Fun Home as Family Romance: Final Paper

"But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I lept."

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, is brimming with recognizable elements from nearly every text we've read this semester. It's a veritable index of Freudian particulars. We've got the intense devotion to lexical explication (i.e., looking things up in the dictionary) that we remember from Freud's essay on "The Uncanny," we've got dreams and dream analysis, Freudian slips, unreliable memories riddled with gaps and lacunae, recursive narrative structures, doubles, multiple returns of multiple repressions and above all, The Family as the harrowing forge of individual identity.

For the final paper I'd like you to discuss Fun Home as a family romance. In other words, how does Freud's essay illuminate our understanding of the family dynamic examined in this memoir? In Freud's terms, the family romance is a way of talking about the stories through which children negotiate their necessary separation from their parents. Much like the Freudian concept of Oedipal conflict, children necessarily struggle with both identification and rejection of parental authority; indeed the Oedipal struggle is premised on the death of the father. But how do you kill a father that is already dead?

In thinking about Fun Home as an active exercise of memory and narrative, it's important to consider that Bechdel has spoken about her work as not only a story about identity, but also a story about becoming an artist, an endeavor which also involves a negotiation with the influence of her father.

You can organize your use of Freud in this discussion any way you choose. I do, however, ask that your discussion include some commentary on the book's narrative structure: the relationship between text and image.

Due: Wednesday, December 17
Length: at least 5 pages.

Return to Oedipus

Freud’s well known concept was inspired by the Greek legends of Oedipus Rex, especially as they are expressed in Sophocles's play, who unknowingly marries his mother and kills his father. The Oedipus complex is way of talking about both the erotic and destructive components of the child’s (especially the male child’s) relation with its parents. Because the legend is about a figure who usurps the Father's role, both as family and state authority (husband and ruler) and suffers horrific mutilation and guilt as a result, the narrative is useful to Freud as a symbol of childhood rebellion and eventual conformity (or psychological "mutilation" for failure).

But the legend of Oedipus also has much in common with the ideas in Freud's essay, "The Family Romance." Oedipus is a figure who is on a quest to discover his parentage: he has been raised by surrogates, first a shepherd and later the royal family of Corinth. It is in order to learn the truth of his birth that he embarks on the journey that leads to his tragic enlightenment. It is the universality suggested in the tale, signaled by the solution to the Sphinx's riddle: "mankind," that intrigues Freud, who writes in The Interpretation of Dreams,

"His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours---because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our Father..."

I think it's interesting to note the way Freud reads literature here: he looks at it as something which throws light on the other narrative components of our lives---our dreams and our retelling of our pasts. In other words, the overlap between "psychoanalysis" and "literature," illuminates what both domains share: an interest in signification, symbolic representation, narrative, interpretation, issues of reading.

Freud worked and re-worked the idea of Oedipal struggle over the course of his life, using it as a way to think about how individuated consciousness is produced, how "humans" are made. As you recall, Freud theorized the pre-Oedipal infant as boundary-less and unfocused mass of needs and desires, unable to distinguish between objects or understand their relation, as this image of an "infant's eye view" suggests:



Pre-Oedipal consciousness is unable to distinguish between self and other, yet dependent on the care of others to satisfy basic necessities. Freud emphasizes the powerful early role of the child's relation to the mother and the mother's breast (or as illustrated in this slightly de-sexualized photograph from 1947, the bottle) as the site of early sexual pleasure or desire:



The pre-Oedipal child's world is focused on the Mother (or a fusion between Self and Mother):



into which the Father intervenes, an unwelcome rival and threatening challenger



to whose power the infant must eventually capitulate.



The child must concede power and centrality to adult authority, moreover his/her early polymorphous sexuality must be funneled into socially acceptable channels: no more self or incestuous pleasure and proper identification with properly gendered role models. The boy learns to accept and identify with male authority, the girl learns to identify with the mother and accede to this less powerful position (though perhaps always resentfully). Through negotiating the traumatic upheavals of the Oedipal struggle, a boundary-less nexus of libidinal pleasures learns to accept His or Her place in the vastly hierarchical scheme of things: gender roles reinforced, satisfactions postponed, authority accepted, the family and society reproduced.

I've sketched out a very simplified account of the Freudian Oedipal struggle because I want to highlight its narrative elements, its function as a story about the birth of individual consciousness through struggle and conflict with parental (and by extension, social) authority and power. But if the Oedipus narrative is a story about capitulation, the Family Romance is a tale of the child getting his own back, fighting for independence by rewriting the family narrative.

The Family Romance

In his short essay, "The Family Romance," Freud talks about the common childhood fantasy of imagining oneself adopted, the child of some other, much better and cooler set of parents. He uses the phrase to talk about the conflicts between parents and children as the child necessarily grows up and grows away from his family.

Freud theorized that a denigration of one's parents replaces an early overestimation of them and that such feelings and desires are not only part of a “healthy” transition to adulthood, but are less about actually “hating” one's parents than kind of contradictory “expression of the child’s longing for the happy, vanished days when his father seemed to him the noblest and strongest of men and mother the dearest and loveliest of women. He is turning away from the father whom he knows to-day to the father in whom he believed in the earlier years of his childhood; and his phantasy is no more than the expression of a regret that those happy days have gone...”

The "family romance" fantasy also addresses the child’s question, “who am I?” and so expresses an attempt to place oneself in a broader social history. Thus, it can also touch on issues of social relations and relations between extra-familial generations as well issues of aging and the passage of time.

My question for our discussion of Fun Home is: Is some element of the family romance fantasy necessary to autobiography, or even memory itself?

(The image above is Charles Ray's "The Family Romance," a sculpture in which all of the members of a generic family have been resized to equal height. Because the figures are not quite either "adult" or "child" sized---they are roughly 4 1/2 feet tall---it's not easy to resolve if it's the parents who have been brought down to size or the children who've been enlarged. Nevertheless, whenever I see it, I see miniaturized parents before I see a gigantic baby.)

Reading Readings of H

Some quick, pre-class feedback on the last round of papers for those waiting nervously.

As a whole it was a stronger group of papers than the first round. Students who were having trouble with development and organization improved in those areas. And pretty much across the board, everyone attempted analyses of the kind required by a non-conventional narrative like H with detailed attention given to the narrative's latent information and assumptions.

In no particular order, these are some individual bits of insight and interpretation that I thought were especially solid and useful. You may recognize some (in some cases many) of your own points here:

1) The "bicycle incident" is probably the most revealing example of the limitations of the "authorities" (parents, doctor, camp directors and counselors) point of view. From their angle, Benjamin is irrational and violent, a potential threat to others. From Benjamin's angle, the context of the incident is explained as well as Benjamin's remorse and realization that he acted wrongly. Here we also see a pattern consistently reproduced: Benjamin's actions are seen in isolation and not in context by those in authority over him.

2) Mr. and Mrs. Sherman are almost diametrical opposites: distant vs. too involved, cold vs. too emotional, one insisting that Benjamin "grow up," the other desiring that he remain her little boy. They are similar however in their lack of any sense of responsibility for Benjamin's "problems."

3) As two students pointed out, Mr. Sherman's never writing to Benjamin directly is symbolic of his inability to address the situation, i.e. his letters are not "addressed" to the right person. One paper specifically compared Mr. Sherman with the absent Master in The Turn of the Screw, another figure who avoided communication by letters and whose absence powerfully influenced the actions of the other characters. Another paper brought in Freud's essay on the "fort/da" game as a way to make sense of Elliot and Elliottown as a means to deal with this parental absence---like that game, the Elliottown fantasy gave Benjamin a sense of control and a way to, as one student said, "write his own story," a story much different than his father's.

4) Benjamin's progress at camp is seemingly invisible to his parents. Can his parents even "see" Benjamin or only their own desires for him? Several students noticed that everything positive about his camp experience is overlooked by his parents, in particular his friendship with Amelia. Since they expect him to make friends with other boys, they are oblivious to the one possible friend he does make.

5) Elliottown is a compensatory fantasy. One of the things it provides that is glaringly missing from Benjamin's "real life" is trust. He cannot trust his parents: after telling him he can decide if Elliot stays at camp, they take her away anyway, Mr. Sherman listens in surreptitiously on Benjamin's phone calls with his mother, Benjamin agrees to go into the hospital, but obviously hasn't had the conditions of his release made clear to him, and so forth. One paper pointed out how Elliottown provides Benjamin with a sense of importance and meaning: he is a capable emissary from another world, sent to observe and make conclusions about Earth, as well as being some kind of "expert" able to help solve various Elliottown problems. Within the Elliottown world, Benjamin has status as a competent leader and advisor.  Another paper pointed out how important Elliot was to helping Benjamin construct an independent identity, independent of his parents and their version of a "perfect son." And many students made the point that most of the adults seem oblivious to Benjamin's sheer creativity. Whatever the ultimate positive/negative effects are, Benjamin's fantasies are deeply creative and maybe this was lost even on his doctor, a man who could help Benjamin utilize his creative play in a more positive (or socially acceptable) direction. Although, interestingly, opinion differed on the extent to which students felt Dyson handled Benjamin's case well (see 10a below).

6) Dave the counselor's perception of Benjamin is an interesting point of contrast with other authority figures. Everyone else sees Benjamin as the problem, but for Dave he is only a problem, and not the worst one at that (i.e., not as bad as the kid who continually poops his pants, or Mike "Motherfucker.") One paper argued that Dave's "matter of fact" handling of Benjamin shows how Benjamin might have acted differently in a different family. Another paper made the astute observation that it was Dave's letter about the camp reunion, and not Dr. Dyson's treatment, that most seemed to spur Benjamin's efforts to leave the hospital. Still another paper argued for seeing the camp directors as slightly different from the other "authority figures" in the first section. This paper appreciated the wise decision they made to not stigmatize Benjamin by disclosing his diagnosis to counselors and other campers, a decision which seemed to create the circumstances in which Benjamin was able to "thrive" relative to his existence pre-camp.

7) Several papers pointed out that Dave seems like a surrogate Father/role model for Benjamin. Interestingly, he is exactly the kind of "average guy" mainstream male that Mr. Sherman wishes Benjamin was. And because Benjamin looks up to him, we see Benjamin is not completely outside of even as limited a view of "normal" as his father's.

8) If being distant, lost in one's own world, and unable to communicate with others are the criteria for being "sick," then isn't Mr. Sherman as sick as Benjamin? Most papers mentioned that nearly all the initial letters encourage the reader to see Benjamin as "sick," but it is only when one views all the letters as a whole that one starts to question the validity of their individual diagnosis. Following through on our class discussions, some students argued that the Sherman family is the major "unsaid" of the text: it is only through a patient (and, of course, partial) reconstruction of the relations between Jeffery and Peggy and their relations to both Benjamin and Hannah that the reader can begin to make sense of Elliot and Benjamin's need for her. 

9) All the authorities see "the problem" as a strictly individual rather than collective one. That is, "the problem" is limited to Benjamin and his behavior, rather than reading Benjamin's behavior as a manifest symptom of a latent context: his family situation. Thus the "cure" is limited to changing Benjamin and not his parents as well (or maybe even society at large?).

10) Several students drew out comparisons between H and The Turn of the Screw as narratives. In particular, these students were interested in the way both novels seemed to them to lack a complete narrative closure, thus placing the reader in an unusual position. These papers were interested in the effects of narratives which don't adhere to traditional formal expectations: a clear beginning, middle and end, lots of narrative exposition to "explain" things to the reader, and a tight closure where a single and clear authoritative meaning is reached by the end. Instead, these two works seem to share a similar effort to engage the reader in the process of reaching final conclusions, conclusions which could play out in several directions and therefore don't really seem to be "final."

10a) Some very interesting readings of the end of the novel were produced. Clearly, it is difficult to decide whether or not the ending is some kind of triumph or failure. How do we make sense of the space Benjamin is in by the novel's end? One student argued, "The last page of the novel is the result of Jeffery and Peggy's hard work. Beat down, tired and medicated, Benjamin gives up the most special gift he had, which is his creativeness....it is tragic because Benjamin did not outgrow Elliot but was instead forced to do so." Most students who took this line felt Dyson was complicit in this tragic loss. However, one paper made a plea to understand the position of Dr. Dyson differently: "Eventually, the place that gave him value is gone.  His relationship with Elliot ends as well. Both are huge leaps for a special child like Benjamin. Through therapy sessions with Dr. Dyson, and with his new found confidence, it looks as if he found his own sense of self...The last letter from Dr. Dyson was most disturbing to me.  After his parent's request to have Benjamin back home...the doctor's response made me feel heartbroken for Benjamin's fate. ...(A)fter I read his last letter my heart dropped at the idea that he will be left back in his parents care, especially without the education and experience of Dr. Dyson. The doctor's letter seemed as if he felt defeated. It was the first time I felt sympathetic to anyone else other than Benjamin."

This Old House

One place to start thinking about how Bechdel's narrative is developed visually as well as textually, is to focus on how the interior "shots" are composed. What sense of everyday life is conveyed? How are relations between family members structured by their situation within rooms, hallways, windows, and so forth?

The first two photos above are from a fascinating New York Times interview with Alison Bechdel that takes place during a visit to her former home (now owned by others, but still keeping much of the original decoration intact). The writer, Ginia Bellefonte makes this perceptive remark about how the Victorian restoration is visual map of Bruce Bechdel's psyche:

"The offending accouterments are still in place: wallpaper imprinted with floral buds and a heavy chandelier that looks as if it were made of skulls. The combination seems a reminder of just how powerfully Victorian décor embraced the nascent and the sepulchral, life and the negation of it, much as the era’s mores were charged with the tension between vagrant urges and the enforced repression of them. If Bruce Bechdel aimed to keep the truth of his life hidden, one could argue that he also put it flamboyantly on display."

The rest of the article can be found here. The last photo above is a snapshot from when the Bechdel family was in residence. I'm sure you can pick out everything in the photo including the vase that somehow got too close to the edge of the table...

You can find a related NYT Q & A session with Alison Bechdel here.

Alison Bechdel on Fun Home

In this interview, Bechdel describes her writing/drawing process in creating Fun Home, including her methods of research. You'll see a couple of family photos as well as the actual site she incorporated into a particular scene:



And here you can see Bechdel reading from her memoir:

Introducing Fun Home: Some Bechdelian Background

In 2006 Time Magazine picked Fun Home as the best book of the year. Not as the best comic book or graphic novel, or fiction or memoir, but best BOOK period. Here's a multimedia roundup of Fun Home information you may find of interest.

First, some stuff to read:

The Wikipedia entry on Alison Bechdel is pretty good. Here you will learn useful things and fun trivia such as Bechdel is a member of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and her baby brother John is now a keyboardist who's played with Ministry, Fear Factory, Prong and Killing Joke among other bands.

Alison Bechdel's website is a compendium of useful items: an archive of her comic strip, information about other past and future projects, links to reviews about Fun Home and so on. One thing you might want to take a look at is a piece she wrote for Slate about telling her mother she was writing about their family.

Here's a short YouTube video of Bechdel drawing the wallpaper endpapers of Fun Home:



And here she talks about her process of drawing many of the scenes in the book by acting out and photographing herself in many of the character's roles (adding more to the many uses of photography in Fun Home):



Here's an early (1981) strip which now reads as trial run for part of Fun Home. Coming Out Story covers some of the same incidents that are also represented in Fun Home.

And if you want to see how academics have treated Fun Home, here are links to three downloadable .pdf's of papers presented at a scholarly conference in France: Double Trajectories: Crossing Lines in Fun Home, by Karim Chabani, Images as Paratext in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, by Agnes Muller and Drag as Metaphor and the Quest for Meaning in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, a Family Tragicomic, by Helene Tison.

Screen/ing Memories

The problem of memory is at the heart of Freud’s work. Before he developed his theories of dreams and their relation to the Unconscious, he argued for the central position of memory as a subject of analysis. We can see the importance memory would have in his later work in his early attempt to define the root of "hysteria:" "Hysterics suffer from reminiscences." In his essay, "Screen Memories," Freud saw a psychological function of general importance, that memory is an active process of the present, reorganizing and reinterpreting the past at the same time preserving shards of original experience. It is through memory that we produce the narrative that is our "selves," a fictional construct with its own truths.

One of the most provocative suggestions in Freud's early and brief essay, "Screen Memories," is the notion that memory itself is a kind of fictional narrative. In other words, memory is more about the present than it is about the past and it is always "image-inary" in nature: something we create rather than just "have." At the end of "Screen Memories," Freud remarks, "It is perhaps altogether questionable whether we have any conscious memories from childhood: perhaps we have only memories of childhood. These show us the first years of our lives not as they were, but as they appeared to us at later periods..."

In her book on children's fiction, The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children's Fiction, literary theorist Jacqueline Rose offers some comments on Freud's essay that may be of interest to our work on representation of memory and childhood.

Rose is interested in the way that Freud seems to come to his master concept of the Unconcious via his early essay on childhood memory. We've read much of our Freud out of chronological order, so it is useful to remember that "Screen Memories" predates Freud's work on dreams and the consequent elaboration of his theories of repression, displacement and sublimation: the transformation of meaning that takes place in the dream-work.

"We do not realise that Freud was first brought up against the unconscious when asking how we remember ourselves as a child. The unconscious is not an object, something to be laid hold of and retrieved. It is the term which Freud used to descibe the complex way in which our very idea of ourselves as children is produced... Setting himself to analyse one of his earliest recollections, he found that the event he remembered had never taken pace. The importance of the memory was not, however, any the less for that. For what it revealed was the unresolved conflicts affecting the way in which he was thinking about himself now. [One of] the most crucial aspects of psychoanalysis is the insistence that childhood is something in which we continue to be implicated and which is never simply left behind. Childhood persists... It persists as something which we endlessly rework in our attempt to build an image of our own history. When we think about childhood, it is above all our investment in doing so that counts...

For Freud, neither childhood nor meaning can be pinned down---they shift, and our own identity with them... [T]he often contradictory and inconsistent ways that childhood appears in analysis undermines any notion of a straightforward sequence and throws into crisis our relationship to meaning itself. Meaning is not simply there---it is built up, it can be determined by totally contradictory associations, and can emerge long after the event which apparently gives it form." (12-16)

Disintering Childhood Memory

Disinter/est is a multimedia artwork by British artist, Joshua Sofaer. In this project, Sofaer investigates childhood memory: how one accesses it as an adult, how much of it is recoverable and in what sense, and what the consequences are of how and what we remember. Of interest for our class is how Sofaer makes use of Freudian method and theory. His work literalizes one of Freud's master metaphors---the psychoanalytic method as an archeological dig, as well as appropriating and recreating various bits of Freudian theory---the Father as Oedipal authority, the figure of the Mother in the fort / da game, for example.

Also of interest is the way Sofaer enlisted his sister as co-rememberer, co-creator in his project, suggesting that childhood memory is more a collective then individual creation.

Sofaer's work, then, is of interest for our discussions of childhood, memory and narrative; something relevant to H and even more central to our next literary text, Alison Bechdel's recreation of family history, Fun Home. Sofaer writes about the place of narrative, psychoanalysis and archeology in his work:

"Autobiography necessitates an experiential narrative, one that is predicated on introspection. The prevalence of psychoanalytic models for the understanding of infancy has resulted in a generic conception of the ‘autobiography’ of early childhood in terms of psychoanalytic tropes. As infancy precedes established long term memory, we can not access our own history with the same kinds of hindsight formulation that we would our later childhood, adolescence or young adult life. This mysterious era that is both of ourselves and of other lends itself to a rethinking of the relationship between self and autobiography...

Archaeologists are interested in investigating the material world and using it to explore the past. Until recently, however, children have rarely figured in archaeological interpretations, although the study of children has important repercussions for how we understand communities...

The children of our study (ourselves) have changed out of all recognition. To all intents and purposes they no longer exist. Rather than being more easily accessible than prehistoric remains - the material remnants of lives in millennia gone by - the subjects under study we are dealing with lack any material form in a traditional archaeological sense. In our case, the human remains are currently sitting at a computer terminal typing away, and are completely transformed. Nor do we have any memory, real or imagined, of the period under investigation. So by using archaeology as a model, we are not exploring the individual self, but constructing the past through a process of categorisation. We are not searching for self in the sense of uncovering past individuals but using elements of the life histories of given people (who in a sense might as well be anyone, not necessarily us) to think about the auto-graphic of childhood."

Thoughts on First Papers

Although I can not hand the papers back until next Monday, I hope I can put everyone's mind at rest by saying that this batch of papers was quite good: most everyone exhibited clear engagement with the ideas we've been working over in class. I wanted this first assignment to give you a kind of experimental space to "play" with the theory we've been discussing, to bring it into the space of reading fiction and perhaps discover new ways to think about narrative and its place in our lives.

I know some students felt flustered by the lack of conventional essay guidelines. Clearly, I didn't want students to simply reproduce the ideas they'd read or the discussion we've had. That can be a tall order when much of your education has focused precisely on those skills: mastery of a formula and its accurate reproduction are useful processes for some areas of academic study. And that kind of "learning" is pretty much where we all begin our earliest lessons: mimicking the sounds cooed to us by parents, following their instructions help us become a "big boy" or a "big girl."

But, necessary as this kind of mastery of social convention is for the infant, it is a far cry from learning to be able to critically reflect on those conventions, on our lives and on our adult selves. Learning how to consciously use ideas is the empowering conceptual break common to both pedagogy and psychoanalysis. Thus, I will continue to push you towards this in our class and in assignments. In other words, I treat you somewhat as a Freudian analyst treats his patients.

Freud once wrote that "The discovery of the unconscious and the introduction of it into consciousness is performed in the face of a continuous resistance on the part of the patient. The process of bringing this unconscious material to light is associated with pain, and because of this pain the patient again and again rejects it...[however] if you succeed in persuading him to accept, by virtue of a better understanding, something that up to now, in consequence of this automatic regulation by pain, he has rejected, you will then have accomplished something towards his education."

Though all of your papers had varying strengths, it was clear to me that there was still resistance, a great deal of it probably unconscious, to push beyond the usual English paper assignment. Many papers began by rehearsing information about Freud or about psychoanalysis or about Henry James that was completely unnecessary for this paper. I think we can take it as a given that Freud and Henry James are "famous writers" and other such generalities. Likewise, many students exhibited a great deal of anxiety about the assignment both before and after. I'm not so much interested in this in terms of "correcting" "problems;" I am interested, though, in the roots of such fear, anxiety and false starts and where and how they can obstruct learning. Kevin recently wrote an interesting log about the issues of "performance anxiety" among other things---you can find it here. I'm still thinking about the relation of the "fear of being seen" (which is kind of how Kevin talks about this in relation to classroom culture) and the Uncanny, but I think that our discussions of the repression trauma that produces the infant as functioning subject certainly has a clear analogy in our current educational structures. I would invite students to read Kevin's log and think about continuing the discussion he inaugurated there.

But, back to the papers. Here are a few interesting and useful bits from the papers on "The Turn of the Screw:" I think there are some useful ideas here for further work in both the logs and future papers. I particularly want to turn your attention to the way these students touched on the role of the reader: that the novel was not just a story about the Uncanny, but an experience of it.

Christina framed her discussion by talking about the frustrations of "not knowing." She discussed how children are often put in a frustrating position by adults who don't explain everything to them (like death) and so they have to puzzle things out for themselves and this "lack" of knowing itself stays with them as a repressed frustration. She brought that insight into the experience of reading "The Turn of the Screw," which over and over again plays on that frustration by not answering anything directly. Although she didn't make this connection explicitly, it seemed to me that Christina was almost saying that the reader is in a kind of child's position in this text, with the adults like the Governess seeming to know more than us, and yet refusing to tell us! The anxiety of not knowing when it seems like everyone else knows something, might be one of the "uncanny" triggers of the novel: it reaches back to our first experiences with withheld information.

Kristine posed the question of who exactly is haunted and by what? Are the children haunted by events they were too innocent to comprehend? Is the Governess haunted by her own desires, desires which run counter to the social conventions she is pledged to uphold (her "unsuitable" desire for the Master, for example). Though she doesn't phrase it this way, I think by the end of the paper, Kristine was thinking that the reader herself is the one who is most truly haunted---haunted by the maddening "ghosts" of answers that seem to be sufficient but then disappear on closer examination. For Kristine, the novel created an unsettling readerly experience, one in which our judgment of events is constantly being challenged or overturned, an uneasy inability to ever feel assured that we have the "right" conclusions.

Sarah found many analogies to the haunting effects of the story in both popular culture horror films and folklore. She compared some of the effects of the novel to films like "The Exorcist" where many ambiguities are initially offered, though later "solved" in a much more direct way than in "The Turn of the Screw." Nevertheless, she pointed out that the more disturbing parts of films like those are when the audience doesn't know the answer or have a final solution to their questions. She also pointed out the many instances one can find of possessed objects, especially dolls, in both literature and folklore and frightening effect of that which seems human, but isn't.

Lindsay drafted a very ambitious paper titled "Robbing of the Human Eye" where she traces the motif of seeing/not seeing throughout Freud's essay, "The Sandman," and "The Turn of the Screw." Her paper takes the fear of loss of eyes in a different direction than Freud does; she's not interested in the eye/testicle symbolism and its link to a threatening father figure. Lindsay connects this fear to the anxiety produced by not being about to "see" something in the sense of "understanding" or "explaining" or even "possessing" it. She also links it to its obverse: the anxiety over not being seen. The Governess would like to be "seen" by the Master. The ghosts seem to only want to be "seen," their presence to be recognized. For Lindsay, all the issues of ambiguity and anxiety in the narrative seem to revolve over issues of "seeing" including the readers: what do we really see? Especially in the novel's climactic ending?

In her paper, Taylor turned the question of the Uncanny away from the ghosts and only the Governess. She was interested in the way in which the ghost's motives may be unclear, but also do not seem to constitute much of a direct threat And yet they are instantly perceived as threatening ghastly presences by the Governess for reasons that are never made entirely clear. For Taylor the ghosts are much less threatening and disturbing than the Governess, a woman who acts with a deliberate surety based on ---well, based on what? An interesting followup to Taylor's paper would be to ask how this affects the reader. I think we are initially set up to read from the Governess's point of view, to be on her team, in a sense. But when so much of the Governess's motivation and knowledge is left unstated, does that undercut our confidence and leave us hanging? And who else is there to identify with in the story? The ghosts? The children? Mrs. Grose? I think none of those seem viable options and the reader is left without a "home" in the story: a place of comfort from which to view events and "safely" deal with them.

Kevin adds another layer of obscurity to the story by reminding us that we are reading a version of a version of a version (the Narrator's memories of Douglas/Douglas's memories of the Governess/The Governess's memories of her experience) all of which are dependent on memory. Though it seems we are getting a direct story from the Governess, we are actually getting a story layered by different time frames and different points of view and ultimately refracted through memory. Nothing is directly presented to the reader, though it often seems to be! This places the reader in a remote and distant position from everything in the text and establishes at the very beginning that we need to be vigilant observers of a complicated and obscure series of events even though much of the rest of the story works to erase our memory of that.

Excavating H

Elizabeth Shepard's novel, H, is a story told entirely through letters---correspondence by, or concerning, the case of Benjamin Sherman. The plot is necessarily fragmented: we have no comprehensive narrative exposition which ties the events of the plot together into an interpretive whole. The role of the reader, then, is much like the Freudian analyst who examines each dream, memory or association as a rich piece of evidence or telling relic, a part which suggests the missing or repressed whole. Freud often likened his work to that of an archeologist, one who examines surface detritus for what it suggests about structures buried beneath.

Freud used the metaphor of archeology quite early in his work, long before he fully developed the model of accessing latent content via its manifest traces in dream interpretation. In Studies of Hysteria, he likened analysis to "the technique of excavating a buried city." And in his essay "Delusions and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva," he again invoked the metaphor in this passage: "There is actually no better analogy for repression, which both makes something in the mind inaccessible and preserves it, than the burial that was the fate of Pompeii and from which the city could reappear through the work of the spade."

Literary theorist Pierre Macherey called such interpretive work, symptomatic reading. As in psychoanalysis what is not said is as important as what is said, and a symptomatic reading must focus on what the narrative omits or excludes as well as what it has included. Clearly, H demands an attentive reader who can read the silences in and between individual letters, who can hear what is stubbornly not being said, who can perceive the avoided and repressed as well as the obvious. For most of the characters in H, Benjamin is clearly the problem, for the reader he is part of a problematic: a larger story which includes the story of the Sherman family, the story of Mr. and Mrs. Sherman, the story of siblings Benjamin and Hannah, the story of conventional psychiatric treatment, the story of conventional notions of childhood and childhood development, and so forth, all of which must be excavated in order to make sense of Benjamin and Elliot.

Discuss your excavation of H: what were you able to reconstruct of the "missing" problematic? What parts remain indeterminate or unrecoverable? Does the narrative itself suggest or imply certain ways of filling in the blanks? Does it favor some interpretations over others? And most importantly, how does the narrative conceptualize the important categories of "sick" and "healthy"? The text's authority figures all take Benjamin to be "sick" (though with differing definitions of "illness") and they advocate for his "health" (again with very differing notions of "sanity"). How does the narrative resolve these contradictions (or does it)? Clearly Benjamin has changed by the end of the story, and clearly this change is predicated on the loss of a rich and creative, if quirky, imaginative structure. Much like the Freudian infant whose polymorphous capacity for pleasure must be narrowed down and contained within accepted behaviors, Benjamin must shed those parts of his psyche which "don't fit." Does the narrative suggest how we should interpret and judge his transformation?

Length: around 5 pages
Due: Wednesday, November 19