Copyright © 2012
Avello Publishing Journal
ISSN: 2049 - 498X
Issue 1 Volume 2:
The Unconscious
THE CREATIVE LEISON BETWEEN LITERATURE AND LIFE
Jordan Skinner, University of Cornerstone, Michigan, America.
“The source of narritivity, which is necessary for the presentation of pathological
cases, lies in the functioning power of illness itself.”
Catherine Malabou
“Studies, yes; why stories, or cases”
Oliver Sacks
1. Narrative as catharsis
The human sciences, or the study of patient's behavioural activity has been as far
reaching as the history of pathology itself. My very short, concise, lucid, clear, analytical
study, which interests itself with the historical annotation of the crisis of impairment
begins, states Oliver Sacks (1995), 'with Hippocrates' scrupulous dictation of the patient's
history.' Sacks suggests that the history of clinical writing, beginning with Hippocrates,
reached its climax with the advent of the impersonal psychiatric and neurological
sciences of the late 20th century. The history of the patient is thus examined in relation to
the systematic criterion of necessity. The patient and her pathology in history thus far has
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been given little recognition; no acknowledgement of her subjective experience is offered
clearly. Any history of interest, suggests Sacks (1995), are “a form of natural history—
but they tell us nothing about the individual and his history; they convey nothing of the
person, and the experience of the person, as he faces, and struggles, to survive his
disease. There is no subject in a cursory phrase (a trisomic, albino, female of 21), which
could as well apply to a rat as a human being." (p. i) The chemist Carl Djerassi (2012)
suggests that the who-is-who is only a record of the person's life and is completely
reduced in an abstracted staccato fashion.
The human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), we learn from Aaron L Mishara
(2010), are based on the understanding of meaningful connections between historical
events. This historical-human science generally works from historical fragments to
describe the object of study. This enterprise, therefore, has historically approached the
whole through fragmented narratives, finding value in each constituent. This clinical
approach, with the development of neurological and scientific psychology of the 20th
century, has fallen asunder to technical mechanisms followed by the necessity for
production. With the rise of capitalism, the clinic began removing subjectivity from its
object of engagement—viewing treatment in relationship with production. Cases and
studies gave way to impersonal management where the amount of prescribed medication
has continued to grow perilously high. The pharmaceutical industry is driven by creating
illnesses in healthy people so that more medicine can be sold. Catherine Malabou (2012),
in the section ‘Literary Forms of Neuropathology’ of her book The New Wounded, calls
for retrieving cases as a subjective approach to neuropathology and returning narration to
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the clinic. This tradition of clinical narration, suggests Sacks, must be endowed with new
life and granted a new destiny; it must be revived. Luria (1972) wrote: ‘The power to
describe, which was so common to the great nineteenth-century neurologists and
psychiatrists, is almost gone now... It must be revived.’(vii) The Mind of a Mnemonist
and The Man with a Shattered World, are Luria’s own attempts to revive this lost
tradition. The tradition must be reminded: to engage in the clinic means to work with
persons, to work with narrations of trauma.
Richard Kearney (2012) in his essay Writing Trauma shows the solution to this
curse of cyclical repetition, or as I want to call it the curse of reputational clinical
production, to be ‘the conversion of the untold wound into some form of telling’.
Through the telling of the wound, according to Levi-Strauss after Aristotle, brings ‘some
sort of catharsis which suspends - through the purging of pity and fear - the compulsive
acting out of mute trauma’ With powerful insight Malabou (2012) suggests: ‘Narrative
work is a clinical gesture’(54).
Aristotle famously suggested that the power of narrative and more specifically
tragic narrative arouses pity and fear in such a way which culminates in a cleansing or
purging of those passions. This he notably calls catharsis. Such catharsis can be seen
through ‘neurological novels’ such as The Man with a Shattered World which tells about
the 25 year case conducted by the late Russian neuro-psychologist Aleksandr R. Luria.
The patient, Zasetsky, was 23 years old when injured in the Battle of Smolensk on March
2, 1943. During this battle a bullet entered his left parieto-occipital area, resulting in a
long coma. Following this he developed a form of agnosia and became unable to perceive
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the right side of things. Objects which he was able to see appeared frequently as
fragmented pieces rather than whole objects. Oddly, even the right side of his own body
was invisible to him. This neurological novel assumes the task of telling the story of an
instant that destroyed the patient’s whole life. This remarkable story tells how this
patient—forced to relearn even the simplest mental based activities—takes up writing
about the injury as a form of recovery. This form of clinical narration or as Kearney
(2012) calls it narrative as catharsis allows the patient to purge their trauma by exposing
it through narrative. Catharsis (κάθαρσις) derived from the Greek verb καθαίρειν means
to clean or to purge. While purging something means to push something out, purifying
something means getting to the base to cleanse what is not seen. In this way narrative as
catharsis gives impetus to the treatment of victims of trauma through their own autotherapy of internal attunement. In this way the wounded take hold of their wound.
I am not, however, negating the necessity for the therapist, but instead wish to
show narratives ability to offer attunement internally and that, according to Jason
Thompson’s Writing About Trauma: Catharsis or Rumination?(2010), the neural
substrate of such self-mirroring processes is not necessitated by the presence of the
therapist. Thompson points out ‘Solzhenitsyn continued to write secretly in the Gulag,
while therapy stops when the therapist goes on vacation’(275). Kearney (2012) illustrates
that ‘storytelling which forever fails to cure trauma never fails to try to heal it. And in this
very effort itself there is pleasure: the pleasurable purgation of pity and fear.’
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2. The trauma of the author: Joyce, Kafka & Beckett
If narration possesses the ability for catharsis, can it not be suggested that some of the
world’s greatest writers are perhaps engaging in their own self-therapy, where the wound
is exposed by the wounded in the form of factious as opposed to fictitious narration?
Through stories, I suggest, we are presented an author’s trauma. To illustrate this I will
turn to the work of James Joyce, Franz Kanka, and Samuel Beckett.
In an interview, the Austrian-American chemist, novelist, and playwright Carl
Djerassi (2012) suggested that writing fiction is a form of auto-psychoanalysis. “Most
psychoanalysts, states Djerassi (2012), would say that it is impossible—you need an
analyst and an analysand—but I can perhaps only say that these psychoanalysts have
never written fiction or plays or they wouldn’t say that.” This term analysand was first
used by Lacan to specify the active nature of the participant in the analysis. Could it be
that literary figures such as Joyce, Beckett, or Kafka, whose own writing mirrors some of
their own traumatic experiences, are in this way the Lacanian analysand?
Joyce, while bringing his daughter, Lucia, to visit Jung in Zurich was told that he
would be as incurably psychotic as his daughter if he had not penned Ulysses (cited in
Kearney, 2012).
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In the concluding lines of Writing trauma: Catharsis in Joyce, Shakespeare and
Homer, Richard Kearney suggests that Ulysses is:
a tireless literary effort to awaken, cathartically, from such historic nightmares by
restoring forfeited stories and bringing ghosts back to life. It is, in short, a work of
mourning and recovery. A writing which translates wounds into scars, flesh into
fiction. A working through of trauma.
Kearney (2012) begins this essay telling the story of how James Joyce, in a letter to his
brother Stanislaus on 13 November 1906, announces that he has just started a new "short
story" - it is called Ulysses. In this letter Joyce explains that the idea for Ulysses came
because of a memory triggered by a recent mugging in a street in Rome. At this time
Joyce had been fired from his job at the bank and on his way home—after having drunk
away his severance pay—was robbed and left lying in the gutter, destitute, despondent
and bleeding. According to Kearney (2012), it was at this moment that Joyce
remembered being assaulted several years previously (in June of 1904) and was rescued
from the gutter by a man called Hunter, "a cuckolded Jew" who dusted him down and
took him home for a cup of cocoa. "In true Samaritan fashion," as Joyce put it. This
repetition of woundings triggered a lost memory where an immigrant Jew came to the
rescue of a wounded Dubliner and planted a seed of catharsis in his imagination. Kearney
(2012) continues this tale several weeks after the Rome mugging when:
James Joyce and Nora were given tickets to an opera whose librettist was called
Blum. This second moment happened, after his humiliating fall in a Roman side
street, furnished the name of his paternal protagonist, Leopold Bloom. Thus was
born the longest short story ever told: Ulysses. The tale of a father and a son
traversing wounds on the way to healing.
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‘Writing his book of trans-generational trauma - of Ulysses and Telemachus, of King and
Prince Hamlet, of Stephen and Bloom – was’, states Kearney (2012), ‘the "writing cure"
for Joyce's own trauma.’ Storytelling which fails to cure trauma, indices, as Aristotle put
it, tragic ‘purgation’ which has the effect of release. What, then, is the difference between
Joyce’s factious tour de force and Zasetsky’s journals? In both cases the wound is taken
up by the wounded and healing is seen through the formation of a story: a literary
confrontation.
If Joyce’s Ulysses is a story of trans-generational trauma, I next point to a story of
transformational trauma: Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. In the first line of this work the
author reveals: ‘One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he
discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.’(2000,p. 1)
The story, which is centralized on this transformation, is not merely a tale of a man
changing into a bug, but is instead an account of what happens after this change; it is a
tale of a post-traumatic attack where Gregor finds himself among the ranks of the new
wounded [les nouveaux blesses]. Therefore, The Metamorphosis is Kafka’s own account
of a post-lesional existence. This story is not an account of the annihilation of the identity
of Gregor Samsa, but is instead the metamorphosis of the vestige of this identity after a
trauma. If, as we have seen above, narration is a form of therapy, Malabou’s The New
Wounded (2012) reminds us that: ‘every therapy, in one manner or another, starts with
the vestiges or the ruins of identity rather than with the metamorphic effects of its
deracination.’(69) Malabou (2012) states:
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The unthinkable is the metamorphosis that makes an unrecognizable subject
emerges from an ontologically and existentially secret place. The unthinkable is a
discontinuous—most often sudden—transformation, through which a decreased
identity deserts it former reference points—which it no longer recognizes as its
own—and fixates upon the undecipherable touchstones of an “outer world.”(xv)
Gregor, in finding himself morphed in to a bug embodies this unthinkable; he belongs to
the family of trauma. This family of trauma which shares commonality in their effects all
bears witness to the same causality: they are, Malabou insists, the new wounded.
Malabou (2012) states that the new wounded are ‘any patient in a state of shock who,
without [necessary] having suffered brain lesions, has seen his or her neuronal
organization and psychic equilibrium permanently changed by trauma’ (10). In this way,
Žižek (2008) states, ‘today’s socio-political reality itself imposes multiple versions of
external intrusions, traumas, which are just that, meaningless brutal interruptions that
destroy the symbolic texture of subject’s identity’ (11).
While Joyce’s story confronts his physical violence of a street attack, Kafka’s tale
is a confrontation with the destructive effects of socio-symbolic/socio-political violence
(social exclusion, social responsibility, etc.).
the victims of socio-political traumas present today the same profile as the victims
of natural catastrophes (tsunamis, earthquakes, floods) or grave accidents (serious
domestic accidents, explosions, fires). We entered a new era of political violence
where politics draws its resources from the renunciation to the political sense of
violence. […] All traumatising events tend to neutralize their intention and to
assume the lack of motivation proper to chance incidents, the feature of that
which cannot be interpreted. Today, the enemy is hermeneutics. […] This erasure
of sense is not only discernible in countries at war, it is present everywhere, as the
new face of the social which bears witness to an unheard-of psychic pathology,
identical in all cases and in all contexts, globalized. (Malabou (2007, 258-9) as
cited by Žižek (2008).
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If Malabou is correct in pointing out that the commonality of the new wounded,
through this coalescent family is unable to be harmonically exposed. This collective is
unable to be infiltrated and no interpretation can penetrate their disease. We are entirely
outside of them, and we have no words to explain their experience, for ‘what rhetoric,
asks Malabou (2012), could possibly account for the breakdown of connections, for
destructive metamorphosis? And who would write the aphasics novel? Who would write
the story of losing all effect’(55)? Only those among the ranks of the new wounded have
the privilege of such exposition. Therefore, the only access available to us—those trapped
outside this family of wounded—is through narration and, as we will see, theatre.
Malabou (2012) suggests that neurological case histories must borrow much from
theatre—in particular, from Beckett’s theatre, whose form might provide inspiration for
the staging of neuro-pathological “cases”. The Portuguese neurologist Antonio Damasio
(2000), has compared many of his patients to that of Winnie from Beckett’s Happy Days,
who is the incarnation of wakefulness without consciousness’(162-167) quoted in
Malabou (2012, p. 55). Damasio (2000) explains:
Wakefulness is best described from watching the transition from sleep to
wakefulness. The indelible picture of that transition that always comes to my
mind is that of Winnie in Beckett's Happy Days when the bell rings at the
beginning of the first act: Winnie opens her eyes to the audience and declares,
"Another heavenly day." On she goes, like a morning sunrise, in a state which
will permit her brain to form images of her surroundings: her bag, her toothbrush,
the rustling sounds of Willie, her body, which, she tells us, does not have much
pain that day, "hardly any." Wakefulness stops at the end of Winnie's day when
the bell rings to close the first act (163).
Patients with certain neurological conditions, states Damasio (2000), are awake and yet
lack what core consciousness would have added to their thought process: images of
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knowing centered on a self. The theatre of absence, suggests Malabou (2012), is the
privileged expression of such affective impoverishment and destructive metamorphosis.
Malabou (2012) shows that the theatre for Deleuze (1989) is the theatre of exhausted
identity. Such identity is the possible born after the exhaustion of all possibles.
There is no longer any possible…Does he exhaust the possible because he is
himself exhausted because he has exhausted the possible? He exhausts himself in
exhausting the possible, and vice-versa. He exhausts that which, in the possible, is
not realized. He has had done with the possible, beyond all tiredness, “for to end
yet again.”(Deleuze 1989, p.152)
Couldn’t these words, asks Malabou (2012), which describes the Beckettian character, as
the “exhausted,” also perfectly well characterize the neurological patient? In this way
Mishara (2010) is quite correct in suggesting that ‘literature documents and records
cognitive and neural processes of self with an intimacy that is otherwise unavailable to
neuroscience. Therefore, narrative, as manifested in Zasetsky’s journals, Kafka’s bizarre
account, or Beckett’s theatre of absence, is usually the privileged site of traumatic
exposition. The writing of neurological suffering—the theatre of absence or the novel of
“brain ache”—raises the vertiginous question, concludes Malabou (2012), of the psyche’s
survival of its own annihilation.(56)
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Kafka, F. (2000). The Metamorphosis. New York: Penguin.
Kearney, R. (2012). Writing trauma: Catharsis in Joyce, Shakespeare and Homer.
[online] Retrueved July 20, 2012, from hppt://www.abc.net.au
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