Social Structure and Freedom in Veronika Decides to Die

Reading Materials of the Week: Veronika Decides to Die – Paulo Coehlo; The Second Sex – Simone De Beauvoir.

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Veronika, a young woman who finds herself disenchanted by everyday life, never able to have any real “strong emotions”, decides to kill herself. Veronika Decides to Die begins at the decisive moment of her suicide, which she has carefully planned for months, claiming sleeping issues in order to obtain various sleeping pills from her friends. She is not depressed, she is not angry at the world – in fact, she believes herself to be “completely normal”. Her reasons for dying are completely rational:

“The first reason: Everything in her life was the same and, once her youth was gone, it would be downhill all the way, with old age beginning to leave irreversible marks, the onset of illness, the departure of friends. She would gain nothing by continuing to live; indeed, the likelihood of suffering would only increase. The second reason was more philosophical: Veronika read the newspapers, watched TV, and she was aware of what was going on in the world. Everything was wrong, and she had no way of putting things right – that gave her a sense of complete powerlessness.” (7)

When she wakes up, Veronika is in a mental asylum, Villete. They inform her that she only has five days to live, a week at most. Veronika reflects that “This could only happen to me” given that she has “spent her life waiting… Normally, people die on precisely the day they least expect.” Although the reader receives evidence that a plan – constructed by the doctor – is afoot, there is a general sense that Veronika really will die. In addition to Veronika’s perspective (told to us in third person), we follow the thoughts and reflections of Dr. Igor, Zedka, Mari, and Eduard (the latter characters are patients at Villete), as each reflect on Veronika as well as life itself. Each of them articulate the sense that society structures the life of the individual in accord with the status quo; to go against this means you’re mad – unless, of course, you are sanctioned by your station, as Dr. Igor is. For Dr. Igor has set the girl up as an experiment; the truth is that Veronika has made a full recovery from her overdose and is fully ready to re-enter the world – except, of course, for the tiny problem that she intends to off herself as soon as possible. Indeed, quickly after being satisfied at the fact that she is going to die, she realizes that even a few days is too long to wait. She has spent her life waiting – how can she wait for death? She must bring death herself, that is the one pronouncement of the self that she can make over her body. “She reflected on her situation there; it was far from ideal. Even if they [Villete] allowed her to do all the crazy things she wanted to do, she wouldn’t know where to start.” (40) Here, unlike The Bell Jar, it is made clear that purposelessness in the face of a unified body is shared, by lawyer and artist alike (Mari and Eduard), not just the individual body (though it is an individually felt thing). But the full extent of the individual’s entrapment is not fully realized until Veronika’s immanent death is brought into play; only then does Mari realize eventually that life outside the asylum is exactly the same as in the asylum: “Both there and here, people gather together in groups; they build their walls and allow nothing strange to trouble their mediocre existences. They do things because they’re used to doing them, they study useless subjects, they have fun because they’re supposed to have fun, and the rest of the world can go hang – let them sort themselves out. At the very most, they watch the news on television – as we often did – as confirmation of their happiness in a world full of problems and injustices.” (198) Still, it is Dr. Igor who coaches Mari in this direction, just as he guides Veronika (in the negative) by telling her that she will die:[To Mari]”You’re someone who is different, but who wants to be the same as everyone else. And that, in my view, is a serious illness… It is [a serious illness] to force yourself to be the same as everyone else. It causes neuroses, psychoses, and paranoia. It’s a distortion of nature, it goes against God’s laws, for on all the world’s woods and forests, he did not create a single leaf the same as another. But you think it’s insane to be different, and that’s why you chose to live in Villete, because everyone is different here, and so you appear to be the same as everyone else. Do you understand?” (169) The doctor is part of the ruling class, so to speak; he speaks from a place of privilege as he who can tell people what they feel and why: because his role allows him to do so. He is able to think “I know the world will not recognize my efforts,” and in so doing be “proud of being misunderstood.” (92) He holds the proverbial phallus. Yet, Coehlo’s Villete is also not any normal asylum; it essentially has no security barriers, and so Eduard and Veronika easily just walk out of the institution. The point here I think that Coehlo is making is that, since the ‘King’ has yet to prove his cure-all theory (which will be proven by the results of Veronika’s test), the ‘institution’ as such does not yet exist. Yes, there are pieces of one – the nurses and electroshock treatment, for example – but these are pieces that exist at other asylums too. It is the result of Dr. Igor’s experiment which will allow him to form a basis for his treatment center, and thus for a miniature society – for is not every new governmental system constituted on a hypothesized set of solutions to pre-existing problems? Further, to build walls is to designate place, and to designate place is to affirm a particular makeup of people – here, this is obviously a ‘makeup of people’ which are evidently being cured because of Igor’s experiment. Villete is thus able to be constructed on the premise of this ‘thesis’ (solution), and walls may be established after: :Meticulously he began to write up his experiment with Veronika; he would leave the reports on the building’s lack of security until later.” (210)

So what about Veronika? Is she freed? Certainly; she has freed herself. She has shirked the bond of fear of/for other people about her. She has been liberated – not really because she was going to die, but because she manages to live. Her masturbation before Eduard allows her to break this structure of fear that impedes the body and the mind from doing whatever it likes. However, it is interesting that this happens before the male gaze, if a schizophrenic can be said to be ‘of the male gaze’. Actually, the notion that Veronika needs any sort of witness to confirm her act in and of herself is questionable. Still, at least in one way, her suicide attempt was actually a birth; it allowed her to start anew because the notion ‘I am already dead,’ was in mind. What this says about Death and Desire (of course in the Lacanian sense!) will be explored further in the process of writing my thesis.

Masochism at its finest; the Princess takes back

Reading Materials for the Week: “Perils of the Princess: Gender and Genre in Video Games.” – Sharon R. Sherman; “The Other Side of the Valley; Or, Between Freud and Videogames – Kent Aardse; “Love Thy Neighbor? No Thanks!” (chapter in The Plague of Fantasies) – Slavoj Zizek.

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Alice: Madness Returns is a new take on Alice, Through the Looking Glass, taking the Burton-esque of interpretation of Alice’s Adventures (both of Lewis’ novels) to another level completely. Developed by Chinese game company Spicy Horse and released by EA Games, the game draws from American McGee’s Alice. It is essentially a re-make of this game, but with a few twists added and a few tweaks made. For example, the voice actors of American McGee’s Alice have American accents – and, let’s face it, it doesn’t work at all. Whether they’re bad voice actors or they just don’t fit the graphics doesn’t really matter; what matters is that the new voice actors of Alice and her compatriots do work, with British accents that actually fit the characters (visually) they voice. Not only that, but the artistry of the game is phenomenal; much of the character design is visually stunning (the character of Alice, particularly), with a lot of focus on little details. That being said, the game is quite glitchy; but it seems to work well with the content given that we jump back and forth from the interior (imaginary) space of Wonderland to (the real space of) London quite often.

After one has collected enough memories, Alice will come across a waiting wooden door behind which flames flicker. She opens the door and walks into the flames of her past. In this way she continually embraces death, and through this death, the death of memories (that moment of the past where she forgot them). She is trying to embrace the Real through a journey to the deepest recesses of her mind; it involves death, but does not culminate in it. This task gives her a way to touch-base with reality instead, fomenting a trajectory of travel out of these sewing marks as she stitches the Real and the unconscious together. Let us align the past with the present.

Zizek writes:

Here we can see clearly how fantasy is on the side of reality, how it sustains the subject’s ‘sense of reality’: when the phantasmic frame disintegrates, the subject undergoes a ‘loss of reality’and starts to perceive reality as an ‘irreal nightmarish universe with no firm ontological foundation; this nightmarish universe is not ‘pure fantasy’ but, on the contrary, that which remains of reality after reality is deprived of its support in fantasy. So when Schumann’s Carnaval – with its ‘regression’ to the dream-like universe in which intercourse between ‘real people’ is replaced by a kind of masked ball where one never knows what or who is hidden beneath the mask which laughs crazily at us: a machine, a slimy life-substance, or (undoubtedly the most horrifying case) simply the real double of the mask itself – sets Hoffmann’s Unheimliche to music, what we obtain is not the ‘universe of pure fantasy’ but, rather, the unique artistic rendering of the decomposition of the fantasy-frame. (84)

Something has evidently happened at the outset of the game (which opens with one of her therapy sessions) to draw her back into Wonderland, which is now completely changed. When Alice arrives in Wonderland, she serenely and matter-of-factly notes this, as if this disturbingly twisted Wonderland is merely a scientific phenomenon. Emotion has no place here. When the Cheshire Cat points out this change again later on, she immediately refers to the authority of her psychologist: “Doctor Bumby says that change is constructive, that different is good.” Alice has been desensitized by the authoritative psychoanalytic framework she has been forced to view her thoughts through. But her unconscious (in the form of the cat) tells her otherwise: “Different denotes neither bad nor good, but it certainly means not the same.” As we find out at the end of the game, her psychologist is actually responsible for the deaths of her family, and the burning of her home. The purpose of entering Wonderland is her mind’s way of pointing her in the right direction. When Alice comes across the vorpal blade early in the game, she (her consciousness) says “I’ve not come back here looking for a fight.” “Really?” The Cheshire Cat replies “That’s a pity. One’s certainly looking for you.” Alice is thus being called by her own mind to commit masochism in the aim of freedom, murdering the disgusting and dangerous creatures created inside her, out of the external forces that have acted and caused her to unleash hell unto herself. What this yields, Zizek illustrates, is how the framework of reality was originally constructed and how to create a new one.

Aardse’s piece on the ‘Uncanny Valley’, stemming from the writings of Freud and Mori, was inspiring in light of this psychoanalytically based game. Freud (2003) makes a distinction between our perception of familiar things (“heimlich”) and our perception of unfamiliar things (“unheimlich”), to say that unheimlich is necessarily connected as an idea to heimlich. “[A]mong the various shades of meaning that are recorded for the word heimlich there is one in which it merges with its formal antonym, unheimlich, so that that which is called heimlich becomes unheimlich.” (132) Unheimlich, he shows, deals with the removal of something from one’s vision, or at least the sense that something is secret or hidden in the confrontation. I also read recently De Beauvoir’s chapter called “Childhood” in The Second Sex. She talks about the doll that the girl is given as reparation for the fact that she lacks a penis, which, for the little boy, brings him to assume his “subjectivity” “boldly”, given that he easily dominates his fear of castration. “[T]he very object in which he alienates himself becomes a symbol of autonomy.” (293) Thus “the little girl pampers her doll and dresses her how she dreams of being dressed and pampered; inversely, she thinks of herself as a marvelous doll.” (293) Relating this notion to Freud’s discussion of the automaton Olympia in E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Sandman, an interesting idea about the control of a female character emerges. Freud writes: “the theme of the doll Olympia, who is to all appearances a living being, is by any means the only, or indeed the most important, element that must be held responsible for the quite unparalleled atmosphere of uncanniness evoked by the story.” (Aardse, 2014, 3) If we consider the mystification of women, then the fact that the game is centered in and around the unconscious mind of this female becomes salient. Alice is a digital woman, and by this definition brings forth the uncanny experience. She is the doll we caress and play with in the absence of a phallus. This brings me to the following questions: When a female plays the game, is it empowering? And when a male plays the game, is it uncanny? It seems to me (on a De Beauvoirian reading), that the female has been given a phallus by utilizing the video game controller. She can do the same as man, now that she has been given the implement she requires. And surely the male feels uncertain at playing the female heroine, as the boys that Sherman interviews affirm. But the male player does not experience this fear of the unfamiliar in Alice, for everything about her speaks of a masculine drive/purpose; yet, the princess is not absent. The male player can feel as though he is the prince saving the princess at the same time, even if it is actually the princess who saves herself.

Alice herself treats the situation with blunt purposefulness; she treats her own (conscious) self like a tool. Could this be connected to De Beauvoir’s penis envy? She recalls a case when a little girl, upon seeing a boy peeing proclaimed “How practical!”; the female at this age has no sexual interest in the penis, but rather in the conceptual phallus constructed around and out of the penis itself. She wants the power of controlling an object in this way. Indeed, Alice herself searches for Law inside Wonderland, concerned about the ethics at play. To what governing system must she adhere in this new, horrifying unconscious? “Changes here are the cause, or their the reflection, or the effect. What’s going on? What are the new rules?” she asks. She is here attempting to find a symbolic language in this world that imposes itself, like the masculine register in place back in London. She (her consciousness) does not yet realize that it is her job – her goal – to re-discover/re-create the symbolic register for herself. She must destroy the creatures that retain elements of the dingy, industrial London she hails from (many of them have pipes spurting oil out of their bodies, for example) in order to be freed. Thus in the masochistic impulse lies a prospective future of pleasure; once again, Alice will be able to inhabit the ‘magic circle’ of her mind as more than a tool, as a subject who plays in the realm of the unconscious…

Other References:

De Beauvoir, S. The Second Sex.  (C. Borde and S. Malovany-Chevalier, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books.

Freud, S. (2003). The Uncanny. (D. McClintock, Trans.). London: Penguin Books.

Chapter 1 Transcript for Alice: Madness Returns. Accessible from: http://alice.wikia.com/wiki/Transcript:Alice:_Madness_Returns.

 

Ideas and Questions I am currently considering…

  • What is the woman’s body?
  • How is it used by Klimt, Woolf, Hawkes?
  • What is the connection between the woman’s body and the expression of art, as illustrated by John Dewey?
  • Provided what Barthes says about language, is there a way to free her through it/from it? (consider, perhaps, her ability to ‘jam’ or give ‘partial answers’, perhaps also in relation to the machines of Deleuze and Guattari).

→Barthes’ five codes: https://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/narratology/modules/barthescodes.html

Sex, Power, and Masculine Androgyny

Readings: Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade – John Hawkes; To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf; Anti-Oedipus – Deleuze & Guattari; S/Z – Roland Barthes.

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One thing that we see when we look at Gustav Klimt’s famous painting, The Kiss, is the male subject in the act of subsuming the female participant. This painting can, and has often been, interpreted as a moment of intense passion – the woman goes limp, transferred to a state of pure bliss – the gold aura that surrounds the embrace and draws the two together is a symbolic gesture representing the energy and pleasure of the moment, while the juxtaposition of geometric forms expresses further this moment of transference. But it can also be interpreted in the complete opposite; the woman, on this view, is pulling away from the man. Rather than her lips, she offers only her cheek, her expression one of patient obedience. The hand around the man’s neck is clenched into a half position between a fist and a soft resting, as if the female cannot decide which to make. The fingers on her other hand delicately reach upward to curl over the man’s hand, which is positioned over where her neck ought to be; but his fingers brush against her cheek, allowing for the interpretation that this gesture is loving. Regardless of the gesture, however, the man holds her in place in order to control the act of passion; the woman is reduced before the man, by the man, visually in size (a folding of her form plus the twist of her head) and by the strength of his body and assumptive aura. In this sense, the aura can be seen as stemming from the man, and the juxtaposition of geometric forms can be understood as a symbolic representation of the masculine and feminine difference.

This representation reminds me of a particular passage near the beginning of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Mrs. Ramsay, reflecting on woman’s condition, wishes that it were not so but recognizes that she can do nothing about it. “They must find a way out of it all. There might be some simpler way, some less laborious way, she sighed. When she looked in the glass and saw her hair grey, her cheek sunk, at fifty, she thought, possibly she might have managed things better – her husband; money; his books. But for her own part she would never for a single second regret her decision, evade difficulties, or slur over duties.” (6) Mrs. Ramsay recognizes her position but assumes it willingly – even gracefully. Woolf shows that this reflects a kind of power. “She was now formidable to behold, and it was only in silence, looking up from their plates, after she had spoken so severely about Charles Tansley, that her daughters, Prue, Nancy, Rose – could sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers” (7). The “wretched atheist” ‘chasing’ after her daughters makes clear (metaphorically) that times are changing. Dr. Shihada (2005) writes that Mrs. Ramsay represents the conventional Victorian female (submissive to the masculine), “her medium emotion and her form human relationship” (136). This is what makes her so beautiful to Mr. Tansley as he walks with her. She allows him to talk about his problems, voice his opinions; she “stood quite motionless for a moment against a picture of Queen Victoria wearing the blue ribbon of the Garter,” the Queen an authority only by virtue of her position within a patriarchal system. Standing for this moment silent, “(as if she had been pretending up there, and for a moment let herself be now)” paused in her continuous performance as ‘woman’, as ‘Other’ – the Other who fulfills the male in the act of courtship. This, after all, is what to Lacan creates culture; the “non-rapport” [inability to find symmetry] between the two sexes [and thus form a whole “One”]. But she quickly re-assumes her role, allows Charles Tansley his revelation [that “she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen”] and subsequent pride; “for he was walking with a beautiful woman. He had hold of her bag.” (14) This last sentence is full of import; by holding her bag, he makes use of himself and thus validates himself through her existence.

The character of Mrs. Ramsay has me thinking about the protagonist of Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade, comparing the two. Before I had begun the book I had not realized that ‘skin trade’ referred to the sex trade in Alaska, only knew that it was about a woman’s search for her father. I was struck by the frankness of her words, the confident poetic voice that weaved for me worlds dominated by the female – a female that is not only ‘feminine’ in the conventional sense [as well as the unconventional], found located in a place that is also often thought of as isolated (barren, cold, almost otherworldly due to its midnight sun). Alaska becomes an oasis that preserves woman’s freedom; the realm of the Flower sisters, meanwhile, is tied to the patriarchal. The protagonist’s mother, like Cinderella, is saved from the evil Flower sisters by the male savior. Her mother goes from a female-dominated world (nevertheless structured by masculinity), to a truly patriarchal realm. That being said, her mother is allowed to enjoy herself in this world, as long as there is mutual love; for love between the father and mother opens up a space for enjoyment, though the male lover is always there in that dynamic, never separated.

There is a strange Oedipal dynamic present in this novel. As a young girl, she calls her mother ‘Sissy’ and her father ‘Uncle Jake’ out of respect for her father’s wishes. “I was not allowed to call him Father. I was never allowed to call him Dad. Especially I was never allowed to call him Dad.” The father is thus distanced from the daughter, at the same time as she is brought close. She describes the eating of a gifted sandwich with every tinge of childish pleasure – yet the overabundance of description, the almost mind-numbing pleasure she experiences despite the dangerously rocking ship, yields a strong, sexual interpretation.

“It was a sandwich. A chicken sandwich. He must have arranged much earlier with Jim to bring me a chicken salad sandwich at the height of the gale, knowing how I would fill my little mouth with soft white bread, golden crusts, cold lettuce, mayonnaise that could not have been creamier, the firm wet cubes of chicken flavored with all the succulence of a secret childhood meal at the height of a gale. And there I lay, propped on elbow, bracing myself with naked foot, knee, elbow, and savoring, as he knew I would, my plump white sandwich while the cabin reeled and the porthole ran with water and the wind howled. The storm drove my face into the sandwich, smeared soft butter and softer mayonnaise on my lips, my lips, my eyebrows, my cheeks, which I wiped with the back of my hand, which I then licked. Chewing turned into rumination and slow bliss. I was my father’s replica, my father’s child, I carried the taste of the treasured sandwich back to the bottom, down to the dreamless sleep of my peace and pleasure.” (47-48)

The eating of the treasured sandwich is, in a Freudian reading, like engaging with the father in the act of sex. It is not as one-sided as might appear, for he ‘knows’ how she will eat the sandwich, how she will savor consumption of the sandwich. The emphasis of white (mayonnaise, chicken, butter, white bread) points both to the consumption of a pure object and to human fluid, perhaps specifically semen. Yet there is even more so a sense of masturbation taking place, the fact that a relationship between the self and object marks the foundation of the consumptive act points to a corollary in the notion of the hand as object, separate from the body, but which is also the means to sexual experience. This is carefully connected to who, or what, she has become. “I am something of a man myself, or have my share of the masculine component, as they say, and dress like a man and stand alone” yet, “Uncle Jake, I owe you nothing”. She embraces the Oedipal father at the same time time as she rejects him. The innocent (metaphorical) fantasy presented above has the father present in the form an abstract physicality as well as conceptually ever-present. But her connection to her father is not just ingrained in her personality, despite her claim that she has broken away from him – she is the last in his line to inherit lineage. A lineage which, because she is female, will die with her.

This masculine-felt side of her has completely messed up the Electra complex. Sunny is drawn to her father by the Electra-drive, but he distances her by name and by substituting himself for her, entering into her fantasy as the chicken sandwich. As the son ought [in the Oedipus complex], Sunny puts herself on the level of her father in relation to her mother. “But if my father was to be blamed for humorously renaming the unoffending population of his little world, and most of all denying to his daughter was was rightfully hers – the name appropriate to that man who was her sole spell-caster – how much more was I to be blamed, since I too called my mother Sissy.”

The protagonist is free to become androgynous, her mother is not. (We can see the theme of the woman being allowed to be whatever she likes also emerging in To The Lighthouse). The daughter repeats the same idea, established at this young age when she and her parents land at Juneau: “And was I not like my father? Size and gender aside, I was his replica.” (41) She peers down from her father’s shoulders at her mother. The girl identifies herself with this position, which is a position of power and organization, based off of the affinity she feels for her father. “But we hung on, Uncle Jake and I, and I knew that I alone was the cause of the electric whistle’s withering, ungainly noise and that soundlessly Uncle Jake was laughing. Together we reveled, he and I -”. In relation to this idea of power, I have at the back of my mind Lacan’s notion of the Symbolic and the structuring of language in relation to the Name-of-the-Father. Writing down her father’s stories from her own convoluted perspective allows the woman to control the structure of language. But Hawkes wants us to remember that language is ultimately masculine (Sunny is male on the surface, but below she is female), and that Sunny thus presents a feminine perspective struggling out of the confines of the masculine text. But Sunny and her “transient girls” seem to do everything but struggle in the Alaskan Skin Trade; the power of the woman to subdue masculinity via her womanly charms is portrayed as a dominance that cannot be trumped. The masculinity of language is manipulated by the women, and they give themselves the phallus “The Men Only [sign] is meant to inspire amusement, curiosity, a dash of pride. At any rate our Willies have the courage to enter… Willie grins or blushes. Among other Willies, he sits on one of the leather and aluminum chairs or cream-colored calfskin couches as deep and soft as snow…” (26) She has become the author that Hawkes grants the woman: “the created woman is reason enough for her creation.”

Reading this book in conjunction with passages from Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and John Dewey’s Art and Experience, I start to think of the female as somehow not a Desiring-machine. The Desiring-machine obeys a binary law of governance where the production of production (flow machine) is connected to an interrupting machine, which interrupts or draws off part of this flow, and so on in a linear fashion down an endless line of connecting entities. As I continue to study and process this idea, I shall elaborate further. It is as if Sunny has broken away from the chain of machinery, or at least separated herself partially, tied to the chain by an elastic string. How far can she go? Is she the author, or is Hawkes? We can see Freud’s psychoanalytic categories breaking down, showing that not all cases can be fit into his paradigm. What is creation in The Alaskan Skin Trade? Is it art?

Additional References:

Dewey, J. (1934). Art as Experience. 

Ferrari, R. (1996). Innocence, Power, and the Novels of John Hawkes. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press.  

Ragland, E. (1995). Psychoanalysis and Courtly Love, Arthuriana 5(1), 1-20. Retrieved from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27869092?seq=6#page_scan_tab_contents.

Shihada, I. (2005). A Feminist Perspective of Virginia Woolf’s Selected Novels: Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse. Retrieved from: https://www.alaqsa.edu.ps/site_resources/aqsa_magazine/files/44.pdf.

Reading Freud in Kafka

I only just received my copy of ‘To the Lighthouse’ by Virginia Woolf in the mail today, and so I have not yet had the opportunity to fully complete my readings for the week. Consequently, I decided I would make a post about an observation made while reading Stijn Vanheule’s book, “The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective” (2014).

Vanheule’s book is divided into two parts, inspired by the strong distinction between Lacan’s early work, and his later work. I have just entered the ‘Second Era: The Age of the Signifier’, where Vanheule goes into greater depth on Lacan’s idea of how language works, which Lacan developed after his doctoral dissertation. This newer work departed from a number of earlier theories, now establishing the body of work for which he is best known. In this later work, Lacan takes paradigm of the signified, signifier, and signification from the linguist de Saussure. Lacan comes to the conclusion that the unconscious follows the logic of the signifier, which is one part of the ‘liguistic sign’. (Vanheule, 2014, 35) It is the analyst’s job to detect these signifiers in a patient’s speech; but unlike Freud, Lacan does not believe that we should determine the underlying cause of speech patterns (therefore psychosis) based off of what we (the analyst) learns from psychotic speech.

The signifier is a identifiable entity in language because it is delimited by the very fact of its existing within the context of a signified chain of speech. As can be surmised by this definition, the signified has an implied connection to a signifier through the verbalization of some idea. Thus, “grammar and syntax have a fundamental effect on the creation of meaning.” (36) Vanheule writes: “speech hooks the signifier to the signified or creates ‘button ties’ in discourse. Their effect is that the sliding of the signified under the signifier comes to a halt.” (37) Language grounds signification of what is in the unconscious; this is the result of the relationship between these two entities.

Much more detail could be gone into regarding the nature of these entities and how they function with regard to a greater social spectrum and to the individual psyche; however, I will refrain from doing so because I wish to address a particular passage of Vanheule’s, where he discusses a case study that interested Lacan – namely, Freud’s Mr. E, who “had an ‘anxiety attack at the age of ten when he tried to catch a black beetle’.” Further:

“During a session Mr. E, when speaking about his anxiety attack, connected the idea of the beetle (Kaefer in German) to the word ladybug (Marienkaefer in German). Before making this connection Mr. E had been talking about his mother, who was called Marie. In other words, the topic of his mother constituted the basis upon which further associations were made. In the path of associations the word ‘Marie’ led to the word Marienkaefer. Furthermore, when talking about his mother Mr. E mentioned that as a child he had heard a conversation between his grandmother and aunt. Freud states that this was about the marriage of his mother, where ‘it emerged that she had not been able to make up her mind for quite some time. As a child Mr. E grew up with a French-speaking nurse, and therefore learned to speak French before German. Regarding the following session with Mr. E, Freud states that just prior to the session ‘the meaning of the beetle [Kaefer] had occurred to him; namely: que faire? – being unable to make up one’s mind…'” (Vanheule, 2014, 38)

Vanheule relates Lacan’s conclusion, which is just that the “acoustic image” relates to two different conceptions. 1) about the bug, and 2) about the mother’s hesitation. The bug is the symbol that represents the mother’s hesitation. The subjective truth of the matter is repressed by Mr. E. (Vanheule, 2014, 38)

This whole idea reminds me of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), and so I went back to read the story on Project Gutenberg (E-book released 2005). From the very first lines of the story, we can detect a metaphor for the concept of a phonetic chain consisting of signifiers. “He lay on his armor-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections.” (Kafka, 2005) We notice too that Kafka displays an interest in surfaces and the ambiguous resonations those walls produce. By resonations, I mean the symbolism implied by the plain and seemingly unassuming insertion of phrases such as “His room, a proper human room although a little too small, lay peacefully between its four familiar walls.” In fact, this particular syntactical construction anthropomorphizes Gregor’s room, pointing out the fact that it is composed of pieces and is not a singular whole. This idea coincides clearly with Lacan’s ideas, if we conceive of part of his issue as arising from the failure to express his feelings of degradation in the job he works. But if we make a connection between Gregor’s story and Freud’s Mr. E, we might turn again to Freud for his model of consciousness in light of his (subsequent, but more important to our reading) model of trauma. Indeed, though Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” was not published until 1920, the corollaries to Kafka’s story are almost uncanny.

First of all, as Susan Bernofsky (2014) points out, Kafka did not want Insekt on the cover of the story, preferring instead the title we know well. Further, the word Ungezeifer, which stems from the Middle High German, ungezibere, is the word Kafka first uses to introduce Gregor’s state. Ungezibere is supposedly a negation of zebar, meaning “sacrifice” or “sacrificial animal”. Ungeziefer describes the class of insect-creature. The word in German suggests primarily six-legged insects, though it otherwise resembles the English word “vermin”. Ungeziefer is also an informal equivalent of “bug,” though the connotation is “dirty, nasty bug”. Thus, Bernofsky (2014) concludes, the word used to introduce Gregor’s newfound condition is highly ambiguous.

Cvetkovich (2003) writes, Freud invites his reader to “picture a living organism in its most simplified possible form as an undifferentiated vesicle of a substance that is susceptible to stimulation.” (53) The model organism is thus abstract, a “little fragment of living substance”, “suspended in the middle of an external world charged with the most powerful energies” (Freud’s words). (Cvetkovich, 2003) External energies are dangerous for this fragile entity, which is cause for fear of penetration. Thus the creature acquires a shield in order to defend against external penetration; and whatever (and whenever) penetration is experienced, it is deemed traumatic. The shield is formed out of what Cvetkovich calls “the death of its [the organism’s] outer layers” which is submitted so that the rest of the organism may live. It is my contention that Gregor represents an individual who has undergone trauma in his attempts to keep his family financially afloat; it has caused his mental condition, which, Kafka implies, also has every kind of effect on the human body. Gregor’s inability to command regular use of his limbs, such as the fact that his new body does not allow him to sleep on his right side, could represent the fact that, while his outer crust protects him, it separates him in some way from his family, who (at least in his eyes) still ‘alive’. In the unconscious’ attempt to protect the body, the individual is also alienated from the world. He has metaphorically represented mental inhibition and trauma and the (Freudian) reaction of the ego to that trauma.

This idea of Freud’s interests me in particular, and I hope to use it in analyzing future readings for my independent study. It would also be interesting to look at the dialogue of female characters in literature using the Lacanian conception of signification in relation to this concept of creating a protective shield.

Sources:

Franz Kafka (2005). The Metamorphosis. D. Wylie, Trans. (Original work published 1915). Retrieved from: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5200/5200-h/5200-h.htm.

Stijn Vanheule (2014). The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Susan Bernofsky (2014, January 14). On Translating Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”, Retrieved from: http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/on-translating-kafkas-the-metamorphosis.

 

 

Reading Melanie Klein

Reading Material of the Week: “Introduction to Melanie Klein” – Juliet Mitchell, in Reading Melanie Klein, edited by Lyndsey Stonebridge and John Phillips; “Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse” – Melanie Klein; “The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego” – Melanie Klein. I also went back and read The Malady of Death by Margurite Duras.

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Melanie Klein’s writings illustrate her experiential studies of the child, going through her interactions in great detail. For Klein, violence centers her exploration of the infant and the child’s ego. She talks about the child’s anxiety and guilt related to the penis and the mother’s body. One could say that the idea of the penis destroying the female body via penetration is her primary thesis point, specifically focusing on translating the Freudian psychoanalytic stages of child development and taking the Oedipus complex for granted. This is an interesting concept, the idea that the male actually destroys the female body, hurts it violently, in the act of hopeful reproduction. In many ways, it is a very feminist reading of the child’s psychosexual development; the language Klein uses, as well as her almost hyper-insistent return to (or repetition of) “the zenith of sadism” being reached, the anxiety (according to Freud’s interpretation) about that sadism [throughout her diagnosis in “Symbol Formation in Ego Development”], gives the Oedipus complex and its manifestations a new tone. In  “The Importance of Symbol Formation,” Klein talks about her engagement with a small boy named Dick, who does not display the Oedipus complex normally (she concludes that the boy represents an instance of childhood schizophrenia, though today he would be considered autistic). Klein manages to find references to the mother and father in everything the small child does (which seems mildly pedantic to me), and that in many ways this hyper-focus results in a biased assessment of the child’s ego. Let me supply a section where this is most salient:

The first time Dick came to me, as I said before, he manifested no sort of affect when his nurse handed him over to me. When I showed him the toys I had put ready, he looked at them without the faintest interest. I took a big train and put it beside a smaller one and called them ‘Daddy-train’ and ‘Dick-train’. Thereupon her picked up the train I called ‘Dick’ and made it roll to the window and said ‘Station’. I explained: ‘The station is mummy; Dick is going into mummy.’ He left the train, ran into the space between the outer and inner doors of the room, shut himself in, saying ‘dark’ and ran out again directly. He went through this performance several times. I explained to him: ‘It is dark inside mummy. Dick is inside dark mummy.’ Meantime he picked up the train again, but soon ran back into the space between the doors. While I was saying that he was going into dark mummy, he said twice in a questioning way: ‘Nurse?’ (102)

To our adult minds it does indeed seem as though Dick shows that the child’s position is at least with the mother, (Klein interprets this as importantly inside her, as in, inside/entering the womb). When Klein explains to the child that the train station is the mother and the child responds by going inside the closet, it seems as though Klein has implanted the idea in the child’s head. Her language betrays this, her phraseology “going into mummy” suggests already to the child that he has gone into something, thus requiring an appropriate response to the idea of ‘going into’ and of therefore ‘being inside’. Further, Klein’s claim that when Dick “discover[s] the wash-basin as symbolizing the mother’s body, and displayed an extraordinary dread of being wetted with water,” that “urine represented to him injurious and dangerous substances” (104). It seems to me that the child has rather equated water and basin-shapes with the mother, and thus considers that anything that should go inside the basin-shape already is or will become a part of her.  This is not internal poison; he is worried that he has hurt the mother in some way. In many ways, Klein is projecting a pre-interpretation of the child’s impulses and trapping the boy in a particular psychoanalytic mindset. In this, I am reminded of Zizek’s big Other and how it manifests in Plath’s The Bell Jar; Esther’s Other is the psychoanalytic platform, the established social norm with which one signs (ha) a contract.

I was also reminded of Marguerite Duras’ The Malady of Death.  This is a strange experimental book, consisting of only 60 pages of enlarged text. The platform on which we establish our protagonist is the self – in other words, the reader (individually and collectively, each at once but also not at the same time). Duras addresses the audience directly in second person; “You” are the thing that makes the book happen. Without the “You” Duras’ statements about ‘what you do’ could not exist. “You” are the subject. “You” are the actor of the great play. Imagine an audience; everyone in it has the capacity to be (and already is) the “You” which Duras addresses. And “You” are therefore ambiguous, transitory; but you are also an aggressor, you do things to the woman (who is the primary object, the only other “character” that appears) inside the book, you do things to the book that are unconscious as you read. “The body’s completely defenseless, smooth from face to feet. It invites strangulation, rape, ill usage, insult, shouts of hatred, the unleashing of deadly and unmitigated passions.” (16)

“You” are like an infant yourself. There is a distance established between the self and the “you” on the page by the virtue of narrative. “You” don’t seem to understand how the female works, what she is for, everything is experimental and there is a very real sense that sexual attraction is not present; that violence is latent but always stewing underneath the skin.

“You look at her. She’s very slim, almost frail. Her legs have a beauty distinct from that of the body. They don’t really belong to the rest of the body. You say: You must be very beautiful. She says: I’m right here in front of you. Look for yourself. You say: I can’t see anything. She says: Try. It’s all part of the bargain. You take hold of the body and look at its different areas. You turn it round, keep turning it round. Look at it, keeping looking at it.” (16-17)

“Out of the half-open mouth comes a breath that returns, withdraws, returns again. The fleshly machine is marvelously precise. Leaning over her, motionless, you look at her. You know you can dispose of her in whatever way you wish, even the most dangerous. But you don’t Instead you stroke her body as gently as if it ran the risk of happiness. Your hand is over the sex, between the open lips, it’s there it strokes. You look at the opening and what surrounds it, the whole body. You don’t see anything. You want to see all of a woman, as much as possible. You don’t see that for you it’s impossible.” (35-36)

This echoes Lacan’s conception of courtly love, his understanding of the lack in the woman which the man consistently attempts to find identity in, so as to validate his existence through her. He uses her for this, but can never be satisfied because as Other, she is merely a sight of recognition which is always there but also not there; she is eternally elusive. Imagine her, as if she were the ghostly Francesca, partially shielding herself from the gaze with a kind of fabric just as she moves in rebellion, in order to disrupt that gaze further…

[Space 2, Providence, Rhode Island, Francesca Woodman]

“There’s nothing left in the room but you. Her body has vanished. The difference between her and you is confirmed by her sudden absence.” (52)

Is there a way that we can interpret The Malady of Death in terms of Klein? “The Malady of Death is inside you,” says the woman, claiming that you can never start to “begin”. The phallus has been passed down from the father to the son, the progeny of Adam being eternally embedded in the male physiognomy. “You” wish to kill her (“While she lives she invites murder.” (33)) because the possibility of her disappearance and the fact that “you” see your own self projected on her speaks to your own being. “You” see her in relation to the gaping “black sea”, which you look out upon: “It occurs to you that the black sea is moving in the stead of something else, of you and of the dark shape on the bed.” (28)

“You look at the malady of your life, the malady of death. It’s on her, on her sleeping body… You don’t love anything or anyone, you don’t even love the difference you think you embody.” (32-33) Though “your” emotions are practically nonexistent throughout the book, you finally develop to where you can cry about your condition (46), “[going on] with the story about the child” (49). Like Dick – as Klein works with him over time – “You” have finally found some measure of (Lacanian) symbolic articulation – you have found a language of expression [in some capacity], even if the woman does not understand your words.

According to Klein, the expression of anxiety and libidinal interest (that is, of the unconscious phantasy) sets going the mechanism of identification, the forerunner of symbolism, which arises out of the baby’s endeavor to rediscover in every object his own organs and their functioning. Sadism predominates at the phallic stage of development (the third of Freud’s stages, though Klein prefers the idea of ‘position’ rather than ‘stage’, conceptually allowing for “much more flexible to-and-fro process[es] between one and the other” (Hinshelwood, 1991)). At this position, the child wishes to possess every part of the mother and destroy her completely by every weapon of sadism. Klein believes that the child has expectations about what is inside the mother. First, the child expects to find (a) the father’s penis, (b) excrement, and (c) children – and all of this he/she associates with edible substances. The child fears the penis, the breasts, the vagina, and so the child represents these things in objects. The child’s first understanding of sex is that the father becomes one with the mother, and so sadistic acts directed at various objects are aimed at both parents. Anxiety is felt out of fear of punishment, which becomes internalized because of oral-sadistic introjection of the objects which goes to form the moral standards by which the ego operates (the super ego).

The boy that she analyzes appears to be unable to express this anxiety; that is, she concludes, the anxiety he felt about penetrating the mother’s body and what would be done to him [particularly by the father’s penis] – for apart from all else, he was only interested in trains, stations, door-handles, doors and the opening and shutting of them; Dick did not display any interest in most other objects around him. Further, he put a stopper on his ability to actually be aggressive, like normal children. This was manifest because he would not eat properly, and at four years could not hold scissors, knives or tools, but could happily utilize a spoon. Klein hypothesizes that all of these worked in defense against sadistic impulses to mutilate the mother’s body. This had resulted in “the cessation of the phantasies and the standstill of symbol formation.” He was unable to represent his phantasies in the world around him. Klein’s imposition of representation for him helped him begin to act more like the typical child who expresses anxieties in the expected way.

My idea is this: That the “You” of The Malady of Death has failed to express his anxieties in the appropriate way. He knows in some distant way that this is related to the opposite sex but does not understand it, having only the black (meaning dark, empty, expressionless, void-like) sea as company before the woman comes. There is of course Lacan tied up in the interpretation, which I discussed earlier. But with the introduction of woman, we see that the man still cannot establish proper contact with the woman because his phantasies have been repressed to the point that they do not even come to the fore of consciousness once he begins to do things to her that are fundamental to such phantasies. He knows he can kill her, but doesn’t move to; instead, he uses her, objectifies her, until finally he is able to weep before her about his own death. In no way do You recover from the sufficient maltreatment undergone as an infant (that is, the failure of the parents to meet the requirements of each development stage); rather, You find yourself eternally stuck within the pre-oedipal death drive, represented by the house you never leave – which the woman enters, and the sea flanks.

Thoughts on The Bell Jar

Reading/Visual material of the week: “Woman’s Situation and Character” (Chapter ten, The Second Sex) – Simone De Beauvoir; “Why is Woman a Symptom of Man?” (Chapter two, Enjoy Your Symptom!) – Slavoj Zizek; The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath; The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Art by Francesca Woodman.

Some thoughts.

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The Subject for Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (Esther) seems to me to come in three layers or degrees. First there is Esther, the protagonist of the book, who functions as an Other for Plath. Then there is Plath, who occupies the Real in a Lacanian sense, and who uses language to create or translate herself into a symbolic Other, which is Esther. Esther creates her own Other, Elly, who [or which?] can be conceived as merely a name standing in for another Esther, who is an alter ego that is no different in personality from Esther herself.

The Bell Jar is considered a semi-autobiographical work, with dates and names changed – much of what Esther experiences or does in the book mirrors Plath’s own experiences. Now, the connection between Plath and her protagonist reveals itself as a mirror; thus the space of the relationship in question is taken up in space by an object, that is, the (conceptual) mirror – which, in this case, could be said to be language, because language is the means by which the relationship is conveyed. Esther is an almost-perfect reflection of Plath, because she mirrors her actions and thoughts but within a different space that retains different names. Elly is a perfect reflection of Esther, because she has no extra attributes and functions entirely in the same world; she is merely Esther by another name, within the world that Esther inhabits. Elly cannot be considered a mirror of Plath, though she might be allowed the title of ‘extension’, and we cannot say that the same language is the mediator of Esther and Elly’s relationship. Elly is Esther’s imago, her imaginary ego, which Esther creates in order to mediate her interactions with a male Other.

In light of Zizek, we consider that Esther has already encountered the event of emptiness. From the first pages, she appears to the audience as a flat note, something empty or devoid, something already lacking; she embodies the void into which Karin descends, having already undergone the “encounter with the Real” (42) that Karin is overwhelmed with [Karin embodies the void in this moment too, recognizing herself in this void as the objet a]. That being said, exactly what Esther has encountered is ambiguous, because we never see that encounter. It has already happened, at the onset of the story; the story merely traces Esther’s descent from this already “point zero” plateau into complete disarray. She repeatedly tries to find herself in the primordial/mystical flow of womanhood (of which de Beauvoir speaks), but fails (her references to water (purity and drowning – perhaps in that purity) dissolve over the course of events until finally it is no longer referred to by the end of the book). She attempts to take control of her own love life, refusing to accept offers of male dates and taking it upon herself to “decide” to seduce a man or let him seduce her. Her intentions are never properly realized, whether we are dealing with Marco, who she rejects and is attacked by, or Constantin, who she hopes will seduce her. “the woman, like the child, indulges in symbolic outbursts… it is not only for physiological reasons that she is subject to convulsive manifestations: a convulsion is an interiorization of an energy that, thrown into the world, fails to grasp any object” (648). Esther has tried to grasp, and she has failed, which leads her to suicide – which is actually (unfortunately) the moment when she gives into the symbolic system established by society. She does not appear, at first, to fit de Beauvoir’s statement: “they [women] play at suicide more often than man, but they want it more rarely”. After all, the choices Esther makes lead up to her final decision to commit suicide. But we must turn to Zizek, who illustrates that woman becomes the objet a, the object which is defined by an internal lack. She is one of the Names-of-the-father, a kind of capricious Master who consistently eludes the grasp of the male. She is his fantasy “par excellence”, but in so being she is also Other – something ambiguous or open, something almost imaginary. And we realize: Esther spends the entire novel playing at suicide, playing with this feminine lack, trying to “grasp any object” in order to fulfill this lack. She fails, and so she actually consents to this ‘big Other’ of psychoanalysis. She departs from nature’s flow which de Beauvoir says is an innate part of womanhood by partaking in that which is either the exact opposite of natural, or else is the natural transformed into something that is not: the pill. It initiates death, and this is the death of Esther’s autonomy. She accepts her role in the fold. Inappropriate as it might be to mention – Plath’s own death was suffocation by the oven, itself is a social symbol of the feminine. They (she) are (is) killed by the social construct – they murder themselves in order to escape this inescapable Other; but as Zizek points out, killing themselves involves utilizing that which is part of the Other, and is thus an affirmation of the power of this Other, as well as an admission to it (caving to this power). Truly, it is inescapable.

Elucidating on this idea of woman being connected to nature, de Beauvoir says that “they almost never use knives of firearms. They drown themselves more readily, like Ophelia, showing woman’s affinity for water, passive and full of darkness, where it seems that life might be able to dissolve passively.” [This reminds me briefly of a moment in Demons in the Age of Light where Ani talks to Whitney about her own ability to see auras: “So you can see these auras, for real?”/ “Sure. They’re strongest around your center and they fade once they leave your skin. Some people barely glow and some are lit up like fireflies. But you, you got the darkest aura I’ve ever seen.” (87) Whitney, a schizophrenic patient, is flattered; what this says about feminine psychosis – as opposed to plain madness – in terms of Zizek or de Beauvoir is up for debate; though darkness, to me, signifies this lack the belongs to femininity.]

The female protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper is more like the female which de Beauvoir describes. She certainly plays at suicide, locking herself in her room and finally removes all of the wallpaper – the removal of the wallpaper can be seen as a suicide, of sorts, because the idea that the woman beneath the wallpaper stems from the idea that the woman is part of the wallpaper (over the course of the story, the two become separated, which indicates a sure psychological departure of the protagonist from the symbolic fold of society). Her illusion becomes that there is another woman trapped underneath the wallpaper, who she needs to free. At first the other is a hostile object, but soon the protagonist empathizes with this creature. She begins to “see” her “creeping” outside of the room in the daylight, more a feeling than visual perception. Every time she turns to look, the woman is too fast! She gets away. At the conclusion of the story, the protagonist mimics this creeping and proclaims triumphantly: “I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” (36) John faints at this active display of rebellion against the patriarchal scheme. What follows is an ambiguous phrase to draw the moment to a close, which suggests that the protagonist is now aware of her ability to move into and out of the patriarchal structure (the wall serving as the symbolic structure or social system): “Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!” (36). Gilman shows the woman for once successful in her rebellion, pushing the man down with mystical force so that he will stay down. The moment described here thus comes across as static, as an ongoing state of affairs. There is in fact a photograph by Francesca Woodman that illustrates both the before and after states of the yellow wallpaper. The figure here is concrete, standing apart from the wall; but the absence of her head indicates a certain nothingness, where identity is absent and all that remains is the body. The navel is shown here, not just for stylistic purposes, but also because doing so denotes the responsibility of womanhood to reproduce. Further, the wallpaper (which could be seen as a layer of womanhood, that is, an entity that is on the one hand part of the wall but also not, and which can be removed, ripped, manipulated – that is, we can do things with our role that are subversive) covers her sexual parts, evoking the importance society places on tastefulness, which itself actually shows the sex to be the focus of the collective psyche.