out what motivates other people to act. The mind is wired to practice this skill by attempting to understand what others are thinking and how that may be predictive of what they will do next. Mind reading thus sharpens mental skills that we need in order to function socially in the world. Yet reading another’s intentions, looking for explanations for their behavior supposes a subject position which is itself shaped in part by the body and spaces it inhabits. Immersion in narrative is crucial to consciousness because it essentially provides the mind with a perch, a subject position. The same kind of projective and retrojective relationship that we experience when engrossed in a good book or film (immersing ourselves in the narrative and exploring ethical choices, possible selves and practicing mind reading) while retaining the ability to step outside this narrative also pertains to our interpersonal relations especially with the persons we are closest to. In the same way that our brains are wired to seek out opportunities to mind read (in fiction but also in daily encounters with other people) the spaces we inhabit and other bodies that we come into contact with offer us normally fleeting but nonetheless significant possibilities to imagine ourselves otherwise. It is as though, far from being a phenomenon completely independent of embodiment, consciousness required embodiment so much that it seeks out multiple possibilities for embodiment by default. By adopting others’ points of view even only briefly and very imperfectly (since the very premise of consciousness as first-person phenomenon precludes any possibility that one can ever truly know exactly what it means to be someone else) one is modifying, if ever so slightly, one’s own embodiment. The ways in which this engages our personal identities is one reason why many students find it so difficult to learn foreign languages fluently – the necessary mental effort has an impact on embodiment which may engage one’s sense of self too directly. This is also why advertising’s narrative omnipresence in our lives carries ever greater force in shaping our selves. After all, this process is not always a voluntary one. One of

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the most common forms of violence does not consist in actually coming into physical contact with another but rather in presenting the other with embodiment possibilities which dramatically or violently disrupt their meta-body. As we will see in this chapter, the tension between voluntary and involuntary imagined embodiment is something that Lauren, the body-obsessed performance artist in Don DeLillo’s novel The Body Artist grapples with when, after losing her husband suddenly, her art which consists precisely in changing her body to adopt other identities begins to escape her control. The basic premise here then is that there is a natural urge to escape the lived body by multiple means such as reading fiction, sexual relations with another, “daydreaming” that one is another or simply contemplating the face of another. These are some of the avenues that the characters in the works studied here explore. But they are far from the only paths to imagine oneself as another. Nonhuman forms – both the kind we physically invest such as clothing, vehicles, buildings or other spaces and the kind which we simply contemplate such as inanimate sculptures, or even other animals – provide the mind with temporary fodder for imagining the self as other either by imagining the self investing the other form or simply by allowing the self to be affected by contact with it. There are of course no standard, universal rules about how such embodied consciousness plays out or which forms are universally considered attractive, comforting or beneficial. Indeed, this is a profoundly cultural and even individual question in the same way that a lived body is never simply a body (as Judith Butler and Elizabeth Grosz among others have clearly shown). It should also be noted that this tendency to imagine the self as other, specifically the desire to imagine other embodiment may be closely bound up with a desire to protect, extend or perfect the self as though the ability to project the self into another body meant a greater chance that this self would survive. The constellation of spaces, influences and bodies both possible and lived is what I have been calling the meta-body, a term not to be confused with current exalted notions of strengthening the autonomous self through prosthetic technology though this is one path for imagining the self otherwise. The meta-body is not necessarily a strengthening mechanism, rather, like memory it has both voluntary and involuntary modes which one hopes to successfully control and which the characters I examine here often cannot. This introduces the contradiction inherent in the effort to preserve the self as same precisely by changing it. This tension occurs because, without difference, there is no sense of self. It is in this rubbing against the possibility of other embodiment that our minds exercise themselves and better construct a resilient sense of self. The inability to distinguish between self and other, or especially the loss of the ability to both leave and seamlessly slip back into one’s

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own embodied consciousness causes the characters in these works to recreate the missing other as a sort of phantom limb.

The Body Artist

Lauren Hartke, the protagonist of Don DeLillo’s novel The Body Artist might well embrace the same lament that Leonard Shelby utters in Memento “How can I heal if I can’t feel time?” Among the critical approaches to DeLillo’s novel, Cornel Bonca’s Heideggerian reading sees it as a faithful representation of Dasein as a being unto death5 while Rachel Smith (2006) sees grief as a productive in-between.6 Robert Ziegler sees it as an exploration of mourning and a “profoundly creative act” (7). However, the most relevant observation for my argument which Ziegler makes is not developed in detail in his article – that of the other as first prosthetic then phantom limb: “For Lauren, an artist whose work requires that she become the strangers whose identities she borrows, her husband’s suicide is experienced as an amputation, the loss of a body part she had taken for granted” (8). I will suggest here that though Lauren’s husband was necessary to Lauren’s sense of self, there are clear signs that in the end what she attempts to recover is not so much the other as phantom limb but rather the ability to step back from this symbiosis. For Lauren, to “feel time” (her ultimate goal) requires the ability to trace the borders of the self as well as the capacity to move beyond and back inside its porous membrane. In a detailed and perceptive reading of The Body Artist, Laura DiPrete focuses on DeLillo’s exploration of the language of trauma: “As DeLillo’s writing 5 Bonca focuses on the eponymous artist Lauren’s trauma as marked above all by a new awareness of her own death as experienced by proxy through that of her husband: “Being is consciousness’s (i.e. Dasein’s) and the artist’s, only real subject – Being as revealed in time on its way to its own extinction” (62). Yet, Bonca does not focus on how DeLillo explores the connections between consciousness and body. 6 In her biopolitical reading of recuperation through grief in The Body Artist Rachel Smith (2006) argues that “the problem of grief in the novel is the problem of anchoring an active life in an abyss of meaninglessness” (101). The critic sees grief as the “ambivalent state of in-between” (104), having “the temporal quality of pausing.” It “is not limited to a subject/ object relation,” appearing as “the inevitable consequence of potentiality”; “[emerging] out of an event or moment of rupture” (104). “[G]rief is ambivalent” “[it] is always between one form of life and another” (105). Smith concludes that “While the novel ultimately exposes the weakness of narrative, catapulting when it is faced with the need to propel the pausing of grief into action, the negotiation of the word and the body constructs a productive tension that takes the body beyond the word” (108).

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plunges into a dimension of distorted temporality and spatiality that shatters conventional language, his project engages in the difficult task of articulating relations among the key terms that structure the experience of trauma: the self, the voice, and the body. How, The Body Artist asks, can one tell a story of trauma, a story in which the known is deeply imbricated in the unknown?” (484). DiPrete goes on to show how the “embodied voice” is itself revelatory of Lauren’s internal witness to trauma which reflects the central theme that the critic calls “the psychic entrapment caused by traumatic experience and the consequential failure of language to move beyond pure self-referentiality” (491).7 Here I will focus on the ways in which the tension between two opposing self images pre and post loss of the other shape how embodiment and lived time intersect. Lauren Hartke, the body artist in DeLillo’s novel is a performance artist who sculpts her body to create new characters, stepping into their skins as completely as possible while going to extremes to embody their pain. Yet, while Lauren’s art is based upon the control and reshaping of her own body, we learn that for her time itself is physical, that is, time and specifically narrative time, which she explicitly recognizes as crucial for the existence of the self, must be perceived by the body in full. Except for two very short passages which provide a neutral, outside perspective (one a newspaper obituary offering some details of her dead husband’s life and another a review of a performance art show Lauren puts on) the novel is written from her point of view. In fact, The Body Artist presents the reader with a penetrating and lexically realistic x-ray of each movement, each of Lauren’s mental steps, stumbles and leaps. DeLillo adopts a halting, vacillating language (filled with attempts to retrace, emend and/or deny what has been expressed) which reveals a meticulous attention to the complexities both of how embodied consciousness perceives time and how the self, in this case the traumatized self of a widow, is built up through projection into space and time both real and imagined. The opening of the novel unfolds a scene of early morning tranquility in which Lauren stands in her kitchen looking out the window watching a spider as her husband Rey sits at the table. Here we have an embodied consciousness unfolding in time with a spider serving as a metaphor of her mind carried forth on pendular attention swings:

7 For more on DeLillo’s search for a way to create a language of trauma in The Body Artist see David Cowart “DeLillo and the Power of Language” in Duvall (2008), Rachel Smith (2006), Atchley (2004) and Nel (2002).

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Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web. (9) Each word matters in this revelatory first paragraph which foreshadows the struggle that Lauren will be going through beginning on the very next day when she learns that her husband, the Spanish filmmaker Rey Robles (a refugee, in his childhood, of the Spanish Civil War) has committed suicide far away in his first wife’s New York apartment. DeLillo writes that time “seems” to pass highlighting a relationship between the body, consciousness and time which we understand later on is crucial to Lauren’s recovery. To say that time “seems to pass” is precisely to say that, at this moment, Lauren enjoys what Lenny in Memento does not, she “feels time.” This capacity is what the coming trauma will strip her of. Yet even this first scene, before the trauma has arrived, hints at the mental confusion that will characterize Lauren’s state once she suffers the shock of unexpected irreversible loss. Once in her traumatized state she begins to misrecognize several things, such as when she mistakes a paint can for a man, or a piece of burlap for a dead squirrel. This misrecognition may be linked to the difficulty of recognizing one’s trauma – and more specifically the nature of the loss that occasions it. Later Lauren will come into contact with a young man (whom she dubs “Mr. Tuttle”) whose identity remains a mystery and whose mimicry skills allow him to blur the lines between self and other. Embodiment, a wavering mind and time are all linked in the formation of Lauren’s self. Of the three, the most mysterious is time as Lauren later states. The second person singular (as in the quote above “you stop to glance”) appears at several points in the novel and reveals moments of self-awareness on the part of Lauren. Throughout the novel she will focus on the feeling of clarity and thus wholeness that sharp, unambiguous distinctions bring (“a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely” 9). These moments of clarity point to the desire for an equally distinct sense of self which nonetheless foreshadows the pain that comes with it: “You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness” (9). That self-awareness should come as a stab suggests that consciousness depends both on the clarity of the distinction between self and other and, as we will see, the pain of such separation.

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Competing with the ideal sensation of time as separable into digestible, lived segments (“The world happens, unrolling into moments,” 9) which the situated self becomes aware of (it is Lauren’s gaze that we follow), one finds in this text a second temporality more indicative of trauma: belatedness. While the first experience of time is indicative of a self-aware subject, situated in the world, belatedness suggests a disconnect and an incapacity to fit what is happening into a narrative as it occurs. As Cathy Caruth has shown in her reading of Freud’s theories on trauma, the temporality of trauma manifests two central characteristics: first it is an arresting of time since the traumatic event has not been processed successfully by the mind and body on which it nonetheless leaves its trace. It remains locked away as a moment frozen outside the narrative flow of one’s life. Second, its persistent, repeated return in the mind’s attempt at comprehension creates a delayed trajectory whereby aspects of the traumatized self only come to be perceived (though not understood) in a late or belated fashion. It is this belatedness that will characterize Lauren’s experience of time and self. Exploring the tension between the autonomous and the relational self whereby the other is alternately held at bay and internalized, ventriloquized even, DeLillo focuses on what everyday language reveals about identity. DeLillo suggests that the mind is like the spider evoked in the opening paragraph, secreting its web around itself – a web of relations. In this first passage, the day before Lauren’s husband Rey commits suicide at a different location, the delay between utterance and comprehension is often highlighted. Lauren and Rey are having breakfast in the kitchen of a rented house by the sea. Rey asks for something, Lauren responds “What?” as though she has not heard and then in the ensuing silence remembers what she has just been asked (rehearing the words) and belatedly registers it. This happens several times, highlighting her detachment. Beyond the hyperrealism of the dialogue, I would argue that this early representation of belatedness is both a foreshadowing of the belated temporality of trauma which Lauren will experience beginning the following day and a reflection of the tension between the autonomous and the relational self. Initially Lauren’s mind tunes out Rey’s comment as though attempting to maintain an autonomous space. Only later does she respond. This is equally reflected by Lauren’s fixation on mentally identifying to whom each object in the kitchen belongs – these are some of the distinctions that Lauren needs in order to feel that she exists as a separate consciousness.8 8 She needs to keep reminding herself of such distinctions because otherwise her world would risk becoming a blur: “It was his coffee, his cup, his cigarette” (20).

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There are key moments when her desire for autonomy appears even more clearly: “She scraped her upper teeth over her tongue to rid her system of the complicated sense memory of someone else’s hair” (13). Here the hair of unknown origin, belonging neither to her nor Rey, appears as an uncanny shock to Lauren who finds it in her mouth. She is disturbed by the material presence of another whose repulsive fluids she can’t help imagining as she attempts to work out the provenance of the unwanted strand. Here is an element of her meta-body (involuntarily melding her body with that of an unknown other) whose connotations she would just as soon cleanse herself of. This theme of the intrusive, mysterious strand of hair will reappear later on in the novel taking on the traumatic status of the Freudian “foreign body” (Fremdkörper) – a trope we will see in other works. One might imagine for now that the disruption it causes in her enjoyment of the early morning clarity is itself a foreshadowing of the process by which she will later be forced to separate herself from the phantom, defunct other. One should note that there is at least one other reason why DeLillo chooses to highlight these gaps and moments of belated or displaced understanding: they reveal something about Lauren’s own thought process as it moves slowly towards its goal (“What’s it called, the lever. She’d pressed down the lever to get his bread to go down,” 11). These moments of hesitation can also convey something like the opposite of the desire for autonomous identity: a gap between doing and understanding, a distance between touching and naming which would seem to direct the character further toward the blurring of identity which she will experience after Rey’s death – in her effort to name she is attempting to join word to object, meaning to act. That hesitant search for meaning (in a relation) plays out both spatially and temporally in the novel. Lauren’s contemplation of the blue jay at her kitchen window suggests two contradictory movements: the first is constituted by a moment of epiphany in which she feels that she has truly seen something for the first time standing out with tremendous clarity against all other existing objects. Lauren controls her breathing so as not to startle the bird and thereby ruin this special moment of transcendence in which she both perfectly perceives another body in the world and imagines what it would be like to inhabit that body. This is the second movement which characterizes Lauren: the desire to meld with an other coupled with the fantasy of mutual recognition. Note the two step process as with naming the “lever”: first there is the perception of the existence of a word, an object or a fact, next a blank hesitation (a gap) and secondly a movement to join the word, object or fact to something else – to give it meaning. Both the movement and the gap – the blank space – are important.

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The blank space here is embodied by Lauren’s holding her breath so that the bird does not fly away. We see later in the novel that breathing is an important part of the exercises that she does in order to modify her body so as to invest the body of an other. Here she imagines what it would be like to be that “royally remote” (i.e. ideally autonomous) blue jay looking in on the strange world inhabited by Lauren and Rey still half asleep having breakfast in their rented house. This is, like her later encounter with the mysterious, perhaps mentally impaired, ghost-like man who appears in the house (Mr. Tuttle), a moment which cannot be shared with others. Both the first movement toward recognizing absolute separation (the clarity of outline, the remoteness of the bird) and the second toward a melding of self and other (imagining what the bird sees) must remain private: She stopped dead and held her breath. It stood large and polished and looked royally remote from the other birds busy feeding and she could nearly believe she’d never seen a jay before. It stood enormous, looking in at her… She watched it, black barred across the wings and tail, and she thought she’d somehow only now learned how to look. She’d never seen a thing so clearly and it was not simply because the jay was posted where it was, close enough for her to note the details of cresting and color. There was also the clean shock of its appearance. […] But if Rey looked up, the bird would fly. […] When birds look into houses what impossible worlds they see. Think. What a shedding of every knowable surface and process. She wanted to believe the bird was seeing her, a woman with a teacup in her hand, and never mind the folding back of day and night, the apparition of a space set off from time. (23–24) The bird’s space lies outside narrative time, it occupies a separate, stagnant temporality that Lauren will occupy after her husband’s death. In many ways this atemporal space is itself the space of death – much like the one depicted by the ghostly photo of himself as ecstatic murderer that, in Memento, Leonard contemplates and fears. This is, like that moment, one of seeing the self as other, of standing outside the self and the normal temporal flow of events. Yet, for Lauren, this moment signifies something diametrically opposed to what it means for Leonard. For her, this is an ideal moment of possible selfmastery as she imagines inhabiting the royally remote bird’s body. It is also precisely the timeless bird whose perspective allows Lauren to narrate her own existence: “She wanted to believe the bird was seeing her, a woman with a teacup in her hand” (24). Thus again tension arises between two subject positions, those of “lived time” (narratable) and “dead time” (atemporal, non narratable).

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Yet, as we will see further on with the mysterious Mr. Tuttle, non-narrative time is above all that of the traumatized self. Much like Golo does for the narrator in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the blue jay represents for Lauren a body into which to project the self – a meta-body for her to temporarily flee in and out of. This free, remote, autonomous and controlled creature hovering before her not only offers her the image of perfect corporality but also an imagined perspective on her lived body. This imagined process of self-reflection is characterized by stepping outside the self to inhabit the other only to swivel back again – a process that mirrors both reading (Lauren occupies the bird’s body in order to “read” herself) and the construction of the self as tension between autonomy and relation. This is one of several “privileged,” almost Proustian, moments in the novel in which Lauren enjoys a flash of awareness. She hesitates to point out the bird to her husband sitting at the kitchen table, and when she does so, the bird flies away before he can see it showing both Rey’s inability to perceive such moments of clarity and emphasizing their fragile, fleeting nature. This may also highlight for Lauren the dangers in attempting to “share” the self. Standing in her kitchen Lauren has to make a mental effort to keep things straight by reminding herself to whom each object belongs (his coffee and cup, his phone, her newspaper, her weather). Meanwhile she has another Proustian moment which evokes the opening passage of In Search of Lost Time when she lets her mind wander and seems to enter into a news item that she is reading actually becoming one of its protagonists. She tended lately to place herself, to insert herself into certain stories in the newspaper. Some kind of daydream vacation. She did it and then became aware she was doing it and then sometimes did it again a few minutes later with the same or a different story and then became aware again. (16) Here DeLillo is particularly concerned, not only with the fact of Lauren’s immersion in another’s story, but also with the actual process by which she cycles in and out of this immersive experience. This passage highlights the wavering of Lauren’s will here, first referring to her “insert[ing] herself into certain stories” as though the process were initiated rationally and willingly – a kind of game or “daydream vacation.” Yet, once immersed she becomes “aware she [is] doing it” and repeats the process of switching subject positions. This suggests that it is involuntary (her awareness is belated), almost as if her very sense of self was nothing more than a flickering light, sometimes on,

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sometimes off. This drifting in and out of awareness also describes the way that she interacts with Rey and the way that she continues to interact with him after his death through the spectral Mr. Tuttle who brings Rey’s voice back to life. Mark Osteen has tracked DeLillo’s delicate investigation into consciousness suggesting that Lauren’s immersive reading process is meant to reflect an ideal reader whom the author hopes to attract: “Reading, for her, is also a mode of performance or possession, and one that DeLillo invites his readers to undertake as well, so that our reading animates the characters, possesses them, and allows them to possess us” (67). Most interestingly Osteen suggests that the blue jay is a figure for the narrator who “also hovers and skitters, dipping into and out of narrative time and Lauren’s mind like a bird at a feeder” (67). Yet this ability to freely dip in and out of narrative is nothing more than an ideal subject position that Lauren struggles to adopt. Lauren’s tendency to involuntarily blur identities increases once she has lost her husband Rey. Now her doubts about her own powers of perception worsen: “Things she saw seemed doubtful – not doubtful but ever changing, plunged into metamorphosis, something that is also something else, but what, and what” (38). She begins to attempt to rebuild a sense of time that will lead her out of her traumatized state: “The plan was to organize time until she could live again. After the first days back she began to do her breathing exercises. […] But the world was lost inside her” (39). She is now deep in the throes of a depression that manifests itself in the desire to invest the other’s (dead) body: “She wanted to disappear in Rey’s smoke, be dead, be him…” (36). To Lauren, the blue jay’s body appears as a brightly outlined form capable of autonomous movement standing in sharp contrast to her own transparent, porous body – one that bleeds into others and has trouble demarcating its own borders. Whereas Lauren easily slips into the fantasy that she has become another (indeed this is the very basis of her art), the bird looking in on her can only perceive her world as profoundly strange (not one to potentially inhabit). Nor does she imagine the bird to be capable of projecting itself (as she does) into the bodies it sees. Thus, while the bird commands an impermeable, agile body, Lauren seems imprisoned in a transparent blur. Her m ­ eta-body is to be located in the attempt to imagine what it would be like to alternately inhabit both corporeal spaces. Who would Lauren be were she to be as light, as well-defined and autonomous as this pretty bird she sees outside her window – separated from her world by a nonetheless transparent sheet of glass?

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Projecting the Self into a Different Emptiness

As a way of escaping her newly solitary existence after Rey commits suicide, Lauren begins watching a live-streaming video of a two-lane road in Kotka, Finland on the internet. For her “The dead times were the best” (40). The dead zone that this road represents is a spatial and temporal void (a “now” removed from both past and present) which the protagonist uses both as a mirror for her own blank state and as an ideally empty space not to imagine herself in but rather to better erase what remains of her self. In this way, unlike the atemporal blue jay, the self here is projected away from its current weakened state into an electronically extended non-human “dead time.” This dead time is so precisely because it is disembodied, whereas the blue jay represented a controlled, atemporal body into which to project the self – initiating a doubling back to the self not produced by the contemplation of the Finnish road. In a sense, her viewing the streaming video may also be seen as an effort to understand or embody not Rey’s body, but rather his temporality, a disembodied, dead temporality. Stripped of the presence of the other, Lauren seeks a visual representation of an absence she mentally locates herself in and which she does not control (a passive exiting of the self into the other’s absence). As such it announces Lauren’s later attempts to think through her body via its erasure and constitutes her first attempt to reconstruct Rey – an effort that will immediately play out in corporeal form. At this point she hears a noise she has heard before in the old house, and upon investigating this time finds an odd, possibly mentally impaired man ­upstairs. He is presented as non-threatening, almost a kind of helpless extraterrestrial. The unknown visitor is unable to identify himself and speaks in a disjointed, repetitious, halting fashion which makes him seem possibly autistic. Lauren imagines him as a visitor from cyberspace “a man who’d emerged from her computer screen in the dead of night. He was from Kotka, in Finland” (47).9 Later, simply to have some kind of name for him, she decides to call him Mr. Tuttle after a teacher she had as a child. Mr. Tuttle appears then both as a harmless and helpless companion to Lauren and as a human void, so fragile and lacking in physical substance that he is difficult to see: “He was smallish and fine-bodied and at first she thought he was a kid, sandy-haired and roused from deep sleep, or medicated maybe” (43). He is further described as ghost-like in his insubstantiality – as though he were difficult to see because his body was transparent (“unfinished”): “His chin 9 The connection that Lauren makes between Kotka and Mr. Tuttle suggests that he is indeed her second attempt to project herself into Rey’s absence.

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was sunken back, severely receded, giving his face an unfinished look, and his hair was wiry and snagged, with jutting clumps” (47). Later Lauren thinks of him this way: “Like someone you could easily miss. Like someone you technically see but don’t quite register in the usual interpretive way. Like a man anonymous to himself. Like someone you see and then forget. Like that, instantly” (97). In a particularly interesting formulation which shows her thinking through her body, Lauren equates the act of looking at Mr. Tuttle to pure perception suggesting that the body’s access to the world is purer because less analytical: “Or you see him upside down, the way the eye sees before the mind intervenes” (98). He appears out of order, temporally “upside down” because the mind is unable to fit him into a satisfying narrative. In this sense, Mr. Tuttle embodies trauma. There is a tragic quality to the lost, solitary character of the subject stripped of any connection to an other. This is clearly a representation of what Lauren herself has been reduced to in her new life alone (the term that most strikingly connects Mr. Tuttle to Lauren). They are both alone. Mr. Tuttle, in his lack of substance has been reduced to a quality and not a person, and is thus referred to as “it” and not “he”: “How could such a surplus of vulnerability find itself alone in the world? Because it is made that way. Because it is vulnerable. Because it is alone” (98). Incapable of projecting any identity or of comprehending the world around him, he literally embodies the void. In this way he is for Lauren a new emptiness into which to project the self. Yet, the insubstantial physical stature of Mr. Tuttle and his limited speech capabilities are not the only problem, it is in fact his one great skill that causes the most stir in the protagonist. He appears to be an excellent mimic capable of reproducing both Lauren and Rey’s voices repeating their words though always in an incomplete fashion. This is a memory stripped of context, embodiment and thus meaning – making his apparently nonsensical outbursts both memories and an audible forgetting or erasure of memory. DiPrete suggests that Mr. Tuttle’s speech is in fact the language of trauma itself and refers to the process by which Lauren accesses the repressed memory of Rey’s death. But what Lauren truly needs is a memory that may be situated in a temporal flow and which makes corporeal sense – something that Mr. Tuttle cannot offer her. This means that he alone cannot be the trigger for her to recover that memory. Lauren’s fruitless attempts to erotically connect with Mr. Tuttle demonstrate equally how tactile and more generally corporeal memory cannot be filled or restored by a void. In her attempts to regain a sense of time through Mr. Tuttle, Lauren displays an apparent lack of interest in another essential element: the past. Only by

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twice revisiting the final moments she spent with Rey, moments she had not contemplated earlier, can she finally begin to envisage a future.

Erasing the Self

Before revisiting this past she needs to efface her current form. Lauren seems determined to erase as much of herself as she can (beginning with her body which she ritually scrapes, molds and denies sustenance) in order to reach some kind of hidden truth at her core that will allow her to move forward. Here a certain kind of pain – self-inflicted pain – is key to “feeling” time and thus recuperating a sense of self: “She used a monkey-hair brush on her elbows and knees. She wanted it to hurt” (86). Later, this violent process appears as a struggle of will (or mind) over body: It was necessary to alter the visible form, all the way down to the tongue. She was suppressing something, closing off outlets to the self, all the way down to the scourings at the deep end of the tongue, concealed from human view. The mind willed it on the body. (99–100) The tension between the desire for an autonomous self and the recognition of the self’s relational nature initially suppresses any reference to the protagonist’s past – except for one key passage below which makes only passing reference to this past when she asks Mr. Tuttle to speak like Rey. In fact, in the e­ xtreme search for an authentic self beneath the varnish of the habitual Lauren willfully erases her past in order “to become a blankness, a body slate erased of every past resemblance” (86). When Mr. Tuttle mimics Rey’s voice, Lauren decides that what she witnesses is not an act of memory, rather Mr. Tuttle is investing Rey’s body through his voice. This is made more possible by the flimsy, insubstantial nature of Mr. Tuttle’s own existence (mind and body): “It was Rey’s voice all right, it was her husband’s tonal soul, but she didn’t think the man was remembering. It was happening now” (89). It is as though Mr. Tuttle’s transparency provided a tunnel directly back to Rey. By denying Mr. Tuttle’s capacity to remember Lauren reduces him to this empty conduit. Rather than remembering the events, she is also experiencing them directly as though they were new, revisiting the self as empty vessel in the key moment before the loss of her husband. While DeLillo resists in his portrait of Mr. Tuttle the trappings of science fiction (though Lauren does at one point think of him as an “alien”) in keeping with the novel’s focus on the quotidian, there is an eerie quality to Mr. Tuttle’s abilities which essentially allow Lauren

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to step outside time. This is the “narrative time” which Lauren realizes that Mr. Tuttle cannot feel. Narrative time clearly denotes the sense of flow that embodied consciousness derives from the ability to locate and reference three basic temporal points: past, present and future. The flow of time is directly linked to its corporeal inscription in the following passage, one of the very few where the past is mentioned in the text. She wasn’t watching him now. She was looking at the backs of her hands, fingers stretched, looking and thinking, recalling moments with Rey, not moments exactly but times, or moments flowing into composite time, an erotic of see and touch, and she curled one hand over and into the other, missing him in her body and feeling sexually and abysmally alone and staring at the points where her knuckles shone bloodless from the pressure of her grip. (51) It is precisely her current “bloodless” state that stops the flow of time for ­Lauren. The mental and physical interpenetration of the other in sex, “an erotic of see and touch,” is again a two-way projection of consciousness which situates the self as does the relationship to time (the retention of the past, the now and protension into the future) and which provides a corporeal and mental path along which to project the meta-body. The inexplicable behavior of Mr. Tuttle and his extraordinary ability to mimic others’ voices is not limited to copying Rey’s but extends also to Lauren’s voice: It wasn’t outright impersonation but she heard elements of her voice, the clipped delivery, the slight buzz deep in the throat, her pitch, her sound, and how difficult at first, unearthly almost, to detect her own voice coming from someone else, from him, and then how deeply disturbing. (52) The “disturbing” skill that Mr. Tuttle displays makes him in some ways a double for Lauren herself who tends to project herself into other bodies, not just in her art but in her daily life as well, leading her, for example, to adopt Rey’s pain – and it is no coincidence that DeLillo chooses to make this clear by having her mimic Rey’s groan: “She was too trim and limber to feel the strain and was only echoing Rey, identifyingly, groaning his groan, but in a manner so seamless and deep it was her discomfort too” (11). What Lauren eventually discovers in her attempts to strip down and recover her self is that there can be no single core to strip down to without the other. The repetitiveness with which Mr. Tuttle utters certain expressions (such as,

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“Don’t touch it. I’ll clean it up later” which he says to Lauren and which she repeats later when he spills some water) suggests that he also mimics her traumatized state. But Mr. Tuttle himself (whom she refers to as “a paradox of the spectral sort” 87–88) has no self to meld with Lauren and ultimately she will need to escape his company: “His eyes were gray gone sallow in this harsh light, slightly yellowish, and there were no stirrings of tremulous self” (87). Mr. Tuttle lies beyond the flow of time which she needs to restore herself: “She thought maybe he lived in a kind of time that had no narrative quality” (67). The tension between the two basic models for identity she struggles with (autonomy and relationality) provides a corporeal and mental flow – by providing three basic temporal/physical points of reference – which helps give the passage of time meaning. Without this tension and this movement between staggered differences time does not flow and personal identity falters. ­Lauren needs to be able to shuttle back and forth between these three positions almost as if they represented the three positions of time: past, present and future. One might even go as far as to map out the three points in this way: self (past), relation (present) and other (future) though these points blur and switch positions. Time itself is perceived as a series of differences which is why the manic repetition of the same triggered by trauma resists temporal flow. Despite his strangeness, Mr. Tuttle is not substantial enough to represent a difference which Lauren’s consciousness might either invest or push back against. This is why her attempts to do so all fail. Despite being intrigued by Mr. Tuttle’s appearance and mimicry, and despite her tendency to lose herself in others, Lauren seems to remain lucid and analytical. Having picked apart why Mr. Tuttle’s usage of “alone” and the “sea” are perceptive and symbolic, she continues to muse on the importance of time and his status as a person who lives outside narrative time. Time is supposed to pass, she thought. […] There is nothing he can do to imagine time existing in reassuring sequence, passing, flowing, ­happening – the world happens, it has to, we feel it – with names and dates and distinctions. (79) He is unable to communicate what his name is and thus effectively has none. This strange visitor frustrates any attempt to definitively classify him. Lauren approaches Mr. Tuttle as an artistic rather than a human problem, even contemplating asking her friend what artistic “use” she might make of him. In fact, she does make use of him by integrating him into a performance piece that she puts on after he has left. The only way to represent the identity blurring, atemporal nature of Mr. Tuttle is by stepping into his skin, as Lauren finally does by

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adopting his voice. Yet, narration and temporality require “distinctions” (which Mr. Tuttle renders impossible or at least does not recognize), thus the performance piece moves beyond Mr. Tuttle incorporating other characters based on people she has observed.10

You are Made out of Time

For Lauren, Mr. Tuttle, who exists outside any context (temporal or relational) “violates the limits of the human” (102). To be human is to be defined by the passage of time; that is to have a past and to be directed toward death. The temporality that Lauren requires cannot be expressed in Mr. Tuttle’s at times oddly meaningful utterings. Lauren thinks: “You are made out of time. This is the force that tells you who you are. Close your eyes and feel it. It is time that defines your existence” (94). Later she states: “Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seams of being. It passes through you, making and shaping. But not if you are him. This is a man who remembers the future. Don’t touch it. I’ll clean it up later” (101–102). Yet, it is the awareness of death (in the loss of the other), in the physical pain that this trauma causes that gives time substance, that allows one to be human and “feel time”: “Time is the only narrative that matters. It stretches events and makes it possible for us to suffer and come out of it and see death happen and come out of it” (94). So important is time and its link to suffering (and recovery) to Lauren’s embodied consciousness that it becomes nearly synonymous with the mystery of identity itself: “This is the rule of time. It is the thing you know nothing about” (101). Comments made by a fictional reviewer of Lauren’s performance piece included in the novel might also be applied to the novel as a whole: “Hartke clearly wanted her audience to feel time go by, viscerally, even painfully” (106). In the end, Lauren does finally begin to recover her lost sense of time and thus her self.

Recovering the Self

It may be said that Lauren attempts to use her relationship with the otherthan-human Mr. Tuttle in order to reconstruct her own self. In the same way 10

The doubt remains in the mind of the reader as to whether Mr. Tuttle ever really existed since, in the end, the protagonist allows no one else to see him and he disappears again into thin air.

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that the nonhuman extension of the self through streaming video of distant (empty) lands allows Lauren to project her consciousness beyond its normal limits, Mr. Tuttle provides her with a voice which she attempts to meld with and which nonetheless “violates the human.” Later, remembering the day her husband left the house to commit suicide, Lauren attempts to go back in time (in her mind) and save Rey by pulling Mr. Tuttle (whom she imagines to be Rey) to the floor to stop him from leaving. Yet, for the reasons we have seen, Mr. Tuttle is of no use.

The Bird and the Strand of Hair

In addition to the initial passage on the blue jay looking in on Lauren, The Body Artist contains two more references to birds which are significant. The first involves the belatedness of recognition of traumatic memory in a passage which links the memory of a bird that comes to Lauren as a “ghostly moment” only recalled, not processed mentally simultaneously with its occurrence. She thought she saw a bird. […] She saw it mostly in retrospect because she didn’t know what she was seeing at first and had to re-create the ghostly moment, write it like a line in a piece of fiction, and maybe it wasn’t a sparrow at all but a smaller bird, gray and not brown and spotted and not streaked but not as small as a hummingbird, and how would she ever know for sure unless it happened again, and even then, she thought, and even then. (93) Here the half-seen bird represents the doubt created by faulty traumatic memory. Rather than a blue jay it has become a hummingbird, i.e. one whose wing motion is such that it seems to embody sound – a bird whose body is its voice just as Mr. Tuttle’s voice is his body. The second time that a hummingbird appears in the text it is as a stand-in for Mr. Tuttle’s voice as it flits across Lauren’s tongue: At first the voice she used on the telephone was nobody’s, a generic neutered human, but then she started using his. It was his voice, a dry piping sound, hollow-bodied, like a bird humming on her tongue. (103) Here DeLillo has linked the emptied out corporality of Mr. Tuttle (“hollowbodied”) with his voice and the buzzing movement of a bird, like the bird with which the novel opens. Yet, this is far from the “royally remote” blue jay – it is

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closer in fact to being the opposite. This adoption of Mr. Tuttle’s voice marks the low point for Lauren who has essentially erased herself and who now has no clear way of moving forward through this new, atemporal “piping” voice. Once Mr. Tuttle has disappeared at the novel’s end, it is only after climbing the stairs in the old house by the beach once more, this time projecting herself out of her body and imagining herself back again with Rey (an attempt at recuperation which, crucially, her body ultimately refuses to cooperate with11), that she realizes that he is permanently, “irreversibly” gone and can open a window, feel the sea breeze and start to feel time once more: “She threw the window open. She didn’t know why she did this. Then she knew. She wanted to feel the sea tang on her face and the flow of time in her body, to tell her who she was” (126). Though the majority of the critics (including DiPrete and Osteen) emphasize that the performance art which Lauren constructs and performs based on observations of several people in town (including Mr. Tuttle, an elderly Asian woman and a business woman) has a redemptive, curing effect on her, restoring her sense of self, the last line in the novel does not fully support this conclusion. This climactic moment comes after Lauren has finally been able to see the empty bed in her bedroom thus confirming Rey’s death and signaling her acceptance of that fact. Yet, rather than presenting us with a “new” or restored Lauren, DeLillo shows that her mental lag (so often emphasized in the text), the belated temporality of trauma has not fully left her. If we reread this passage we see that Lauren’s efforts toward restoring her sense of self have begun to bear fruit (she is “fitting herself to a body in the process of becoming hers,” 123). Upon reading the words “sea tang” in the last line the reader’s mind searches back to an earlier moment when the word “sea” appeared in the text. When Lauren first encounters Mr. Tuttle, he enigmatically utters words which she immediately finds significant: “Alone by the sea” (50). In her gloss on these words she thinks “The house, the sea-planet outside it, and how the word alone referred to her and to the house and how the word sea reinforced the idea of solitude but suggested a vigorous release as well, a means of escape from the book-walled limits of the self” (50). Like so much of what she thinks, this thought is immediately dismissed by Lauren: “She knew it was foolish to examine so closely” (50). Yet, there is something about the bracing sea air which is a release for her. Freed now from the prison of denial of Rey’s 11

“She stood a while, thinking into this. She stopped at room’s edge, facing back into the hall, and felt the emptiness around her. That’s when she rocked down to the floor, backed against the doorpost. She went twisting down, slowly, almost thoughtfully, and opened her mouth, oh, in a moan that remained unsounded” (125).

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death, she “wanted to feel the sea tang on her face and the flow of time in her body, to tell her who she was.” Thus is Lauren newly ready for the future (the flow of time) though she still can’t say herself who she is. Her new solitude is fundamentally different from her earlier state since it has been consciously chosen rather than thrust upon her. It is a solitude which, unlike her previous prisoner-like state, constitutes a “release.” While Lauren’s meta-body is partially constructed in relation to a body which moves and exists outside of it (either that of the blue jay, Mr. Tuttle or Rey) only that of her husband may be considered a kind of phantom limb. Her meta-body is constructed in the differential meeting of these bodies each of which takes on a different meaning (in the case of the bird, the image is that of an idealized autonomy which represents a desired future state for Lauren, whereas Mr. Tuttle represents both her past state of partial fusion with Rey and her present state of erasure). Like Mr. Tuttle or the blue jay, the “dead time” of the streaming video from Kotka provides Lauren with a nonhuman space into which to project the self. But, unlike the blue jay, this empty space offers nothing more than a passage further into the self which, emptied of its relational other, never reveals the stable core she seeks. Ultimately her recognition of the irrecuperability of Rey’s loss, it is suggested, allows her to desire a sense of balance between what can now be felt as her past identity and her current solitary existence (“Alone by the sea”). The symbolic opening of the window and the act of looking out it while feeling the sea air (“the sea tang”) against her skin clearly signifies an ability to imagine a future and thus the ability to once again “feel time.”12

Sous le sable

In François Ozon’s film Sous le sable (Under the Sand, 2000), the protagonist Marie’s sense of self also requires another body – that of her missing husband. 12

Rachel Smith’s reading of this final scene is compatible in some ways with my own though she focuses on the return of “narrative knowledge” in a text which she sees as up until then rejecting narrative for the void of grief. “This transition from corporeal belief to narrative knowledge is essentially the transformation of a sensation into a knowable certainty. This produces tension immediately between the body and words […] At this point, the novel begins to produce two Laurens, one who is physically present with Rey in the room, […] and the other who narrates the scene without looking, who tells herself what she will see if she looks into the bathroom” (107). These two Laurens correspond to the retemporalization of her life that I highlight, one being the past self and the other (narrating) the present self who can feel time (and thus can narrate).

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Despite having attracted little critical attention as of yet, this is a major film in the growing oeuvre of one of France’s most talented directors.13 Yet, Sous le sable’s protagonist’s isolation plays out much differently from that of The Body Artist since, lacking any mechanism such as Lauren’s body art with which to process what has happened to her, Ozon’s Marie chooses not to recognize the loss she has suffered and remains mired in an ever worsening spiral of alienation. After Jean, her husband of twenty years, has disappeared presumably drowned in the ocean while taking a swim as she sleeps on the beach, Marie, a fifty something English literature professor living in France, begins to “see” and speak with him in their apartment. Charlotte Rampling plays Marie, embodying her sense of isolation, stubborn withdrawal from reality and repeated attempts to deny what has happened to her in an effort to retain control by not relinquishing the past. This is made possible for nearly the entire film by the absence of Jean’s body which is only discovered at the end. Lacking a body to confirm his death Marie decides that he is not dead – in fact, she decides that he has never left her at all. Corporeality plays an important role in this film which explores how Marie copes with her husband Jean’s disappearance. There are two key scenes in which this corporeality is explored, the first being the scene where Marie goes swimming in a pool sometime after her husband Jean’s disappearance. Water At the gym we see Marie stride alone to the pool and get in. Once in the water she places dark swimming goggles on her eyes and stands still facing forward. The point of view switches and we see that she is looking at an older, balding man swim in front of her with his face hidden beneath the water. First the 13

In “Sex after death: François Ozon’s libidinal invasions,” Max Cavitch deals very briefly with Sous le sable arguing that “What makes Under the Sand far more than a simple study of denial is the stunning intricacy with which Marie’s imaginary projections of her husband coincide with both her erotic fantasy life and her actual affair with Vincent, whom she meets at a dinner party shortly after Jean’s disappearance” (324). Britt-Marie Schiller’s article entitled “A Memorial to Mourning” has a similar focus on the depiction of the rite of mourning in Sous le sable from the standpoint of psychotherapy, concluding that “The ambiguous ending points to an ambivalence at the heart of mourning – a tension between a wish to live life among the living on the one hand and, on the other hand, a wish to exist with the dead in a timeless, internal world” (223).

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camera remains fixed on a side view of Marie’s motionless face as we hear the older man swimming in the background (Figure 4). Then, filming her from behind (Figure 5), the camera pans slowly from her feet to her head showing her rigid body in the water. The camera comes to a halt focusing on the back of her head. These two shots – especially when joined by the toe-to-head pan – explicitly link Marie’s water bound body and her mind while emphasizing how

Figure 4

Marie stares straight ahead in the pool ( from right). © StudioCanal

Figure 5

Marie stares straight ahead in the pool ( from behind). © StudioCanal

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Marie stares straight ahead in the pool (head-on). © StudioCanal

she is mentally processing this fleeting moment of retrocession to her husband’s disappearance and probable death at the beach. The older man awkwardly ­swimming – never raising his head from the water – in front of her is a clear visual reference to her missing husband. Yet, now, in the pool as she is reminded of what has happened and the maddening difficulty of grasping and mentally accepting this event without either explanation or physical proof, the viewer is placed in the position of interpreting both her silent physical stasis and, in particular, the attitude of her head as she decides how to react to this unwelcome reminder. After filming the back of Marie’s head for a several seconds, the camera switches back to her stoic, closed facial expression (Figure 6). It is noteworthy that Ozon chose to block out Charlotte Rampling’s expressive eyes with the nearly black goggles for these key shots. At this point in the film Marie, who has decided to live as though Jean not only had not died but had not disappeared at all, has maintained on the exterior a semblance of control which will later show cracks. But at this relatively early point she remains a cipher. The viewer is given no outward clues as to how she feels as she stands in the pool, nor, aside from the innocuous appearance of the older man’s ungainly stroke, is it immediately obvious why the film has seemingly come to a halt here. We are blocked from reading Marie’s mind much the same as she is prevented from establishing her husband Jean’s motives in either disappearing or committing suicide. Ozon highlights here the impossibility of fully penetrating another’s mind (even when Marie is not wearing goggles, Rampling’s closed expression seems to ward off

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the viewer’s inquisitive gaze) – a theme explored in all three works considered in this chapter. The shot of the back of Marie’s head is particularly interesting for the play between different interpretations it allows. The presence of Marie in water – the means by which Jean has presumably died –, along with the presence of the faceless older man paddling in front of her and her own stasis all suggest, as I have already pointed out, that Marie has stopped to contemplate the meaning of Jean’s disappearance; i.e. precisely what she has heretofore sought to avoid. We are thus encouraged to interpret the shot of the back of her head as an invitation to mind read and assume that she has been arrested by her own inner turmoil and doubt or at least by some deep sense of disquiet. Yet, the stillness of her body, as well as that of the water she stands in also suggest an emptying of the mind, perhaps therefore a continued, or further wiping clean of her mental slate as concerns Jean’s fate. When one adds to the preceding details the further visual cues of Marie’s black swimming cap and her black goggles, the suggested reading changes. In this third reading Marie appears not so much to be caught in the act of contemplating Jean’s fate as sharing that fate. This is a moment of erasure of self that is reinforced by the presence of the black goggles which here not only hide her emotions or any clue to what she may be thinking as communicated by the eyes, but seem even to have burned them out. It is as though in testing or trying out Jean’s fate for a very brief moment she has also emptied her mind of any content. Her erasure thus mimics his as when Lauren, in DeLillo’s The Body Artist, stares at the livestreaming online video of Kotka. Having waited for the older man to finish (we can no longer hear him in the background), Marie descends vertically downward into the water like a periscope pulling itself in and begins to swim slowly. The film cuts to her teaching an English literature course at the Sorbonne – another key scene where water, time and death are linked.

Time Lets Fall Its Drop

Marie reads to her English literature class from Virginia Woolf’s modernist classic The Waves: ‘And time,’ said Bernard ‘lets fall its drop. The drop that has formed on the roof of the soul falls. On the roof of my mind time, forming lets fall its drop. Last week as I stood shaving, the drop fell. I, standing with my razor in my hand, became suddenly aware of the merely habitual nature of my action (this is the drop forming) and congratulated my hands, ironically,

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for keeping at it. Shave, shave, shave. I said. Go on shaving. The drop fell. All through the day’s work, at intervals, my mind went to an empty place, saying, “What is lost? What is over?” And “Over and done with,” I muttered, “Over and done with,14” solacing myself with words. People noticed the vacuity of my face and the aimlessness of my conversation. The last words of my sentence tailed away. And as I buttoned on my coat to go home I said more dramatically, “I have lost my youth.”’ As she pronounces the words “my youth,” Marie sees a young man sitting in the amphitheater where she is teaching. Her face falls as she recognizes him. He is one of the lifeguards who helped her look for her missing husband on the beach in “Les Landes” when he disappeared. Troubled, she sits down and unable to continue reading the Woolf text, quickly decides to end class early. Ozon closely tracks the movements of Marie’s mind and its fragility. Here he has Marie recite Woolf’s metaphor of the drop of water forming “on the roof of [the] mind” (an image of time slowing down as the mind focuses on something – here on something unpleasant it has intentionally papered over) while this very thing happens to her. The unpleasant realization which occurs (the drop falling) is met with denial. When the young man asks her moments later whether she recognizes him, she denies having met him or even ever having been to Les Landes. This is one in a series of denials which, as in Memento, present the viewer with a consciously self-deluding protagonist who attempts to retain her previous sense of self by lying about herself to others and to herself. Later, when Marie denies that the body that has been found by the police is Jean’s (despite his swimming trunks and watch matching the descriptions she gave of them) Rampling’s extraordinarily expressive features show the character struggling to present the brave face of mixed emotions: happiness at not yet having found conclusive proof of Jean’s death, the seriousness, anger even of the witness attempting to convince a policeman of what she has seen and the fragility of a person who no longer seems to know what is true. All she knows, it seems, is that she needs to cling to the fiction of Jean’s continued existence. After a night out with Vincent, a publisher whom a friend of hers has been trying to set her up with, Marie lies face up on her bed alone in her apartment (Figure 7). Here again Ozon slowly pans along her static body – filming her from above, in this case, from her feet up to her head. A close up follows in which Marie’s eyes are not visible (they are closed) yet the difference is that Ozon clearly indicates to the viewer what she is 14

It is interesting to note that the words “Over and done with” are translated in the original French subtitles “Mort et enterré” (dead and buried).

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Figure 7

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Marie face up in bed staring at the ceiling. © StudioCanal

f­ antasizing about since we see the hands of Vincent and Jean caress her body starting at her feet and moving up. As with the scene in the pool where Marie’s body’s immersion in water is clearly linked to her mental state, we see Jean and Vincent’s identifiable hands (though their faces are never seen) as they touch different parts of her body. A close-up of the expression of sexual pleasure on her face makes it unmistakable what she is up to. Marie’s own hands also touch those of the two men and move upward with them finally reaching her own head where a close-up reveals a confusion of hands touching her face. Marie’s expression of erotic abandon is obscured by the six hands covering her face almost making her appear to drown under them. Though she is clearly masturbating, the way that this scene is shot, starting with the fact that she is filmed upside down so as to decrease viewer identification with her and increase the sense that she has been laid out on a table (actually a bed), plays with the tension, explored throughout the film, between Marie’s status as both a victim and a manipulator of her own mental state. Rather than indicate passivity, the stasis of her body in these two scenes shows Marie’s capacity to mentally resist the events that she is living through. This does not mean, of course, that her fragility is given short shrift. The resistance which she shows herself capable of is, in both cases, played out through her self control – thus the stasis of the body here is not a passive lack of motion, nor is it quite the triumph of total control, rather in the end it appears to be the limited control of the body which barely ­manages not to collapse.

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Three sets of hands on Marie’s ecstatic face. © StudioCanal

Ozon highlights Marie’s agency by adding her own hands to those of the two men who caress her body and notably her face. This indicates not only that she actually touches herself as she imagines the other two men doing the same but also that she is the guide. She constructs an erotic fantasy but not one in which she is merely an object. It is precisely the point at which the fantasy of being an object and the control of self-delusion meet which Ozon explores here. When Marie climaxes her hands are in her crotch. The next shot shows her eyes open as the hands slowly slide away from her face. Again, as in the pool scene, the final shot of Marie’s motionless body in the dark red dress she bought suggests her death. In fact the position that Marie has been in as she lies on the bed and is groped by four hands (plus her own) evokes that of a body laid out for autopsy – much like the one she will refuse to identify as her husband’s. As in the pool scene, she is dressed in dark red (her dress) and black (her shoes). It is no coincidence that the shot from this scene used on the posters for Sous le sable has been turned 180 degrees so that Marie’s head is right side up. The right side up orientation on the poster emphasizes her pleasure whereas the upside down orientation in the film emphasizes the link between her fantasizing about Jean (and Vincent as well here) and a kind of death. Is this the death of self-obliteration in the other that Lauren, in The Body Artist, seemed to both seek and fear? In any case, this moment of self-gratification does not come across as one in which the main character has fully regained control. She lies spent on the bed in an upside down shot in the position of the victim of a crime more than that of one who is filled with pleasure.

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Meta-body in Sous le sable

Marie’s meta-body is woven in the interrelation between her sleek frame and Jean’s large body (played by the very bulky Jean Cremer). When Marie actually has sexual relations with Vincent, his much smaller, thin body gliding against hers, far from arousing her, provokes hysterical laughter. This is not an example of Marie’s borderline madness rather, as she says first happily and later asserts in an angry outburst, Vincent doesn’t measure up: “Vous ne faites pas le poids” (literally he isn’t heavy enough). Even when Marie fantasizes about being caressed by Vincent, his pair of hands is not enough. She needs to simultaneously imagine Jean’s hands on her as well. This explains why the spectral other Jean is filmed in a perfectly naturalistic way after his disappearance. Jean’s presence must precisely be “substantial” for Marie’s mediated sense of self (her “metabody”) to be restored. This is again something which greatly distinguishes her from Lauren Hartke in The Body Artist. The “other body” with which Lauren comes into contact (perhaps only in her mind), is precisely an insubstantial person whose body does not outwardly resemble that of her husband Rey. It is through Mr. Tuttle’s voice and the mimicry that he is capable of that he appears to mirror Lauren’s effacement of self; importantly Mr. Tuttle applies this ability to a replication of both Rey and Lauren’s voices (thus representing a kind of disembodied joining of the two). Like Marie, Lauren imagines a sexual encounter with this phantom other which in more ways than one reflects her own desire for sexual self-control and definition. While Marie imagines Jean and Vincent’s hands joining those of her own on her body, Lauren’s dominant position to the child-like Mr. Tuttle allows her to control his every move. ­Lauren’s sexual encounter with him is thus akin to masturbation. These are both brief moments of control which nonetheless do not signal recovery for the protagonists. At the end of Sous le sable, after speaking with Jean’s elderly mother who suggests that rather than committing suicide, Jean has simply left her, Marie goes to identify the body at the morgue. This scene is one of several instances in which she will deny the evidence of what has happened. When faced with Jean’s deteriorated body which nonetheless is clothed in a blue swimming suit and has a watch of the kind she had described to the police, she denies that it is him. The coroner explains to Marie that he has established a 99% match between the genetic make-up of Jean’s mother and the body they found (as well as dental records). She insists on seeing the body even though the coroner has explained that the advanced state of putrefaction has rendered it useless for the purposes of identification.

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Marie’s shocked expression at the morgue. © StudioCanal

Rampling’s wide eyes vividly express the shock of seeing the bloated body, the first physical evidence she has actually come across confirming Jean’s death (Figure 9). Ozon shoots her face partially covered in a white hospital mask in a moment of revelation that clearly contrasts with the scene in the pool where her self-control was symbolically signaled not only by the still body but also by the blacked out eyes. Her eyes have literally and figuratively been opened. Nonetheless Marie desperately sticks to her story that this is not her missing husband’s body, alleging that the watch they found on the body is not the one she gave him. Her refusal to recognize his decomposing body in its difference, the rejection of continuity between this body and the one she knew, allows her to cling to her own past meta-body. That is, by not recognizing him she attempts to maintain her own self-recognition. From the morgue Marie returns to the beach where Jean disappeared. Sitting on the beach she puts her hand into the sand and, grasping it, seems to caress it. We see her cry for the first time and she does so with abandon. This scene has been referred to as possibly a symbolic attempt by Marie to “bury” Jean (the hand under the sand being what the title presumably refers to). Yet, this does not seem a convincing reading of the scene as her hand movements indicate more likely a nervous gesture as she cries and reaches out unconsciously looking for some physical connection with Jean in the spot where she last saw him alive. Looking up from her crying, Marie sees a man (seemingly as bulky as Jean Cremer) in the distance standing alone on the beach. As Marie’s eyes widen with interest in this man in the distance a piano poignantly

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b­ egins to play suggesting that her madness has returned. We see her run to him though we do not see her reach him as the films ends. Ozon’s film suggests that Marie’s imagining Jean still present in her life has the function of a Derridean pharmacon, a medicine which both cures and poisons the subject. Unlike DeLillo’s Lauren Hartke, Marie does not want to imagine herself as autonomous despite the fact that her friends suggest that living the lie of Jean’s presence is damaging her. By immediately imagining her dead husband as alive and present Marie does not allow him to be placed in the past thus blocking her access to an imagined future. DeLillo’s Lauren Hartke ultimately learns to accept the loss of her husband whereas Ozon’s Marie does not. Sous le sable gives the viewer every reason to believe that Jean did indeed die on that beach (genetic match of the body with his mother, dental records match as well as the swimming suit and watch). In addition, we learn that Jean was on medication for depression. This makes his suicide at least a believable possibility for the viewer. Though it is important to maintain some level of doubt with respect to Jean’s death, the accumulation of these pieces of evidence do signal a clear reading. Fundamentally DeLillo’s novel and Ozon’s film deal with how a woman who has been seemingly inexplicably widowed attempts to reconstruct her sense of self.15 In Ozon’s film the explicit intertext of Virginia Woolf’s own suicide – Marie quotes Woolf’s real suicide note to Vincent while claiming that it was a “belle mort” (a beautiful death) – contrasts sharply with how Marie feels about the possibility of her own husband’s suicide. When one considers the Woolf texts quoted in Sous le sable, (first, the moment when a character who takes his own life compares the realization that he had “lost his youth” to the formation of a drop of water forming and secondly, Woolf’s real suicide note which emphasizes her desire to spare her husband further pain caused by her own feelings of madness), Marie’s own hallucinations seem to take on a darker tone. Suicide is linked in both the Woolf texts with the process by which the conscious mind, normally lulled into sleep by habit, comes to life in an illuminating if painful realization. The taking of one’s life, the voluntary erasure of consciousness – appears as an effort to regain a level of control which has been lost (for Virginia Woolf who writes “I feel I should go mad” as well as for her character who has “lost” something profound). In a real sense then, the Woolf

15

Lauren is clearly not expecting Rey’s suicide and Marie only knows that her husband has disappeared, only later suspecting that he may have committed suicide.

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intertexts suggest that suicide is a way of recuperating control over the self in extreme cases when the self threatens to disappear. This attempt to preserve the self through its erasure may be seen to play out in very different ways for Lauren and Marie – survivors of another’s suicide whose efforts to rebuild powerfully tie their sense of self to the lost other and require different levels of self erasure. In some senses Marie’s determination to see Jean’s body is her final attempt at erasing the self – because seeing the body, even though she knows in advance, perhaps because she knows, that the body will be unrecognizable (due to putrefaction) and the added weight that that will give to the notion of Jean’s definitive death will only further destroy her. She is someone who has existed, in her own words, for the past twenty years mainly through Jean (she never had children and gave up her research projects in order to spend more time with him). Yet, the result of this exercise for her is radically different from that which Lauren’s complex imaginings around the figure of Mr. Tuttle have. Whereas, for DeLillo’s Lauren, the acceptance of her husband’s death brings her to the realization that she must return to the real world and restores a clear sense of self, the seeming confirmation of Jean’s death completely destroys Ozon’s Marie.

Naissance des fantômes

Having explored DeLillo’s novel (published in 2001) and Ozon’s film (released in 2000) I now turn to a French Basque writer who preceded these works with a short novel exploring much of the same themes though with a different – and in many ways more overt – focus on cognition, and the concept of the lost loved one as phantom limb. Written in a deceptively simple, direct yet arid tone, infused with bursts of metaphor and symbolism, Marie Darrieussecq’s second novel entitled Naissance des fantômes (My Phantom Husband, 1998) explores in a first-person narrative how a woman copes with the abrupt and inexplicable disappearance of her husband. The story itself may be summed up simply: an unnamed female narrator, wracked with guilt over not being a “good wife” (“bonne épouse” 46), recounts how her husband’s unexplained absence progressively invades her body like a ghostly erasure, leaving her with a tenuous grasp of her own existence. One might also simply say as the original French title suggests that this is the story of how the narrator’s angst at being alone turns her into a ghost (we witness the “birth of ghosts” or “naissance des fantômes”). As with her popular and somewhat controversial first novel Truismes (translated as Pig Tales), Darrieussecq’s second published narrative

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is open to readings which serve as commentaries on the marginal status of women in society – though this will not be my focus, nor is it the one that the author herself privileges.16 In pursuing her inquiry of how the body and mind react to the sudden disruption of the meta-body (caused by the mysterious disappearance of the protagonist’s husband), Darrieussecq mixes elements of the fantastic genre with a physiological investigation of affect and cognition which functions on two levels: the biological and the imaginative. Here the brain and the mind are explored in both scientific and poetic language. While the first person narrator/ protagonist notes in particular the symbolic presence of different species of birds (the appearance of which she relates to her husband’s ghostly presence), her main focus is on the ways in which her body registers this new absence, this lack in the meta-body. The scientific language (including references to “sensory evidence,” neurons, adrenaline, the cerebral cortex, “field of vision,” veins, lungs and various other physiological functions) is supplemented by the inclusion of metaphors, in particular the image of the narrator’s body filling with a symbolic liquid – one which is always threatening to overflow. Importantly, and as in Ozon’s film, the missing husband is physically imposing in a way which, when he was present, was comforting to the protagonist. Like Ozon’s Marie, here the unnamed narrator’s existence suddenly seems insubstantial when shorn from that of the physical presence of her husband. In this case, it is his body which served as guarantor of the protagonist’s very reality: “Les nuits d’insomnie, quand le grand corps endormi de mon mari m’apparaissait comme une île au milieu du lit immense, il m’arrivait de voir les meubles bouger, il m’arrivait de me perdre à force de fixer mon regard dans le noir; alors je me collais contre lui (rien ne m’a jamais paru plus mystérieusement réel, que le grand corps endormi de mon mari)” (29) / “During nights of insomnia, when my husband’s large drowsing body was like an island in the middle of our immense bed, it could happen that I saw the furniture move or stared so hard into the darkness that I lost myself; then I would burrow close against him (nothing has ever seemed more mysteriously simple, known, and real than my husband’s large drowsing body)” (19). Taking a Theory of Mind approach to the novel, Mikko Keskinen argues that the narrator’s “mind reading activities necessarily – and radically – differ from those usually performed by fictional characters. Since her husband is not corporeally present, she cannot interpret his body language and behavior as indicative of his mental structure or state. Instead, she must rely on her memories and the residual markers of his past behavior” (201). Yet the narrator does not 16

For a feminist reading of Naissance des fantômes, see Robson (2004).

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spend much time attempting to interpret her husband’s past behavior or personality – she concentrates much more on her own perceived failings (worrying incessantly, for example, that she has been a “fake wife,” “épouse factice,” 51). What’s more, she seems to take only a desultory interest in the initial police investigation – perhaps because she fears that she is somehow at fault for his absence. She cooperates with the police but does not make much of an inquiry herself (aside from a trip to the local hospitals and a visit to her husband’s business). When the opportunity arises to speak with her mother-in-law about her husband, she finds that she is unable to do so. Despite her clear attachment to him, the protagonist’s emotional distance from her husband (she constantly refers to her fear that theirs is a “failed marriage”) is patent in the way in which she refers to him exclusively as “mon mari” (my husband). The possessive adjective here takes on a stubborn tenuousness underscored by the narrator’s doubts concerning the reality of her marriage, her love for her husband and her lack of acceptance by his family. He is never named in the text and as such appears to the reader almost like a misplaced object or perhaps a pet who has run off – a confounding event indeed but, despite the narrator’s own ghostly transformation, not quite shattering in the way that it is for Ozon or DeLillo’s protagonists. This is so despite the fact that the consequence for the narrator is in many ways more severe, more radical than it is for either DeLillo or Ozon’s protagonists. Here Darrieussecq’s narrator reaches a nearly complete erasure from which there is no return to “feeling time” or the self as in DeLillo, nor a continuation of a false sense of self as in Ozon’s film. The unnamed narrator is so far beyond fitting what she refers to as stereotypical poses (such as she attempted to adopt in her wedding photos) that she sees herself as simply a being, implicitly rejecting any special status for humans. Yet, despite the narrative’s commitment to a certain Darwinian ethics (placing animals and humans fundamentally on the same cognitive and existential level) and the narrator’s rejection of the traditional confessional narrative, the novel does end up ratifying essential aspects of the liberal humanist narrative, placing ratiocination at the heart of an essentially recuperative narrative. In this case it is the protagonist’s ability to write which is recovered – notably something which she accomplishes at her husband’s place of work. This recuperation of a minimal level of agency occurs notwithstanding the narrator’s progressive erasure which does not stop at her present state. It eats away at the very base of her identity, like a kind of time-travelling virus, by erasing what she considers the most important past evidence of selfhood. When the narrator contemplates her marriage photos and finds that her husband no longer peers directly into the camera but more and more away

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from it eventually disappearing, the reader almost suspects that this is the narrative of an imagined marriage, one which has never really existed and which the narrator is just now accepting as such. However, this is not the case. The marriage was real, what was not solid were the emotional, affective bonds that tie the narrator to her husband. This lack of emotional connection is reflected in the very style in which the novel is written and in the narrator’s obsessive interest in her own physical reactions, and rejection of the stereotypical confessional narrative deciding that she does not wish to share the details of her story (“mon histoire” [“my story”] 21). Yet it is the husband’s disappearance from the marriage photos, not the past lived experience of emotional distance that confirms to the narrator that she has begun a fantastical physical transformation, one which recalls the uncanny nature of the hair that DeLillo’s Lauren finds in her mouth in The Body Artist. The narrator states that her husband’s mysterious absence from her marriage photos has turned her into a “foreign body” (“corps étranger” 52). It is not clear whether this means that her body is foreign to others (the first reading to present itself) or to herself (an additional possibility) but in any case it is essential to see that the character’s past as guarantor of the present is here denied, breaking the narrative arc of her life and forcing her into a new atemporal existence. Further evidence of what she may mean by “corps étranger” is offered a few pages later when the narrator’s mother calls her. The protagonist compares her own revelation that her husband has disappeared to a chemical experiment in which a foreign agent is inserted into a body: “It was like attempting a chemistry experiment, introducing a foreign element into a body” (48) / “C’était comme tenter une expérience chimique, faire entrer dans un corps un élément étranger” (57). Here we have both sides of what is happening to her. At the same time that she becomes a “foreign body,” she is invaded by the ghostly, foreign presence/absence of her husband. Like those of the nouveaux romanciers of the nineteen fifties and sixties this text steadfastly rejects psychology taking a close-up look at the way in which the body’s organs and vessels are connected to the brain – and the mind –, tracing their connection to poetic creation (a ghostly process in itself). The focus here is on analyzing the inner physiology of an embodied consciousness that has suffered a kind of amputation. Something is missing, but the missing thing (her husband) is not itself of direct interest, nor is it exactly her relationship to that thing which matters, but rather the ways in which her body reacts to this unexpected loss. What dominates here is not concern for the husband’s wellbeing (a thought which only very fleetingly occurs to her) but the basic question of the reality of her own existence. The dry, factual Camusian tone in which the novel begins seems itself somewhat like a witness’s

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account taken from a police report: “Mon mari a disparu. Il est rentré du travail, il a posé sa serviette contre le mur, il m’a demandé si j’avais acheté du pain. Il devait être aux alentours de sept heures et demie” (11).17 Though Simon Kemp has argued persuasively18 that Darrieussecq consistently rejects the Cartesian mind/body split in this novel, I would argue that, much like her mixing of genres, the author’s approach to mind bears the marks of different models of personal identity. While the emphasis remains throughout much of the novel on the strong connection between the physiological and the mental, at certain key moments a higher, detached self (a “moi”) is posited which is clearly conceived of as somehow separate from the body. This account follows the narrator’s progression toward the immaterial state of being a ghost – an account which interestingly is analogous to one which would trace a path from the brain to the mind. Unlike most of the works I deal with in this book, and despite its police report tone, Darrieussecq’s text rejects the reassuring trajectory of the detective story. Here we have a female protagonist who uses her mind not so much to understand either self or other but to document how absence coupled with the writing process, far from founding meaning, erases it. It is as though the husband, who remains barely a two dimensional sketch of a real estate salesman, founded the narrator’s existence to such an extent that his absence empties it completely of the possibility of meaning. Though many of the basic facts are the same as in DeLillo and Ozon (disappearance of the husband, childless marriage, hallucination of the isolated female protagonist, the spectral return of the husband), the tone and style of Darrieussecq’s text are strikingly different as are her goals. One of the key aspects of her narrative which differs from that of the other two is that she presents the reader with a highly analytical first person account of how the protagonist’s mind and body react to the uncanny experience of the sudden disappearance of her husband. While DeLillo uses free indirect discourse to convey his protagonist’s thoughts and feelings and Ozon presents Marie’s mind as a locked box from the outside, the unnamed narrator of Naissance des fantômes strips away all protective layers affording the reader a semblance of direct access to the physiological basis for her thoughts and emotions. Starting from the level of cardiovascular flow and proceeding quickly through the neurons of the brain then to the mind and its processing of the data it is receiving, Darrieussecq takes the reader silently beyond the vexing “hard problem” 17 18

“My husband has disappeared. He came home from work, set his briefcase down against the wall, asked me if I had bought any bread. It must have been about seven-thirty” (1). Kemp (2008).

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(of how the brain gives rise to the mind) through metaphor sliding into the description of increasingly surreal experiences. The physiological is so central that the adrenaline rush the narrator gets when she fears her husband may never return becomes her guarantee that what she is experiencing is real: Et les jours à venir, j’allais devoir expérimenter encore ce choc au cœur, l’adrénaline lâchée d’un coup, une vague électrique qui vient buter au bout des doigts et paralyse la gorge, figeant les organes et s’attardant comme un gel dans les bronchioles les plus intimes; l’adrénaline qui serait, les jours à venir, dans mes veines et dans mes muscles, la marque du réel, son moyen, sa consistance. (23) And in the days to come, I would have to experience this shock to the heart again and again, the sudden surge of adrenaline, an electric wave that crashes into the tips of the fingers and paralyzes the throat, freezing the organs and lingering like a frost in the innermost bronchioles, the adrenaline that would be, in the days to come, in my veins and muscles, the mark of the real, its instrument, its texture. (14) What is physiological is “real” and therefore undeniable. Material proof is limited to that which causes a physical effect in the narrator’s body, only this vanishing repository of “foreign fluid” can be trusted, nothing else is solid. The body, tightly bound to the mind it feeds, is the primary locus of the real. This kind of detailed physiological analysis is the exact opposite of Ozon’s “black box” approach to Marie’s suffering where Rampling’s sphinx-like eyes suggest opaque psychological depths. For Darrieussecq’s narrator, what guarantees reality lies within the protagonist and does not come from without. Her isolation approaches solipsism. As with the two abovementioned works, Darrieussecq concentrates on sensation in her analysis of the narrator’s consciousness and its transformation through pain and loss: “L’air devenait de plus en plus palpable. On sentait sous la tiédeur une butée froide, comme une qualité matérielle du silence” (16).19 There are several other points at which sensation not only of inner physiology but of data that arrives from without is important, such as when in a passage again reminiscent of Camus’ L’étranger, the narrator writes “Je prenais conscience de la chaleur du soleil sur ma peau qui flottait dans mon champ de vision le plus restreint […] Le soleil faisait s’évaporer le monde, et je flottais” 19

“The air was becoming more and more palpable. Underlying its balminess was a shaft of cold like a material quality of silence” (6).

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(105).20 This passage is typical of the novel in that it combines an explicit reference to the mind (“conscience”) and an embodied experience (“champ de vision,” “field of vision” and “soleil,” “sun”) which, far from anchoring the character in the physical world, leads her to float above it. In the two quotes above we see two forms of alienation: in the first, the ­physical data of perception are translated through simile suggesting a correspondence between the husband’s absence (as silence) and the physical world, in the second, sensation alienates the narrator even further from the world and what she calls “reality.” Yet, importantly, this process of interpreting sensation, far from suggesting the possibility of attaining metaphysical heights, remains as restrained as the narrator’s own field of vision. Thus, the “material quality of silence” is never qualified further as something which might have transcendental significance. What’s more, the connection between the external, physical signs of the world, their possible symbolic meaning and the narrator remains tenuous, uncertain or frustrated entirely. This is the case for example, when the narrator looks for confirmation that the world notices her (i.e. that she matters), imagining that two politicians having a debate on television might suddenly turn to the camera and demand that action be taken to help her (30). In each case, such as when she states that she sees herself as a “thing,” the search for meaning and recognition requires unattainable confirmation from without, the notion of an “inner self” being absent.21 Above all, the narrator sees her body as an empty vessel (she refers to it as an “network of dikes,” “ensemble de digues” 80 and a “container,” “récipient” 48) whose mind makes her incapable of certain feelings: “j’espérais une réponse qui fuserait sous la forme d’une sensation immédiate et sidérante or dans ces moments précisément, je pouvais être certaine que ce que l’on nomme le sentiment, cette affection diffuse du quotidien allait être désintégré par les circuits de mon cerveau” (34).22 Affect, like meaning, remains elusive, 20

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“I grew aware of the warmth of the sun on my skin, on the fog of skin that floated in my most restricted field of vision […] The sun was evaporating the world and I was floating” (96–97). Robson (2004) sees the television in this novel as a means to create an alternate or “virtual reality” in which the protagonist’s loss has not occurred and argues that Naissance des fantômes suggests that women are alienated from their bodies even before the loss of the other. She argues that the novel suggests that “this alienation may be linked with overdependence on the individual (male) other as purveyor of bodily identity, with overreliance on the “virtual” presence of both the other and the self” (14). “I waited for an answer that would burst out of me as an immediate, overwhelming f eeling, yet those were precisely the moments when I was certain that what people call feeling, that scattered, daily affection, would be broken down by the circuits of my brain” (24–25).

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a distant unattainable ghost hiding behind material reality – or, worse still, a pure impossibility. In this way the narrator reads the physical world around her and her body and mind transform it through metaphor but she refrains from suggesting that this process puts her into contact with any higher meaning. This is especially striking in a work which is explicitly inscribed in the fantastic genre and which concerns the appearances of a ghost. In some sense, this suggests that the activity of the mind, in particular its attempts to extrapolate meaning through metaphor, is itself a generator of phantoms or ghosts. The mind itself is a ghost machine, nothing more, nothing less. The narrator’s marked emotional restraint will show itself throughout but most importantly it will be applied to the phantom husband and her relationship with him. Because of this level of control, Darrieussecq’s fantastic may be compared to that of Ozon (who films Marie’s husband’s spectral return as an everyday event using no special effects to suggest that it is otherworldly). Yet, the novelist here has made more of an effort to increase the reader’s uncertainty with respect to the existence of the ghost. While Ozon does suggest a sense of uncertainty (with respect to Marie’s husband’s fate), too much objective evidence is given in the end for the viewer to believe in the ghost or imagine that the husband is indeed still alive. This is the result of the differing choices of point of view and the resulting access that the reader/viewer has to the minds of the respective traumatized protagonists. Nonetheless, in both cases the same conclusion offers itself to the reader/ viewer: the ghost is simply an artifact of the mind. The difference lies in the fact that in Ozon’s (and DeLillo’s) work there is greater emphasis placed on this artifact being created as the direct result of trauma, whereas in Darrieussecq’s novel the phantom does not appear solely as the result of trauma. In fact, it is the mind’s natural functioning which, Darrieussecq implies, creates phantoms (to be defined in this context as nothing more than an embodied consciousness shorn from its other, a kind of empty shell). Another element sets this novel apart from the other two works. The narrator has suffered more than one miscarriage and this fact weighs at least as heavily on her as the loss of her husband. In Naissance des fantômes the absence of the husband is increasingly equated with the absence of a miscarried child. Like a phantom limb, both the still-born babies and the husband have been severed from the narrator and yet continue to cause her pain. Midway through the novel the protagonist goes to the beach where she watches seals. The corpse of a young seal which she catches sight of as it is carried forth on the waves reminds her both of her husband and her miscarriages. The detached, contemplative tone in which the narrator describes the torn

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creature suggests a similar emotional distance, that of the mind ­objectively analyzing the body (in this case that of a seal, but in others the narrator’s own): La chose avait laissé une longue traînée dans le sable, un rail, j’ai pensé au corps de mon mari (ma poitrine raidie sous l’afflux d’une conscience plus rouge dans mes artères), mais la chose est revenue, je l’ai vue dévaler dans le haut du rouleau, une petite masse blanchâtre, gonflée et défaite, un corps rendu par l’eau mais que la brume gommait, je l’ai regardé qui déferlait vers moi et glissait à ras le sable, doucement guidé maintenant par la vague. Une grosse gueule rouge l’ouvrait par le milieu. On aurait dit un enfant éventré, mais c’était une jeune otarie, le corps coupé en deux par des éclats de mine. (70) The thing had left a long skid mark in the sand, a railroad track, I thought of my husband’s body (my chest gone stiff with the inrush of a more scarlet consciousness in my arteries), but the thing came back, I saw it tumbling at the top of a wave, a little whitish mass, swollen and ravaged, a body delivered up by the water but erased by the mist, I watched as it surged toward me and slid along the surface of the sand, now gently guided by the wave. A gaping red gullet opened out in the middle. It could have been mistaken for a disemboweled child, but it was a young sea lion, its body cut in half by a mine. (61) Here the severed body of an animal stands in for that of the protagonist’s still-born child in an example of Darrieussecq’s intentional erasure of any line separating the human from the animal. It is striking in particular that the “little whitish mass, swollen and ravaged, a body delivered up by the water but erased by the mist” could equally well figure the body of her husband who will later appear as a ghost obscured by a mist. Yet the apparent emotional distance belies the power of the forceful and highly vivid language Darrieussecq uses at these moments: “Une grosse gueule rouge l’ouvrait par le milieu.” (the alliteration of the three g’s coming through well in the English translation: “A gaping red gullet opened out in the middle”). Yet this arresting image is immediately contradicted by the nonchalant tone of what follows: “On aurait dit…” (“It could have been mistaken for…”). This is the author once again reining in affective language, with the clinical detachment of a zoologist simply noting down a morphological similarity between two animals’ bodies.23 Further 23

For a different analysis of the innovative ways in which Darrieussecq uses language (in particular tense and pronoun choice) see Young (2008). Young argues that “Darrie-

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e­ vidence that Darrieussecq is presenting the portrait of an embodied mind lies in her situating consciousness directly in the protagonist’s veins (“conscience plus rouge dans mes artères”/ “more scarlet consciousness in my arteries”). In the following passage we see one of the clearest examples of a moment in which the movement from the physiological through the mental is distinctly delineated while the mind seems to float somehow above the body – like a kind of separate, if passive self. This image of the mind as capable of separation from the body remains in contradictory juxtaposition with the opposing view (embodied mind/brain unity) throughout the novel. Je restais là au bord de la fontaine, la conscience aiguisée comme une lame mais tendue vers rien du tout, une béance, un énervement vide. Une masse liquide montait dans ma poitrine, gonflait par-dessus mon sternum et voulait faire jaillir mes côtes, si je bougeais j’allais verser comme un tonneau. La place se rassemblait autour de moi, les dalles flottaient à plat, les lampadaires découpaient des galettes de macadam rouge. Je me suis levée toute droite. Le silence a craqué comme une braise. Le fond de la place a vacillé, et tout a tremblé comme sous un coup de gong, l’air vibrait au ras du sol. Je voyais glisser un éclat sur la façade, comme une silhouette seule dans un reflet. La fontaine dans mon dos s’est mise à ruisseler et je me suis réveillé d’un coup, un couple de voisins venait, ils m’ont saluée. Mon corps s’est souvenu sans moi. J’ai articulé bonsoir dans le silence et le mot s’est replié comme deux ailes noires, j’ai entendu sonner mes pas. (20–21) I was still sitting next to the fountain, my consciousness sharpened like a blade but reaching toward nothing at all, a gaping, empty edginess. A liquid mass welled up in my chest, distended below my sternum and tried to spurt from my sides, the slightest movement and I would gush out like a wine barrel. The plaza fell back into place around me, the flagstones floated flat on the ground, the street lamps cut out little cookies of red asphalt. I stood up, very straight. The silence crackled like burning wood. The back of the plaza swayed, and everything trembled as if under the

ussecq makes skilful use of the opposition between the perfect and the preterite in this novel to portray the wife’s gradual progression from dependence to autonomy, which is the true subject of the story” (68). I would argue, however, that the argument made in this article represents a simplification of the questions of personal identity and autonomy as Darrieussecq explores them in this novel.

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blow of a gong, the air vibrated at ground level. I saw a gleam slip across the façade like a lone silhouette in a reflection. The fountain behind me started flowing and I came back to myself with a start, a pair of neighbors were approaching, they greeted me. My body remembered on its own, without me. I uttered a bonsoir into the silence and the word folded up upon itself like two black wings, I heard the echo of my footsteps. (11–12 translation modified) The first line in this passage attests to Darrieussecq’s explicit interest in the mind – particularly one which is both incisive and destructive. The narrator’s anomie is reinforced by the fact that she is concentrating not on a thing but on no thing, an absence, a void (“la conscience aiguisée comme une lame mais tendue vers rien du tout, une béance, un énervement vide”). Here we see a curious contradiction at play whereby the mind distances the subject from the world, yet depends entirely on data from the body immersed in that same world to function. Once the ties have been cut with the other (here the narrator’s husband), the empty self/mind spins its wheels, losing all purchase. Rather than draw on an inner sense of self (however damaged or invented), the narrator must rely entirely on outward signs and physical data. Her physiological description of her distress ends with an accumulation of similes24 which seem to reduce her corporality to that of a simple container, a vessel to be filled up and emptied: “Une masse liquide montait dans ma poitrine, gonflait par-­dessus mon sternum et voulait faire jaillir mes côtes, si je bougeais j’allais verser comme un tonneau.” (“A liquid mass welled up in my chest, distended below my sternum and tried to spurt from my sides, the slightest movement and I would gush out like a wine barrel”). Once she has moved onto the terrain of simile (signaling a real, if limited interpretative intervention of the mind), perception of the exterior world becomes distorted: “La place se rassemblait autour de moi.” (“The plaza fell back into place around me”). Note that here “moi” (“me”) may at first be taken by the reader to refer to the whole person but later it clearly refers to the mind as separate from the body. Having “seen” the plaza tremble (“like a struck gong”) 24

Six similes are used in this passage in quick succession: “la conscience aiguisée comme une lame […] j’allais verser comme un tonneau. […] Le silence a craqué comme une braise. […] tout a tremblé comme sous un coup de gong […] Je voyais glisser un éclat sur la façade, comme une silhouette […] le mot s’est replié comme deux ailes noires” (20–21) / “my consciousness sharpened like a blade […] I would gush out like a wine barrel. […] The silence crackled like burning wood. […] everything trembled as if under the blow of a gong, […] I saw a gleam slip across the façade like a lone silhouette in a reflection. […] the word folded up upon itself like two black wings” (11–12).

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she awakens from her reverie as she automatically responds to the greeting of her neighbors: “Mon corps s’est souvenu sans moi.” (“My body remembered without me”). Contrary to DeLillo’s Lauren Hartke who claims that she sees Mr. Tuttle “upside down,” here the body’s more direct access to the world does not require the mind’s belated intervention. While all three works explored in this chapter present the mind as capable of distorting reality, Darrieussecq’s novel is the one which most closely adheres to a defense of the body’s primacy. Again, the tension between the mind/body split and a fully embodied mind remains, perhaps unintentionally in the text. The mind is an epiphenomenon of the body’s functioning, she seems to say; it is a secondary effect, not a primary cause – impossible to fully unlink from the body but nor is it the body’s master. Here the mind observes the body – a vessel threatening to empty itself of its foreign liquid. The body itself, including its sensorial equipment, remains anchored in the real world but not the mind which, as in the passage above, floats above it. The automatic verbal response to her neighbor’s wave takes over. Yet, the narrator’s mind continues, through metaphor, to proffer interpretations of what her body perceives, imperceptibly sliding into the fantastic: “J’ai articulé bonsoir dans le silence et le mot s’est replié comme deux ailes noires, j’ai entendu sonner mes pas.” (“I uttered a bonsoir into the silence and the word folded up upon itself like two black wings, I heard the echo of my footsteps”). Here the detached “I” of the mind hears her footsteps as the spoken greeting flutters off. This metaphorical, fantastical description of a voice, emptied of corporeality flying off on two wings recalls the moment at the beginning of the novel when the narrator has first realized that her husband has been away for a suspiciously long time. She notices at this moment swifts (martinets) circling in the air above: “Les martinets zigzaguaient encore, certains passaient au ras de ma fenêtre, les flancs bleus, la gorge gonflée, leur corps n’était qu’un sifflet plein de vent, deux ailes creuses autour d’un cri.” (16) (“The swifts were still zigzagging, some of them skimmed so close to my window, their sides blue, throats ruffled, their bodies no more than a whistle full of wind, two hollow wings around a cry” 6). Like the crucial early scene in DeLillo’s The Body Artist when Lauren contemplates the “royally remote” bird outside her kitchen window, Darrieussecq’s unnamed narrator seems to compare her now fading existence to the insubstantial corporeality of a bird – reduced here to a cry between two wings. Yet in the two aforementioned examples taken from Naissance des fantômes this comparison to a nearly disembodied, free floating voice figures the narrator’s inability to connect with and therefore to effectively act in the world. The focus here is on a lack of substance, which unlike for Lauren, is perceived in the French novel as destabilizing, and an escape of the other akin

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to loss for the self, not liberation for the disintegrating meta-body.25 In fact, in each case, the flight away from the writing subject suggests a loss of control, a moment of regrettable incapacity to act. Darrieussecq’s narrator, unlike her husband, can neither fly away nor enjoy a solid, physical connection to the world. This means that despite the symbolism of the wings and the shadows the narrator is trapped in a passive corporeality which is periodically filled from without until it bursts. She lacks the essential ability to invest another body herself or profit from the imagined investiture of the self by another. Yet, none of this lessens the role of the mind in the text. The idea that the mind, though produced by the brain – that organ so often directly invoked by Darrieussecq –, is somehow detachable from the body that it contemplates permeates the novel. Yet, this is a stripped down mind, not the noble, metaphysically superior mind associated with the soul which Descartes refers to. Rather than guaranteeing existence, this mind (referred to in the text as “moi”) is not an essence, but rather the data storing camera of a consciousness which, far from deciding on the path the body will take or successfully conferring meaning on the world, observes with a level of helplessness close to that of Amis’ narrator in Time’s Arrow. Evidence of this stripped down mind/self/camera is clear in an earlier passage as well: “Mon cœur s’est mis à cogner, où chercher sinon dans les boulangeries, mon impuissance devant les rues désertes me vidait les jambes, mon corps de défaisait de moi pour se remplir d’un fluide étranger, comme un réservoir de farine ou de larmes” (19–20).26 Here the body is again reduced to a “réservoir.” What is interesting to note is how the typical mind / body split has been reversed both here and in the previous passage. Rather than the mind controlling the body, it is the body which “remembers” (“se souvenir”) or “rids itself of” (“se défaire”) the mind (“moi”) and the mind which is left to register the body’s footsteps and spoken words. In this sense it is clear that though the mind/ body split does reappear under Darrieussecq’s pen, this is not the 25

26

For a different, psychoanalytic reading of loss in Naissance des fantômes, see Robson (2004). Robson argues that Freud neglects the importance of the distinction between definitive loss of the other through death and loss resulting from the disappearance of the other. She explores “an alternative model of loss figured by the disappearance, rather than the death, of the other” (3). Robson correctly focuses on the importance of the body in these texts asserting that “The loss of the husband is experienced as the loss of his body, which in turn alienates the woman from her own bodily identity plunging her into what I describe as a ‘virtual reality’” (4). “My heart started hammering – where else to look besides bakeries? My own powerlessness as I faced the deserted streets made my legs go hollow; my body did away with me to fill up with an alien fluid, like a reservoir of flour or of tears” (10).

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t­ raditional way of presenting it. Here the body is central and the mind but a (somehow detachable) extension of it. As in DeLillo’s novel, the text suggests that the body in fact reacts before the mind which is reduced to being the mere product of the body’s functioning, not a directing force. While DeLillo’s Lauren seems obsessed with losing herself in an other, Darrieussecq’s narrator curls up within herself more like Ozon’s Marie – the difference being that we have access to what is happening in her mind. Even when it becomes clear that the narrator who, having witnessed the ghostly presence of her husband become ever more solid and coherent in form, seems to slip closer to the ethereal nether world of phantom status herself, this signifies in no way that she has melded with her husband or any other body. Instead, what Darrieussecq has done here is to present us with a mind spinning its wheels. Later in the novel, the narrator grapples with the problem of shared ­perception – a skill which allows for mind reading (the ability to discern an other’s intentionality based on shared real world knowledge). Interestingly, the narrator explicitly refers not only to other humans but animals and insects as thinking beings whose minds she ought to be able to “read.” She wonders whether “mon mari (si les chats, les oiseaux, les poissons et les mouches aux yeux à facettes) sentait et voyait tout de même ce que moi je sentais et voyais” (146).27 This question is equivalent to her asking herself whether she is already so detached from the world and her mental image of it is so distorted that she can share her perception of it with no other sentient creature. The fact that this key phrase is reproduced at the very end of the novel reinforces the idea present throughout that the human is not defined by its mental capacities in contradistinction to other living beings but rather this intellectual capacity is something it shares with them. In fact, in multiple passages the narrator compares her own thought or behavior to that of animals.28 After a final encounter with her husband’s ghost who leaves her yet again, the novel ends with the narrator deciding that she will cease to wonder whether other sentient creatures see what she sees and feel what she feels. The narrator is capable of meta-cognition (access to her own mind) yet fails at mind reading. She abandons the task of deciding whether she perceives the same world that others do thus sealing herself in a solipsistic cage. Mind reading

27 28

“If my husband (if cats, birds, fish, and flies with their many-faceted eyes) felt and saw what I felt and saw.” (138). E.g. “me soutenir dans l’affliction (ainsi donc font les baleines, de leur bosse-museau, un mouvement de bas en haut).” (77) / “to support me in affliction (like the whales making an upward motion with their snouts)” (68).

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appears here as vitally linked to the self-building practice of narrative creation and narrative immersion. In the case of mind reading, one immerses oneself in an imagined or supposed narrative not of the self but of the other. Like metaphor it entails a translation, a shift in perspective which then depends upon there being a border to jump. Thus mind reading as narrative immersion requires difference and an other whose own mental capacities are equally conducive to mind reading. The meta-body flickers into existence in these parallel and related moments, first when the body’s data is translated into meaningful metaphor, next when the mind reads that of a mentally capable other. This second operation fails in Naissance des fantômes precisely because the ghostly other imagined by the narrator is the equivalent of a zombie, incapable of producing mental representations or being emplotted into a temporal trajectory. This fusion with, or inhabiting of, the other is denied the narrator, as we will see, by her own unwillingness to imagine the contents of others’ minds. Reality itself is a concept that requires the ability to share a point of view, something which the narrator cannot do. The narrator searches incessantly for a reality (or the “real,” “le réel”) that her husband’s disappearance has put into question and which remains elusive. Yet, her attachment to the surface of things (evident in the phenomenological description of bodies including her own as simple material objects) is precisely what makes it impossible for her to connect with other people. She seems to float uneasily across the surface of things, never fully being certain of their reality and dependent on unreliable external signs to confirm her own reality. Her materialism leads her then to a distinct isolation leaving her unable to communicate with the one person who is in the best position to understand her loss: her mother-in-law. Je n’ai plus entendu qu’une respiration raidie, la pulsation presque palpable d’influx cérébraux, la forme que peut prendre, entre deux personnes en contact dans le noir, un effort ou un vacillement de la mémoire. Une sorte de décrochage s’est produit à cet instant entre ma belle-mère et moi, un glissement où il aurait fallu que je réagisse, que je ne m’agrippe, que je prononce une de ces phrases dont les mots manquent toujours: pas une trouvaille de la repartie, mais une phrase impossible, d’un ordre métaphysique, une phrase qui donne à exister. (27) I heard nothing then but a tense breathing, the almost palpable impulse of every nerve cell in the brain, the form that contact between two people in the dark can take, a straining or flickering of memory. At that moment a kind of disengagement occurred between my mother-in-law

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and me, a slippage that should have made me react, get a grip on myself, speak one of those phrases for which the words are always lacking: not some witty retort, but an impossible, metaphysical phrase, a phrase that brings something into existence. (17–18) Rather than interpret and report explicitly on affect, the narrator notices only “a tense breathing, the almost palpable impulse of every nerve cell in the brain.” She admits to being completely unable to produce a symbolically metaphysical sentence (one which would “donne[r] à exister” / “bring something into existence”). The data which would normally generate emotion here fail to. This is as close as the reader will get to an admission by the narrator that she is simply a recording device, capable neither of interpreting nor producing meaning. This incapacity to mind read, a crucial skill for any interaction with others, hampers the narrator’s ability to act in the world. Yet, unlike the protagonists of Nolan’s, DeLillo’s and Ozon’s works, she does not seem to struggle with this lost agency. J’aurais aimé que ma phrase impossible me précède, soit inventée sans moi par la téléphonie et résonne, dans le vide entre les étoiles, jusqu’à nous réunir définitivement. A la place j’ai entendu, répondant au silence incertain de la ligne, comme le souffle d’une aile flageolante, quelque chose qui fuyait, et maladroitement trouvait à s’envoler. (28) I would have liked for my impossible words to precede me, to be invented by the telephone without me and to sound in the void between the stars until they brought us together once and for all. In their place I heard, responding to the uncertain silence on the line, something like the beating of a faltering wing, something that was fleeing and clumsily found a way to take flight. (18–19) Instead, the laconic reference to the loss of agency is expressed as the desire for the words to be “invented” for her, without her (“sans moi”). Here again her inability to connect with others or label physical phenomena as emotions, in short, her literalism and passivity are marked by the passage of a wing flapping (signaling the visitation of her phantom husband). The narrator’s passivity is in fact patent throughout the novel. In the following two passages this passivity is described as turning the narrator at once into a kind of beast and the victim of monstrous torture: “ne plus vouloir me renverser comme si je n’étais qu’un culbuto ou un bête récipient. Alors j’ai cru me noyer dans mon grand fauteuil, lourde et clapotante, pleine jusqu’à la gueule de l’absence de mon mari” (48) and “la nuit m’avait assez

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a­ ppris qu’elle est une sorte de passivité monstrueuse, un comble de passivité, très exactement une torture” (59).29 This is the most forceful portrait of such extreme passivity in the works examined in this study. Here, without the gaze of the other, the narrator not only loses a sense of self but essentially ceases to exist as a being in the world. This sensation reaches a climax when, upon contemplating the husband’s disappearance from their wedding photos, the narrator states that his absence might mean that he now considers that their marriage never existed, indeed that she herself never existed.30 This other who conferred a sense of reality upon the narrator and who has now become a ghost has both deprived her of this sense of reality and returned as a negatively invading force which fills her with angst (after consciousness and explicit references to the mind and brain, one of the most frequently used words in this text is angst or “angoisse”). Yet, the apparently metaphysical presence of a ghost is here no such thing. Rather it is an artifact of the mind’s effort to attain some higher level of meaning to which it does not have access – which indeed does not exist. The ghost is simply the trace of the immaterial movements of the protagonist’s mind. This lack of access to the metaphysical manifests itself as well as a limited vision of the self as not only an accumulation of sensation and data but also as a thing: “j’avais l’impression d’être moi-même une grosse chose vibrante et chaude” (15) / “I felt as if I were one big thing, warm and vibrating, myself” (5). Here the mind’s identification with the body is so overpowering that one is in fact entirely reduced to the other. Not only is the self (the isolated “moi-même,” or “myself”) reduced to the body, but this is a body which is denied any other connotation than that of its bare materiality. It is a “grosse chose, vibrante et chaude” (literally a “fat, vibrating, warm thing”). This lack of distinction between the human and the inanimate is also at times the result of the author’s translation in the most literal terms of human

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“no longer wanting to tip me over as if I were nothing but a mindless container or one of those toys that bobs right back up, but accumulating into a thick layer. Then I thought I was drowning, heavy and sloshing, in my big armchair, brimming over with my husband’s absence” (38–39), “the night had already taught me well enough, was a kind of monstrous passivity, the culmination of passivity, or, to be very precise, torture” (49). “mon mari, de là où il était au moment où j’assistais à sa disparition, mon mari se considérait-il désormais comme divorcé, jamais marié, libre de toute attache? Mon mari considérait-il, de là où il se cachait, que sa femme n’avait jamais existé?” (52–53) / “did my husband, from the place where he was while I was present at his disappearance, consider himself henceforth divorced, never married, free of all attachments? Did my husband, from wherever he was hiding, think his wife had never existed?” (43–44).

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vision: “mon nez est devenu une petite masse blanche posée de trop près sous mes yeux” (15) / “my nose became a little white mass set too close beneath my eyes” (5). But this status as a solid, existing being (the anti-sentimentalism is patent here as she refuses to heighten her ontological status to the level of “human”) will not last as she immediately begins to dematerialize: “Ce soir-là, ce fut la dernière fois, à mon souvenir, que je réussis à me percevoir comme entière, pleine et ramassée; ensuite je me suis diffusée comme les galaxies, vaporisée très loin comme les géantes rouges” (15).31 On the materialist view, this vaporization is nothing to be lamented of course since we are all made up of star dust to which the body will return – something to which the text alludes (“géantes rouges,” “red giant”). Two key final quotes from the Darrieussecq text will serve to show how her particular approach to consciousness connects the physiological, the cerebral and the mental, finally projecting the narrator into an oddly undefined space which is that of a dispersed meta-body. It is revealing in particular to see how the narrator’s inner vision of what is happening in her body is both penetrating and highly self-limiting. Yet, again it is the physiological which leads directly to the meta-real. Here, as the narrator lies in bed analyzing her body’s functions, she traces the content and path of her tears eventually giving rise to the transformation of her pain into the tentacles of a surreal octopus which is struggling to leap from her body: Je restais les yeux grands ouverts sous mes paupières, à scruter dans le noir orangé de la peau les ridules minuscules qui font des réseaux grands comme la capacité de souffrir, et je voyais seulement les phosphènes qui dansent dans les larmes, épaississant lentement à la jointure de mes paupières et formant comme une cire pour m’empêcher de rouvrir les yeux, de sortir de là, d’échapper à la pression de plus en plus insupportable dans mon système nerveux, à l’éclatement probable de mon système nerveux de plus en plus sensiblement disjoint, éparpillé à l’intérieur de moi: j’étais allongée sur le dos, à plat sur les draps en boule, les plis dans les reins, tendue comme un arc ; les bonds de mes nerfs me réveillaient par saccades dès que je lâchais un peu de terrain, dès que mon corps endormait ses défenses, que mes muscles se détendaient et que mon cerveau abaissait lentement la garde, toute l’énergie accumulée me sautait

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“That evening was the last time in my memory that I succeeded in perceiving myself as whole, full, and collected; after that I scattered like the galaxies, vaporized out across space like a red giant” (5).

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à l’échine et m’éjectait au plafond, quelque chose voulait sortir de moi: un monstre tout en dents, un gros tentacule de pieuvre enroulée dans mes intestins et qui jaillirait sous n’importe quelle forme, contorsionnée ventouse par ventouse dans les replis de mes viscères, collée, vibrante, mordue dans mes ovaires, le bec planté dans mon utérus qui s’écartèlerait dans huit directions en déroulant d’infects caillots de sang, j’avais mal au ventre à éclater et j’agrippais mes genoux ; une brève détente amadouait la pieuvre alors c’était le dos qui me lançait, la colonne vertébrale plantée en moi comme une épée, forée au long de ma chair et hameçonnée sous ma nuque, le bulbe bien ferré, une poigne de métal crochetée dans l’occiput, une canne à pêche électrique tirant de mes veines des barbelés, en crissement jusqu’aux dents ; et je me réveillais d’un coup, veiller était la seule option. (59–60) I lay motionless, eyes wide open beneath my eyelids, scanning the ruddy blackness of the skin for the miniscule wrinkles that form networks as large as the capacity for suffering, seeing only phosphenes dancing in my tears, which were slowly thickening at the folds of my eyelids and forming a kind of wax to keep me from reopening my eyes, from getting out of there and escaping the more and more unbearable pressure of my nervous system, the probable explosion of the more and more palpably fragmenting nervous system scattered across the spaces of my interior. I was lying face up, stretched out flat on the tangle of sheets, folds of fabric wadded into the small of my back, taut as a bow; the jangle of my nerves jerked me awake as soon as I started to give in, as soon as my body’s defenses were lulled and my muscles began to relax and my brain slowly let down its guard. All the accumulated energy sprang onto my backbone and hurled me to the ceiling, something sought to exit from me: a monster bristling with teeth, a giant octopus, its tentacles coiled in my intestines, which would erupt in any form, contorted, sucker by sucker in the folds of my entrails, lodged there, vibrating, biting down hard on my ovaries, its beak planted in my uterus, which would rupture in all directions, spiraling out foul gobs of blood, my stomach ached as if it were about to explode and I gripped my knees; then, when the octopus was momentarily mollified, my back started in, the spinal column planted deep in me like a sword, skewered through the length of my flesh with its curving tip digging into the back of my neck, an iron hand picking at the occiput, an electric fishing rod pulling strands of barbed wire from my veins with a rasping that penetrated to the teeth; and I awoke with a start. Staying awake was the only option. (51–52 translation modified)

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Here Darrieussecq’s combination of precise scientific language, references to metallic weaponry and horror imagery (phosphenes, nervous system, brain, backbone, monster, octopus, intestines, entrails, ovaries, uterus, blood, sword, occiput) convey both a sense of clinical detachment and depict a scene of gothic torture. The fact that the metaphorical octopus (an image both of the anxiety which fills her and the incisive, sword-wielding power of the mind) inside her attacks her uterus is a clear reference again to the connection between the trauma of the loss of her children and that of her husband. The pain has inscribed itself so deeply into her body that it runs from her uterus to her brain with the force and penetration of a sword whose metal she imagines piercing her occiput. Here again the “moi” (the self) appears as something separate from the body “dès que mon corps endormait ses défenses, que mes muscles se détendaient et que mon cerveau abaissait lentement la garde, toute l’énergie accumulée me sautait à l’échine et m’éjectait au plafond, quelque chose voulait sortir de moi” (“as soon as my body’s defenses were lulled and my muscles began to relax and my brain slowly let down its guard. All the accumulated energy sprang onto my backbone and hurled me to the ceiling, something sought to exit from me”). A passage in which the narrator contemplates the body of a baby sea lion further illustrates how she sees the connection between the bodily pain and mental confusion that arises from it as a path toward inhabiting the diffuse body of her phantom husband. Chaque vague qui s’arquait, au moment de rompre, chassait comme entre des fanons de baleine un souffle d’embruns et de brume mêlés. Les otaries disparaissaient peu à peu. J’entrevoyais un dos que la vague avalait, une demi-poitrine que s’effaçait en vrille avant de plonger sous le reste du corps dans l’enfournement noir du rouleau. Le quadrillage d’écume mouvante qui retenait les épaules de la houle se défaisait à chaque enroulement, chaque intersection du filet de plus en plus fine et diffuse au milieu d’autres petits points pulvérisés. J’imaginais ainsi mon cerveau, soumis à la pression et vaporisé, toutes les connexions de mon cerveau peu à peu défaites, brumeuses et floues (une maille effilochée, une mantille de poussière ne retenant même plus les propres atomes de dispersion), et ma pensée se vaporisait à son tour en cherchant à s’épandre à la mesure de ce qui lui manquait, épousant le corps creux, vide et volatil de mon mari. (68–69) Each arching wave, at it broke, expelled as if between plates of whale baleen a breath of mingled spray and mist. Bit by bit the sea lions disappeared. I glimpsed a back swallowed up by the waves, half a chest that

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twisted away before plunging beneath the rest of the body into the black surface of the surf. The criss-cross of moving sea foam that clung to the shoulders of the swell was further undone at every new cycle, each intersection of the network growing finer and more diffuse amid other little pulverized points. That was how I imagined my brain, subjected to great pressure and vaporized, all its connections undone little by little, foggy and slack (a frayed piece of mesh, a mantilla of dust without even the atoms of its own dispersion), and my mind was vaporized in turn as it sought to spread out to the dimensions of what it was lacking, to embrace the hollow, empty, and volatile body of my husband. (59) In each case, the analysis begins with the lower body and ends with the brain/ mind such that the diffuse meta-body posited here is in a sense a more extreme version of Lauren’s Mr. Tuttle or the streaming video of Kotka. The dispersion of the narrator’s brain which attempts to take on the form of what it lacks signals a final state of passivity and detachment signaled again by the presence of multiple metaphors (“a frayed piece of mesh, a mantilla of dust without even the atoms of its own dispersion”). But this moment of contact between the narrator and her husband’s ghost is only in her imagination – there will later be an account of renewed contact that is presented as actually happening (not simply wishful thinking). It is after she meets him again and they embrace in the final scene that she can finally envisage “seeing my mother off on her boat, and going back to the agency to write this story, at that moment I stopped wondering whether my husband (or cats, birds, fish, and flies with their many-facetted eyes), felt and saw what I felt and saw” (154).32 This return to a modicum of agency is markedly different from that of DeLillo’s Lauren as indeed it differs from nearly every other such recuperation we have seen in this study. Here, the return to agency is not accompanied by a clear return to selfhood, the narrator has essentially become a ghost, the very ghost who writes the lines that we have read – one who is alienated from the world and who, despite a lack of any notion of an inner self, is able to write. It is crucial to note as well that in Darrieussecq’s text the body appears almost exclusively as perceived in the mind’s eye – from an imagined inside perspective. The reader does not find here detailed

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“d’accompagner ma mère au départ de son bateau, et de retourner à l’agence écrire cette histoire, je sais seulement avoir cessé, à ce moment-là, de me demander si mon mari (si les chats, les oiseaux, les poissons et les mouches aux yeux à facettes) sentait et voyait tout de même ce que moi je sentais et voyais” (162).

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d­ escriptions of the narrator’s outer body or its possible changes, rather it is the inner physiology and above all its capacity through the brain to produce a mind which detaches itself from the same, clinically slicing through its layers, alternately attacking and “impersonally describing” (as Parfit might say), it is ultimately this mind, this “moi” – stripped of any Cartesian majesty or sense of authenticity – that tells the story. All three works discussed in this chapter suggest that the concept of “mind reading” is a flawed one. In each a female protagonist is unable to discern the motives behind the mysterious actions taken by her missing husband. This is not a commentary on female perceptive limitations (nor on the irrationality of men) but rather a commentary on the impenetrability of other minds in general. The depth of the complex inner lives and analytical skills of each female character also refutes any suspicion that this plot line was chosen in order to follow hackneyed stereotypes of women being more emotional than men. Each of these female protagonists goes to great lengths to control herself and explores the complexities both of her own mind and of what it means to lose an essential other. In this sense these remain works that begin with the premise of the relational self (defined by its relation to others) and end with varying degrees of emphasis on an autonomous self which nonetheless searches to imagine the body of an other with which to meld – into which to project itself. The self’s temporality may be restored by the encounter with the other. This is clearly shown in both DeLillo and Darrieussecq’s texts by the hinting at future action for each protagonist (implicit in the former’s and explicit in latter’s text). Only Ozon’s Marie remains mired in the past and attempts to satisfy ­herself with the fiction of Jean’s presence, suggesting that her own mental faculties have been damaged. Thus each of these works proposes a different solution to the trauma of the loss of the other. DeLillo’s Lauren works through her loss by finally seeing the emptiness of Mr. Tuttle, reconnecting with her body, revisiting the past and ultimately “feeling time” again through a “new” body. Ozon’s Marie refuses to see the lie in her mental picture of a physically present ghost and spirals into madness. After finally reuniting with her husband who has materialized enough for her to get her hands around him, Darrieussecq’s narrator finds herself alone again and her autonomy has returned enough for her to both stop asking herself whether she and her husband shared the same mental space and to begin writing the text we read. Her healing only comes once she has felt the mutual investment of the meta-body though this does not establish the kind of control that Lauren enjoys at the end of The Body Artist: “(à proprement parler, il ne me touchait pas, rendu presque invisible par

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le rapprochement; mais je le sentais: à la fois entièrement en moi, et où je ne pouvais l’atteindre)” (161).33 In Darrieussecq’s novel embodiment is an ever-present, inescapable fact, one whose importance is even more clearly delineated as an essential part of consciousness than in other works. Yet, despite this very heavy emphasis on the physiological body and its experience not so much of the world as of itself, the narrative movement of the text is oriented toward a dispersal of this corporeality. This disembodying movement does not appear so much as the product of the narrator’s desire for fusion with her ghostly husband (since the text presents the protagonist as nearly devoid of efficacious agency) but rather as a consequence of his absence. The day that the husband disappears is, as she says, the last in which her existence still feels “solid.” Is this newly felt dispersion the result then of the erasure of a false sense of solidity that the presence of the other provided? The steadfast refusal on the part of the author to endow social experience with any further meaning other than its corporeal status as physical fact seems to indicate that this hypothesis is correct. Naissance des fantômes rejects the long tradition of manipulative narrators who foist excessively emotional or metaphysical interpretations upon their readers. Yet the author’s efforts go beyond a rejection of psychology in literature to posit a truly materialist view of the self which is incompatible with any further fact either in consciousness or personal identity. For Darrieussecq, we simply are what we are (at an impersonal distance which rivals that posited by Parfit and Dennett), no wishful thinking allowed. For Darrieussecq then, it is not necessarily the posthuman volatility of the narrator which is somehow abnormal. Rather, this is the true state of the literally empty self that appears here as an embodied consciousness with nothing left to focus on but itself (“my consciousness sharpened like a blade but reaching toward nothing at all, a gaping, empty edginess” 11). She presents an image of the self which appears to be equivalent to Dennett’s computational model for consciousness, yet as I have been attempting to show, this is still a narrative text, one which sets forth a clear temporal path for the protagonist and one which, far from rejecting the concept of embodied consciousness presents the most detailed demonstration thereof in this study. Despite the deliberately unemotional style, the protagonist still requires some level of contact with the husband before any agency may return (in 33

“(he was so close that he was almost invisible, and strictly speaking he didn’t touch me, but I felt him: at once entirely within me and somewhere where I could not reach him)” (153).

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the form of writing) – even if the reader is given no reason to feel that that agency is in any way triumphal or complete. Darrieussecq is among the very few authors who can conceive of a subject moving on without going through a stereotypically restorative or healing process. Her narrator’s is an embodied, empty consciousness narrating what it registers, bringing us closer to a certain posthumanism.34 The materiality of the body and its relation to the self will once again arise as key topics in the next chapter. The films we explore in chapter four take the examination of the corporeal sense of self into the arenas of medicine and science fiction with investigations of what paralysis and cloning of the body mean for personal identity.

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In an article which explores two other narratives, Amaleena Damlé (2012) argues that Darrieussecq’s posthumanism undermines the very basis for a stable human subject: “in Le Pays, the complicated relationship of the subject to the notion of origin appears to be a more generalized product of contemporary culture and the place of the embodied subject within it. Pablo’s relationship to history can thus be inserted into a broader sense in Darrieussecq’s writing that stable foundations for the human subject cannot be located” (308).

chapter 4

Survival: Human and Posthuman All of the works that we have examined in this book treat the question of the survival of the self after some kind of traumatic experience. While the works themselves explore embodied consciousness in exceptionally direct, sometimes even technical terms as the key to personal identity, the main characters whose trajectories we have followed have much difficulty restoring a lost sense of self. We have also seen how the meta-body works as a malleable if not always effective construct (or a set of possible selves) into which to project (to protect, extend or perfect) and thus repair the self. Yet, until now, we have not examined any works in which characters can do anything other than imagine these meta-bodies by (a) physically modifying their lived bodies (in Memento Leonard’s meta-body is in part that of a tattooed killer, while in The Body Artist Lauren “sculpts” her body, scraping her tongue in an effort to erase her old self), (b) fleeing the body (the disembodied narrator of Time’s Arrow may be seen as a representation of Tod/Odilo’s desire to escape his corporeality and its accompanying guilt) or (c) investing other existing or imagined bodies (such as when DeLillo’s Lauren identifies with the bird she sees outside her window, and Ozon’s Marie and Darrieussecq’s unnamed narrator imagine seeing their dead husbands with whom they couple). In none of the previously examined works have the protagonists’ own bodies been severely impaired, nor has their own corporeal integrity suffered any substantial changes (e.g. through paralysis or actual amputation). Thus each character in these preceding texts and films has worked from a subject position, which, while mentally altered, was still anchored in a substantially unchanged lived body. This is no longer the case for the characters of the works examined in this final chapter where we see protagonists who, either through near total physical paralysis, downloading their mind to a computer or cloning, can no longer use as a starting point for their meta-body the stable lived body they have always known. In these characters’ construction of a meta-body I discern a fundamentally dual and sometimes contradictory intention to, on the one hand, preserve (or recover) what is perceived as essential to the self and, on the other, to perfect and extend the self by funneling it into a different, surviving vessel. I have already argued that this projection of the self into a meta-body is equivalent to the “projection of sentience” that Scarry locates in the creation of artifacts. In both cases the intention is to somehow survive. Where I differ with Scarry

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is in her characterization of this move as “disembodying” if that is meant to be an end in itself. Despite the fact that it is clearly an attempt to leave or supplement the envelope of the lived body and thus is indeed disembodying, the meta-body is more of a reembodiment. Corporeal form remains important for these characters who imagine, however briefly, an existence in an other body (be it virtual, human, animal or ghostly) and they evince the same need for meaningful embodiment (one that is time-bound) no matter how radical the corporeal change. Yet, this imagined projection of the self is usually followed by a return to a restored sense of self. This is a trajectory which suggests that though the other body is necessary for the self, only the ability to return to the borders of a semiautonomous self will truly satisfy the need for agency. It is the mental act of imagining the self as other (other bodied) which allows the mind to partially restore what trauma has damaged. The path to restoring the self leads therefore, for these characters, through the contemplation of another vessel which to imagine occupying. In some cases this other body is actually perceived as a severed piece of an earlier, dual body (as in DeLillo and Ozon). For other characters (such as Nolan’s Leonard, Amis’s Tod/Odilo and Darrieussecq’s narrator) it means a transformation of their own bodies. Survival is thus for these characters only possible once they have been able to intentionally restore the missing phantom limb – one which, for most of them, is discarded or successfully separated from (Ozon’s Marie is seen as a tragic figure precisely because in the end she is incapable of achieving this autonomy). Darrieussecq’s novel is a rare exception, a work of recuperation in which only minimal agency is recovered by the protagonist – and in which no fuller agency is contemplated or perhaps even needed. The violence and self-deception of the main characters who are not able to disengage themselves from the meta-bodies that they have imagined (especially Nolan’s Leonard and Amis’s Odilo/Tod) suggest that they run the risk of annihilation of the self. It is also notable that these are precisely the characters who are unable to conceive of a healthy relation to an other due to an inability to step outside themselves (a key requisite of empathy and ethical action). Both Leonard and Tod/Odilo are unable to truly see themselves or understand where they are headed precisely because of their distorted relation to time and their incapacity to step into and out of a meta-body. The capacity for self-irony (or distance from the self) functions as a kind of guarantee of authenticity – a quality which these two characters lack. This is an idea which some of the films which we will study in the second section of this chapter explore in a posthuman context. The concept of survival itself is approached in a different manner in the films I discuss below than it is in the other works previously

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studied. While the basics of humanism remain solidly in place here, the slide into posthumanism transforms the very meaning of survival (a concept itself dependent on a certain idea of personal identity). Survival may be defined as a form of continuity (both physical and mental).1 But when the mind or body have been severely damaged the question becomes what to salvage and how much will be enough to constitute survival of the self. For some characters the damage and transformation of the self has been too extensive (Nolan’s Leonard Shelby, Amis’s Tod/Odilo and Ozon’s Marie), for others the recuperation of the self is relatively successful (such as for DeLillo’s Lauren). In each case the central character struggles to restore a sense of personal identity and psychological continuity through their own efforts (focusing above all on their bodies and their relations with real and imaginary others). The first two films to be discussed in this chapter also treat the question of how the individual faced with trauma and a damaged sense of self seeks to survive (here the body is paralyzed but the mind remains sharp as does access to memory). Again, the figure of the meta-body appears – often in the form of a remembered, oneiric, past body (one that is, above all, capable of sensation and movement) – as a vessel into which to retroject the mind and restore the self. The meta-body crucially also provides for these characters a temporality to a self which, because of their near total physical paralysis, seems to stagnate. These films, which are firmly implanted in corporeal identity, remain clearly within the confines of humanism even if the protagonists choose opposite paths to solve their nearly identical predicaments (one seeks metaphorical survival through the production of a literary work and the other hastens his own death). Le Scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, 2007) is a feature film based on the life and writings of Jean-Dominique Bauby an editor at Elle Magazine in Paris who suffered a stroke in December 1995 which left him completely paralyzed except for the ability to blink his left eyelid. American 1 The Oxford English Dictionary lists the first definition of “survival” as “The continuing to live after some event (spec. of the soul after death); remaining alive, living on.” In its more romantic-metaphorical sense, survival (e.g. through a work of art) is a concept that, though I link it to an overarching notion of humanism, is nearly as old as art itself. As Andrew Bennett (1999) points out: “Writers, artists, philosophers, and other manufacturers of cultural artifacts have a perennial fascination with the immortality effect, the ability of a poem, novel, statue, painting, photograph, symphony, or philosophical work to survive beyond the death of its originating individual. […] The tradition is […] an aspect of the cultural inheritance of the West: as Heraclitus tells us, ‘The best choose one thing in exchange for all, everflowing fame among mortals.’ ‘Writing so as not to die,’ comments Foucault, glossing Blanchot, ‘is a task undoubtedly as old as the word.’” (131).

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painter and director Julian Schnabel who chose to film this movie in French (the language in which the source material was written) is particularly interested in questions of personal identity, consciousness and survival. Fortunately, we know much about what Bauby felt after his accident because, with the use of an innovative system of writing (called “partner assisted scanning”) he was able to author a book about his life simply by blinking one eye to choose the letters to spell the words he wished to express. In the film, the contrast between the extreme physical isolation of Jean-Do2 (played by Mathieu Amalric) and his mental agility as well as the freedom of expression which his writing affords him is a central aspect of this remarkable story which highlights an indomitable desire to (as one character says) “hold on to humanity”3 (“s’accrocher à l’humain”) – defined here essentially as a combination of the life of the mind (and its artistic expression) and the life of the flesh – only accessible now to the protagonist through memory and the imagination.4 Le Scaphandre et le papillon is filmed principally from the perspective of Jean-Do’s single functioning eye – except for imagined scenes, memories and very brief moments when the director wants us to see what Jean-Do looks like (though this is also done by having him see his face reflected in mirrors and other surfaces).5 2 When referring to the historical author Jean-Dominique Bauby, I will simply use his last name: Bauby. When referring to the character in the film based on the same man I will use the abbreviated form of his first name which the other characters use: Jean-Do. 3 All the translations of the French dialogue in Le Scaphandre et le papillon which appear here are my own. 4 In his memoirs entitled Le Scaphandre et le papillon which the movie is based on, Bauby states that he refused to wear the hospital garb he was offered insisting instead on his own clothing since that gave him the impression that he was “still himself” (“J’y vois plutôt un symbole que la vie continue. Et la preuve que je veux être encore moi-même” 23). As previously noted, clothing is an element of the meta-body. 5 It is curious to see how Schnabel’s film differs from Bauby’s book (and even Ronald Harwood’s original script). While neither Harwood’s script nor Bauby himself presents the first time he sees himself as profoundly upsetting, the film does. Bauby is almost impossibly philosophical (unrealistically so perhaps Schnabel concluded) about his appearance (he is in fact overtaken by a strangely “euphoric” feeling). He describes the moment as provoking a bout of uncontrollable laughter in him. Since he has no voice, his laughter is translated by slight physical movements which are taken as worrisome at first. Bauby imagines Napoléon iii’s wife Eugénie laughing along with him: “Une étrange euphorie m’a alors envahi. Non seulement j’étais exilé, paralysé, muet, à moitié sourd, privé de tous les plaisirs et réduit à une existence de méduse, mais en plus j’étais affreux à voir. J’ai été pris d’un fou rire nerveux […] Mes râles de bonne humeur ont d’abord interloqué Eugénie avant qu’elle ne cède à la contagion de mon hilarité” (31).

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Jean-Do wakes up in the hospital two weeks after a severe stroke with blurred vision completely paralyzed and with no idea what has happened to him. He discovers that he cannot speak when he is repeatedly asked his name and his doctors do not hear his responses. The viewer who hears everything Jean-Do thinks in voice-off thus shares his mental space as well as his limited view of the world. The question of whether he can continue in such a state is immediately posed when his neurologist first visits. The doctor explains that normally Jean-Do would have died from his stroke but due to the advanced resuscitation techniques in use, he did not, adding somewhat dubitatively: “enfin, on peut prolonger la vie” (“in short, we can prolong life”). At this, Jean-Do thinks “Ça, c’est la vie?” (“This is life?”). This doubt about the viability of his life is reinforced as we see his limbs which appear to him as mere objects to be contemplated, therapeutically massaged and examined by others as though in their unresponsive state they were no longer an integral part of the self or its meta-body which now needs to be reconstructed. Unlike in Darrieussecq’s somewhat radical text, here the body immediately signifies; it does not simply convey neutral data, and the director relies upon the embodied viewer’s shared sense of entrapment and paralysis. The significance of the body (both of self and other) as vehicle for motion, source of pleasure and finally as anchor for a subject position is immediately apparent. The protagonist’s two female therapists are presented by the neurologist as “deux magnifiques jeunes femmes” (“two magnificent young women”) a point upon which the doctor insists by repeating the description as though to console and encourage his patient. Yet, when he sees the two attractive young women up close Jean-Do laments being unable to physically interact with them. As with his own unresponsive limbs, he can only contemplate the tempting flesh of the other. Thus the relationship between patient and therapists is immediately presented as erotic, even tormenting at times. Yet, as I will argue, as limited as Jean-Do’s bodily sensations are since incoming information may only be received through a single eye (no other data being registered by the rest of his body), his mind is more than capable of constructing a hybrid meta-body via the bodies of these therapists. Nonetheless, this is quite different from the dual-bodied meta-body that Marie in Ozon’s Sous le sable or Lauren in DeLillo’s The Body Artist attempt to reconstruct. This is in fact an involuntary meta-body, one which Jean-Do must accept as his only path to a renewed agency since the melding of the two (bedridden protagonist’s mind and therapist’s mind and body) becomes essential to his survival. Before this liberating yet frustrating, even infuriating, hybridity may be enacted Jean-Do suffers from a sense of entrapment (in his own body) the harrowing nature of

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which experience is not highlighted in the film because Schnabel’s emphasis is on the contrary on Jean-Do’s path back to agency. In the first image of an involuntary meta-body in the film, his growing sense of entrapment leads Jean-Do to imagine himself floating in an antique diving suit (Figure 10). The image which appears at several points in the film is far from being the most horrifying one imaginable (e.g. Schnabel might have imagined Jean-Do feeling buried alive). Though it is clearly meant to convey a sense of helplessness, the billowing suit suggests neither pain nor panic. In fact, and perhaps in keeping with his self image as a kind of adventurer (as we will see later with the other images he associates with himself), this ancient diver floating adrift seems also to figure the free-floating mind which has been cut off from the crucial senses which feed it. As though, having set out on an exploratory dive, the protagonist had suddenly found that his suit no longer functioned and was therefore stuck in the deep sea, tethered but helpless. Here, it is not that the stimuli do not exist but rather that the suit isolates him from them making it a metaphor for a kind of floating prison in which he is confined. This sense of being a mind locked in a suddenly unresponsive body is contrasted with flights of sensual fantasy (in scenes where Jean-Do imagines he is out dining with Claude the assistant whom his publisher has sent to help him write his book or when he imagines the sea’s waves crashing against the rocks of a promontory). As we will see later, the usage of the sea as a metaphor for depth (of the mind and the self) plays a prominent

Figure 10  Jean-Do deep in his tethered diving suit. © Pathé Renn Productions, France 3 Cinéma, The Kennedy/ Marshall Co.

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role in Alejandro Amenábar’s film Mar adentro which also explores the real life bed-ridden existence of a quadriplegic. With impressive practicality Jean-Do (clearly not someone who has time for self pity) quickly sets out to imagine reconstructing a meta-body that will afford him some sense of agency. It is interesting to note how the heavy emphasis on the first person point of view contributes to the viewer sharing the feeling of being trapped that the protagonist experiences (his near total paralysis is called “locked-in syndrome”). Megan Craig has argued that the first-person perspective of the film telescopes and binds several different embodied points of view (itself a form of meta-body she calls an “animal-machine collective”): “Schnabel thereby stitches us all together into a hybrid animal-machine collective (directorcamera-protagonist-audience). He takes Bauby’s condition as the occasion for exploiting the material possibilities of film: the monocular camera, the film in its flickering reel, the projector’s single beam of light, the dark theater, and perhaps above all the event of being held captive, of being audience to one and the same scene” (147). There is however an important way in which Jean-Do is not disabled and that is in his ability to mind read, judging others’ emotions and thoughts by their facial expressions and their words. As the scene where he apologizes to his speech therapist Henriette clearly shows, this is a skill he is proud of being good at. In this scene, which I will discuss in greater detail further on, Jean-Do clearly reads Henriette’s wide smile as meaning that all has been repaired between them. He is right in this assumption as all her subsequent behavior confirms. In fact, he even brags about this ability to himself. The sexist comment he makes “pas compliquées, les femmes” (“women are easily figured out”) (suggesting that women are quickly satisfied by a man who is willing to apologize) shows that he is proud of knowing exactly how to repair his crucial relationship with her and importantly, given his circumstances, with the greatest concision. A single word (“merci” which he doesn’t even need to finish as she guesses the word after a few letters) sufficed to say “Thank you,” “I apologize” and “You were right.” This ability to read people (or mind read) is a crucial skill which allows him to construct a fuller sense of self (both by interacting in a more complete fashion with those he works most closely with and in order to construct a meta-body through his subsequent writing). The inclusion of this scene (not in Bauby’s original text) also serves as further evidence for the viewer of Jean-Do’s mental health precisely by demonstrating his ability to escape the confines of his own point of view and adopt that of another. Mindreading is itself akin to a kind of meta-corporeal movement by which one attempts to view things from another’s vantage point. As such, it is also a kind of narrative immersion.

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Jean-Do will desperately need this skill as his sense of imprisonment increases from his initial state of shock. After his doctors discover that his right eyelid does not close, they decide that the lid must be sewn shut – an experience which Schnabel presents again from the perspective of Jean-Do and whose impact on the viewer may be compared to that of the famous scene in Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou when a young woman’s eye is slit with a razor (filmed in disorienting extreme close-up so that the viewer does not realize that it is actually a cow’s eye which is being slit). The horror of this scene, possibly the most powerful one in which JeanDo’s corporeal imprisonment is evoked, derives first from the position of the viewer (behind not in front of the eyelid) and second from the fact that his eyes are literally the only window Jean-Do has on the world (Figure 11). Having only his two eyes to look out from he loses fifty percent of his perceptual tools when his right eye is sewn shut. As this is happening we hear his thoughts which ­narrate throughout. The contrast between Jean-Do’s calm, often ironic voice which we hear as though we had direct access to his mind and the way in which his body, now an object to be manipulated at will by others, is treated serves to increase the distance between mind and body. Indeed, it is suggested that though the body is inaccessible, the mind remains very much intact (as evidenced by his humor). In fact, Jean-Do’s mind is so strong that he only suffers a fleeting moment of depression (expressed in a direct, unsentimental way the purpose of which, as we will see, seems to be to shock his therapist more than to express

Figure 11  Jean-Do’s right eye is sewn up. © Pathé Renn Productions, France 3 Cinéma, The Kennedy/ Marshall Co.

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despair) which is immediately followed by a resolution “never again to complain” (“ne plus jamais me plaindre”). Neither Jean-Do’s briefly expressed wish to die nor the immediate reproach by Henriette (called Sandrine in the book) appear in the memoir. Thus he is presented as emotionally superhuman. Yet, this brief moment of depression (again, which is not fully expressed as such) quickly gives way to a more imperious need: that of creation and mental exploration. It is precisely because the mind can project itself into other spaces and bodies that it can heal. Despite being essentially buried alive, the protagonist is able to hold onto his sanity because he has access to a form of self-expression and because he has access to other bodies (present, imagined and remembered). Jean-Do gives meaning to his existence by going back and projecting himself both into his past and into a certain fantastic future. There is a sense in which even when deprived of a functioning corporeal existence, Jean-Do is able to give form and body to his life by reconstructing its arc. In his imaginative jaunts the senses take on a vital role. The central sequence in which Jean-Do’s imagination takes flight begins with a very tight close-up of a butterfly being born. This butterfly – clearly symbolizing an ideal meta-body like that of Lauren’s blue bird in The Body Artist – will take flight and visit far flung regions of the world as the scene cuts to a rocky wind-swept promontory far above a crashing sea, a black and white film of an early twentieth century colonial army riding on camels past the Great Sphinx of Giza, shots from above of wild terrain and a mountain, of Martinique, as well as a naked woman lying in bed who removes the covers for him as the camera approaches (“the woman I love” he thinks). Next, he is lying on a beach kissing the same woman, followed by a black and white film of a statue of the Egyptian Pharaoh Ozymandias, a snowcovered mountain, a surfer (“my childhood dreams” he thinks), a bullfighter (“my adult ambitions”). At this point the fantasy begins to weigh on him and he decides that he wants to see himself as he really was:6 a series of exuberant photos of Marlon Brando, in heavy make-up, taken while he was making the film Candy appear in succession. After several of these Jean-Do interjects “That’s not me! That’s Marlon Brando!” at which point the film cuts to a young downhill skier “That’s me!” (he exclaims with satisfaction). Here the viewer witnesses an interesting process of on the fly self-editing on the part of Jean-Do. After running through several appealing possible bodies to mentally inhabit (the butterfly, a colonial explorer, a surfer, a bullfighter) Jean-Do rejects the face of the well-known 6 “Maintenant je veux me souvenir de moi tel que j’étais” (“Now I want to remember myself as I was”).

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actor. This is not a childish search to somehow be like a prepackaged other but rather an attempt to find himself.7 The satisfaction of being able to recall a true image of himself unleashes a series of other photos of his youth ending with one of him as a baby and then another of him as a young man of approximately twenty. This youthful close-up is followed quickly by a shot of his now paralyzed face, prone in bed, one eye sewn up and covered with a patch as he is wheeled off for tests. Here it becomes clear that the meta-body incorporates a past, now idealized self which, crucially, affords it a temporality. When Jean-Do imagines himself as a newly born butterfly whose main characteristic is that it is free to fly, not only has he launched his creative powers but he has reset the clock on his self. Many of the other attractive images which occur to him are specifically temporal and narrative (the surfer corresponds to his youth, the bullfighter to a dreamed of adulthood), and he goes beyond metaphor to recall past selves. But this is not enough if there is no space for a possible future body – a need that is fulfilled by his imagining the beach-bound kiss of the woman he loves. The same function is filled later on when he imagines dining with and kissing Claude the attractive female editor who helps him at the hospital. These are possible futures to be contemplated, both of which are highly corporeal because they are erotic. They are both also notably relational unlike the surfer and the bullfighter who literally stand alone. It is the narrative temporality of the self (a temporality which may only be felt because it is relational and comparative) that the meta-body crucially supplies when it is successfully imagined. It is only because Jean-Do may compare himself to a past self, a hoped for self and a desired other that he may now begin to situate and rebuild his sense of self in time. This may be seen to be the case when we take into account the extremely close relationship that exists between the following key elements: narrative, lived time, meta-body and personal identity. Unless a story can be told and a relation established between self and other (or past/future self) to accompany a body image it will fail to be fully integrated in the meta-body. This is precisely 7 This scene may be compared to one of the final scenes in Vanilla Sky (2001), Cameron Crowe’s remake of Amenábar’s Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes) where, as he falls from the skyscraper, the protagonist David sees an increasingly fast succession of images of both private and public moments in his past. This is preceded by Edmund, the representative of the company running his computer assisted “lucid dream” explaining to him: “You sculpted your lucid dream out of the iconography of your youth.” This scene constitutes one of the few new elements that Crowe includes in this highly “faithful” remake. One might also contrast Schnabel’s depiction of Jean-Do’s self-awareness with the self-ignorance of Nolan’s Leonard.

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what happens in DeLillo’s Body Artist with Mr. Tuttle who, as we have seen, cannot afford Lauren the temporality she needs – something that she explicitly recognizes.

The Temporality of the Paralyzed Body

It is important to note that Jean-Do’s written self (in the autobiography he is at work on) is only possible as a relation between him and the person who transcribes his words letter by letter. In this effort Jean-Do is forced down to the smallest unit of written language and an excruciatingly slow pace. If he constructs his written meta-body in such small fragments (one letter at a time) all of which are only possible as the result of a very close collaboration with another, what does this say about the imagined body and spaces for self projection which his work unfolds?8 This project to rebuild the traumatized phantom body proceeds not only with the prosthetic hand of his assistant and therapists but also with their voices which replace his not only in telephone conversations but in the writing process itself which is both visual and aural (to gain time, his assistant guesses the word he is trying to spell speaking it aloud before he finishes). Thus Jean-Do spends many hours looking directly into his assistant’s face and blinking his eye to confirm letter and word choices. What is striking is not only the incredible patience of both therapist and patient but the ability to project and reconstruct a lost self in the immaterial world of impossibly detached text – and in such tiny increments. Freed from the constraint of meta-narrative he can pursue his rebirth at the micro narrative level each image or sequence being its own possible story. In a sense this means that Jean-Do must reverse the process by which the mind filters data from the world. Rather than filter an overload of perceptual data input (which no longer enters his consciousness from without) he must now work with pre-filtered bits. Jean-Do must use this piecemeal technique to feel his way through conversations but he decides that, for his literary compositions, he will memorize entire passages when he is awoken at five in the morning and recite them to Claude his assistant one letter at a time when she

8 One of the themes explored by the movie is his failed relationship with Céline. He corrects his father when he refers to her as Jean-Do’s “wife” calling her simply “the mother of my children.” In some ways the three women (his two therapists and his writing assistant) who care for him are proxies for this failed relationship. They are all presented as loyal and caring partners.

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arrives three hours later.9 He is therefore forced to rebuild each sentence one letter at a time and to contemplate the text from an entirely different angle – an extreme close-up mimicking the relationship he has with his therapists. Since Schnabel is more interested in the triumphal journey of the main character than in his struggles, we never see Jean-Do compose or edit his autobiography; we only see him recite it. The production of the text is linked t­ herefore exclusively to its liberating effect (not the hard work which its existence requires). There is another sense in which, unlike DeLillo’s Lauren, the stripping away that this process entails (as though he were building a pyramid with bits of sand) brings Jean-Do down to a core self – both more authentic10 and more open to imaginative reworking. This is not a little inspired by the erotic relationship that, in his mind, he develops with his speech therapists and his assistant. In some ways Jean-Do’s state puts him in the unusual position of being both radically isolated and never alone; it is precisely because he is not alone that he is able to recreate himself. Indeed, the bond that he develops with the three women who care for him (Henriette, Marie and Claude – respectively, the two therapists and his writing assistant) becomes so intense as to suggest that he exists as a kind of hybrid of self and other.11 The constant close-up shots of his speech therapists and others who help him clearly show both how he is able to emotionally reconstruct a sense of self (as someone who matters to others as they often tell him) and as someone who exists not just to see but to be seen. In fact, his devoted therapists, precisely because he views them as erotic others, quickly become something akin to tormentors especially when Marie shows him how to practice swallowing by gliding her tongue against her teeth and back down against her palate. This scene is especially interesting as ­Schnabel shoots Marie’s face along with a small mirror she holds up (much to Jean-Do’s dismay since he does not want to see himself). What he ends up seeing though is a split image, the combined faces of Marie and his own. This is visual confirmation of his developing hybrid meta-body dependent as it is on the bodies of others. Yet, for the protagonist, the intrusion of his own face, which he views as grotesque, serves as a nightmarish interruption of the erotic show his therapist is unintentionally offering him. He would in fact prefer to remain free-floating and dynamic in his ability to inhabit other bodies (such as those of the therapists, or his own pre-stroke body, the skier, 9 10 11

Bauby did this seven days a week for two months. In the movie, Jean-Do claims, as we will see, that before his accident he was superficial and only truly able to become himself after the accident. This relationship is clearly reciprocal as Henriette declares that he “already means a great deal” to her and Claude tells him that he is “her butterfly.”

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Figure 12  Jean-Do’s hybrid meta-body (therapist and patient together). © Pathé Renn Productions, France 3 Cinéma, The Kennedy/ Marshall Co.

the bullfighter or even the butterfly which glides over dramatic terrain in different exotic locations). Here again one notes the tension between a desire for autonomy and the reality of the relational self upon which any notion of agency must ultimately rely. The metaphor of the butterfly clearly corresponds to his desire for lightness, mobility, beauty and a connection with the world – but one in which he enjoys the invisibility of Gyges. Whereas that of the diving bell – laden, ugly and submerged in a blurry sea – represents his isolated, oppressive condition. What the film suggests is that he will in fact attain neither of these; rather he will gain a sense of self as a literary creator only as the split image of Marie and Jean-Do suggests: as a hybrid (Figure 12).

Starting with “I” Quand j’étais en bonne santé, je n’étais pas vivant. Je n’étais pas là, j’étais superficiel. Mais quand je suis revenu du coma, avec le point de vue du papillon, je n’étais plus que ce je, je suis revenu à la vie sous la seule forme de ce je. Jean-Do in Le scaphandre et le papillon

(“When I was in good health, I was wasn’t alive. I wasn’t there, I was superficial. But when I awoke from the coma with the butterfly’s perspective, I was nothing more than that I, I came back to life exclusively as this I.”)

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Once he understands how the partner assisted scanning works, Jean-Do agrees to give it a try. The first letter which he chooses to express is “j” (for “je” or “I” in French), thus it seems at first that he begins by affirming the continuity of his identity, yet when he finishes his first sentence by adding “want to die” (“veux mourir”) it is clear that this is not his main objective. Henriette, the ambitious therapist who is proud of having designed a modified alphabet12 for his use (ordering the letters according to their frequency of use in the French language) is deeply upset by Jean-Do’s first sentence declaring his desire to die. Her indignant response points up the contrast between what his state means to him and what it means to her professionally and personally – after all, should he die without making progress this would also be a defeat for her. She berates him in harsh and unfair terms “C’est un manque de respect. C’est obscène.” (“That shows lack of respect. It’s obscene”). When she storms off after he refuses to continue to form words, Schnabel’s camera lingers on the empty room and the light breeze moving the thin curtain at the window. This anonymous, empty space (with its pale green walls) is the space in which the protagonist must remain since he is incapable of storming off as his therapist does. She comes back soon after to apologize. Later, she appears again and when she asks whether he feels more cooperative today he blinks once to assent while thinking “Oui maîtresse” (“Yes ma’am”) in feigned submission. Now his first word to her is “merci” which elicits a big smile from his therapist and a dismissive “Pas compliquées, les femmes” (“Women are easily figured out”) from Jean-Do. He soon comes to realize that he is still, perhaps more than ever, free to use his mind as he likes: “A part mon œil, il y a deux choses qui ne sont pas paralysées: mon imagination, ma mémoire […] les deux seuls moyens de m’évader de mon scaphandre.” (“Apart from my eye, there are two things which are not paralyzed: my imagination, my memory […] the only two means of escaping my diving bell13”). 12

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The ESARIN alphabet places the letters in order of the frequency with which they appear in written French: ESARINTULOMDPCFBVHGJQZYXWK. The Association du Locked-in Syndrome created by Jean-Dominique Bauby in 1997 after his stroke states that this alphabet may be modified further to make communication eve faster by switching the position of the “s” and the “j” (the first letter of the subject pronoun “je” or “I” in French) since “I” comes up much more often in the spoken French that patients express themselves in. The film does not reflect this modification. http://www.alis-asso.fr/spip.php?article33. I have followed here the judicious translation used in the English title of the word “scaphandre” which means “diving suit” in French. The choice of “diving bell” reduces the imprisonment to that of the head and thus the mind – precisely the opposite of Bauby’s condition but still more appropriate for the title (Schnabel gets around this in the film simply by showing the protagonist in the entire antique diving suit as it appears in his

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With this the camera swings around to show both what he sees and his paralyzed countenance more often.

Correcting the Past

When the film begins, Jean-Do is dismayed to discover that he has been in a coma and suffers from “locked-in syndrome” – the ensuing devastation is later symbolized by footage of a huge ice shelf falling into the sea below. At his death from pneumonia (just when he was beginning to regain real hope of progress since he had managed to slightly move his face), the ice runs in reverse back to its initial position in an image of restoration and completion that metaphorically refers to his book having just been published. As the credits roll we see the arctic ice shelf landslide in reverse over a period of five full minutes – matching the upward flow of the credits as they rise. This process is directly associated with the act of creation as the text on the screen informs the viewer that Bauby died ten days after his book was published (in March 1997). This sense of completion is, of course, also closely linked to the autobiographical project of the book, the completed text of which constitutes for the author a new meta-body which will survive his physical death. This is then a humanist film in several senses.14 The written work represents here the classic form of self-realization through the creation of an intellectual

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imagination). Certainly “diving bell” sounds more confining in English than “diving suit” which conveys more a sense of pleasant corporeality of modern diving suits (the ones which most likely would be evoked in the mind of the English speaking viewer by this term in the title). Another unwanted connotation of “diving suit” could be the sense that the tight fitting modern diving suit is actually a good match for the self as it hugs the lived body so closely. All of these things the translator would have wanted to avoid. The diving bell (“casque de scaphandre” in French) is a heavy, ungainly prosthesis more likely to connote entrapment and lack of movement – a much more appropriate term to oppose to the extreme lightness and freedom of the butterfly. The French word “scaphandre” is derived from the Greek words for ship or hull (σkάϕoς) and man (ἀνδρo). Finally, I find it curious that the oed lists the definition of the English word “scaphander” as “A cork belt used as a support in swimming” noting the following: “In later Dicts. with erroneous explanation: a watertight suit for a diver.” Webster’s online dictionary lists its meaning as much closer to that of the French “The case, or impermeable apparel, in which a diver can work while under water” not that “The Scaphander and The Butterfly” would have worked as a title – as it would doubtless have called to mind the sea snail of the same name rather than the diving suit. In an interview which his website links to Schnabel explicitly refers to filmmaking as a “denial of death” and a humanist project: “When I was talking about Vittorio de Sica

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work that, it is hoped, will outlast the author. The film notably omits mention of Bauby’s work to create an association to help other sufferers of Locked-in Syndrome. A brief reference to his association only appears among the small print of the final credits. In his paralyzed state he is forced to rethink who he is and even what it means to be human (a project explicitly foisted upon him by his friend Pierre15). He successfully canalizes this reflection on the human into a written work so that he may die a more complete (and better) person. This heavy emphasis on Jean-Do’s humanity bears the fingerprints of the director as Schnabel made a series of key changes in his fictionalization of Bauby’s original memoir. The scene of Pierre’s visit to Jean-Do introduces three main differences between the film and the book: In Bauby’s book, (a) the character the film calls “Pierre” (whom Bauby refers to as “Jean-Paul K.”) does not visit him, thus (b) this friend never encourages him to hold onto his humanity, (c) nor was the plane that Bauby gave him a seat on hijacked. Bauby simply mentions that Jean-Paul K. spent several years as a captive in Beirut and that he never saw him again and felt guilty about it (Bauby, 110). This scene therefore adds a dual emphasis not in the original text. The first is the effort to recuperate (and correct) one’s past found in nearly all the works studied in this book and key to the humanist project the essential thrust of which is to guarantee survival by fighting loss. By linking the flight to Pierre’s kidnapping, Schnabel increases the weight of guilt hanging on Jean-Do’s shoulders rendering their fictional meeting even more momentous. Pierre’s visit and efforts to give Jean-Do the hope to continue in his disabled condition represent a moment of recuperation (of the lost opportunity to see his old friend) that spurs his redemption through a written narrative. The inclusion of this key scene shows that Schnabel’s emphasis is clearly on the restoration of personal identity and the defense of “what makes one human” – defined as survival through artistic and specifically narrative

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before, Billy Wilder, these people, through their art, now they are communicating with you even though they are not around, but their art is alive and their art is a denial of death. And their art includes you. It’s this sort of thread of humanity that’s transferred from one person to the next in the most intimate way really as if you knew that person.” (“Julian Schnabel in Conversation with David Moos,” 15) http://issuu.com/julianschnabelstudio/ docs/8.inconversationjuly22/1. In the film Pierre was held hostage in Beirut for four years after Jean-Do gave him his seat on a plane which was subsequently hijacked by terrorists. Pierre was held in a small cellar which he called his grave. “J’ai survécu parce que je m’accrochais à ce qui faisait de moi un homme. […] Il faut vous accrocher à l’humain” (“I survived because I held on to what made me a man. […] You must hold on to your humanity”) he advises Jean-Do.

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reembodiment through assisted writing. Jean-Do is presented as more complete compared to how he lived when he was physically healthy. Jean-Do’s paralysis then is not seen as lessening his authenticity, despite depriving him of an essential mobility, rather it affords him a chance to reconnect with his true self, to find what had already been lost as he himself says. Again, the differences between the book and the film are instructive. Schnabel emphasizes heavily the relational nature of personal identity especially in his inclusion of two key episodes not in the book: Henriette’s injunction to never contemplate giving up and Pierre’s exhortation to hang on to humanity. Both essentially say the same thing: the inner, authentic self (equivalent to “what makes one human”) must be preserved. Bauby’s book, which does not include any episode resembling these, emphasizes the autonomous subject at key moments such as when he decides to write angry public letters to disprove rumors that he has become a “vegetable.”16 These moments of defensiveness do not appear in the film probably because Schnabel chose to present an idealized version of Bauby – one in which he was incapable of such vanity and anger. Yet, they are a clear demonstration that Bauby, despite his extreme isolation, was no solipsist and unlike Darrieussecq’s narrator, felt more than capable of sculpting others’ views of him. In the film, this awareness of the importance of others’ opinions of him was limited to the more vital issue of managing to get his assistant and therapists to do what he wanted. When we first see the ice shelf fall, Jean-Do’s voice-off can be heard saying “Toute mon existence n’aura été qu’un enchaînement de petits dérapages: des femmes qu’on n’a su aimer, des chances qu’on n’a pas voulu saisir, les instants de bonheur qu’on a laissé s’envoler. Etais-je aveugle ou sourd ou bien fallaitil un malheur pour m’éclairer sur ma vraie nature?” (“My entire life has been nothing more than a series of little slip ups: women unloved, lost opportunities, happy moments which were allowed to dissipate into thin air. Was I blind or did I need a tragedy to learn my real nature?”).17 The disintegration of the 16

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Aside from the acknowledgment to her at the beginning of the book, he makes little mention of Claude his assistant in the book itself. In this sense, despite its relentless adoption of the first person point of view, Schnabel’s film is more concentrated on the relational self than Bauby who was very understandably interested mostly in himself as autonomous agent – something he fiercely defends. Again, Schnabel here has taken an innocuous passage of the original text by Bauby and transformed its meaning into an exaltation of authentic inner humanity. In his memoir, Bauby explains that he heard that people had disparagingly referred to him as a vegetable (“un légume”) at the Café Flore. To counter this Bauby decides to write regular letters which are sent to as many as sixty recipients sharing his news and demonstrating that his mind is in perfect working order. Discovering that those with whom he had the most

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ice shelf is therefore closely associated with missed opportunities, lack of selfawareness, a blindness which Jean-Do now aims to correct. Craig sees the initial ice shelf collapse as a thawing out or heating up of Jean-Do’s mind and the final scene of the ice’s rise as symbolic of his death, yet this implicitly negative reading may also be reversed. When the ice shelf is pulled back into place18 the literary work has just been completed and published and Jean-Do unexpectedly dies. This signals a return to a past moment of trauma in order to repair what has been damaged (replacing the ice). This theme first appears in our study when in Amis’ Time’s Arrow the protagonist’s reverse journey shows Jews being saved (the reverse of their moment of destruction), we then see this same desire throughout Memento since Leonard’s entire reason for being is to go back and correct the past (of his wife’s murder and his own impotency during the attack). In DeLillo’s The Body Artist, Lauren finally returns to the moment of Rey’s departure in order to hide the keys and thus stop him from leaving and committing suicide. All three female protagonists in DeLillo’s, Ozon’s and Darrieussecq’s works return to the moment of loss searching for answers. As we will see, this same process is enacted in Alejandro Amenábar’s film Mar adentro (The Sea Inside) as the protagonist’s liberation is metaphorically represented by a return not just to a previous healthy state, but specifically to the moment in which he was paralyzed. In this case the traumatized self must constantly return in order to attempt to rebuild and thus protect that which has been damaged. We will see that this is not necessarily the temporal movement that is privileged by posthuman discourse (focused as it is on the future and a different approach to the question of survival). Humanist narrative requires preservation not so much of the present state of the self as it does of a past state. The past is inaccessible, immaterial and viewed as a more authentic state – one that, for humanism, carries special significance. The temporal movement that is enacted by humanist

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superficial contact have suddenly become philosophical in their letters back to him he states “Étais-je aveugle et sourd ou bien faut-il nécessairement un malheur pour éclairer un homme sous son vrai jour?” (“Was I blind or deaf or did a tragedy have to occur for a man’s true self to be revealed?”). The man he refers to here is not himself but one of his correspondents (who revealed his depth of thought to Bauby only after his accident). Bauby himself makes a point in his book of saying that he has not changed. His signature irony is intact – showing itself even in his ability to distance himself from his disfigured countenance (rather than recoiling in horror as in the film). The question here, as we will see with Sampedro in Amenábar’s Mar adentro, is that of defining the self through selfknowledge and self-control. In a five minute long sequence, we see a series of ice shelves flying up back into place (or more likely the same scene playing in a loop).

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discourse on trauma and authenticity is one which constantly loops back on itself while maintaining a future horizon. One assures a future precisely by protecting the past. In Schnabel’s Le Scaphandre et le papillon there is tension between a disembodied self, a thing-like static body and a meta-body which is constructed partially as a relationship with the bodies of the women who care for Jean-Do. We hear him groan, for example, as he realizes that he cannot touch the Spanish neurologist whose erotically mobile tongue (as she shows him how to regain movement of his own tongue) and body are offered up to him. The camera often hovers in the same way over parts of female bodies that tempt Jean-Do (his ex’s bare legs, the speech therapist’s lips, chest or legs). Here the meta-body is constructed as a relation between the desired body of the other, the unresponsive body that Jean-Do inhabits and his humanist, literary project to write his autobiography.19

Destroying the Self to Save It

Both Le scaphandre et le papillon (2007) and Spanish filmmaker Alejandro Amenábar’s Mar adentro (The Sea Inside, 2004) are based on real-life autobiographical texts written from the first person point of view by bed-ridden quadriplegics who remember what it was like to enjoy a healthy bodily existence and who attract a following of female admirers and helpers. In both cases the expressed desire to escape by suicide is reprimanded by others. The principal difference between the two is that while in Le Scaphandre Jean-Do’s decision to write his book is symbolic of his choice to pursue an enriched existence through the creative act, in Mar adentro Ramón Sampedro (played by Javier Bardem) is determined to end an existence which, for him, is no longer worth living,20 despite the fact that he is actually in a much more functional physical state than Jean-Do (since he can speak, use both eyes and move his head – whereas Jean-Do can only open and shut a single eye and move nothing else). Ramón is a quadriplegic who has spent twenty nine years in this state after his initial injury to his neck in a diving accident. 19 20

Often resorting to maritime metaphors, in the film, Jean-Do refers to himself as a “naufragé” (a castaway or, more literally, the victim of a shipwreck “naufrage”). Ramón states his reason for wanting to die very succinctly: “La vida para mí en este estado, la vida así no es digna.” (“Life, for me, in this state is not dignified”). We meet the character in the film near the end of his struggle to commit assisted suicide after a twentynine year period of paralysis.

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In Mar adentro the main character’s death is presented as successfully recuperating his self (the final image of Ramón after his death is of his youthful self) whereas in Le scaphandre Schnabel resorts to the visual metaphor of the ice shelf’s reverse cascade at the moment of the protagonist’s demise/ triumph.21 In the last scene of Mar adentro Amenábar briefly overlays the image of Ramón’s22 younger drowned body floating in the water (after he has broken his neck) with that of his older face as he lies in bed having voluntarily ingested a deadly mix of drugs in order to commit suicide (Figure 13). This double image of the lived and the imagined body23 is one of the most dramatic and clearest representations of the meta-body in the works that this study examines (along with that of Jean-Do’s hybrid countenance). Here we see the two meet – crucially this happens in a moment of pain for each. In contrast, Schnabel’s film does not end, for example, either with a photo of Jean-Do’s youth nor of the butterfly, rather the camera stays fixed on the immense wall of ice which is magically pulled back upward, restoring its physical integrity. This reverse movement evokes a restorative temporal reversion akin to that which appears in the sequence of photos at the end of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (composed of actual photos of a man falling from the one of the Twin Towers during the 11 September 2011 attacks). The wishful “falling up” depicted in Safran Foer’s book however is to be distinguished from that of Schnabel’s film as the latter’s depiction is a triumphal (and drawn out) visual representation of putting back in place an entire edifice. This image of the immensity of the ice shelf would appear to be much more in tune with a Proustian image of the “immense edifice of memory” which the narrator famously evokes and which signifies the restoration of the “inner self.” This is Schnabel’s choice as Bauby’s own imagery centers on the much more modest metaphors of the diving suit (“scaphandre”) and the butterfly. 21

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Jean-Do’s healthy body only appears for a few seconds in the film the most physical scene being when he fantasizes about dining in a fancy restaurant with his writing assistant in which the sensuality of food and sex is highlighted. The focus remains on the freedom of imagining different possible bodies and the adventure of a mind free to coast over limitless exotic terrains not on Jean-Do’s past state of health. As with Le Scaphandre et le papillon I will use Ramón Sampedro’s first name for the character and his last to refer to the historical author of the book the film is based on. The younger drowned body is only imagined because Ramón was saved from drowning a fate he comes to believe he should have suffered as it would have been better than twenty-nine years in his paralyzed state. Thus this is not a remembered image but actually a desired, ideal state (one in which he dies).

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Figure 13  Ramón’s meta-body (past and present). © Sogepaq

In some sense Ramón24 (like Jean-Do) survives through the book he writes though Amenábar does not present his writing project as a kind of proxy vessel for him. It is his legal struggle to be allowed to commit suicide which is the focus of the film, not Ramón’s writing. The protagonist expresses the belief that he should have died in the diving accident that paralyzed him and that what he calls his current “undignified” physical state does not reflect his true self. Paradoxically, it is the fact that he is able to carry out his own death (through suicide) that most clearly marks his brand of humanism. It is this reading of humanism (in this case exalting a certain view of human dignity which heavily emphasizes agency, rather than a desire to extend human life at any price) which has deeply disturbed disability theory specialists.25 This will for control over the self extends not only to the concept of survival after death which is one of the foundational Western beliefs about art, but also by adding meaning (via self-mastery) to one’s own death. Ramón sought above all to end a situation in which he was entirely dependent on others to live. Physical continuity does not constitute survival for Ramón – not in a meaningful sense. Nor is memory and mental continuity enough for him. He is unwilling to accept the reduced autonomy of his life as a quadriplegic. After nearly three decades in this state he is determined to end his own life, something which he does finally 24 25

The book he published entitled Cartas desde el infierno ([Letters from Hell] 2004) contains poetry and letters that he sent to friends. See Rivera-Cordero (2013) on the disability theory critique and on authenticity in Mar adentro.

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accomplish despite legal and other obstacles (including the opposition of his own family). Luckily for him, Ramón’s mental faculties are perfectly intact and he is able to use his mindreading skills to convince some friends to help him with his plan to commit suicide. Amenábar’s film, like that of Schnabel, emphasizes the protagonist’s role in the negotiating of the relational self. One scene in particular demonstrates this capacity. When Ramón is staying in a hotel with his friend Rosa (who is in love with him and had previously expressed much opposition to his plan but has now relented) he promises her that, after his death, he will visit her bed and they will make love. Amenábar clearly shows that this promise is meant to guarantee that she will follow through with her promise of cooperation (his plan risked failure at any moment should one person in the chain of those who were to help him have a change of heart).26 The director indicates that Ramón is successful by showing the wide smile on Rosa’s face as she listens to his words. Yet, when she leans over to give him a kiss she stops at his defiantly closed mouth and gives him a chaste peck on the forehead. Ramón’s comments, it is suggested, did not reflect a true passion for Rosa that he had any intention of acting on (and his strict rationality would seem to exclude any belief in the ability to visit her after his death). Ramón in fact, has no time (literally or figuratively) for romantic relationships, and is indeed entirely focused on his desired fate, insisting that the only way he can preserve his true self is by destroying it – the ultimate form of control. Here the central focus is not, as in Schnabel’s film, the grandeur of the creative act. Rather, this film remains on the very human scale of the protagonist (whose dreams take him on flights over the rugged terrain of Galicia where he lives and on to his beloved sea). The central humanist tenet upheld here then is not the apotheosis of the creative work of the mind but that of a unique self and its “dignity” (in Ramón’s words). The last image of the protagonist’s body remaining in the water after his accident twenty-nine years earlier (as he wished he had been left, rather than having been pulled out) is to be contrasted with that of the fully lucid Ramón filming himself as he drinks through a straw the drug which will kill him. Amenábar wants us to see that the decision to destroy the self is taken and the act carried out by a lucid mind (representing here the true self as willed by the mind). Whereas Schnabel’s film suggests that the extreme relational self which Jean-Do develops allows him to survive, in Amenábar’s film the true source 26

In order to avoid any of his friends being prosecuted (for homicide) Sampedro broke up each task into its smallest parts allowing no one to perform any task complex enough to count as conspiratorial.

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of the self resides in a singular mind – and recuperation of a past ideal body. Though other bodies are crucial to Ramón, they function more as prosthetic limbs (acting on his behalf) though one could argue that they are just as much a part of his meta-body, Amenábar’s focus is on Ramón’s voluntarism. Ramón acts as a kind of director, literally using the hands of others, each of whom performs just one small part of the work necessary to prepare and execute his assisted suicide. In this way Amenábar places great emphasis on the autonomous model of personal identity. This is highlighted by the fact that his ideal meta-body image is a combination, not of his body and that of another, rather it is made up of two overlapping images of Ramón’s own body. It is useful to compare here Mar adentro with an earlier film by the same director. In Amenábar’s Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes, 1997) the young protagonist César’s once perfectly comely face constitutes a central piece of his sense of self. Having suffered a disfiguring accident and now living in a futuristic computer application into which his mind has been downloaded, César decides in the end to reawaken from his digital dream partly because he is promised that “[he] wouldn’t believe the things they can do now” – i.e. he can now have a new, perfect body. César chooses to leave the world of virtual reality and live again in the material world with a physical body. Since the computer simulated his sense of embodiment, his choice isn’t so much between embodiment and disembodiment – as far as his mind is concerned – but rather between virtual embodiment and its counterpart in the real world where action has consequences. The film’s ethics suggests that it is better to reinhabit a body in the real world (as opposed to the computer simulation he has existed in for one hundred and fifty years) – but only because it will now be a perfect body. Essentially what this means is that César has been granted his ultimate dream of physical recuperation but no longer has to be restricted to the dream world to do it. He can live in the real world (in the future) with this new body. Here then is another example of the rejection of the damaged body in favor of an ideally restored body. The search for corporeal wholeness is so strong in these two Amenábar films that both suggest that one needs to go through a purifying death to reach it. Yet, the temporality of the two is different. In the humanist film Mar adentro, survival requires a return to a past state whereas Abre los ojos posits leaving behind the past for a “better” posthuman future. In Abre los ojos, César, who is dreaming a digital dream must take a leap off a skyscraper – simulating suicide – in order to wake up in his new body. In Mar adentro Ramón must likewise make a leap into the annihilation of death in order to find again the youthful functioning body he has lost (though this is a reversal of Abre los ojos since he actually commits suicide to escape the real world into an ideal world – the exact opposite of what César does). Since

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César’s escape is performed in an idealized future world that for the viewer is an abstract non-reality, the perfect, whole body is in both Amenábar films something one can only attain in fiction. It is as though the world in which we live were ruled precisely by the kind of damage that his characters all wish to escape from. We will return to this film in the next section on posthuman consciousness.

Posthuman Consciousness

The fusion of mind and digital technology, as well as the cognitive theories which posit the brain as essentially an information gathering and processing unit with no central, metaphysical core have begun to blur the lines between the human and the mechanical, between flesh and object, mind and matter in ways that many argue have moved the human paradigm into a posthuman period which forces a radical rethinking of the liberal humanist subject. Notions of the self, the autonomous individual and personal identity have been put into question. The image of the mind as essentially a decentralized, networked architecture with no true will or core, but rather the simple illusion of a self which is constructed through the “lying machine” of narrative (cf. Dennett’s “center of narrative identity”), leads to at least two conclusions that threaten traditional notions of the humanist subject. First, under the posthuman paradigm the inner self presumably endowed with its own authenticity becomes nothing more than an illusion based on self-deception, thus potentially endangering legal, social and individual notions of uniqueness of identity and responsibility. Second, if the mind is essentially a network of connections, then other networks can be designed (such as those currently making up the internet) which could theoretically reach a level of consciousness that would put them on an equal footing with humans (a similar idea of a computer based neural network reaching consciousness is the premise of the Terminator films). Naturally this also directly affects views of the role of the body in the human, and here as with many of the other questions surrounding the posthuman, some of the most penetrating analysis comes from N. Katherine Hayles whose work How We Became Posthuman, remains a key reference as it traces the scientific advances and philosophical leaps beginning after World War ii, which led to the implementation of posthuman thinking in computer design, Artificial Intelligence, cognitive science as well as other areas. Hayles states early on in her book what she sees as the aspects that characterize posthumanism (in a list that she is quick to qualify as neither exclusive nor definitive):

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First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation […]. Second, the posthuman view considers consciousness […] as an epiphenomenon […]. Third, the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate […]. Fourth, and most important, by these and other means the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals. (2–3) Posthumanism entails a rapport between the human and technology that requires rethinking the “essential” status of the body. Since humanism has always been concerned with finding new ways not only to extend the capacities of humans but also to extend human lifespans, the posthuman turn also poses the question of what survival means. The lack of a need for a body or the possibility of accepting survival in another body be it as a clone or simulation would seem to posit the fulfillment of the ancient dream of immortality. Cary Wolfe’s recent work entitled What is Posthumanism? (2010) posits a view which is almost diametrically opposed to the concept discussed above of the posthuman as benefitting (or suffering from) the extension of its capacities (often via an abandonment of corporeal limitations). Wolfe seeks to build an ethics that is posthumanist “in the sense that it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from humanism itself…” (xv). For the critic, true posthumanism should be understood as the effort to place the human within the larger context of nonhumans (explicitly dethroning them from the humanist position of prominence they have enjoyed). Having critiqued what he sees as Daniel Dennett’s involuntary reinscription of Cartesianism in his explicitly anti-Cartesian theory of consciousness and having highlighted the ethical problems that Dennett’s functionalist theory entails (an implicit privileging of the fully conscious person over the mentally disabled person as well as animals), Wolfe states “the human occupies a new place in the universe, a universe now populated by what I am prepared to call nonhuman subjects. And this is why, to me, posthumanism means not the triumphal surpassing or unmasking of something but an increase in the vigilance, responsibility, and humility that accompany living in a world so newly, and differently, inhabited” (47). In this sense of posthuman (a condition in which one is freed from the cognitive exceptionalism which characterizes much of humanist thought), Darrieussecq’s Naissance des fantômes is a resolutely posthuman text that presents a world in which her narrator’s pain is

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as far away from “privileged suffering” as can be imagined. The tension I uncover between embodied consciousness and a certain residual Cartesianism in Naissance des fantômes (in the passages where the narrator states that her body acted or remembered “without me”) demonstrate the degree to which the paradigms of humanism persist – even among committed posthumanists. There is however, as I argue in Chapter one, a counter-argument to Wolfe’s contentions that Dennett essentially falls back into an unconscious Cartesianism and which I have already alluded to in my discussion of the usage of metaphor in Darrieussecq’s text. When a certain level of cognitive ability is reached (i.e. one which distinguishes humans from animals) the physiological and neuronal activities which characterize both give rise to the phenomenon of consciousness – one which Hayles argues is a mere epiphenomenon bearing no necessary link to the body. Wolfe’s argument is perfectly in line with those, such as Vivian Sobchack and Disability Studies scholars more generally, who view the triumphalist “transhumanism” discourse as one more instantiation of a trend which has long dominated the darker side of humanist thought (one which, for example, uses the concept of human perfectibility to justify a repressive eugenics). Since I view his ethical argument regarding the human’s “new place in the universe” as essentially consonant with Darwin’s arguments concerning differences between humans and animals as one of degree not of kind, I would argue that Wolfe’s brand of posthumanism is ultimately as tinged with a certain humanism as that of Hayles (though it is the latter which appears most frequently in works I examine here). This may be because humanism has always had at least two branches one of which leads to the kind of excesses which Todorov decries (based on a desire to dominate by extending the will of the autonomous subject) and the other, more ethical branch (which Todorov defends) which does not posit an extreme exceptionalism for the human subject but rather preaches ethical restraint. The systems theory, which as Wolfe explains, negates the possibility of any kind of subjectivity since the epiphenomenon of human consciousness is itself a function of a larger system fits well with Hayles’ statement quoted above that “In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation…” though his focus is more on the human as a small part of larger biological systems rather than the interface between the human and ­technology. Despite these theories, personal identity and consciousness in particular remain fundamental reference points in recent posthuman literature and film signaling that even in modified form the lineaments of humanism persist – even where it is ostensibly negated. I have already hinted that one of the reasons for this persistence of the human is the key role that narrative plays for the mind. I’d like to suggest that

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beyond being a “lying machine,” a “virtual machine” and a “narrative machine,” the mind is also a “survival machine.” That is to say that because of its very structure, the mind attempts to constantly make connections, seeks and creates meanings, in order to weave a cohesive narrative whose basic purpose is twofold: to establish and perpetuate a stable sense of self and thus to survive. Without a stable sense of self the mind withers. It is thus by making these narrative connections that the mind weaves and clothes itself with the meta-body: ultimately this is one more method for survival.

Parfit on Transpersonal Survival

British philosopher Derek Parfit, whose views on personal identity are highly influential in the field of philosophy of mind, argues that with respect to the question of a person’s survival (her or his continued existence at a future point as essentially the same entity) the language of identity itself poses a problem. Whereas identity imposes a one to one relationship between currently existing person A and a future person B in order for one to say that B is A at a later date, Parfit argues that “what matters” in survival is not identity itself (that is, the state of being identical) but a certain relationship whereby memories and psychological continuity are preserved. He calls this relationship “Relation-R.” Thus, for Parfit, R-relatedness (psychological continuity and connectedness which is directly causally related) is the key to survival. On his view, the psychological relatedness of one person to another (one person and their future self) may be split out into a Y branch whereby (through cloning for example) one person gives rise to two copies both of which are R-related to the original person. In his influential article entitled “Personal Identity” and in his book Reasons and Persons (1984) Parfit describes a hypothetical operation whereby his brain is split in two and each half is successfully transplanted into a new body. Since each of these halves retains its psychological continuity both of the resulting persons are in fact Parfit. That is, together they constitute one person. What Parfit is getting at is that the question as to which of the two is really him cannot be answered; rather, one can only say that Parfit “survives” as both resulting persons. He states the result of the operation in this way: “[Its] effect is to give me two bodies and a divided mind” (6). Even if the two resulting persons were to develop apart from each other and thus be considered in fact two different people, Parfit claims that he would survive “as both.” He therefore suggests that we must “give up the language of identity” pointing out that “We can suggest that I survive as two different people without implying that I am these people” (8 emphasis added). Parfit states

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that we must abandon the need to decide all identity questions as being either true or false. Allowing for some wiggle room in this question is not a typically satisfying response and Parfit knows this. Yet he insists that the question “Will I survive?” should not be understood as equivalent to saying “Will there be some person alive who is the same as me?” For Parfit is it a question of relation not identity that should matter to us: “The relation of the original person to each of the resulting people contains all that interests us – all that matters – in any ordinary case of survival” (10). Further on, he states that “Identity is all-or-nothing. Most of the relations which matter in survival are, in fact, relations of degree” (11). He thus seeks to “suggest a sense of “survive” which does not imply identity” (14). Even more radical is his claim that “It might be possible to think of experiences in a wholly “impersonal” way” (17). This reductionist approach (which recalls Dennett’s later computational approach to consciousness) is, of course, a direct challenge to the central core of consciousness theory in philosophy of mind: namely that consciousness is an irreducible first-person perspective. We will see how in at least one of the films I consider in this section Parfit’s thirdperson perspective of identity comes to be accepted by a character who learns that he is in fact a clone. Parfit’s rejection of the “language of identity” leads him to argue against the concept of self-interest with respect to how one takes future directed decisions. The philosopher asks whether we must be exactly the “same person” in the future in order for our decisions today to matter to us. In other words, need we believe that today’s decisions will have a direct impact on a future person who is the same as who we are today in order for those decisions to matter. He argues that we do not. Parfit believes that, in fact, our future selves are too far separated (with respect to psychological continuity) for them to be considered the “same person.” They are in fact, in his terms, “descendant selves” – related to us but not identical to us. Parfit says that despite the fact that these descendant selves are not the same, they should still matter to us. Making decisions based not on concern for a present embodied self but rather on a concern for a future “descendant self” requires the kind of metaphorical, disembodying (or metacorporeal) move that the meta-body entails though in this case the metabody being imagined is not contemporaneous with the lived body but rather is an imagined future self. In both cases, as in mindreading, the mind’s ability to project itself into another body (and in this case another time) is crucial to establishing a kind of loyalty to the self. In the humanist works that I have ­discussed so far, the direction of the temporal orientation of this loyalty is retrospective. Authenticity (or loyalty to the self) is sought in those works by directing one’s mind to a past, imagined self and attempting to discern what made

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that self a true image in order to either maintain this core or use it as a goal to be attained – a past to be recuperated. The question of whether or not this attempt is made in an honest fashion is immaterial to the mechanism itself. The fact, for example, that Leonard in Memento lies to himself about who he is and who he was does not change the fact that he uses a (possibly false) past image of himself as a motivating factor for current and future action. He even molds what will be seen as this past image in the future in order for it to be interpreted by a future self (to whom he lies) as real and true. It is the effort to reembody a distant past self that matters. Again I am speaking here of an idea of the self as an orientation and thus also as both temporal and narrative. Several recent films explore this question of survival of the self through projection into another body while offering different perspectives on the ethical problems that arise with artificial consciousness (computer simulated, cloned and time travelling multiple avatars). I will concentrate on ­Alejandro Amenábar’s Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes, 1997), Nacho Vigalondo’s Cronocrímenes (Time Crimes, 2007) and Duncan Jones’ Moon (2010) as they are among the most interesting recent films to explore these ideas.27 One aspect that links these films, beyond the exploration of posthuman survival, is their apparently contradictory discourse on the self – a contradiction which I have uncovered in other works previously discussed. They seem to simultaneously suggest both that the autonomous or unique self does not exist and that no matter how one tries to, one can never truly escape the self since each clone or simulation of the character in question reproduces the essential psychological characteristics of the first to appear (not always posited as an “original” since it may itself be a clone or copy that one first encounters). For these films, other-bodied survival does not give rise to a fundamental refashioning of the self rather it entails an obsessive preservation of psychological continuity. In this way, even the scenarios involving the radical rethinking of the corporeal or the disembodied instantiation of the mind (and the self it projects) allow for the retention, the preservation of a core self. Abre los ojos represents Amenábar’s attempt to grapple with some of the consequences for personal identity and ethics of imagining the continuation 27

Rian Johnson’s time travel thriller Looper (2012) sets up a similar dilemma in that a contract killer named Joe (played by Bruce Willis) is sent back into the past to be killed by his younger self (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt). The question of loyalty to a future self is nicely dramatized here in just the way that Parfit imagines it. Willis’s Joe is sufficiently older and physically different from Gordon-Levitt’s (despite the heavy-handed make-up job) that they seem like quite different people. The fact that Joe is a professional killer only seem to makes the suicide easier to envisage.

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of life beyond the destruction of the body as co-directed and invented by the mind and a super computer. Amenábar’s film posits the future possibility of Life Extension by downloading the contents of a human brain onto an advanced computer which can be made to run an ostensibly endless simulation of life based on the characteristics that the user chooses before his physical death. The story centers on the highly egotistical César (played by Eduardo ­Noriega) a wealthy young man who falls in love with Sofía (Penélope Cruz) a young woman whom César’s best friend Pelayo (Fele Martínez) brings to his birthday party. Immediately smitten, César whose serial conquests mark him as an overconfident “player,” spends a single night with Sofía and then, upon having a car accident purposely caused by a jilted lover of his, suffers a terrible disfigurement to his previously handsome face. This devastates him and he slips into a depression eventually committing suicide after having signed a contract with a company called Life Extension which promises to extend his life after physical death by cryogenically freezing his body and running a simulation to keep his brain functioning endlessly – with the dream scenario of his choosing. Before his suicide he has a falling out with Sofía who can tolerate less and less his erratic and aggressive behavior. The memory of their break-up is erased in the simulation he experiences which is meant to create a virtual heaven in which César and Sofía are always together and happy. Despite César’s desire to have Sofía love him inside the simulation, a malfunction causes him to experience a series of increasingly upsetting nightmares involving him believing he has killed the ex-lover whose suicidal car accident with him in the car caused his disfigurement and discovering that he has in fact killed Sofía. Yet, since César’s mind functions entirely from within the simulation he is unable to step outside its narrative and realize that he is “only dreaming.” This means that his imagined life, one which was planned to be perfect, has become a prison, one which he is initially unaware of inhabiting. Like many of the works discussed in this book, this one is structured as a detective story. Here, the protagonist César is forced to retrace his steps to understand what is happening to him only to discover that he is living in a virtual world. When the film opens, César is incarcerated for a murder he denies having committed. He believes that he has been set up. Wearing a mask which he refuses to remove he speaks to a psychologist who tries to help him remember what has happened. As César recounts what he remembers to the psychologist who gradually gains his trust, his crisis reaches such a crescendo that Life Extension, the company running his simulation, sends a character into his dream who stops the nightmare, explains to César what has really happened to him and gives him the choice of either remaining in the simulation or waking up.

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Mr. Duvernois (the Life Extension representative) explains that César’s memory of the suicide as well as of the signing of his contract with Life Extension have been erased. As did Memento’s Leonard, César attempts to shape a future self (the one to be housed in the computer simulation) by lying about his past (deleting the memory of his break up with Sofía) though César must resort to computer simulation in order to carry out his self-deception. Here consciousness is very closely compared to narrative filmmaking as in the scene where César finds out that he died one hundred and fifty years previously his altered memory is presented as having been spliced together once the unwanted memory was cut. Narrative identity is presented as a simple succession of images as César’s mind has no need of a physical body while the basic narrative element is presented as crucial: César’s reciprocated love for Sofía. Yet, here again, one sees the resurgence of a strongly humanist nostalgia. As we will see, the central point of this film is not that one’s mind cannot function without a body but that such an existence is a lie necessarily arising from disembodied consciousness. This will lead the newly awakened protagonist to choose between a certain embodied authenticity and disembodied immortality. But before getting to that argument we will look at how the posthuman dream itself is infused with the exaltation of the self and the attempt to avoid its eventual loss. In Abre los ojos the protagonist’s desired recuperation is two-fold: the computer simulation restores César’s unblemished face and his lover whom, by the time of his suicide, he had already lost. The simulation is accompanied by an initial memory editing process by which all César’s unhappy memories preceding and including the suicide were erased in favor of a smooth continuation of what he viewed as his perfect life with Sofía. Because the simulation ends up malfunctioning, his idyllic love with Sofía becomes a nightmarish ordeal whereby he is accused of murdering her (having strangled someone whom he thought was another woman who was persecuting him). Through the intervention of the company running the program he learns that that he is dreaming one hundred and fifty years in the future and his memory of signing the contract (which had been deleted) is restored. He is given the choice of either having the computer reprogrammed or reentering the physical world with a new body – though to do this he will have to commit a symbolic suicide by jumping headlong from the top of one of Madrid’s tallest buildings. The film offers a contradictory view of the posthuman future – both dystopia (the computer malfunctions and César’s simulated life becomes a source of trauma) and utopia (in which nearly anything is possible). In essence the film posits the question of the ethics of disembodied posthumanism in the sense that César must choose between continuing to live entirely in the Machine or

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returning to a (new) corporeal form in the real world. He chooses to return to the world in what is presented as a courageous step back into truth. The case of César in Abre los ojos illustrates in some ways Parfit’s argument about the undecidability of personal identity in extreme cases. Though César 2 (post suicide in the simulation) is connected psychologically to César 1 (before his suicide), new memories have been created for him by the computer of events that never happened to César 1. Before his suicide, César 1 agreed to pass responsibility for the control of his life to the Life Extension company (in this way he actively chooses future passivity and to live a lie). The preplanned scenario that he thought would play out eternally is corrupted by a computer malfunction that resembles a mental illness since the computer essentially is his brain. The state of perfect (preplanned) freedom, here in the form of excessive self-mastery, backfires and reduces his autonomy. Yet, as I have said, he had already signed away his autonomy by trusting Life Extension to care for him as he had stipulated in his contract. This control over the self by proxy was his first entry into the posthuman. Much like Leonard in Memento, César 2 (whose downloaded mind suffers in the program) is separated enough from César 1 (who signed the contract) to be shocked that such a thing could be possible. César 2 is indeed a descendant self of César 1 and does not wish to exist in a simulation. His choice to return to corporeal form in the real world is presented as a recovery of his true self. It is as though César 2 who is no longer the same person as César 1 is better equipped to recover the true self that César 1 abandoned. His decision to reenter the material world (even if it is no longer recognizable as the one he left) is clearly an effort to recuperate his lost self.28 This would seem to suggest two contradictory conclusions with respect to the posthuman condition as it appears in the film. On the one hand, the first posthuman option (simulated life within a computer) is presented as viable and a true life extension (i.e. César 2 despite living a lie based on invented memories and preprogrammed virtual reality scenarios, still retains sufficient psychological connectedness with César 1 to be considered a “survivor” of that person – his frozen body is no obstacle to this). On the other, the second posthuman option (gaining a new or rehabilitated body) is presented as being even more authentic than remaining in option 1 because he would now have new “real” experiences (he would somehow be a truer “survivor” of César

28

Indeed, despite presenting itself ostensibly as a story about the relational self which is dependent on the loved other (Sofía), in fact Abre los ojos is highly focused on the self as autonomous agent.

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1 because he would have a corporeal existence and live with other such embodied persons). César wants to leave the computer and control his own thoughts (he wants to “own” his experiences – the quintessential mark of liberal humanism since at least Locke who bases his entire theory of property on one’s ownership of one’s own body, thoughts and labor). This is essentially an ethical choice as it also means that he will once again become responsible for his actions (which, in turn, will have consequences in the real world, unlike his actions in the simulation). In addition to retaining the distinction real world /false world as they apply to the physical world and the simulated program, the primacy of the first-person autonomous/liberal embodied subject is asserted here. But in addition to his choice to be free to choose and be ethically engaged in his life, by recovering a physical body, César is also choosing the possibility of true corporeal pain, something that will make him human again. When in the last scene on the roof of the skyscraper César must jump from in order to reawaken to his “real” corporeal self Duvernois tells him that none of the people in his life actually exist, he is also telling César that he himself in some sense does not exist. He will only truly exist, it is suggested, if he takes the leap and plunges back into bodily experience and ethical responsibility. It is interesting to note that the company cannot take this step for him, it must be the result of an active choice on his part, symbolized by the leap into the abyss. This is itself a nod to the discourse of agency, one which also runs counter to posthumanism tenets. It is understood that César 2 could remain frozen dreaming the ­computer-assisted dream indefinitely, yet by being rechanneled into a body it is not clear that he will be putting a limit on his life since he is told that truly amazing things are possible in this new future world. One assumes that if his brain could be run on a computer and then be put into a body once, this process could be repeated indefinitely. What he is really choosing is incorporation and control over his mind – and not necessarily mortality. Rather than simply be a spectator of his mind’s processes, he will now become a player. It is specifically the instantiation in the body that confers authenticity upon César’s choice. It is clear that while the film presents a posthuman future in which the computer simulated self is still connected enough to the original to count as the self – there is no suggestion that César is no longer himself – the locating of the self in the body and the accompanying discourse of authenticity is not jettisoned. This ambivalence is not limited to Amenábar’s film, rather it is present in many other such films presenting a posthuman future including the Matrix series and I Robot both of which make use of the discourse of corporeal authenticity vs. computer driven inauthenticity. Thus, despite the apparently

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posthumanist stance, humanist tenets (autonomy/agency, first person consciousness, corporeality, “owning” the self) dictate that survival requires reinsertion into the world and a physical body. Perhaps even more tellingly the constitutive nature of narrative for personal identity is asserted. The whole point of the computer simulation is to help César’s mind tell itself stories about itself. In César’s case his mind becomes aware of the malfunction and sets itself up to investigate itself (by creating a film noir-like plot of a man accused of murder). This plot device – placing the lead character into the role of the investigator of himself – is used in a similar fashion in the next film I examine in which a man coexists with different avatars of himself all of which have been projected back one hour in time. In Cronocrímenes (Time Crimes, 2007) Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo imagines a time machine that creates havoc when a middle class homeowner who is renovating his house discovers that he is in fact an avatar of himself – a copy sent back from one hour in the future. Faced with the threat of another man (whom he discovers later is in fact another avatar of himself) who seeks to kill him and what he believes is the accidental death of his wife, the protagonist Héctor (played by Karra Elejalde) decides to go back in time to fix what has gone wrong. This only makes matters worse. Héctor 2 who is the first one that we see on the screen becomes Héctor 3 when he goes back in time in an attempt to save his wife. Each successive avatar of Héctor is physically wounded more deeply than the previous one – as though to suggest that with the increased presence of simultaneous avatars there is a kind of degradation – though they are identical and retain all memories up until the moment they went into the time travel device. In the end, a badly wounded Héctor 3 decides to sit down, throw away his binoculars – and wait for the police to arrive. Like César in Abre los ojos, Héctor has discovered that the posthuman capacity to replicate the self pushes the narrative play of lived body and meta-body onto dangerous terrain. Whereas in César’s case (in Abre los ojos) it is initially the inability to step outside his digital meta-body, the lack of any distance from the imagined self, which creates anxiety, for Héctor (in Cronocrímenes) it is the production of a perfect duplicate that threatens his very existence. Thus, one might say that while César does not have enough flesh, Héctor has too much. It is a cliché that the utopian vision of a perfectly controlled future society will quickly slip into dystopia.29 But here what Vigalondo offers the viewer, in 29

Elysium (2013) is a recent example in a seemingly unending series of films that imagine dystopian futures. Interstellar (Nolan, 2014) and The Martian (Scott, 2015) are examples of highly successful recent sci-fi films which carry hopeful messages – not so much because the future is perfectly bright, but because their protagonists triumph; but the highly

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a highly focused exposition resembling a philosopher’s thought experiment, is not the question so much of what effect such a time travel machine would have on society at large but rather on the narrow question of personal identity and one’s relationship with a loved other. Here again, as in Parfit’s theory, the clone, a psychologically connected copy of the self in an identical body, appears as a possible posthuman option. In Cronocrímenes Héctor discovers a secret laboratory at which a young scientist (played by the film’s director) works in secret and learns that the man who has been chasing him is a time-traveling clone of himself. This means that Héctor co-exists with another embodied copy of himself. The horror that this coexistence of multiple selves produces in Héctor pushes him to quickly ­conclude that he must eliminate his other self – no other course of action is ever contemplated. For Parfit, this is equivalent to suicide since both copies are Héctor. Héctor 3 must kill Héctor 2 in order to survive (and vice versa). The confusion over the puzzling question that this provokes (which is the real Héctor?) and which Parfit’s unflappable response evacuates as unimportant could not be more vital here. The otherwise humanist discourse of authenticity (usually expressed as the obligation to “find” and stay “true to” oneself) appears here as its polar opposite. While the traumatic threat to the self in Schnabel’s film (Jean-Do’s paralysis) triggers a pressing need to survive by keeping one humanity in tact, one which requires the caring and scholarly help of others (such as the therapist who develops the partner assisted scanning technique), in Cronocrímenes the clone is a primitive intruder who rapidly transforms the mild-mannered homeowner into a murderer. The former film bases the exaltation of the autonomous human on the reality of the relational nature of human identity, the latter argues that self-preservation may require the elimination of the other, even when that other is oneself. The link between murder, suicide and self-preservation is at once logical and provocative. In fact, the cloning / time travel premise sets up a posthumanism that is oddly corporeal. As each successive Héctor comes to the inevitable conclusion that he must kill to survive, there is a clear regression to prehumanist ethical systems – Locke giving way to Hobbes. The assertion of the self which appears playfully in Le scaphandre et le papillon30 manifests itself in Cronocrímenes as a violent, all-consuming effort to prevent the loss of self, especially what the self possesses (both itself and the other in the form of

30

negative reception which Tomorrowland (Bird, 2015) received demonstrates that too much optimism is often unpalatable. This occurs, for example, in the scene where Jean-Do rejects Brando (“Ça, c’est pas moi!” / “That’s not me!”).

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Héctor’s wife). This is partly dictated by the mix of detective, horror and sci-fi genres that Vigalondo engages with. Interestingly, Cronocrímenes poses an additional problem for the viewer who, when she initially sees the protagonist attacked by a man whose face is covered in bandages, easily identifies with Héctor as he defends himself. However, once the attacker is revealed to be a copy of Héctor himself it is much less clear with whom to identify. The viewer’s visceral reaction to this dilemma will depend partly on her own concept of personal identity. If, as Parfit suggests, we agree that all copies are in fact the same person for all intents and purposes then we must see the protagonist’s project of self-preservation as criminal if understandable on a different level. After all, how many of us would be happy to find some identical other living our lives and more specifically our conjugal lives? Yet, Vigalondo’s direction does not play up this secondary complication as it is hard enough to explain to the viewer what is happening; like Amenábar in Abre los ojos and Duncan Jones in Moon, he is forced to insert a professorial character to explain the plot – in this case, the young scientist played by the director himself. Vigalondo astutely chooses to simplify the viewer’s potential problem of whom to identify with by privileging the point of view of the first Héctor we see on the screen encouraging us to see ourselves in this everyman. The key moment of horror for the protagonist occurs when looking through his binoculars – previously the instrument of the vicarious pleasure of watching a young woman undress – as he realizes that the man he spies is a copy of himself, in his home with his wife. This moment is just as horrific as the one in which he realizes that he is not the only Héctor to come out of the time machine. Héctor decides with no hesitation that he is the only version of himself who deserves to survive. His other avatar constitutes an immediate threat which he must eliminate, not a possible proxy, stand-in, or partner with whom to reimagine the self’s singularity. The fact that he has already been attacked by his clone does not help, of course. In the end, the key question for Héctor 2 (the first one we see) is one of possession of the self – a fundamental concept for the liberal humanist subject. The possibility of dispossession of the self (relinquishing or sharing his self with an other “self” even if this be an identical copy of himself) and moreover giving up possession of his home and his relationship with his wife (whom he is horrified to see with another avatar) are enough to push him quickly to a kind of self-preserving “suicide.” The fact that each clone which comes out of the time travel machine feels forced to do violence to an earlier self sets up an interesting comparison with Memento since Leonard’s attempts to dictate his own future action and manipulate his future sense of self constitute violence to a descendant self.

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In each case the actual time which separates the selves is short (as little as five to ten minutes in Memento and one hour in Cronocrímenes). Yet, these are clearly separate selves. In the case of Memento, though there is continuity as regards the basic facts of his identity (i.e. memories from before his accident remain intact) Leonard’s later self is cut-off from his earlier self by complete ignorance of what he has just done or what has just happened to him. This is enough of a separation that Leonard feels no compunction in forcing his later self to commit a crime by lying to him. In Cronocrímenes the separation is caused by the split between two identical, psychologically connected bodies who compete for the same prize. In both cases, the choice of attempting to maintain an extreme autonomous self fails. Leonard never actually enjoys the sensation of stable control over his identity, nor does Héctor. Both are caught in never-ending attempts at excessive self-mastery which cannot succeed. The kill or be killed approach to self-preservation in Cronocrímenes may be contrasted with that of British filmmaker Duncan Jones’ film Moon (2009) which turns the image of the menacing clone on its head. The opening lines of the film explain that in the near future fusion energy has been successfully harnessed and has resolved much of the earth’s energy problem. A lone worker, named Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell), toils on the dark side of the moon in a control base tending to automated harvesters necessary for this tremendously profitable energy source, sending containers filled with Helium 3 back to earth. The asymmetrical relationship by which a single man (who we later learn is a clone) is responsible for the operations which supply the energy for 70% of the world’s needs is significant here as it appears as an updated, posthuman form of colonialism whereby the colonized subject does not know that he is basically a slave. The earth depends on the work of this single man who, far from being considered an exceptional individual, leads a monotonous life characterized by such extreme isolation that his mental health begins to crumble (he is told that real time communications with earth are not functioning and so must wait for recorded messages to arrive from his family back home).31 He is sustained by the knowledge that only two weeks remain on his three-year contract and he will soon be able to return to his wife and three-year-old daughter back on earth. After being injured in an accident outside the base when his vehicle 31

Early on he burns his hand because he thinks he sees a young woman sitting in his chair. He denies that he has hallucinated to the central computer GERTY who suspects that he is lying when he says it was the tv which distracted him (the tv was off). The crash which injures the protagonist is caused when he hallucinates again imagining that he sees a woman standing out on the moon in front of his vehicle with no protective suit.

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crashes into a harvester, Sam Bell awakens inside the base infirmary where he is being cared for by the central computer GERTY. However, the viewer soon learns that the man who has awoken is not the man who drove his cruiser to the harvester and had an accident. He is in fact a clone with the same name. Since it turns out that the first man we see in the film is also a fifth generation clone of an unseen original Sam Bell we will give the two the following names: Sam Bell 5 (the first person we see and central character) and Sam Bell 6 (the man who awakens in the infirmary).32 After an initial period in which Sam Bell 5 does not accept that he is a clone (something that Sam Bell 6 accepts early on) in which the two fight verbally and physically, they begin to work together and become friends – acting like brothers even. Jones highlights the differences between each clone as their relationship evolves quickly from one of shock and rejection to one of close kinship. Sam Bell 6, who has just been woken up, is the picture of health whereas Sam Bell 5 is increasingly exhausted and ill eventually vomiting blood. One of the benefits of this difference in physical state between the two is to allow the viewer to easily distinguish between them. But there are also personality differences. We learn that Sam Bell 6 has a temper problem which Sam Bell 5 has had the time to learn to control (he later explains that he was separated from his wife for six months because of it). Sam Bell 6 has not had the time to control this innate tendency and so initially is more violent than Sam Bell 5. This implies that the cloning process makes a near exact copy of the original dna; we know that the copies are not always exact however as GERTY later explains that whenever a clone is awoken it must go through a battery of neurological exams to see whether it has any defects introduced during the cloning process. Sam Bell 5’s initial reaction upon seeing Sam Bell 6 is to deny that he is a clone. If anyone is a clone, for him, it is Sam Bell 6. He believes that he is a unique individual. When Sam Bell 6 implies otherwise Sam Bell 5 angrily shouts “You’re the clone!” Yet, once they have gotten over the initial period of conflict (which plays out more like sibling rivalry than the fight for survival which Héctor must engage in in Cronocrímenes) they begin to adapt the way they use personal pronouns to refer to themselves. At one point Sam Bell 5 tells Sam Bell 6 about their daughter (whom the latter does not know) saying “I had, 32

The first Sam Bell we see on the screen is in fact the fifth in a series. This is revealed when he speaks with his daughter whom he expects to be 3 years old and is now 15. This allows for five three-year contracts, the fifth one being the one he is about to complete. The clone who awakens after him is therefore Sam Bell 6. This is confirmed at the end of the film when Sam Bell 6 is referred to as being “Clone 6, the clone of Sam Bell” by a tv reporter discussing his return to earth.

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we had a girl.” This is, in fact, the daughter born to the original Sam Bell and his wife Tess. Since the child was born before Sam Bell 5 was awoken he cannot actually be her biological father though this knowledge does not diminish his attachment to her – as he has the same memories of her as her biological father had. We can surmise that this memory implantation was accomplished after Sam Bell 5 was “awoken” since Sam Bell 6 does not yet have these memories (this indicates that the clone itself awakes without those memories). Sam Bell 5’s personal identity is built upon the implanted memories of the original Sam Bell and on the subsequent messages that Tess, his wife, sends announcing the birth of their child as well as other news.33 Having now accepted that both are clones, Sam Bell 5 and 6 decide that the “rescue unit” which will soon arrive from earth on the moon is actually being sent to murder Sam Bell 5 or possibly both. Sam Bell 6 decides to “wake up” an additional clone (Sam Bell 7) and allow him to be found and killed by the rescue crew thus saving Sam Bell 5 and 6. Sam Bell 5’s state deteriorates so much that it becomes clear that he has been genetically engineered to last only three years – the length for which it has been calculated that his mental health would hold out under such harsh conditions. Sam Bell 5 later accesses the Sam Bell database and discovers that other Sam Bells have ended up the same way. He also discovers that the “return vehicle” supposedly meant to send him back to earth after his contract is up actually destroys him to make way for the new clone. Sam Bell 5 discovers the incineration room while Sam Bell 6 is still out investigating the signal blocking devices on the lunar surface. Below the fake transport room there is a huge storage facility with what looks to be hundreds of drawers containing Sam Bell clones waiting to be awoken. Sam Bell 5 later explains to Sam Bell 6 that his plan to kill Sam Bell 7 and save Sam Bell 5 by sending him secretly back to earth will not work. He points out that they cannot kill Sam Bell 7 because he knows that he himself would be incapable and that therefore Sam Bell 6 would also be incapable of such an act. The clones decide to work together as Sam Bell 5 seems to believe that the survival of the self requires protecting descendant selves (or parallel selves), not destroying them.

33

One assumes that both the original Sam Bell and Tess, his wife, work with the company and know that the clones are on the moon. This would explain the birth of the daughter while Sam Bell 5 is away and her crying in her messages. The pressure of maintaining a real and a fictional relationship with the same man seems to deeply upset Bell’s wife. We later learn that she has died young.

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Sam Bell 5 chooses to remain behind in the stranded vehicle rather than waking up and sacrificing Sam Bell 7 (whom he does not know) in order to allow Sam Bell 6 (whom he does know) to escape back to earth. Sam Bell 5 thus sacrifices himself in order for the two other copies to survive. In this way his actions follow the logic of Parfit’s suggestion that transpersonal interest trumps self-interest. In fact, Sam Bell 5 doubly preserves a core self. He both allows for physical continuity through the survival of Sam Bell 6 and preserves his character (by not allowing Sam Bell 6 to kill Sam Bell 7). It is interesting to note that in this film the clones have transpersonal memories34 which, though they are not their own, have the same emotional impact as if they were (this is also the case for the time-travelling Héctor avatars in Cronocrímenes). Each clone remembers for example what “his” wife is like. Sam Bell watches video messages from “his” wife and “his” daughter and recalls the story of his life to which he has frequent recourse at the start of the film to combat his feelings of solitude. In the design of the clones it is narrative which affords the crucial continuity and structure necessary for them to function believing they are unique human beings. Yet their programmed obsolescence (after three years) is also necessary because it is thought that no normal human being would accept to remain in such isolation for extended periods of time and the clone could not “return” to earth (where it has never been) since that would create the very problem that Héctor has in Cronocrímenes (multiple contemporary avatars of one person). These are literally disposable human beings. Yet Sam Bell 5’s desire to sacrifice himself was clearly not the reaction the company feared he would have upon learning of his ontological status. This is why the entire space station at which he works is controlled by the central computer GERTY which has been designed to hide from him the fact of his being a clone. The unusual nature of Sam Bell 5’s generosity is made further apparent by Sam Bell 6’s initial surprise upon hearing of his plan to sacrifice himself (though he does not oppose this plan). The very fact that Sam Bell 6 could devise the plan to kill Sam Bell 7 (even if, as Sam Bell 6 states, he would be incapable of carrying it out) leads the viewer to conclude that despite initially being identical, each Sam Bell does have a margin for difference (possibly based on the amount of time that each has lived after awakening – in this sense Sam Bell 5 is Sam Bell 6’s older brother though he is not wiser in every respect as he has much greater difficulty in accepting his clone status). There is no question that these clones are considered fully human in the film. This is in fact a point that Sam Bell 6 insists on just before he escapes from 34

Parfit calls these memories “q-memories” (14–15).

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the base station and reboots GERTY. When GERTY alludes to Sam Bell 7’s programming, Sam Bell 6 responds “GERTY, we’re not programmed. We’re people. You understand?” (He receives no response). This is yet another example of the nostalgia for the human within the posthuman context. By many measures, these are engineered, programmed humans. Thus though it is true that they are human, the liberal humanist conceit of the centrality of freedom has here been put into serious question. Sam Bell 5’s decision to courageously stay on the moon, prevent the murder of Sam Bell 7 and send Sam Bell 6 back to earth is meant to reassert the power of self-defining free will. The last act that Sam Bell 6 undertakes before he gets into his escape pod (designed to send the energy cylinders to earth) is to program a harvester to run into and destroy the secret antennas which serve to jam the live connection between earth and the moon. This demonstrates the same concern for a descendant self which Sam Bell 5 displays because this live connection will allow Sam Bell 7 to learn his true identity. Here it is Parfit’s ethical theory of impersonal (or what one could call “postpersonal”) identity which is most useful to understand how the human and posthuman intersect in this film.

Postpersonal Identity

Philosopher Derek Parfit’s ethical system of personal identity is in fact neither “personal,” nor does it accept the concept of “identity.” As we have seen, Parfit reduces the question of survival to something he calls “Relation R” (psychological connectedness). His reductive theory of impersonal description does not depend on the concept of an overarching person unifying body and mind. In some senses then Parfit remains a Cartesian dualist as the mind is privileged in survival. Yet Parfit points out that this mind may be split and function in two separate spheres. Since it is essentially characterized by the data it contains, the mind may be “impersonally described” and duplicated. Thus one may “survive” as two or more persons – as happens, for example, in mature cloning. This view is posthumanist in that it posits the acceptability of contemporaneous, separate selves (thus jettisoning the need for a “unique” self) yet it may also be viewed perhaps more accurately as “postpersonal” in the sense that it is the result of an argument against the “language of personal identity” which nonetheless leaves the basics of humanism intact. It leaves some essentials of humanism intact in at least two senses. First, Parfit actually argues that a normal human existence covers enough of a time span that descendant selves are, after a given period of time – say twenty years – separated enough from their past selves as to be considered different persons. Yet the present

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(soon to be past) self still behaves as though it cares for this future, descendant self. In fact, one acts as though this descendant self will be oneself. Parfit argues that this fact should not change in the case of teletransportation or cloning – in fact it should be even easier to consider such a second self the same as oneself. This empathy for the other, even if that other is a descendant self, is emblematic of the kind of humanism that Todorov defends – based essentially on care for those who share the same ontological status as beings of the same species. Secondly, since Parfit’s theory posits what may be seen as an additional path for survival (through multiple selves, teletransportation, time travel or cloning) it responds to one of the central humanist anxieties and desires. Of all the films discussed in this chapter only Moon presents a truly posthuman, postpersonal vision in the sense that Sam Bell 5 accepts the idea of transpersonal survival through Sam Bell 6. Yet, as I have noted, Sam Bell 6’s insistence on the opposition between being human and being programmed represents – as I have found in all the works examined here – a strong nostalgia for the liberal humanist subject. Thus, these three films suggest that mainstream cinema is still far from going decisively beyond humanist discourse. Rather, the anxieties surrounding the question of personal identity (uniqueness, autonomy, ownership of the self, survival) play out in very much the same way as in traditional humanist narrative – as do the question of narrative identity and the fundamental role of memory in defining the self. Even Moon’s step toward a more posthuman vision remains firmly planted in the human as the drive toward self-sacrifice is itself a touchstone of heroic humanist narrative.

The Absent Machine It is possible that there is no other memory than the memory of wounds.35 Czeslaw Milosz, Nobel Lecture, December 8, 1980

Our final work tackles the complex question not only of personal survival in a posthuman context but collective survival as well. Argentinean novelist

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http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1980/milosz-lecture.html.

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­Ricardo Piglia’s La ciudad ausente (The Absent City),36 follows its hard-boiled journalist/detective/spy protagonist as he investigates a woman/machine whose haunting suffering literally connects her to a nation. If espionage fiction involves the transformation of detective fiction, the “epistemological genre par excellence” (McHale 9), into a “paranoid vision of ‘violation by outside agencies’ and ‘violation of individual autonomy by internal agencies’”37 through much of the twentieth century this “paranoid vision” reflected all too closely the reality of the average citizen of Latin America. The Anglo-American detective novel tradition which posits the righting of wrongs committed by deviant individuals gave way to the hard boiled crime novel which focused on a darker vision of society’s deeply embedded ills – uncovering at the same time structural vices which could not be fixed by the lone detective. The problem was now systemic. Combining the genres of the hard-boiled crime novel – especially in the often politically charged variant popularized by the French roman noir – with the challenge to autonomy embodied in espionage fiction, the Latin American novela negra suggests not only that the enemy is within and that there is no order to return to, but in its most audacious forms, explores the consequences for personal identity of such a violation of the distinction between inside and outside. Detective fiction (a genre brilliantly rethought by J.L. Borges) and hard-boiled crime novels (consistently championed as an editor and novelist by Ricardo Piglia) have left their mark on Argentinean literature. In both cases, the hermeneutical search for explanation and justice is often fruitless. On the one hand, the desire for correspondence between earthly evidence and a higher signifier is frustrated (e.g. in Borges’ “Death and the Compass”), on the other, there is no true meta-narrative upon which the narrative we believe to be our own may rely. Piglia’s La ciudad ausente (The Absent City)38 was published in 1992 nearly ten years after the end of Argentina’s military dictatorship known as the Proceso de reorganización nacional (Process of National Reorganization 1976–1983) – or simply “el Proceso.” A brutal regime, characterized by its repressive tactics and widespread human rights abuses (such as torture and extrajudicial killings),39 constitutes the menacing backdrop to a universe whose time period 36 37 38 39

All English translations come from Sergio Waisman’s translation of the text (2000). See Bloom (2) quoted in David Seed “Spy fiction” in Priestman (115). All English translations come from Sergio Waisman’s translation of the text (Duke up, 2000). Modifications of this translation are indicated where appropriate. “In initiating a “process of national reorganization” it was predictable that the military regime would put a policy of repression into practice, but the scale and nature of the violence to which it resorted were unprecedented. The initial measures followed a f­amiliar

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remains, like much in this novel, imprecise. The text hovers between direct reference to Argentina’s past political upheavals and resistance movements (in particular the period of Perón’s exile and the Proceso dictatorship) and an ostensibly future state of non-identity into which the city of Buenos Aires (here arguably a metaphor for the world) has been plunged.40 Though the difficulty of distinguishing storylines and identities in this novel gives the reader the impression of feeling one’s way through a labyrinth in pitch black night, the characters live in a city which never switches off the flood lights – even during the day. The excess of light is here merely another cause of blindness – the flip side of the dark – metaphorically embodying an excessive desire for total knowledge as much as it reflects the tactics of a paranoid and ultimately powerless state bent on watching every person, every moment of the day and night. In an atmosphere of what might be termed cyber noir,41 at times recalling the dark futuristic vision of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, at others the textual possible worlds of Borges, this novel tells the multiple stories which are generated by a woman/machine alternately called simply La máquina (The ­Machine) or Elena (wife of real-life Argentine novelist Macedonio Fernández and the woman whose memories served to create the Machine after her death). This machine appears simultaneously as a passive, suffering, disembodied cyborg modifying and circulating stories it neither comprehends nor can control and as the source of everything in the obscure universe of the novel. As we will see, the Machine constitutes an example of posthuman survival which points toward two very different possible futures. The Absent City of the title is a

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pattern: the prohibition of political activities, censorship of the press, the arrest of labour leaders and intervention in the unions. To this was added the death penalty, administrated in a form which was different from anything ever known before. […] The repressive infrastructure was based, rather, on officially authorized but clandestine detention centres and in special units of the three military branches and the police, the mission of which was to kidnap, interrogate, torture and, in the majority of cases, kill. This infrastructure was highly decentralized; the real authority was invested in the regional commanders, who in their own territory were the supreme power and reported only to their immediate superiors. This decentralization and autonomy granted the shock forces enormous impunity. This mechanism had several advantages: it was a difficult network to infiltrate, it was immune to the influence of well-connected relatives of the victims and it allowed the government to deny any responsibility for the violation of human rights” (Bethell, 158). One of the characters mentions that it has been fifteen years since the Berlin Wall fell which would make it 2004 but other references indicate that it could be much earlier. The mix of genres that Piglia creates has been identified as intersecting principally with cyberpunk, the detective genre and science fiction.

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Buenos Aires which remains in the clutches of a brutal dictatorship resembling that of the Proceso in Argentina. It is a city in which all are watched and one character jokes that those who are not already in jail are busy informing on each other for the police. The ostensible protagonist Miguel MacKensey (who goes by the nickname Junior) is an Argentine reporter of English descent who chases down leads given to him by an anonymous female caller (who turns out to be the Machine) and who seems to have foreknowledge of future events. The hard-boiled Junior pursues blind leads in two emblematic places in his efforts to understand what it is that he is seeking: the Museum and the Island. In the Museum, Junior is confronted with audio, visual and textual copies of the stories generated by the Machine as well as life-size recreations of these same stories sometimes with variations. Yet, the Machine is much more than a repository for Elena’s memories, and the source of endlessly modified stories, testimonies and memories of actual and invented persons. The Machine is a networked consciousness created by Argentinean novelist Macedonio Fernández42 in a desperate attempt to resuscitate his deceased wife Elena (who dies at a young age from a mysterious illness). Yet, this potentially all-knowing device is in fact in a position of ignorance with respect to basic questions such as what it is, where it is and how it got there. Seeking to clarify these elements which are crucial to narrative identity, the Machine investigates itself, using Junior to accomplish this task. This is, like so many aspects of Piglia’s text, both a reference to a crime fiction cliché (that of the detective investigating or working for some purpose or someone other than what he first thinks) and a radical rethinking of the genre. In this sense, the generic crossroads which Piglia’s novel represents (combining detective fiction, science fiction, cyber punk, espionage fiction and political commentary) turns Junior, in his capacity as both investigator of the Machine and its manipulated agent, into an unwitting double agent. This is a world in which no one seems to be truly in control and which is nonetheless saturated with devices meant to establish control by guiding, surveilling and modifying identities in constant flux. This is why The Absent City may be seen as much as a detective novel as espionage fiction – focused as it is on the political ­intrigue 42

The insertion of real-life Argentinean novelist Macedonio Fernández (author Museo de la Novela de la Eterna and inspiration for Jorge Luis Borges) is the most prominent but not the only example of Piglia’s mix of real and invented characters. The character based on Fernández in the novel defines the real not as the actual but the possible. It is interesting to note that, like much in this novel, this declaration may be read in two ways, one (literary) positive and the other (political) negative.

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of a double agent sent on a secret mission eventually leading him to spy on a network of intellectuals working to resist the repression of a dictatorial regime. The details of this resistance as well as the regime being fought remain a mystery until late in the novel such that the reader, like Junior, doesn’t initially understand just what it is that he is searching for. Piglia creates a textual labyrinth of uncertainty (replete with name-changing, reoccurring characters and the blurring of fact and fantasy) with intersecting paths leading toward a final passage in which we hear the Machine’s mournful voice more clearly. The mix of reality and fiction in the stories that the Machine broadcasts includes accounts of torture, accidental discovery of hidden mass graves, a woman who commits suicide, legends concerning the original lost language of humankind and a story about an autistic girl (simply called “La nena” or “the girl”) who is taught intelligible speech by her father. Critics have concentrated their efforts on the political references in the novel including Demaría and Jagoe (highlighting in particular the female cyborg myth), Williams (as a basis for posthegemony in Latin America), the fantastic (Filer), the textuality of the city (Waisman) and mourning (Avelar) while Brown has written convincingly on its neobaroque elements (2009) and, more importantly for this study, on Argentine posthumanism (2010). In this text the destabilization produced by the dictatorship is so total that the concept of survival itself must be rethought. It is significant that Piglia imagines the central figure representing the paralyzed, traumatized Argentine society of the time as a suffering, helpless cyborg. The dehumanization of the State is symbolically mirrored and yet fiercely resisted by the dehumanized Elena, now involuntarily reborn as a Machine unable to disconnect itself from the nation’s thoughts and memories. The text ties posthuman survival to the suffering caused by the loss of a coherent self which generates a desperate, and ultimately fruitless, quest for authenticity. The search for a singular truth which would make an authentic self possible is seriously put into question, not only because of the context of pervading trauma, but also because of the way that the characters’ narrative identities shift in the ever-changing flux of words and references. The world in which a stable autonomous self would be conceivable is here ruled by a paranoid, authoritarian regime which seeks to impose an excessively controlled version of such a stable identity at the national level. It is the hybrid nature of Argentina’s culture that, Piglia suggests, represents the best form of resistance to a dictatorial effort to impose a single identity on the nation. Literature’s capacity to rewrite old paradigms represents the only true escape. Yet

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here, the literary path ultimately leads to an erasure of personal identity not its affirmation. In The Absent City the humanist search for an origin collides with a disturbing posthumanism which is not the result of choice. The fallen state of Elena / the Machine as the immobile, connected mind of the city in combat with the State whose narratives it both infiltrates and counters figures a sorrowful, selfconscious erasure of self. In fact, Elena comes to resemble the very state that her counter narratives are meant to disrupt. Whereas the State seeks knowledge in order to exert control, the Machine seeks knowledge to recover a sense of self that was taken from it. This is how she is described when Junior first receives an anonymous tip from Elena / La Máquina: Hablaba en clave, con el tono alusivo y un poco idiota que usan los que creen en la magia y en la predestinación. Todo quería decir otra cosa, la mujer vivía una especie de misticismo paranoico. […] La mujer hablaba todo el tiempo de La máquina. Le pasaba datos, le contaba historias. “Está conectada; ni ella lo sabe. No se puede desligar, sabe que tiene que hablar conmigo, pero no se da cuenta de lo que pasa…” (13–14) She spoke in code, with the allusive and slightly idiotic tone used by those who believe in magic and predestination. Everything meant something else; the woman lived in a kind of paranoid mystical state. […] The woman talked constantly about the machine. She relayed information to him, told him stories. “She’s connected, but she doesn’t even know it. She can’t free herself, she knows she has to talk to me, but she’s not aware of what’s happening to her…” (17) This paranoia, the frequent references to Elena’s possible madness in ­addition to the absence of any narrative other than those produced by her give her textual world of resistance an aura of limbo. The State remains a shadowy force operating behind the scenes only appearing in the person of the torturer Dr. Arana. This is the fog of non-identity in which all the characters roam.

The Machine Speaks

The final passage of the novel contains the testimony of the Machine alone in the shuttered Museum, gripped with emotion and a sense of abandonment

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and foreboding. Here, the theme of her madness reappears (“A veces tengo alucinaciones […]” 157 / “Sometimes I have hallucinations […]” 129). She asks herself more and more desperate questions (“¿me habrán dejado sola? ¿Para desaparecer?” 157 / “could they have left me alone? To disappear?” 129). Piglia further imagines the consequences of a possible posthuman future, one which, given the current omnipresence of cameras,43 seems a prescient commentary on how the scopic obsession reduces the human to a cyborg of digital image production and consumption. As the Machine says: “todos vamos a terminar así, una máquina vigilando a otra máquina” (157), (“we are all going to end up like that, one machine keeping watch over another” 129). This veil of a narrative stream that carries connotations of both liberation and imprisonment introduces simultaneously two key concepts in the novel: that of the double (characters with doubles, secret lives, the dream world which doubles for the waking one) and that of narrative itself as a Derridean pharmacon (both illness and cure). This is also where the otherwise celebrated art of storytelling (in particular as a tool of opposition to the oppressive regime) is revealed to be a tool of the oppressor: “La narración es un arte de vigilantes…” (158) / “Narrative is an art of surveillance” (130 translation modified). This is so because readers – particularly of detective and spy novels – are driven by an excessive desire to know as are the protagonists of the same. These narratives are the result of interrogations.44 This link between the desire to know and the abuses of the police state are made explicit at several points. For example, Junior’s search leads him to an Island where a group of rebels lives in a surreal environment of linguistic shifts – constantly forgetting one language and adopting another without even realizing it. There, though he suspects that Junior may be a spy, Russo, one of the Machine’s main engineers, explains the history of its creation: Ve, dijo, y levantó la mano con un gesto que abarcaba los árboles y las islas lejanas, hay micrófonos y cámaras ocultas y policías por todos lados, todo el tiempo nos vigilan y nos graban y yo no sé si usted mismo es de

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(on cell phones, tablets, public buildings, laptops, highways, private homes, cars, trucks, bicycles, helmets and for a while even eyeglasses). “He [Elena’s father] used to say to me that narrative is an art that belongs to the police, that they are always trying to get people to tell their stories, to narc on other suspects, to tell on their friends, their brothers” (130) / “La narración, me decía él, es un arte de vigilantes, siempre están queriendo que la gente cuente sus secretos, cante a los sospechosos, cuente de sus amigos, de sus hermanos” (158).

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veras un periodista o si es espía o las dos cosas a la vez. No importa, no tengo nada que ocultar, ellos saben dónde estoy y si no vienen es porque estoy ya fuera de la ley. El Estado conoce todas las historias de todos los ciudadanos y retraduce esas historias en nuevas historias que narran el Presidente de la República y sus ministros. (143) “Look,” he said, and raised his hand in a gesture that encompassed the trees and the nearby islands, “there are microphones and cameras and policemen hidden everywhere, they watch and record us around the clock. I do not even know if you yourself are a journalist or a spy, or both things at once. It does not matter, I have nothing to hide, they know where I am, and if they do not come it is because I am already outside the law. The State knows all the stories of all the citizens, and retranslates them into new stories that are then told by the president of the republic and his ministers.” (118) Here the self’s shaping by means of narrative (its “narrative identity”) is a source of weakness in a world swimming in manipulated narratives. Russo defines the State’s activity as based on distortion and corruption of the truth. Yet, the way that he describes this distortion closely resembles the Machine’s own processes: “The State knows all the stories of all the citizens, and retranslates them into new stories that are then told by the president of the republic and his ministers.” After all, the Machine, though conceived as an automatic translation device, creates new stories in an uncontrolled fashion. This reinforces the sense that the Machine and the State have much in common – a point which has been overlooked by the scholarship on this novel, doubtless because so much emphasis is placed on the Machine as a tool of resistance. Yet, Piglia’s text is less reassuring than this narrative of resistance would seem to imply. In fact, his characters often compare writing itself to the activity of a spy. This means, for the Machine, that “Todo relato es policial” (159) / “All stories are detective stories” (a phrase which may also be translated “All stories are police stories”). They are also therefore, Piglia might add, paranoid. Yet, this can’t be the only way to imagine narrative, since it is also a mnemonic tool for those who seek to remember past suffering. As the Machine states “Nunca hay una primera vez en el recuerdo, sólo en la vida el futuro es incierto, en el recuerdo vuelve el dolor igual, exacto, al presente…” (159) / “There is never a first time in memory, it is only in life that the future is uncertain, in memory the pain returns to the present unchanged, exactly the same” (130–131 translation modified). At the same time that the Machine here acknowledges that

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she exists outside lived time (in a stagnant time in which there can be no anticipation of the future) this last comment reveals a metaphysics of presence which is guaranteed by pain and the memory of pain. Even for a posthuman cyborg devoid of clear corporeal limits, it is pain that functions as the trace of the real and a guarantor of some link to a lost authenticity. Importantly, it is also the ability to feel pain which differentiates the Machine from the State. The Machine derives no pleasure from this total recall as it goes on to note “hay que evitar ciertos lugares a medida que se atraviesa el pasado con el ojo de la cámara, quien se mira en esa pantalla pierde la esperanza, veo la laguna hundida en la neblina baja, el aire gris de la mañana, ahí se mató mi padre…” (159) / “you have to avoid certain places as you go over the past with the eye of the camera, whoever looks at himself on such a screen loses all hope, I can see the small lake under the low fog, the gray sky of morning, that is where my father killed himself…” (131). Though the Machine represents the triumph of a certain humanist desire to protect the past unchanged (as does the Museum itself, a lonely empty place where images go to die) it does not share the fervor of its creator/husband Macedonio Fernández. It is striking that the Machine should share so many attributes with the “machine of the State” (paranoia, surveillance with cameras, generation of multiple narratives, madness). Yet, what opposes the two most clearly is the stance regarding pain, memory and thus identity: the State, which feels no pain, seeks to erase the past by eliminating any memory of it, while the Machine makes collective survival possible by protecting memory (through an evolutionary translation process). Here the Museum appears as a place to kill memory not preserve it (which is why the State moves the Machine there). The question of how to preserve memory is one of the main sources of tension in this text which enacts what Gareth Williams has aptly called the “performance of exhaustion” (of the possibility of meaning and identity). Even the final “yes” (the last word of the text) represents for Williams no more than an “affirmation of continuity [which] comes into being only by giving voice to the full knowledge of finitude and of fatality” (141–142). He goes on to argue “It is the writing of the absolute limit of the place where cultural history is narrativized into logic…” (142). While this pessimistic reading is fully understandable, we must also make room for the life made possible by the death at the heart of the text. Though it is an unwilling sacrifice, La máquina’s suffering serves the same purpose as the sacrifice of Sam Bell 5 for Sam Bell 6 and 7 (in Moon). In both cases, a posthuman being with implanted memories suffers so that others may survive and somehow attain more authentic identities. In the case of Sam Bell his suffering is constituted mainly by the fact of his impending death whereas for La máquina it is her inability to die. Yet, both allow

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others to retain what is truly theirs – some kernel of the self (memory, character). In direct opposition to the imprisoned, static, repetitious cycle in which La máquina is trapped she provides multiple narratives for others which help liberate them, the concept of possibility itself being the highest value the text has to offer. Indeed, Piglia’s text contains a proliferation of textual avenues to follow, opening passages for the reader to go down the rabbit hole into other wellknown literary texts of the past with which La ciudad ausente dialogues, but the Beckettian ending (“me arrastro a veces, pero voy a seguir, hasta el borde del agua, sí.” 168 / “sometimes I have to drag myself, but I will go on, to the edge of the water, yes” 139 translation modified) evokes agony as much as it relies upon the reference to pain as guarantor of a vestigial humanity. This is a markedly less optimistic portrayal of a possible future (characterized here by endless suffering) than that imagined by the writer Macedonio and the engineer Russo who professes great confidence in the power of the Machine as he explains the principle of possibility to Junior: “una forma disponible, ésa es la lógica de la experiencia, siempre lo posible, lo que está por venir” (138–139) / “An open option, that is the logic of experience, always what is possible, what is to come…” (114). This tension between the freedom of possibility and the imprisonment of the Machine (to which only Junior is privy) has not been closely examined by other scholars for whom the Machine represents either an efficacious tool of resistance or the death rattle of identity.

Involuntary Immortality

If the Machine’s action is meant to be redemptive it is still as an unwilling redeemer that she acts. She is first and foremost the creation of others, lacking the freedom to choose her own path, or even to end her torturous life. After Macedonio’s desperation upon finding that neither his own medical knowledge nor that of her doctors could save his young wife from a mysterious disease, he concludes that the body is a cage from which to escape. The Machine is his solution to this problem (as Russo explains): “la vida no está hecha sólo de palabras, está también por desgracia hecha de cuerpos, es decir, decía Macedonio, de enfermedad, de dolor y de muerte” (139) / “life does not consist just of words. Unfortunately, it is also made up of bodies or, in other words, of disease, pain, and death, as Macedonio used to say” (114 translation modified). Macedonio shares this desire to flee the corporeal sheath and hopes to occupy space in the Machine’s memory in a disembodied form – something that is

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never fully elucidated though he (or his image) later appears and is no longer able to recognize Elena nor be recognized by her.

The Recuperative Project

Like those of DeLillo, Ozon, Darrieussecq and Amenábar’s Abre los ojos, this is a story of recreating the prosthetic or phantom other: No podía soportar que ella, muerta, pudiera recordarlo y estuviera triste al verlo solo. Pensaba en la memoria que persiste cuando el cuerpo se ha ido y en los nudos blancos que siguen vivos mientras el cráneo se disgrega. Grabadas en los huesos del cráneo, las formas invisibles del lenguaje del amor siguen vivas y quizás es posible reconstruirlas y volver viva la memoria, como quien puntea en la guitarra una música escrita en el aire. Esa tarde concibió la idea de entrar en el recuerdo y de quedarse ahí, en el recuerdo de ella. Porque la maquina es el recuerdo de Elena, es el relato que vuelve eterno como el río. (153–154) He could not handle the idea that she, dead, might remember him and feel sad because he was alone. He was thinking about the memories that survive after the body is gone, about the white nodes that stay alive even when the flesh disintegrates. Engraved on the bones of the skull, the invisible forms of the language of love stay alive. And perhaps it was possible to reconstruct them, to bring those memories back to life, like someone plucking music written in the air by a guitar. That afternoon he came up with the idea of entering those remembrances and staying there, in her memory. Because the machine is Elena’s memory, it is the story that always returns, eternally, like the river. (127) This passage actually suggests that Macedonio intended to enter into Elena / The Machine’s memory in order to keep her company – something which he seems to have accomplished as he appears later in the novel. But this effort fails as well since Macedonio’s image in Elena’s memory is fixed in time, such that neither recognizes the other. As Junior stands in the Museum looking at photos and artifacts relating to Elena/The Machine’s stories he concludes: “Macedonio no intentaba producir una réplica del hombre, sino una máquina de producir réplicas. Su objetivo era anular la muerte y construir un mundo virtual” (60) / “Macedonio was not trying to build a replica of man, but rather a machine that could produce replicas. His goal was to nullify death and

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construct a virtual world” (52). The idea behind this, the ultimate project to preserve life, is to use language to maintain life by generating and distributing narratives. However, while Elena may give life she cannot live herself, nor can she avoid pain.45 A strong sign that Macedonio’s creation of the Machine and efforts to save Elena are a failure to keep her from pain reappears when in the story entitled “Los nudos blancos” (“The White Nodes”) Elena imagines (or recalls) that she was tortured. Her attacker, Dr. Arana, first speaks of saving her from illness by “opening” her white nodes. This was precisely what Macedonio did. Later ­Arana demands “names and addresses” from her as she describes being stretched out on an iron bed with the sensation of being opened up and feeling the air on her bones (73). The mingling of her torturer and her ostensible savior is a chilling reminder of the terrible consequences of Macedonio’s plan. Though she is not dead, Elena cannot live because, lacking a corporeal structure (and the knowledge of mortality), she is unable to “feel time.” This means that, like Lauren was for most of The Body Artist, she is stuck in a stagnant non-time.46 But unlike Lauren who is closely in tune with a body which she retains control over, The Machine has lost the limit of death of the physical body and is left only with her pain. The lack of limits (temporal and physical) transform the experience of time into a stagnant temporality of eternal return in which stories simply circulate and reproduce themselves, incorporating changes which The Machine will never know. She is in fact drowning in a pool of sameness which atemporality creates. This temporal aporia is akin to that of the impossibility / obligation to narrate which, for Idelber Avelar, allows the text to embody the mourning of an Argentinean society that has awoken from 45

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“Estaba segura de haber muerto y de que alguien había incorporado su cerebro (a veces decía su alma) a una máquina. Se sentía aislada en una sala blanca llena de cables y de tubos. No era una pesadilla; era la certidumbre de que el hombre que la amaba la había rescatado de la muerte y la había incorporado a un aparato que transmitía sus pensamientos. Era eterna y era desdichada. (No hay una cosa sin la otra).” (67) / “She was sure that she had died and that someone had transferred her brain (sometimes she said her soul) into a machine. She felt she was completely alone in a white room full of tubes and cables. It was not a nightmare, it was the certainty that the man who loved her had saved her from death and had incorporated her into an apparatus that transmitted her thoughts. She was eternal and cursed. (You cannot have one without the other)” (59). Like Perón’s clandestine recordings which Renzi listened to as a child and about which he says “esas historias que están como fuera del tiempo y empiezan cada vez que uno quiere.” (12) / “[the machine’s] stories that seem to be outside time and start again every time you want them to” (15). This is the inhuman, perfect recall of recordings (machine memory). It mirrors La máquina’s relationship to the past.

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the nightmare of dictatorship to an emptiness.47 This brings us to the central crux of the novel’s problematic: the meaning and practice of human and posthuman memory. If Elena / The Machine may be seen as a memory machine, one which additionally is designed to “keep memory alive” by introducing difference in the form of variations on the stories it tells, then it may be seen as a triumph for Macedonio’s human/posthuman dream of preservation. The ethics of memory is a theme which permeates this novel appearing most dramatically in the story entitled “La grabación” (“The Recording”) about a gaucho who stumbles upon multiple mass graves and traces what he says is an indelible “map of hell” in the ground: “Yo he visto cosas que quisiera empezar de nuevo otra vida, sin recuerdos, si ya estuve por dejar a mi mujer y a mis hijos […] aunque si uno se va igual los recuerdos vienen con uno.” (32) / (“I’ve seen things that make me want to start life over again, without any memories. I’ve been on the verge of leaving my wife and children […] But it’s no use, if you leave, your memories still go with you” 32). Here memory is a heavy burden and the desire for a clean slate is powerful. This burden of memory is especially onerous in nations where recent (or not so recent) open wounds fester precisely because there is no agreement as to how to remember and recognize past atrocities and the lives of their victims. The drive to erase trauma (by amnesia) is strong not only among perpetrators who would just as soon be free of the burden of guilt but among many victims as well for whom remembering and the impossibility to narrate such events is too painful. In La ciudad ausente the practice of translation appears as one way of preserving the past while avoiding repetition of the same. This was in fact the first purpose of The Machine which started as an automatic translation machine. When Poe’s “William Wilson” is fed into it, it transforms (expands and translates) the story, changing the title to “Steven Stevenson.” Avelar reminds us that the original Poe story narrates the murder of a double in which the murderer is warned that by killing his double he is signing his own death warrant. What interests Avelar in this story is the fact that the Poe character Wilson returns 47

Avelar states that Piglia’s novel “nos condena al orden del metafantasma: disertar infinita, neuróticamente acerca de la imposibilidad de narrarnos; así como la imposibilidad de no narrar esta imposibilidad” (417) “condemns us to the order of the metafantasy: to discourse infinitely, neurotically on the impossibility of narrating our lives; as well as the impossibility of not narrating this impossibility” (my translation). Further on he argues that “La ciudad ausente se puede resumir en una afirmación aparentemente sencilla: hay que narrar” (425) “La ciudad ausente may be summed up in an apparently simple statement: one must narrate” (my translation).

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in the new version by The Machine as Stevenson (whose name recalls that of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus who declares his intention not to be defined by nationality, language or religion) a foreigner in Argentina for whom “todas las lenguas eran su lengua materna” (98) / “every language was his mother tongue” (82–83). Poe’s short story, a foundational intertext, has another reading as well. It is presented as essential for understanding all those that would follow: “La primera obra, había dicho Macedonio, anticipa todas las que siguen.” […] “tomó el tema del doble y lo tradujo” (41–42) / “The first work, Macedonio had said, anticipates all those that come after it […] It took the theme of the double and translated it” (37). Indeed, La ciudad ausente is replete with reflection on the theme of the double. In each case the doubles which appear are not exact replicas rather they are transpositions of characters sharing essential characteristics. Piglia uses these doubles in part to explore the theme of exile, distance and communication over time between linked yet separate persons. Again, the central element in these stories of separation is pain.48 Doubles with difference also bear a metaphorical resemblance to the act of remembering itself – as repetition with difference. This is precisely what La máquina does: “Usa lo que hay y lo que parece perdido lo hace volver transformado en otra cosa. Así es la vida” (42) / “It takes what is available and transforms what appears to be lost into something else. That is life” (37). In other words, life is movement, change, adaptation, not the stultifying repetition of the same that the dictatorial state seeks to impose. What I am calling here the act of remembering Gareth Williams refers to as just the opposite (“active forgetting”) doubtless because it involves changing the original and thus “forgetting” it. Yet, one might look at this necessary difference inserted into the remembered text not as an “active forgetting,” but as an ethical remembering. A remembering which in this case retains the pain of the 48

Examples of such situations abound: Junior is separated from his daughter (whom his wife has taken away to Barcelona just as his own mother did with his sister). Junior himself is presented as a kind of double of his father whose name he shares (thus the nickname). Junior feels that his estranged four-year-old daughter is just like him, a kind of double. Elena / The Machine has several doubles including Eva, Ana and “La nena” each of whom is described as being a kind of machine and all of whom suffer from a sense of separation from others. Junior’s father “Mr. MacKensey” is a kind of double for Macedonio himself (referred to by Elena as “Mac” the natural abbreviation for MacKensey) since both are separated from their wives. In some cases the link to exile is explicit since the characters live in countries other than their own, in others the exile is metaphorical and not meant to apply to the question of the home nation but the meta-body as composed of by two beings (especially husband and wife).

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body and mind as the kernel to be saved – the “white node.” This brings us dangerously close to affirming that La máquina seeks to preserve a certain truth – something that Williams’ entire article vigorously and convincingly argues against. Yet, this is not the type of hegemonic truth that Williams is most interested in showing that Piglia’s novel rejects. Rather it is a fragmentary, corporeal and constantly undermined – though omnipresent – aspect of nearly all the stories that are told. The omnipresence of pain in this novel and the explicit references to torture49 along with the historical circumstances of its writing all point to Andrew Brown’s reading of the cyborg as traumatized. The nostalgia for a truth (residing in the vital, loved other) makes itself felt in this novel. This is a truth that is clearly acknowledged to produce pain in its own right (in Macedonio’s project to preserve Elena). It is the State that propagates lies. Despite the fact that Piglia explicitly draws our attention to the importance of the Machine being that of a play between possible and impossible (rather than the categories of what is true and false), it is clear that the avoidance of such neat dichotomies carries as much a political as a literary meaning. The categories of unambiguous truth and falsity are those of the repressive government and above all of its abusive police force which attempts, through torture, to obtain yes or no answers to unrelenting questions. This is the logic that the entire novel is set against. The apology of the possible (in line with those of Agamben and Calvino) is then not specifically a statement of the impossibility of any historical truth, though it does rely upon the problematization of the vehicle for that truth. This is precisely the founding tension in the novel. On the one hand, we have the utopian dream of escaping history into the future (the posthuman clean slate) as explained by a character named Fuyita discussing Macedonio’s project in the museum: “Huir hacia los espacios indefinidos de las formas 49

Here are a couple examples: Dr. Arana announces “Hay que operar – dijo –. Tenemos que desactivar neurológicamente.” (79) / “‘We have to operate,’ he said. ‘We have to deactivate her neurologically’” (69); Later La máquina recalls “En el Museo Policial había una sala dedicada a la vida del comisario Lugones, llamado igual que su padre, Leopoldo Lugones (hijo), que fundó la Sección Especial e introdujo una mejora sustancial en las técnicas argentinas de tortura, usó la picana eléctrica, que tradicionalmente se había empleado con las vacas para embarcar el ganado en los trenes ingleses, meterlas en los bretes, la usó en el cuerpo desnudo de los anarquistas encadenados de los que quería obtener información” (160) / “In the Police Museum there was a room dedicated to the life of Lugones, the chief of police, whose name was the same as his father’s, Leopoldo Lugones. He founded the Special Division and introduced a substantial improvement to the torture techniques utilized in Argentina: he took the electric prod, which was used on cows to direct the cattle up the short ramps and into the English trains, and used it on the naked bodies of the shackled anarchists from whom he wanted to get information” (131–132).

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futuras. Lo posible es lo que tiende a la existencia. Lo que se puede imaginar sucede y pasa a formar parte de la realidad” (60) / “To escape toward the infinite spaces of future forms. The possible is what spreads forth into existence. That which can be imagined occurs and goes on to become a part of reality” (52). On the other, no amount of subverting the dictatorial order through the magic of fiction can erase the memory of torture which seeps through at every turn not only in the stories of others which the Machine helplessly repeats but in her own memory. Indeed, the Machine itself resembles a kind of iron maiden for Elena who deeply laments her inability to escape it. The novel ends with her voice rising again to decry her untimely fate: Sé que me abandonaron aquí, sorda y ciega y medio inmortal, si solo pudiera morir o verlo una vez más o volverme verdaderamente loca, a veces me imagino que va a volver y a veces me imagino que voy a poder sacarlo de mí, dejar de ser esta memoria ajena, interminable, construyo el recuerdo pero nada más. Estoy llena de historias, no puedo parar… (168) I know I have been abandoned here, deaf and blind and half immortal, if I could only die or see him one more time or really go insane, sometimes I imagine that he is going to come back, and sometimes I imagine that I will be able to get him out of me, stop being this endless, alien memory. I create memories, but nothing else. I am full of stories, I cannot stop… (138 translation modified) Her most fervent desire (one which will never be fulfilled) is to be rid of the alien memory (“memoria ajena”) that she carries and transmits. Curiously this interpenetration of Macedonio and Elena in The Machine recalls the uncanny horror felt by Lauren in The Body Artist when she experiences “the complicated sense memory of someone else’s hair” (13). This alien hair is equivalent to the “alien memory” which The Machine cannot excise from her circuits. Both characters suffer from the interpenetration of two selves and the inability to disentangle her own from that of her husband. Yet Lauren frees herself from this alien memory by retracing the borders of her self, something which the Machine cannot do. It is because the Machine cannot forget that she preserves the collective memory (and identity) yet cannot affirm her own.50 50

Additionally, when interrogated in the Clinic by Dr. Arana, Elena explains that “This is a place without memories […] Everyone pretends to be somebody else. The spies are trained to disown their own identities and use somebody else’s memory” (65) / “Éste es un sitio libre de recuerdos […] Todos fingen y son otros. Los espías están adiestrados para

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One of the ways of remembering (and not dying) then is for Elena to reappear in the form of other characters such as that of La nena (“the girl” in the story of the same name). Elena / the Machine is like La nena for whom “el mundo era una extensión de sí misma y su cuerpo se desplazaba y se reproducía” (53) / “The world was an extension of herself; her body spread outward and reproduced itself” (47). Furthermore, like the Machine “Era un híbrido, la nena, para Madame Silenzky, una muñeca de goma-pluma, una máquina humana, sin sentimientos y sin esperanzas” (55) / “Madame Silenzky thought the girl was a hybrid, a doll made out of foam, a human machine, without feelings, without hope” (48). Like Elena/The Machine, La nena has no sense of time, she lives in a petrified present (“presente petrificado” 55). When her father manages to get her to “feel time” through the study of music (“logró que la nena entrara en una secuencia temporal” 55 / “he finally got the girl to enter a temporal sequence” 49) her mother becomes so ill that she is hospitalized and dies only two months later. La nena’s father now decides to teach her to use standard referential language. By telling her all the different versions of James’ “Last of the Valerii” (about a newlywed who is tormented by Venus when he inadvertently puts his ring on the finger of a statue of her which comes to life), La nena eventually comes to recognize the different parts of the story. Eventually she tells a version herself. This learning process (based on repetition with difference) mimics that of La máquina and suggests that it is narrative that allows one to “feel time.” Without narrative, there is no lived time. This in turn means that The Machine, whose function it is to tell endless stories, is not just a guardian of the city’s memory but also of its very identity. It is no coincidence that the foundational story in this case, the one which makes it possible for La nena to enter into the linguistic world of lived time (and in some sense become more human it is suggested) contains two key elements we have already identified: the double (Venus as double for the protagonist’s wife) and the separation of husband and wife. There is an additional symbolically important element in the story: an inanimate female comes to life through the intervention of a man (just as The Machine does). The reverse of Elena/the Machine’s remembering with difference is represented by the forces of the State which are bent on imposing the erasure of memory and whose agents forget their own identities as a strategy of infiltration and subversion. When Junior goes to see Hannah, a friend who never negar su identidad y usar una memoria ajena” (75 emphasis added). This “memoria ajena” (“alien memory”), which the State’s agents use in order to subvert the identity of the population, is precisely what the Machine claims to suffer from.

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leaves her shop, she explains that the authorities are planning on disconnecting the Machine so as to induce amnesia among the population: “La quieren archivar, mandarla al museo de Luján, lo que sea con tal de que la gente se olvide” (104) / “They want to stow her away, send her to the museum in Luján. Anything to get people to forget” (88). One might trace Piglia’s commentary on memory and forgetting in the following manner: The State attempts to impose an unethical forgetting upon the population by replacing true memories with false ones, while the Machine preserves memory in two ways. First, it repeats others’ memories with difference (an ethical and necessary remembering which gives life while preserving and constructing collective identity). Second, the Machine’s total recall demolishes her own sense of self as she cannot place her existence within an evolving temporal narrative. While there is an ethical responsibility to remember collective pain, total recall of personal pain stagnates the self’s temporality rendering narrative identity problematic. The static, immortal present (overfilled with memories of the actual and possible past) predicated as it is on the absence of limits (this is why the city is absent – its borders can be traced nowhere) is equally a source of pain. Posthuman survival is posited here precisely as a form of torture since it is a denial of the natural limit of death. No temporal trajectory may be traced when the meaningful limit of death is eliminated. The goal of immortality – not for the self but for the ideal, prosthetic other – is represented as a violation. Unlike César in Abre los ojos, Elena/the Machine never has a chance to decide whether she wants to be immortal. Elena is plugged into every aspect of Argentinean life, so much so that she has become the source of the characters’ thoughts, those thoughts in turn investing hers. The reader comes to realize then that there is no longer any way to clearly distinguish, for example, between Elena and Junior (who exists inside the narrative machine that she is an integral part of but did not design). Elena represents not just the inherently traumatic posthuman body in the context of dictatorial Argentina, but the horror of infinite survival itself. This is akin to the horror of inhuman memory that Tod/Odilo suffers from in Time’s Arrow and points to another basic aspect of the mind’s relationship to time. When the lived-time markers that the mind attaches to events (along with many other categories of metadata such as affective, tactile or spatial information) can no longer be created, the now is no longer a rolling event with a temporal horizon that fades upon reaching a certain limit. This automatic forgetting (controlled archiving or loss of data), necessary both for normal functioning of the mind and thus personal identity but also for recovering from trauma, has been denied Elena.

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Her totalizing memory recalls a torture technique: sleep deprivation via bright lights left on in a prisoner’s cell for days at a time. In fact, in Piglia’s oppressive, borderless Buenos Aires the lights are never shut off – the better to facilitate computer controlled camera surveillance. Yet, Elena survives as a machine because Macedonio built her to be one out of love. It was not the dictatorial regime that built her. In fact, that very regime seeks to disconnect her as she is viewed as a threat serving as she does as a distribution mechanism for the testimonials of those who have been tortured. Dr. Arana tortures Elena only after she becomes a machine. Worse still it is precisely this transformation that Macedonio has performed that makes the torture possible. Had Elena been allowed to completely die and disappear she would have been safe from the regime’s cattle prods. If Elena then is not an example of successful posthuman personal survival, she may nonetheless be considered the anguished voice of posthuman collective survival, something which Brown has called “national mourning and survivorship.”51 Here, unlike in the other texts discussed in this chapter, to survive is specifically not to survive for oneself (though, like the other texts, it does imply a kind of self-sacrifice), rather survival here is an act which allows other narratives to continue – and which risks confusing one’s own “center of narrative gravity” with those of all others.52 Thus, for Piglia, posthuman survival is (as Brown has also argued) to bear the physical marks of a torturous past as witness, but it is also to liquidate the self in a never-ending reliving of a networked suffering. By making sure that his prosthetic other was never again to be lost Macedonio loses her to the entire nation, and in fact becomes subsumed under her narrative totalization. After all, Macedonio’s and Junior’s stories are only accessible through the filter of the Machine which the former built. It remains connected to all, suffering for all. This is not the powerful, triumphal nor pleasurable bonding of human and non-human of some posthuman fiction. As Brown points out: “Haraway’s characterization of the fusion of flesh and technology as “pleasurably tight coupling” seems wildly inappropriate here” (152). As readers we are left with the final image of the Machine’s painful unending insomnia ourselves unsure what space we have entered 51

52

“As the clockwork hearts, the speak-and-spell tongues, the machines that preserve consciousness combine, they create a corporeal space in which national mourning and survivorship can be processed” Brown (2010, 42). Avelar argues that “Piglia despersonaliza el duelo, desubjetiviza el afecto” (Avelar, 426) [emphasis in original] (“Piglia depersonalizes mourning, desubjectivizes affect” [my translation]).

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upon reading the text, unable as we are to locate the characters spatially, temporally or ontologically. The only things that remain are the network and the suffering it sustains. Amis’ Time’s Arrow offers the reader an easier way out. The ethical, embodied reading his text calls us to undertake requires principally that we read it in reverse. And though, as I have shown, he also problematizes this simple reversal, the text still embodies a very clear linear trajectory (as does Nolan’s Memento). Piglia’s text rejects the straight trajectory for the more ambiguous centrifugal spiral (a rereading of the circular Finnegan’s Wake to which it refers in several spots) and the garden of forking and intersecting paths. This free-floating narration is the perfect form to figure the disembodied borderless machine. Thus, Piglia’s novel suggests that the way of combating the repressive mindset of the State is not as simple as a reversal. The way to resist the penetrating gaze of the State and its ability to form and transform meta-narratives is to respond with more narrative as Fuyita tells Junior in the Museum: “Quieren anularnos, pero vamos a resistir […] dirigidos por el Ingeniero, tenemos historias múltiples y pruebas” (61) / “They want to nullify us, but we will resist. We […] led by the Engineer, have many drafts and multiple stories.” (53). Yet, the entire novel also resists this fundamentally optimistic reading of the power of narrative. After all, losing oneself in narrative possibility is only pleasurable immersion when one has a subject position to fall back into. Self-possession In Piglia’s allusive and metaphorical text, one in which the reader is constantly invited to leave one textual world for another, the Machine allows for several interpretations. Macedonio’s explicit rejection of the body and pain in favor of what he sees as the essence of the human (narrative possibility) presents a problem. The liberal humanist model of the self relies fundamentally upon the concept of an autonomous self capable of agency and which, before it can act in the world transforming repetition into proper habit, must first “own itself.” Self-mastery or possession is one of the cornerstones of humanism which posthumanism puts squarely in doubt. The pain which I have argued still marks the Machine with the vestigial glow of humanity derives in part from the fact that despite being made up of mechanical parts, the Machine’s consciousness is composed simply of words, for the most part words of others which she may transform but which she does not generate. In this way, her fate resembles that of all speakers who are born into a language they do not create and cannot control.

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In his afterword to the English translation of The Absent City Piglia emphasizes the point that language belongs to no one: “I hold the same relationship with literary property as I do with property in society: I am against it. […] Language is a common property; in language there is no such thing as private property. We writers try to place marks to see if we can detain its flow. There is no private property in language; language is a circulation with a common flow. Literature disrupts that flow, and perhaps that is precisely what literature is” (147). Just as telling are his remarks on the activity of translation: “I have always been interested in the relationship that exists between translation and property, since the translator rewrites an entire text that is his/hers, and yet is not. […] Translation is a strange exercise of appropriation” (146). Translation, in blurring the lines of authorship, stands here as a metaphor for the confusion between self and other which The Absent City enacts. One may also see the evacuation of self, despite the pain it causes, as an ethical solution to the problem of survival. In this reading of the Machine not only does it appear that Macedonio’s hubristic goal of immortality is a mistake but the Machine’s unwilling sacrifice of self may be seen as a relinquishing of self-possession which is necessary for a people as a whole to survive. Yet if literature’s purpose is to attempt to interrupt the impersonal flow of language, putting a metaphorical finger in the dam’s crack, the Machine appears to symbolically reflect the defenseless position of the writer whose text brings others to life but who can never exert control over his work which, produced in a ceaseless conversation with other works, is constructed in a language which is public and open to interpretation. I have suggested that this text may be read on two levels, the literary which I have just referred to and the political. The politico-historical reading of this text would place it in the context not only of the horrific Proceso dictatorship but beyond that into the history of Latin America as a land, since the encounter of 1492, which is “free for the taking,” a land to be “possessed.” Against the excessive desire to possess and the tragedies that it causes Piglia offers us the painful image of a saving dispossession – that of Elena/the Machine. Thus, while literature may be that temporary interruption, a link between parallel worlds, it is not in Piglia’s text a full stop but rather the opening of a passage to a new flow. By no means does The Absent City attempt to fix in the mind of the reader a reverent image of the past literary masters it playfully inserts into the diegesis. On the contrary, Piglia “translates” these authors, appropriating what they have done, modifying, extending, reversing and giving them new life.

Conclusion Michel Foucault formulated a definition of humanism as based on an overarching desire to restrict the abuse of power which fits well with the tradition that Todorov refers to in The Imperfect Garden. The constitutive elements which Foucault identifies as historically making up humanism are nearly all present in the works examined in this study: Humanism invented a whole series of sovereignties: the soul (ruling the body, but subjected to God), consciousness (sovereign in a context of judgment, but subjected to the necessities of truth), the individual (a titular control of personal rights subjected to the laws of nature and society), basic freedom (sovereign within, but accepting the demands of an outside world and “aligned with destiny”). In short, humanism is everything in Western civilization that restricts the desire for power. It … excludes the possibility of power being seized. The theory of the subject (in the double sense of the word) is at the heart of humanism and this is why our culture has tenaciously rejected anything that could weaken its hold upon us. foucault, “Revolutionary,” 221–222

To this list we may add that the human is always narratively constructed. One might say that the accumulative effect of these elements is to fight irredeemable, definitive loss. This is as true of Christian humanist tradition (which posits a metaphysical redemption, itself a concept of total recuperation) as it is of the liberal humanist tradition. In the end, as Foucault clearly states it is the subject whose loss humanism fights. While the stability of the humanist subject has wavered and faltered in the past fifty or so years of fictional narrative (its very substance refuted, undermined or simply denied), what has returned with force – spurred by an increasing general interest both in the workings of the mind, in the connections between technology and the mind and in the area of artificial intelligence – is the central, if problematic, position of consciousness. Following many theorists and philosophers, I have argued that the mind is an embodied story-making machine. Because embodied consciousness is shaped by imagined and real spatio-temporal relations, it evolves dynamically in the form of possible selves, trajectories of embodied, perceptual desire: meta-bodies. But this play between self and other relies upon a viable subject position, something which posthumanism is thought to eliminate. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004323674_007

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Yet, even in posthumanist fiction the mind’s fundamental need for narrative produces characters which, relying on narrative and embodied consciousness, ultimately reject the disembodied state as unethical partly because it lays bare the fiction of self-mastery (Abre los ojos) and partly because its denial of the limit makes both a stable subject position and more generally a tripartite temporal horizon impossible (La ciudad ausente). The ethics of history also demand that subjects be embodied, for if disembodied selves do not experience “lived time” then pain no longer makes sense and ethical memory becomes impossible (as we saw in Time’s Arrow and La ciudad ausente). Among the works I examine here, only Moon imagines a truly posthuman transpersonal model for survival, one which posits nonetheless an ethics of self-sacrifice which fits perfectly within the humanist paradigm (as does its emphasis on narrative construction of personal identity). Marie Darrieussecq’s short novel Naissance des fantômes is one of the very few which thoroughly rejects the discourse of self-recuperation and while the narrator’s pain is palpable, she attains a level of minimal agency without enjoying an autonomous self or a clearly defined body – though her physical dispersal is not meant to be taken literally as in the case of Piglia’s Machine. Despite this, her narrator does not escape the fundamental need for narrative. Cronocrímenes provides the most brutal reaction to the threat to the self which an identical clone represents and suggests that the dark side of the ideology of the autonomous self is far from leaving the scene.

Pain and the Clean Slate

It may be argued that posthumanism represents in many cases a longing for a more radical clean slate than humanism. Humanist narratives at least recognize that a past exists when they depict the yearning to go back and correct it (as an impossible, ever-renewed project), posthumanism does not. Nonnarrative time bears no relation to any possible past. And without any concept of a relation to the past there can be no ethics. In an essay on hypertextuality and the body Christopher Keep makes the following argument about how we read texts today in our connected multi-tasking lives: “Dispersed among the hypertextual links of the Net, the ego’s sense of itself as embodied, as comprising a discrete entity, is eroded, broken up, and scattered…” (178). This breaking up of the autonomous subject (equipped with a whole body, seeking a sense of completion in fiction) is not a loss, rather it is a gain: “it is precisely the absence of a determinable center that allows the reader to discover pleasures other than those of closure and comprehension, to imagine bodies as something other than monadic” (179). This is a description of one

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possible form of posthuman consciousness, one which appears in two very different forms only in the final two works considered in this study: Moon and La ciudad ausente. These two works are nonetheless radically different in the type of relationship that they attempt to build with the viewer/reader. The former is a cinematic work which tells its story in a straightforward linear fashion. As with Cronocrímenes, Moon invites us to follow and identify with one of the clones over the others (thus implicitly countering the argument that all clones are alike and equivalent – were this to be the case, there would be no choice of central character possible – akin to being reduced to choosing a favorite among a group of ants or bees). By focusing on a single clone or avatar, both films recognize the reality of their viewers’ need to occupy subject positions. Only the most experimental and non-commercial artists explore completely non-narrative work – in fascinating art installations which are unlikely to gain wide audience interest for the reasons that I have elaborated on.1 In fact, as DeLillo’s Lauren shows in her interaction with the streaming video of the non space of Kotka and Mr. Tuttle who lives in a non narrative blur, the mind seeks to narrativize and embody even those works, spaces and objects (or beings) which stridently resist such narrativization.2 Ricardo Piglia’s work is more formally innovative and, being much less linked to the logic of the market, the author (who does not support himself exclusively through fiction writing) is free to explore writing that defeats readerly expectations (and habits of embodied reading). Yet even this postmodern work ends up mourning the loss of the autonomous subject, in Elena/The Machine’s fate, as much as it fails to erode that of the reader who is offered up a panoply of possible worlds to explore. This is accomplished in no small part due to its myriad intertextual references by which the reader is simultaneously cast into multiple narrative worlds from different time periods. Far from abandoning narrative, both Moon and La ciudad ausente are in fact tales built around two of the most ancient and persistent humanist themes: love and survival. In Moon Sam Bell 5 still thinks of his wife and child even after accepting that he is a clone who has never known these people. At the end of the film he entrusts the survival of his self to another clone and sacrifices 1 Marketers and politicians have always known of this need for narrative and have exploited it with ever increasing skill – aided by ever more sophisticated media – especially since the Second World War. Narrative is what gives (political, commercial, cultural) symbols their force. 2 See Fludernik, “[narrativity is] not a quality inhering in a text, but rather an attribute imposed on the text by the reader who interprets the text as narrative, thus narrativizing the text” (2003, 244).

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himself so that other avatars may live on.3 Despite the acceptance of transpersonal survival that this represents it does not by any means represent a rejection of narrative as formative of identity (as I have already argued, the film both in its telling and its content constitutes a defense of this idea). Piglia’s La ciudad ausente, despite being a fascinating and significant work whose presentation of posthuman survival ties it closely to what Williams argues is a period of exhaustion of political meaning in Argentina, is built on a proliferation of stories (Junior the reporter/detective, La nena and her father, Macedonio and Elena, The Machine, the community on the Island, Fuyita, the woman who commits suicide etc.). Each of these stories is given a role in constructing an increasingly clear image both of what The Machine is and why and how it suffers. Each of these brief glimpses into the mind of The Machine (itself arguably a metaphor for the narrative generation of the mind in relation to the body since it both sends and receives messages from its networked proto-body) offers the reader a narrative path, filled with images of selves in formation or being undone.

The Other Penetrating / Occupying the Self

Each of the works which The Persistence of the Human examines includes one or more moments in which a central character feels that an alien entity has penetrated her or him. In some cases this alien is the desired other (such as a spouse) in others it is on the contrary a past self which has now become alien. In Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow the disembodied narrator of unknown ontological status penetrates the thoughts of Tod/Odilo who in turn is haunted by the inexplicable, disturbing image of an unknown baby and a doctor. We later learn that these two are a Jewish baby the protagonist had killed, while the doctor was his past self (all trace of whom he has attempted to erase in his flight to the United States). In Christopher Nolan’s Memento a false “alien memory” is placed in Leonard’s mind by an earlier self with full knowledge 3 Gary Shteyngart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story (2010), doubtless taking a step beyond humanism (while hilariously examining the exaltation of a certain posthuman survival of the self), opens with an in-your-face rejection of Derek Parfit’s reductive model of transpersonal survival: “Today I’ve made a major decision. I am never going to die. Others will die around me. They will be nullified. Nothing of their personality will remain. The light switch will be turned off. […] But wait. There’s more, isn’t there? There’s our legacy. We don’t die because our progeny lives on! The ritual passing of the dna, Mama’s corkscrew curls, his granddaddy’s lower lip […] Utter nonsense. The children are our future only in the most narrow, transitive sense” (3–4).

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that, because of his memory impairment, he will not recall having done so. In Parfit’s terms, this is an example of a past self influencing a “descendant self” separated enough in time to make one a stranger to the other. The following three works I tackle imagine this penetration of the other in corporeal terms. In Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist the “sense memory” of the hair in Lauren’s mouth, prefigures the appearance of the mysterious Mr. Tuttle. Thus a link is made between unwanted (hair) and wanted (sexual) penetration of the other. Both contribute to Lauren’s move toward autonomy. In François Ozon’s Sous le sable Marie imagines sexual penetration by the absent other (her husband Jean). In this case the desired penetration is symbolic of Marie’s lack of autonomy – one which suits the protagonist whose face registers satisfaction. In Marie Darrieussecq’s Naissance des fantômes the body itself in its physiological production of affect is an example of penetration of the absent other. This manifests itself, as we have seen, as a progressive movement from hyperreal medical description to metaphor (metaphor itself being a key path to imagining the meta-body). Julian Schnabel’s film Le Scaphandre et le papillon argues that without the hybrid meta-body provided by successful mind reading of the other, there can be no agency. Amenábar’s Mar adentro presents Ramón’s final triumph as an overlaid image of his suffering lived body and his imagined, past self (a whole but lifeless form) as the final desired meta-body. In the same director’s previous effort, Abre los ojos, the “alien memory” of a past self is inserted into the mind of the protagonist by a defective computer. The disfigured self’s return figures the undeniable historical truth of a repressed past. In both Vigalondo’s Cronocrímenes and Duncan Jones’ Moon clones are an example of the other occupying the self by replicating it (in another body). This unbearable proximity of the other – in its overlapping of the self in a different though identical body – makes the question of personal identity one which is impossible to resolve. In Ricardo Piglia’s La ciudad ausente the “alien memory” (“memoria ajena”) of Macedonio in Elena / The Machine is the source of pain as much as the inability to die is. In each case the meta-body appears at the moment of awareness of the penetration of the other in the self. This is the narrative space in which self and other meet. In this study, each of these moments appears as a crisis precisely because the borders of the self are put into question by trauma. We see in these works that the self may also be the other (as when it confronts a “descendant self”). The importance of temporality cannot be overstated in these analyses. It is because the self is temporal – must be constructed as a series of subject positions in time and dynamically evolves never settling completely – that the concept of “descendant self” is both pertinent and unsettling.

206

Conclusion

If a previous self, from whose memory one is cut-off, may return to penetrate the present self, if the self is simultaneously multiple (clones) or bodiless (Piglia’s machine), how does the subject persist? I have analyzed examples of meta-body in these texts and films from the perspective of characters who appear as embodied subjects who penetrate a space or a body in order to occupy a different subject position. This desire to penetrate and meld with another (present in both male and female characters) is what Merleau-Ponty terms “reversible” (in “The Intertwining – The Chiasm”). It is not initially conceived of as such by the subject yet the discovery of the presence of the other in the self produces a crisis by which an “alien” presence, in the end, often must be extirpated. In these works, the autonomous, humanist paradigm which posits the perpetuation of the self as fundamentally separate – despite the recognition of mutual subject construction – reveals the hold that narrative, consciousness and humanism continue to enjoy. What is narrative after all if not the possibility of projection into a space (i.e. a subject position) which the listener/reader/viewer may occupy at will while retaining the capacity to mentally retract him or herself from it? This fundamental need for separation – and assertion of the fictional autonomy of the self – is most dramatically depicted in Abre los ojos by César’s suicidal plunge to wake up from his computer induced dream. One must be able to extract the self from the imagined space of the meta-body, even if only fictionally since one never truly exists outside it, in order to exist as a “center of narrative gravity.” The consequences of not being able to awaken from the dream plays a prominent role in Christopher Nolan’s film Inception (2011) in which the trope by which dying in a dream means dying in real life posits the consequences of excessive stasis of the subject (in this case the inability to move in and out of an imagined self). Yet, despite this need for autonomy, consciousness would not function without psychological connectedness which relies upon memory. If, as Parfit posits, our personal identity is made up not of a repetition of the same (identity) but rather a series of connected transcendent selves, then the function of memory is to allow the current self to be penetrated and partially defined by a past self. In this sense there is no difference, for all intents and purposes, between a clone’s relation to his implanted memories and the original dna donor’s relationship to the same memories. Both branches (both persons) survive as the self. The capacity to feel pain and the desire to preserve (i.e. return to) an ideal self remain the hallmark of humanist narrative (as markers of the human subject). What makes Ricardo Piglia’s Elena (in the posthuman form of La máquina) recognizably human despite her disembodied state is her capacity for pain.

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When artificially intelligent machines of one kind or another are created that are able to feel pain and embodied temporality (i.e. when they process damage as interrupting the flow of their simulated center of narrative gravity) – then we will be close to true posthumanism. Conversely, and less probably, true posthumanism will be attained when the human mind no longer requires either narrative or the crutch of a fictional self. In the meantime, there is a good reason why mainstream posthumanism in film and literature has not yet fully broken with humanism: the reading/viewing public itself is still composed of embodied subjects whose minds crave narrative. As soon as we let the adjective “narrative” slip in our description of a given film or text we are already admitting that we are still in the realm of the human. This is because we are still basically hunks of flesh looking for a good story.4

4 (who don’t appreciate being interrupted by someone else’s iPhone).

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Index Absent City (Ciudad ausente) 12, 181–183, 185, 200 Agency 15, 16, 46, 47, 71, 117, 130, 135, 137, 140, 143, 145, 151, 159, 171, 172, 199, 202, 205 Alien memory 195, 196, 204, 205 Amenábar, Alejandro 9, 11, 34, 145, 148, 156–162, 167, 171, 174, 190, 205 Amis, Martin 8, 42–49, 51–55, 58, 67–70, 82, 127, 140, 141, 156, 199, 204 Authenticity 166 Autonomy 2, 15, 18, 92, 94, 100, 104, 124, 136, 140, 151, 159, 163, 170, 172, 180–182, 205, 206 Bauby, Jean-Dominique 11, 141, 142, 145, 150, 152–155, 158 Blade Runner 182 Body 10, 18, 40, 81, 83, 87–89, 102, 105, 108, 111, 112, 118, 126, 136, 139, 143, 147, 149, 156, 191, 195, 205 Body Artist 10, 81, 87–89, 102, 105, 108, 111, 112, 118, 126, 136, 139, 143, 147, 149, 156, 191, 195, 205 Borges, Jorge Luis 21, 54, 181–183 Center of narrative gravity (Dennett) 8, 10, 25, 26, 31, 38, 62, 71, 198, 206, 207 Clones (cloning) 176 Consciousness 6–8, 12, 14, 18, 21–32, 35, 37–40, 42, 44, 47, 49, 50, 55, 58–61, 63, 64, 66, 67, 74, 79, 80, 82–91, 95, 99–102, 114, 118, 120, 122–125, 127, 131, 132, 137–139, 142, 149, 162–164, 166, 167, 169, 172, 183, 198, 199, 201–203, 206 Corporeal 24, 140 Damasio, Antonio 7, 22, 23, 31, 47 Darrieussecq, Marie 10, 81, 82, 115–117, 119, 120, 122, 123, 125–128, 132, 134–140, 143, 155, 156, 163, 190, 202, 205 Darwin, Charles 164 Death 181 DeLillo, Don 9, 10, 81, 82, 87–92, 94, 95, 98, 99, 102, 103, 108, 114, 115, 117–119, 122, 126, 128, 130, 135, 136, 139–141, 143, 149, 150, 156, 190, 203, 205

Dennett, Daniel 3, 8, 24, 26, 31, 36, 37, 52, 64, 137, 162, 163, 166 Detective 181 Disembodiment 18, 40, 72, 137, 140, 161, 163, 166 Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le Scaphandre et le papillon) 11, 141, 151, 153, 157, 173 Embodied 29, 37 Embodied mind 3, 7, 10, 23, 24, 27, 28, 35–38, 124, 126 Embodiment 90 Fernández, Macedonio 182, 183, 188 Foucault, Michel 15, 19, 85, 141, 201 Frame 211 Freedom 17 Hansen, Mark B.N. 24, 30, 31 Hayles, N. Katherine 11, 19, 31, 162, 164 Holocaust 8, 41, 44, 45, 54, 55, 68, 69 Human 7, 8, 11–13, 17, 18, 21, 24, 38, 40, 83, 139, 204 Humanism 14, 16, 156, 201, 202 Humanist narrative 11, 34, 117, 180, 206 Identity 15, 66, 165, 166, 179 Immersion (narrative) 31, 86 Jones, Duncan 9, 12, 31, 34, 167, 174–176, 205 Keskinen, Mikko 116 Koepnick, Lutz 73 Latin America 70, 181, 184, 200 Liberal humanist subject 5, 18, 75, 162, 174, 180 Memento 8, 55–58, 66–70, 72, 74–76, 78, 82, 85, 88, 90, 93, 109, 139, 156, 167, 169, 170, 174, 204 Memory 8, 12, 30, 40, 66, 78 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 30, 31, 35, 59, 65, 206 Meta-body 3–5, 7–10, 17, 32, 66, 82–87, 92, 94, 95, 99, 104, 112, 113, 116, 127, 129, 132,

218 135, 136, 139–145, 147–151, 153, 157–159, 161, 165, 166, 172, 193, 205, 206 Metaphor 6 Metz, Christian 8, 33, 34, 64 Mill, John Stuart 18 Mind 5, 7, 22, 29, 86, 128 Moon 12, 31, 34, 167, 174, 175, 180, 188, 202, 203, 205 Naissance des fantômes (My Phantom H ­ usband) 10, 81, 115, 116, 119, 121, 122, 126, 127, 129, 137, 163, 202, 205 Narrative 3, 6, 20, 24, 27, 32, 35, 43, 99, 169, 186, 203 Narrative identity 5, 6, 10, 20, 28, 33, 41, 58, 64, 162, 180, 183, 187, 197 Narratology 24 Nolan, Christopher 8, 22, 55, 56, 58, 61, 62, 68–71, 73, 82, 130, 140, 141, 148, 172, 199, 204, 206 Open Your Eyes (Abre los ojos) 11, 148, 161, 167, 169, 170, 172, 174, 190, 197, 202, 205, 206 Ozon, François 10, 81, 82, 104, 105, 107, 109, 111, 113–117, 119, 120, 122, 128, 130, 136, 139–141, 143, 156, 190, 205 Pain 18, 40, 202 Parfit, Derek 12, 25, 31, 37, 51, 64, 136, 137, 165–167, 170, 173, 174, 178, 179, 204–206 Phantom 9, 10, 81, 115 Piglia, Ricardo 9, 12, 181–184, 186, 187, 189, 192–194, 197–200, 202–206 Posthuman 11, 81, 139, 162, 197 Prosthetic 215 Proust, Marcel 55, 60, 94, 158 Revenge 75 Ricœur, Paul 3, 13, 20, 21, 28, 31, 38, 41, 51, 58

Index Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 18, 19 Ryan, Marie-Laure 6, 8, 24, 32, 35, 70 Sampedro, Ramón 11, 156–160 Scarry, Elaine 16, 18, 23, 40, 45, 46, 49, 51, 65, 72, 75, 76, 139 Schnabel, Julian 11, 142, 144–146, 148, 150, 152, 154, 155, 157–160, 173, 205 Sea Inside (Mar adentro) 11, 34, 145, 156–159, 161, 205 Self 19, 51, 64, 96, 157 Self-mastery 5, 9, 41, 62, 64, 65, 74, 77, 93, 159, 170, 175, 202 Sobchack, Vivian 13, 14, 24, 59, 62, 84, 164 Spectral 64 Stiegler, Bernard 7, 13, 14, 16, 65 Subject 214 Survival 11, 139–141, 165 Taylor, Charles 19, 21, 25 Temporality 7, 13, 28, 51, 149 Theory of Mind (ToM) 7, 10, 86, 116 Time 8, 11, 13, 20, 29, 42–44, 46, 47, 54–58, 61, 65–68, 75, 78, 82, 85, 90, 94, 100, 101, 108, 127, 139, 156, 167, 172, 197, 199, 202, 204 Time Crimes (Cronocrímenes) 11, 167, 172 Todorov, Tzvetan 7, 15–18, 164, 180, 201 Trauma 8, 9, 28, 40, 41, 51, 54, 74, 81 Under the Sand (Sous le sable) 10, 81, 104, 105, 111, 112, 114, 143, 205 Varela, Francisco 3, 7, 8, 25, 29–31, 66, 68 Vigalondo, Ignacio (Nacho) 11, 167, 172, 174, 205 Wolfe, Cary 11, 26, 163, 164 Woolf, Virginia 21, 108, 109, 114 Zunshine, Lisa 86