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Article Excerpt
This essay grows out of my fascination with melancholia and with women's modern and postmodern novels that are somehow "beside" themselves. For example, writers such as Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison have all produced novels that are relatively unconcerned with plot and are dense with intricate, even excessive, language and complex form. I suggest these texts use that difficult form to make visible a blind spot and an absence that cannot be represented easily and so are figured as loss or a kind of generative melancholia. Melancholy and narrative are intricately connected because melancholia is, in part, about the experience of loss and how to represent that loss (or how that loss is manifested) to oneself and to others. This seems simple enough; yet a problem emerges if different experiences of loss, because of gender, sexuality, race, or other differences, go unrecognized or unmarked. Indeed, as psychotherapist Lynne Layton notes, quoting Freud, we may all live in a kind of "common human unhappiness" (and here I read this as in a state of loss) because we have no say on the inevitability of death, or loss, or separation. However, this common psychic unhappiness turns into something quite other when coupled with historical contingencies like sexism, racism, and homophobia. Loss, then, is experienced differently, depending on how the culture values or does not value the lost object. And here the representational or social world impinges on the psychic and vice versa; they are not separable.
In what follows, I explore the psychoanalytic concept of melancholia as a way to develop a theory of the relations among women's subjectivity, loss, and literary representation, arguing that women are paradigmatic melancholics and outlining what is at stake in that claim. In recognizing loss and in representing it, I suggest, certain fictional texts utilize a strategy of resistance--stagings of loss--to effect compensation. (1) This syntax of loss calls attention to culture's misrecognition or non-recognition of who is allowed to grieve, what is lost, and who makes the rules for what is recognizable as loss. Finally, through a brief reading of two fictional texts, I examine how the concept of loss as a structuring mechanism can be used for understanding women's experimental narrative fiction and how these fictional texts might refine our understanding of a theory of loss. Indeed, the concept of generative melancholia provides a way to see language in those narratives not as foreclosed (in the Freudian sense of disavowed, refused, repudiated) grieving, but rather as language blown open, an excess and/or self-conscious effort that forces a recognition not only of the subject who grieves and speaks, but of the "unspeakableness" of the loss. This language blown open signals a type of loss that is not fully worked through, as in mourning, nor is it simply endless repetition, compulsively repeating or acting out traumatic loss, as in Freud's melancholia. Lastly, if we understand the process of melancholy as having much to do with the production of subjectivity insofar as we build the self through our losses, then certain women's narratives can be read like the process that constructs the ego, as a kind of memorial to loss, in the sense these narratives give an account of loss and enfold an absence and thus make loss "visible" through language. These narratives, then, are a kind of acting out that could make way for at least a partial working though.
Drawing on an idea formulated in the context of hysteria in 1894 by Pierre Janet, French neurologist, protege of Charcot, and researcher into trauma, I suggest that melancholia for women is a malady of representation. And here I use French theorist and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray to clarify my meaning. She suggests women's condition in culture and representation to be a kind of "I." The term dereliction, stronger in French than in English, designates a state of being abandoned, isolated, and deprived of all divine help. Irigaray claims that women are abandoned outside of a masculine representational structure (or symbolic order) that disallows representation specific to women and instead subsumes difference back into a version of itself. This idea of dereliction or, more simply, "loss," offers us a structuring trope for reading and understanding women's narratives. This conception of loss can be situated broadly within feminist work in psychoanalysis, critical theory, and trauma studies (works by Laura Brown, Juliana Schiesari, Judith Butler, and Cathy Caruth). Like Brown, I contend that, in addition to overt traumatic instances such as abuse, rape, or incest, women experience repetitive interpersonal events that produce, for women as women, a sense of loss. Loss, then, can range from the "trivial"--losses such as losing one's maiden name in marriage--to the traumatic experience of rape, the loss of a child or mother, or monumental cultural absences like exclusion from historical, philosophical, and literary narratives such as those discussed by Irigaray or by African-American critic Hortense Spillers.
In thinking about the economies of loss, the central starting point is Freud's well-known 1917 essay, "Mourning and Melancholia." Here, Freud considers the affect of mourning in order to understand the mental disorder of melancholia. At first, the mechanics of both mourning and melancholia operate in a similar way: one is propelled into mourning or melancholia due to the loss of a loved object or a loss of a more abstract nature--that is, "one's country, liberty, an ideal, and so on" (243). During the work of mourning, the lost object continues to exist as the mind slowly, and with enormous amounts of energy, withdraws its libidinal attachment bit by bit from this object, and the ego is eventually freed. In mourning, then, one comes to terms with one's own relation to the lost object; one performs a kind of psychical working out. However, in melancholia, this process is circumvented. The lost object is set up inside the ego and a kind of compensation is effected. But this identification with, and internalization of, the lost object is not without cost. For though the object is kept within the ego, there remains an ambivalence; feelings of both love and hate (hate because the object has been taken away) are incorporated, hence the expressions of self-depreciation so often accompanying melancholia--what Freud calls an impoverishment of the ego. The result is aggression of the self against the self and an unacknowledged denigration of the lost object.
This entire process produces the common characteristics associated with both mourning and melancholy: "a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, a loss of the capacity to love, and the inhibition of...
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