16
Towards
a Writing without Power: Notes on the Narration of Madness
SAGE Publications, Inc.200410.1191/0967550704ab002oa
BrendanStone
University of Sheffield, UK, b.stone@ shef.ac.uk
Address
for correspondence: Brendan Stone, Department of English Literature, University
of Sheffield, Shearwood Mount, Shearwood Road, Sheffield, S10 2TD, UK; Email:
b.stone@ shef.ac.uk
In this paper I consider
some of the implications, possibilities and dangers of addressing the experience
of `madness' or `mental illness'1 within autobiographical narrative:
in particular, I ask how madness can be narrated, or spoken. Engaging
with theoretical interventions by, amongst others, Jacques Derrida, Michel
Foucault, Shoshana Felman and Maurice Blanchot, and looking at three autobiographies
of madness, I suggest that an attentive reading of narrative form, as the
outworking and evidence of a way of knowing and thinking about the world,
may reveal authorial attempts to manage and stretch the constraints inherent
in conventional narrative's tendency toward linearity and resolution. This
tendency, I argue, is inimical to the expression of madness. Insinuated in
this process of working with form is a particular narrative mode of existence
, which has implications for the psychodynamics of living with mental
distress. With reference to the work of Sarah Kofman on the representation
of trauma, I propose that her conception of a `writing without power' may
be a salutary way in which to address chronic distress, and to reformulate
identity in the light of biographical disruption.
SPEAKING
OF MADNESS How can one speak of that before which all possibility of speech
ceases? ~ Sarah Kofman Fundamental difficulties present themselves to the
autobiographer recording a descent into the troubled spaces of madness. Traditional
narrative form, in which raw events are recodified into a coherent plot, and
also language's inherent quality of producing meaning via order and sequence,
may be inimical to the expression of what Julia Kristeva (1989: 33), writing
of melancholia, has called the `excess of an unorderable cognitive chaos'.
Many autopathographers2 have
17
addressed
precisely this difficulty. For instance, in 1903 Daniel Schreber wrote of
his psychotic experience: `I cannot of course count upon being fully understood
because things are dealt with that cannot be expressed in human language; they exceed human understanding. ... To make myself ... comprehensible I shall
have to speak much in images and similes. (Schreber, 1955: 41). More recent
memoirists who have expressed similar sentiments include the following: Ross
Burke (1995: 193), who writes that `The truth cannot be expressed. It is the
land of the id'; Andrew Solomon (2002: 16), who insists depression `can be
described only in metaphor and allegory'; Lauren Slater (2000: 21~20), who
writes of the `subtleties and horrors and gaps in my past for which I have
never been able to find the words'; and William Styron (1990: 83), who speaks
of a `horror', `so over- whelming as to be quite beyond expression'. Such
sentiments call to mind contentions emerging from `trauma theory', that body
of work which, amongst other things, addresses the epistemological implications
of traumatic experience and its representation: in particular, they evoke
the supposedly unspeakable nature of trauma. This aporetic state is engendered
by (at least) two factors. First, because severe shock is not fully cognitively
processed, it is both known (in the body, and occurring as nightmares, symp-
toms and flashbacks), and simultaneously unknow~ because unavailable to the
ordinary mechanisms of memory and narrative (see, for instance: Caruth, 1996; Felman and Laub, 1992; Freud, 1991; Herman, 1994). Secondly, and more prosaically,
the problem- atic of the unspeakable arises in the question of whether it
is possible to fit the limit experience of shock, psychical chaos, crisis,
or acute suffering into a narrative, when such experiences are in themselves
profoundly anti-narrational in character. Moreover, if we do narrate the limit
experience, surely this narration would transform trauma into something that
it was, and is, no~ something governed by or- der, sense, reason and progression.
And would not such a narrative be a false story, one which is dissonant with
the self's distress? While one might conceivably argue that the cautionary
sentiments of the memoirists I have quoted simply represent instances of a
version of the rhetorical device of recusatio,3 and that, in the light of
the context in which they appear, that is, within memoirs of madness, exemplify
only the topos of literary self-deprecatio confidently demonstrating literary
ability in the very act of denying i I want to suggest that, given their subject
matter, such declara- tions merit more serious consideration. For, in the
case of madness, the questions I have highlighted as crucial in considering
the representation of trauma come into particularly sharp relief. It is,
18
arguably,
an a priori proposition that to faithfully describe or express the manifestations
of madness within a discourse governed by reason will be an undertaking, which,
at the least, is fraught with difficulty. Madness is, after all, defined,
one might say constructed, by its very difference from reason, and also, to
some extent at least, by its vari- ance from the readable forms of narrative; generally speaking it is characterized variously by fragmentation, amorphousness,
entropy, chaos, silence, senselessness. Inhabiting the sufferer's mind is
not the singular internal voice of though a voice that might be com- pared
to a narrator's accent imposing coherence on the disparate fragments of `story'; on the contrary, consciousness is filled with wreckage, dispersion, obsessional
repetition, or, inversely, character- ized by stasis, aphony, catatonia. Such
being-states do not fit well with narrative's drive to organize and arrange
experience: whether the author is describing his or her experience from within
madness, or from a position ostensibly situated outside it, there would appear
to be a disjunction between the content to be narrated and the possi- bilities
inhering in conventional narrative forms. The psychoanalyst and linguist Julia
Kristeva addresses some of these issues in her book Black su~ a meditation
on depression and melancholia and their relationship to art and literature.
She con- tends there that the madness of chronic depression is characterized
by a `glaring and inescapable' `lack of meaning ... compelling me to silence'
(Kristeva, 1989: 3). `For the speaking being', she goes on, `life is a meaningful
life' (1989: 6), but without the cogency of `speech', however, meaning is
lost: melancholics are `mute and steadfast devo- tees of their own inexpressible
container ... unbelieving in language' (1989: 14). The depressed person `appears
to stop cognizing as well as uttering, sinking into the blankness of asymbolia
or the excess of an unorderable cognitive chaos' (1989: 33). In Kristeva's
analysis, then, the narrative rendition of melancholia is beset by what might
first appear to be insuperable difficulties: madness is characterized either
by a chaotic flux, which is by its nature unorderable, or by a frozen stasis,
concomitant with which is a powerlessness inimical to the willed production
of meaning that is the narration of one's story. The question of whether narrative,
indeed linguistic, representation is intrinsically inimical to the expression
of madness also informed the famous debate between Michel Foucault and Jacques
Derrida, initiated in 1961 by the publication of Foucault's landmark work
Folie et deraison (the much abridged English translation to which I refer
here is entitled Madness and civilization (Foucault, 1999)): in fact one could
say that this issue was the fulcrum on which Derrida's trenchant critique
turned. There is not space here to do justice to
19
the
richness of the arguments aired (for a lucid and accessible account of the
debate see Boyne, 1990), but, in my reading, and addressing the radical breach
between madness and reason, both philosophers did agree that the essence of
madness is its radical `unsayability'. Thus, in Derrida's terms (1978: 43):
`madness is what by essence cannot be said', while for Foucault (1999: 107),
if madness assumes `an appearance in the order of reason', it departs from
its essence, `thus becoming the contrary of itself'; discourse about madness,
therefore, `is merely reason', even though madness, `is itself the negation
of reason'. The crux of Derrida's objection to the project of Madness and
civilization was that in practice Foucault forgot his own monitory sentiments.
Specifically, Derrida claimed that Foucault, in attempting to write the archaeology
of the `silence' (Foucault, 1999: xiii) dividing madness from reason (a divide
that Foucault claims took place at a historical juncture), by means of revisiting
the `zero point... at which madness is an undifferentiated experience' (1999:
xi), was over- reaching himself. For Derrida, the schism between madness and
rea- son is absolute, and the Foucaultian project merely reinters madness
within reason: only by `imprisoning madness' can `speech ... open up the space
for discourse' because `the reign of finite thought can be established only
on the basis of the more or less disguised internment, humiliation, fettering
and mockery of the madman within us, of the madman who can only be the fool
of a logos which is father, master, and king' (Derrida, 1978: 61). If we accept
these arguments, then a fundamental problem con- fronting the autopathographer
of madness is that, to use Derrida's terms, `by its essence, the sentence
is normal. It carries normality within it' (1978: 5~5); or to put it another
way: in constructing sense-making sentences the essence of madness evaporates,
is swal- lowed up by reason. Certainly in one view, this could be construed
as a potentially beneficial effec one might picture the reasonable discourses
of sanity as an island reached by the exhausted swimmer adrift in the turbulent
tides of psychic chaos. Yet I think one might legitimately question what value
the resultant narrative would realistically hold for its author if its very
structure and dynamics were so absolutely dissonant with the experience intended
by its account. Would not such a document, governed as it would be by the
reason- ableness of linearity, cause and effect, and the progressive accumu-
lation of insight and meaning, completely subsume the alterity of madness
within the parameters of reasoned discourse? And is there not a sense in which
this would represent a kind of violence inflicted on the life narrated? I
will shortly explore one approach to the writing
20
of madness
and trauma in which the limitations of narrative and linguistic form may be
negotiated in a more salutary fashion by the autopathographer, but before
I come to that I want first to outline a further potential difficulty awaiting
those who revisit the dark spaces of lunacy. PERILOUS JOURNEYS Whatever the
arguments surrounding its originating `cause', if madness is a condition centring
on and evoked within various aspects of cognition, then the autopathographical
venture will involve a rene- gotiating of the spaces of the self in which
suffering is, or was, experi- enced. That is to say: to formulate a narrative
will necessitate a willed passage into and through the same spaces of the
sel~ thought, memory and emotio in which illness has been, and possibly still
i~ manifest. The autopathographer must will themselves back into, and spend
sustained periods within, an interiority which has been experienced as hostile
or dangerous. Because madness is intermeshed with the very processes with
which we tell stories and make meaning, the autopathographer needs to employ
in a systematic and sustained fashion cognitive tools that are overshadowed,
inflected, even altered, by the remembrance and reverberations through time
of their own disruption. Thus, the very tools with which autopathographers
construct their stories, those mechanisms without which story would be impossible,
are no longer innocent and can no longer be taken for granted. Indeed, the
manner in which they tell their stories, the tools employed to tell the story,
are themselves a significant part of the story content. All of this, I want
to suggest, means that the narrative journey may be a perilous one, and that
the form of narrative might map more than a discrete history, but rather dramatize
the very echoes and reverberations of distress. This is, I would argue, the
case with Elizabeth's Wurtzel's well- known memoir of depression, Prozac nation
(1999). For, just as the narrator of Dante's Inferno (Dante, 1997, Canto I)
laments that narration is itself a perilous enterpris~ `To tell/about those
woods is har~ so tangled and rough/And savage that thinking of it now, I feel/the
old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter~ so Wurtzel as narrator frequently
appears imperilled by the material she relates. Indeed narrative form often
seems to dramatize or perform the experiences Wurtzel describes, resulting
in an often radically incoher- ent text. The various factors which destabilize
its cohesion include the inconsistent use of tenses; apparent plot repetitions
to the point of tedium; continual displacements of the autobiographical self
into
21
other
fictional selves; the fragility of both tentative narrative schemas and of
the narrator's detachment from the events recalled; and the lack of a sense
of plot or character development. This last point is particularly arresting:
Prozac nation does not convey the impression of a life analysed and then reimagined
from an external narrative pos- ition of certainty; rather both protagonist
and narrator frequently seem to coalesce in their inability to hold to an
overview of either the experience of distress or its narration. There is little
suggestion in the book' s narrative economies of an external position of certainty
from which the narrator may gaze back and formulate a structured sjuzhet (or,
indeed, a coherent `subject'), which is somehow removed from the uncertainties
of events. The effect of this, together with the various other destabilizing
narrative devices, is to produce a startling, virtually textbook, representation
of that endless, repetitive grieving named by Freud (1958; 1981) as characterizing
melancholia. One particularly interesting feature of Prozac nation for my
context here is the way in which the ambiguous and confusing chronotopes 4
of Wurtzel' s novelistic text strikingly parallel her description of the way
in which a balanced sense of past, present and future are painfully dis- rupted
in her depression. So, passages narrated in the preterite (or simple past)
are continually disturbed by the incursion of the present tense, as if the
act of remembering has awoken slumbering horrors which invade the moment of
writing. As if attempting to explain this narratological and psychological
dynamic, at one moment in the text when describing a nervous collapse, Wurtzel
writes of the act of remembering as an invasive counterpart of breakdown:
I am collapsing and I am collapsing on myself. I am shards of glass, and I
am the person being wounded by the glass. I am killing myself. I am remembering
when my father disappeared. I am remembering when Zachary and I broke up in
ninth grade. I am remembering being a little child and crying when my mother
left me at nursery school. I am crying so hard, gasping for breath, I am incoherent
and I know it. (Wurtzel, 1999: 10~102) The cry here of `I am remembering',
evoking as it does both the protagonist's experience of memory as invasion,
but also, inevitably, the remembering consciousness of the narrator/writer,
leaves the reader uncertain who is remembering, who is incoherent: is it Wurtzel-as-protagonist,
Wurtzel-as-narrator, or both? Is this an event which has happened, or is it
still happening at the moment of writing? A similar sense of the narrative
self caught up in the events it relates, albeit conveyed via a very different
formal style, is evident
22
in Tracy
Thompson's memoir The beast: a journey through depression (1996). Despite
an ostensibly assured narrative voice, Thompson tells her story, particularly
the story of an abusive relationship, with very few narrative overviews. Relating
her involvement with a man who at first appears kind, but is soon revealed
as a manipulating bully intent on convincing her that she is responsible for
bringing her suffering onto herself, narration, as in Prozac nation, proceeds
as if the events are still happening, and as if Thompson is unaware of the
story's outcome. Because of this the reader may feel temporarily unsure whether
Thompson-narrator has managed to extricate herself from the destructive mindset
in which Thompson-protagonist blamed herself for the abuse; indeed, reading
The beast can feel at times like attending to the groundless self-blame of
a frightened, bullied woman. The frustration for readers may be that what
is plain to them, is apparently lost on both protagonist and narrator. The
claus- trophobic sense of being caged in a suffering and oppressed consciousness
is such that any hints of retrospection, or narrative distancing, stand ou
because of their relative scarcity. As with Wurtzel' s memoir, The beast occupies
an uncertain narrative ground with the narrator refusing to completely distance
herself from the protagonist's experience of distress. While both Thompson
and Wurtzel do actually provide narrative overview in the form of epilogues,
afterwords and introductions, as well as occasional prolepses and analepse
their narrative des- cents imply not only the problematization of narrative
as a detached vehicle for an objective life history, but also, I suggest,
evoke a kind of speaking, or narration. In each of these texts the narrating
self refuses to separate itself off from its `history', and resists a strict
demarcation of discrete regions of health and illness, instead allowing the
unsettling refluxes of distress and uncertainty to imbricate its telling.
In sum, whether entirely willed or not, the narrative stances adopted are
predicated on an openness to the unforeseen, to the irrup- tion of the `past'
within the present moment of writing, and most importantly do not attempt
to shut out these emergent and anarchic energies; they are each, to use Peter
Brooks's formula as he describes the narrative dynamics at work in Freud'
s case history of the `Wolf Man', restagings of a `complex and buried past
history ... as it cov- ertly reconstitutes itself in the present language'
(Brooks, 1992: 283). WRITING `WITHOUT POWER' All of this brings me back to
the first of the difficulties I spoke of earlier: the issue of whether it
is possible to speak of madness in such
23
a way
that does not do violence to the speaker and their experience. The French
philosopher Sarah Kofman (1998) imagined (and demon- strated) just such a
way of speaking and writing in her book Smoth- ered words, an extraordinary
and moving meditation on the effects of the Holocaust on discourse (see also
Kofman, 1995). She named this mode écrire sans pouvoi~ `writing without power'.
Throughout much of her work Kofman was concerned to highlight and challenge
the way that traditional forms of narrative in their dependence on retrospective
closure, linearity, unity and coherence repress the possibility of multiplicity
and otherness. She searched for, as Vivian Liska puts it, `a mode of thinking
and writing capable of undoing the repressive authority and exclusionary mastery
in a philosophical tradition that pretends to have conclusive truths, to own
the ``last word'' ' (Liska, 2000: 91). Addressing the representation of trauma,
Kofman herself put it like this: `To speak: it is necessar~ without the power:
without allowing language, too powerful, sovereign, to master the aporetic
situation, absolute powerlessness and very distress, to enclose it in the
clarity and happiness of daylight' (Kofman, 1998: 10). Note the two imperatives
in Kofman's dictum: first, to speak; and second, to speak without power. Such
a speaking, she says, does not attempt to master the traumatic event; does
not attempt to make that which is aporeti~ intrinsically full of doub into
something that can be fully known and understood (and, therefore, consigned
to `history' and forgotten). Instead it represents, as Kofman's translator
Madeleine Dobie explains it, an `attempt to give voice to a language beyond
the authority of an author'; and is a `writing without being able to write
... the impossible writing which is not of the order of intentionality and
power' (in Kofman, 1998: xiv). Importantly, for Kofman the converse of this
impossible writin~narratives defined by their self-sufficiency, their movement
towards closure and coher- ence, their inherent drive for mastery over the
chaos and incompre- hensibility of events, reproduces the dynamic that led
to the Holocaust, and which W.G. Sebald (2002), in his novel Austerlit~ a
work that tracks the reverberations of this historical trauma on the individual
psych called a `mania for order and purity' (2002: 278). Kofman, therefore,
links the desire for philosophical and narrative mastery to a desire to exterminate
that which is othe ~o destroy the unknown, and to delimit the infinite. Kofman's
concept of a writing without power is, I think, particularly relevant and
useful when thinking about the narration of mental distress. And significantly
this particular mode of represen- tation (and the kind of knowing implied
by it) stands in stark contrast
24
to
the world view, implicitly underpinning a purely biomedical stance on madness; indeed, one might characterize the biomedical position as precisely an attempt
to enclose the intrinsically aporetic in the clarity and happiness of (a scientistic,
diagnostic) daylight. From such a starkly materialist position, disease is
knowable, as Roger Levin (1987: 165) puts it, `as the simply physical through
reductive analyses unencumbered by the complexity of subjective meanings'; yet as we have seen, memoirists frequently point to the mystery and unknow-
ability inherent in madness. Its extremity, its antinomic relation with reason
and linearity, its generation of both insight and utter despair, its inextricable
implication in the social, the complex effects of stigma, and, moreover, that
all this and more is experienced through the very lens of `mad' perception,
means that a narrative model that only explains, connects and concludes will
at best fail to signify its object. The American psychologist and author,
Lauren Slater (2000), directly and indirectly addresses some of these issues
in a memoir of her own mental illness entitled Spasm. She claims her account
is `passionately dedicated to the truth' (2000: 160), yet it is subtitled
A memoir with lies, and she describes it as a `slippery, playful, impish,
exasperating text, shaped ... like a question mark' (2000: 223). Spasm mixes
together fiction with memoir, with its author refusing to reveal what is `true'
and what `false'; it is couched in a poetic and postmo- dern style, in which
the `end' of the story occurs in the middle of the book, and a metanarrative
is utilized to usurp any suggestion of a detached or transparent view; it
includes letters to the reader and the publisher, and extracts from medical
textbooks. The point of all this is that Slater wants to convey narrative
(rather than narrowly referential) truth, by using a metaphorical (rather
than an infor- mational) discourse: `invention', she claims, can `get to the
heart of things', while metaphor can gesture towards `the silence behind the
story': `through it we can propel silence into sound' (2000: 196).5 Slater,
then, is not concerned with autobiographical precision. She openly acknowledges
that the `sounds' generated by her use of metaphorical discourse and elliptical
narrative methods would not correspond to that chimeric shibboleth, the detached,
objective life- narrative. Yet, as she puts it, `even if the sounds are not
altogether accurate, they do resonate in some heartfelt place we cannot dismiss',
and it is this poetic resonance that satisfies the autobiographical impulse:
`That is why it is in this book, although not always factually correct, that
I have finally been able to tell a tale eluding me for years, the story of
my past' (Slater, 2000: 2120). In Spasm Slater draws out the implications
of those memoirists' sentiments regarding the unspeakability of madness with
which I
25
opened
this essay. Her valorization of a metaphorical, literary approach to the narration
of its strange alterity also chimes with the sentiments of the anonymous author
of Autobiography of a schizophrenic experience, who, even in the midst of
her madness, discovered the salutary value of an artistic engagement: `I was
unable to think coherently or plan any action, but I had to use my Poetic
imagination instead, for poetry could be counted on not to lead me astray'
(Anon., 1964: 997): At the end of Spasm Slater highlights some of the more
socio- political ramifications of her writing strategy, by emphasizing the
narratological nature of diagnosis, and implicitly arguing for the kind of
`cultural epidemiology' in which, as David Levin (1987: 7) puts it, `The assumed
subject of epidemiological study can no longer be sepa- rated from questions
traditionally reserved for humanism and the social sciences.' Slater's description
is less formally expressed, but occupies the same thematic ground: All I know
for sure is this. I have been ill much of my life. Illness has claimed my
imagination, my body, my brain, and everything I do I see through its feverish
scrim. All I can tell you is this. Illness, medicine itself, is the ultimate
narrative; there is no truth there, as diagnoses come in and out of vogue
as fast as yearly fashions. Line up all the DSMs, the book from which mental
health professionals draw their diagnoses, and you will see how they have
changed, how they have radically altered from decade to decade depending upon
the Zeitgeist of the time.... Therefore, despite the huge proliferation of
illness memoirs in recent years, memoirs that talk about people' s personal
experiences with Tourette' s and postpartum depression and manic depression,
memoirs that are often rooted in the latest scientific ``evidence,' ' something
is amiss. To me, the authority seems illusory, the etiologies constructed.
(Slater, 2000: 219) A cultural epidemiology representing `the ideal of a fateful
inter- section' between `the sciences of nature and the sciences of life'
is seen by David Levin (1987: 8) as proffering the possibility that `the con-
dition of human suffering' might be fruitfully interpreted, while yet `acknowledging
its speech and listening openly to its dangerous truth'. He goes on to claim
that `even madness is death only when its truth cannot be heard. Compassion
begins when this truth and the pain it exacts can be freely shared' (1987:
8). It is to this en the proclamation of a dangerous truth, the sharing of
pain, and pos- sibly, as I shall later elaborate, the genesis of a more compassionate
stance towards mental illness in her readershi~ that Slater employs
26
a literary
or poetic autobiographical narrative style. So too, I think, Wurtzel and Thompson
in their novelistic, open and unsettling texts, and many other autopathographers
(see, for instance, Burke, 1995; Kaysen, 1995), attempt to twist the limits
of narrative structuring, using literary techniques so that the text might
point beyond itself to that which cannot be easily sai the silence behind
the story, or, perhaps, the reverberations of an ancient distress still at
work within the psyche, and showing through the writing consciousness like
a half-glimpsed palimpsest. In such works narrative remains unfi- nalized
and open ended, preserving the uncertainty inherent in their protagonists'
and narrators' experience of madness, refusing to con- sign the experience
wholly to a biochemical disruption within the self, or at least grappling
with the phenomenology of such synaptic storms. To use Derrida's terms, in
a passage where he appears to acknowledge the metaphorical, poetic drift of
Madness and civiliza- tion (and, incidentally, by this admission weakens his
critique in my view): `the silence of madness is not said, cannot be said
in the logos of this book, but is indirectly, metaphorically, made present
by its pathos' (Derrida, 1978: 37). Derrida is here evoking pathos as not
only that which excites pity or melancholy, but also as an art inflected by
transience and emotion, as opposed to one aspiring to permanence or the ideal:
logos. He is also addressing a very similar problematic to the one Kofman
considers in Smothered word~ encapsulated in her question: `How can one speak
of that before which all possibility of speech ceases?' (Kofman, 1998: 9).
A particularly intriguing commentary on the theme of the meta- phorical approach
to the `unrepresentable' can be found in the literary theorist Shoshana Felman's
essay `Education and crisis, or the vicissi- tudes of teaching' (Felman, 1995).
Felman, a professor at Yale, des- cribes the processes, problems and insights
encountered both by her students and herself during the teaching of an undergraduate
module on testimony and trauma. (Her analysis, with its emphasis on the organic,
evolving character of education, in which the learning process is osmotic
and mutual rather than monologic, has important things to contribute to pedagogical
debate, and it is not too far fetched, I think, to extrapolate from her essay
a model of a `teaching without power'.) On the representation of trauma, one
of Felman's most interesting conclusions is that inherent in the traumatic
experience is an intrinsic otherness, an alterity which, if the author is
not to produce a `bad faith narrative' (see Craib, 2000), cannot be `possessed'
or fully enclosed within a discrete narrative form. Citing the poets Mallarmé
and Celan, she formulates a notion of precocious testimony, which is, she
claims, `the very principle of poetic insight and the very core of the event
of
27
poetry
which makes ... languag through its breathless gasp speak ahead of its knowledge
and awareness and break through the limits of its own conscious understanding'
(Felman, 1995: 230). `Poetry', she continues, can `speak beyond its means'
and is thus able to testify to a half-known trauma, the repercussions of which,
in their `uncontrollable and unanticipated nature, still continue to evolve
even in the very process of the testimony' (1995: 30). Such an evolving is
evident in Slater's Spasm, and in the memoirs by Wurtzel and Thompson. The
sense connoted by their shifting and uncertain narrative dynamics is that
selfhood is still being formu- lated; the subjectivities described, therefore,
are not enclosed in the clarity of daylight, but are bound up with language,
expression and the negotiation of the temporal. Intrinsic to this, and implicit
in the notion of a writing without power, is that narrative in such works
allows space for otherness, or that which cannot be fully understood and assimilated.
In my context here, such an alterity stands for that which inheres in the
experience of madness but which the biomedical narrative cannot account for; more broadly, it also allows for the otherness of the self: narrative selfhood
is insinuated not as trans- parent, atomistic and contained, but as something
labile that cannot be completely known. Finally, Julia Kristeva also suggests
something along the same lines as Derrida, Kofman, and Felman, albeit in more
psychoanalytic terms, when she writes that `art seems to point to a few devices
that bypass complacency and, without simply turning mourning into mania, secure
for the artist and the connoisseur a sublimatory hold over the lost Thing'
(Kristeva, 1989: 97). Certainly her assertion that ``by means of prosody,
the language beyond language that inserts into the sign the rhythm and alliterations
of semiotic processes' (1989: 97) resonates with the agitation the `spasms'
perhap at work within narrative form in the memoirs by Wurtzel and Thompson.
Of parti- cular interest, and leading me conveniently towards the conclusion
of this essay, is that, in her analysis of the effects of the artistic sub-
limation of distress, Kristeva indicates that redemptive possibilities for
the self may lie in such an engagement with language: Sublimation' s dynamics,
by summoning up primary processes and idea- lization, weaves a hypersign around
and with the depressive void. This is allegory, as lavishness of that which
no longer is, but which regains for myself a higher meaning because I am able
to remake nothingness, better than it was and within an unchanging harmony,
here and now and forever. (1989: 99)
28
AGENCY
AND `SALVATION' Despite the openness to the unexpected which Felman highlights
in her account of teaching trauma, she does not shun the more linear and conventional
pedagogical aims of accumulative insight and direc- ted learning. Felman's
direction is tempered by a readiness to encoun- ter the `eventness' of the
classes, the texts and the conversations, but she still guides her charges
through the module. Progress, then, is not aleatory or haphazard, but is aimed
at facilitating a better under- standing of the mechanisms of testimony. Similarly,
in the context of autobiographical writing about the experience of mental
illness, it is important for me to emphasize that I am not envisaging a speak-
ing without power as equivalent to a speaking that eschews agency. Sarah Kofman's
model is inspired in part by the writings of Maurice Blanchot, in particular
a section of The infinite conversation where Blanchot discusses Robert Anteleme's
Holocaust memoir The human race, and then from this engagement examines the
dynamics of speak- ing the unspeakable. Blanchot writes that the crisis experience
in which selfhoo the sense of `I is utterly dispersed in and by the depredations
of extreme suffering can only be transformed into `salvation' with a restorative
reformulation of subjectivity: `there must be restore beyond this self that
I have ceased to be, and within the anonymous communit the instance of a Self-Subject
(Blanchot, 1993: 134). Blanchot describes this restored mode of exist- ence
as one which is `no longer ... a dominating and oppressive power drawn up
against the ``other' ' ' , but rather is that which can receive the unknown
and the foreign, receive them in the justice of a true speech (1993: 134).
But, intrinsic to true speec~ or a writing without powe~ is the reclamation
of the `I': if the psychical frag- mentation of acute distress is to be transformed
then a willed occupation of the ground of first-person discourse is essential.
Such ideas chime with those advanced by James Glass in his ongoing work on
the politics of the self and mental illness; indeed, the salutary effect of
narrative agency is one of the central concerns of his book Private terror/public
life (Glass, 1989). Glass, a professor of government at the University of
Maryland, has worked extensively with residents receiving medical treatment
in the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Mental Hospital, and in this book he records
and comments on their narratives. He is particularly sensitive to the importance
of language and its intimate implication with issues of action and agency,
and he links psychosis with a deleterious inter- nalization of language, which
in turn spawns a semi-autonomous `discursive' or symbolic realm displacing
the individual as agent,
29
and
in generating a disorienting power of its own. It is worth noting in my context
here Glass's insistence that delusion equates to action; psychosis is described
by his narrators as a drive and a dynamism that dismantles subjective structures
and dislodges the individual from the social, while also putting into place
a new, nightmarish architecture of the psyche. In contrast, the narratives
Glass records also represent a form of action, but one which restores the
self to a sense of its own agency; indeed, narration is itself the very condition
of agency. `Language', writes Glass, is `a form of action.... To speak was
to find oneself literally engaged with the action of speech.... Language,
being and metaphor became totally bound up in one another, and the speech
act itself took on a lived, vital quality' (Glass, 1989: 12). In Glass's analysis,
the agency of the autobiographical narrative act also returns the speaker
to `history, time, continuity and action ... to feel tied to the Other through
a dialectical and shared symbo- lism' (1989: 34); moreover, he contends that
`the shared, the public, the dramatic as artistic form moves outward in contrast
to the solip- sistic, isolated, realm of the interior monologue, the delusion
without any shared component or audience' (1989: 16). While the dialogic character
of autobiography is not my primary focus here, it is worth noting that in
these observations Glass concords with Blanchot's in- sistence on the redemptive
speech act being situated within a social context. On this point, it is interesting
to note that the memoirs by Slater, Wurtzel and Thompson are explicitly oriented
outwards towards their imagined readers. Each of these narratives openly acknowledges
the importance of the one who hears, thus demonstrat- ing an awareness of
an other outside the text; as such they implicitly contest notions of autobiographical
identity as atomistic and self- contained. Slater is particularly remarkable
in this regard, in that she links her metaphorical writing strategy to a desire
to reach out to the other haunting the fringes of her narrative: I have decided
not to tell you what is fact versus what is unfact prim- arily because a)
I am giving you a portrait of me, and b) because, living where I do, living
in the chasm that cuts through thought, it is lonely. ... Come with me, reader.
I am toying with you, yes, but for a real rea- son. I am asking you to enter
the confusion with me, to give up the ground with me.... Enter that lostness
with me. Live in the place where I am, where the view is murky, where the
connecting bridges and orient- ing maps have been surgically stripped away.
(Slater, 2000: 163) Such an awareness of the other points towards the potentially
transformative power of autobiographical discourse within culture.
30
When
the boundaries between self and other, author and reader are blurred in an
attempt to make the text a dialogical encounter as opposed to deepening that
Foucaultian silence separating reason and unreason, then there may be a possibility
that reading and writ- ing can become instances of praxis, a stage on the
path towards a more progressive politics. As I have said, to do this subject
justice would require a much longer discussion than I have space for, but
I think that Patrocinio Schweickart (2000) is proposing something very similar
in her illuminating essay `Reading ourselves: toward a feminist theory of
reading', where she urges a choice of the `dialectical over the deconstructionist
plot', suggesting that it is `dangerous for feminists to be overly enamoured
with the theme of impossibility' (2000: 4). Similarly, Marie Lovrod (1998),
in a study of sexual abuse survivor narratives, comes to a comparable conclusion,
and elo- quently summarizes how a transformative potential might inhere in
the transmission and reception of such texts: The writer as a reader of her
or his own experience seeks to build a bridge between ... the violent shocks
for which there have been no words and the reader of the survivor narrative
so that the process of mediation between abuse and culture may proceed toward
validation of the experience and transformation of the culture. (Lovrod, 1998:
32) CONCLUSION A writing without power, a true speech, or, as Blanchot (1993:
134) also names it, an `attention to affliction', is an ethical mode of being
because it is predicated not on a desire for total understanding, but allows
for an exces the unknown and the foreig which is outside of comprehension,
and approachable only via art, via the elliptical, the sidelong, the metaphorical.
In the case of a Holocaust memoir this is a particularly potent notion, as
it inverts those destructive dynamics bent on purity or homogeneity, but such
a just speaking is also germane in my context here, because, as that which
is outside reason, madness is patterned by the movements of `otherness'. A
just speech might be envisaged as the self speaking into, and of, multi- plicity
and inner storm with a singular voice, thereby strengthening a sense of selfhood
and agency (see Davidson and Strauss, 1992; Morin and Everett, 1990), while
yet remaining attentive and open to the unexpected, the mysterious, to dislocation
and uncertaint rather than imposing a rigid conceptual framework on the interior
realm. This is, potentially, a salutary mode of existence: allowing for the
irruptions of otherness within speech and writing may help
31
effect
a reconciliation with what Kristeva (1991: 1) names the `foreigner' `within
ourselves', and repudiate stasis and repression in favour of a joy which emerges
from `perpetual transience' (1991: 4). Paradoxically, however, such an openness
may also threaten the self. Allowing the othe in its very distres to be heard,
may be to re-experience the roots of the distress and disorder which have
precisely engendered, or been engendered by, madness. Yet it may only be in
such a mode of narrative existence that an authentic, and therefore ethical,
relation with the sel Blanchot's `salvation', or Kristeva's `remaking of nothingness
is possible.
NOTES
1 Both these terms can, for
different reasons, be problematic for those who live with acute mental distres
- hence my use of scare quotes here. In the rest of the essay I drop the
quote marks and generally use `madness'. I personally prefer this term because
it does not so overtly tie chronic distress to the medical model.
2 Autopathography: an autobiographical
story of illness.
3 A rhetorical device in
which a poet declines to write a certain type of poem or treat a particular
theme in his or her poetry because, ostensibly, he or she lacks the necessary
skill: a conviction of superiority usually lurks beneath these displays of
mock modesty.
4 The sense of space and
time in an artistic work (see Bakhtin, 1981: 234).
5 Cf. George Aichele' s
definition of metaphor as `any figure (or trope) of language, in which language
resists our desire to possess it through a single, identical framing of sense
and reference; the fundamental incompleteness of language' (Aichele, 1985:
143).
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NOTE
ON CONTRIBUTOR BRENDAN STONE is currently finishing his Ph.D. and teaching
in the Department of English Literature at the University of Sheffield. His
research project focuses on the relationship between narrative, identity and
mental illness; in particular he is interested in the ways in which individuals
living with chronic distress employ narrative to negotiate and construct a
sense of selfhood. His other research inter- ests include trauma and its representation,
and the intersections between fiction and autobiography.