Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal

The Mother's Son

James Martell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429575259
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Focusing on their conception and use of the notion of the mother, Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal proposes a new interpretation of literature by modernist authors like Rousseau, Baudelaire, Poe, Rimbaud, Rilke, Joyce, and Beckett. Seen through this maternal relation, their writing appears as the product of an "anxiety" rising not from paternal influence, but from the violence done to their mother in their attempts at self-creation through writing. In order to bring to light this modernist violence, this study analyzes these authors in tandem with Derrida's work on the gender-specific violence of the Western philosophical and literary tradition. The book demonstrates how these writer-sons wrote their works in a constant crisis vis-à-vis the mother's body as site of both origin and dissolution. It proves how, if modernism was first established as a patrilineal heritage, it was ultimately written on the bodies of women and mothers, confusing them in order to appropriate their generative traits.

1 The Anxiety of the Son

Incorporating Metis

You gave birth to me because you could only

give me what you are.

Mother, you gave birth to my death.

Ever since, I live and die in you,

who are love.

Ever since, I am reborn of our death. (70)

These lines from Jabès’ The Book of Questions describe the theme of this book in their expression of the writer-son’s realisation—and possible acknowledgement—not only of a certain debt towards his mother but also of a continuous containment within her, an enveloping beyond life and death. In the tradition to which these lines belong, they are related to other mother-son figures and their aporetic, inseparable relations, like Death and his mother Sin in Paradise Lost, where she describes their mortal mother-son relation thusly:

Before my eyes in opposition sits

Grim Death my Son and foe, who sets them on,

And me his Parent would full soon devour

For want of other prey, but that he knows

His end with mine involved; and knows that I

Should prove a bitter Morsel, and his bane,

Whenever that shall be; so Fate pronounced. (48)

While these two examples, as well as those that will follow, provide us with literary expressions of the son’s anxiety vis-à-vis his mother, especially with regard to the possibility of creation, The Mother’s Son’s proper theoretical interrogation begins with the question: what if Derrida’s enigmatic “law of obsequence” was the law of modernism, or even more, the law of modernity? A neologism composed of the French term obsèques and sequence, but with an inexhaustible anasemic proliferation due to its signifying and material particles (ob, sequor, funeral, following, according to, etc.), this law is one of Derrida’s most enigmatic terms.¹ Its description in Glas—where it first appeared—is less a definition than a short narrative, almost a Baudelairian prose poem:

As she follows, absolutely, she always survives—a future that will never have been presentable—what she will have engendered, attending, impassive, fascinating and provoking; she survives the interring of the one whose death she has foreseen. Logic of obsequence. (116–17b; FR 134b)

As a short story about a mother that, tautologically, precedes her infants but also, aporetically, buries them, its biggest resonances seem to appear in modernist literature and not in philosophy. From the inaugural role of the telegram that Joyce/Stephen Dedalus’ receives saying “Nother dying come home father” (Ulysses, 42) to Beckett’s confession “I am what her savage loving has made me” (Knowlson, 273), this law or logic of a surviving mother with the power of giving both life and death embodies the inaugural anxiety that creates the modernist text, especially when considered together with Derrida’s logic of pregnancy:

This is what I call in English the logic of pregnancy and in French the foreclosure of the name of the mother. In other words, you are all born, don’t forget, and you can write only against your mother who bore within her along with you, what she has borne you to write against her, your writing with which she would be large. And full, you will never get out of it. (The Post Card, 150)²

Putting these two laws together brings up the main subject of this book: the modernist son writer. He is a son not because of a biological determination but because he was born through a mother that he cannot become in his turn. He is a son writer not because of a profession but because everything that he writes—following the logic of pregnancy—was already within his mother, and—according to the law of obsequence—will continue its survival only through hers. Finally, he is a modernist son writer because these two laws betray the ambivalent stance in front of tradition that makes writers modernist, except that their “anxiety of influence” is not transposed into a fathers and sons only genealogy but shows instead an original maternal daemonic ground, especially in the anxious equivalence of these last four words.³

Now, this book comes also in the wake of a growing tradition of thinkers who have been working on the links between modernism and its writers’ relation to the mother for a few decades now. It owes much to works like Elisabeth Bronfen’s Over Her Dead Body (Routledge, 1992) and The Knotted Subject (Princeton, 1998), Elissa Marder’s The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Fordham, 2012) and Dead Time (Stanford, 2001), Barbara Johnson’s Mother Tongues (Harvard, 2003), Amber Jacobs’ On Matricide (Columbia, 2007), Maud Ellmann’s The Nets of Modernism (Cambridge, 2010), and Lynne Huffer’s Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures (Stanford, 1998).⁴ In these works—and many others—theorists have examined the complex question of mother and maternity vis-à-vis writing. But while they analysed both male and female authors, the question of the particularity of the writer-son in front of the notions of mother and maternity as he writes and thinks them has, for very understandable reasons,⁵ received less attention. The most direct recent attempt to tackle this question has been Andrew Parker’s The Theorist’s Mother (Duke, 2012). While Parker focuses mostly on the mother as this notion and body appears and works through the theorist or philosopher (focusing on Lacan, Freud, and Marx), in this book I focus first on some of the “strongest” modernist authors of our evolving canon and later on the crossroads between the author who is seen as the closure or ultimate consequence of the logics of modernism, Samuel Beckett, and Jacques Derrida’s work. Analysing Beckett and other authors next to and through Derrida’s oeuvre, I try to continue on Parker’s steps and add to what he, Elissa Marder, and Gayatri C. Spivak understand is a tremendous and fortunately unending task: to understand the role of the mother in Derridean deconstruction.⁶ As we know, this task cannot be tackled only from philosophy, theory, literature, or psychoanalysis. As the modernist texts examined here, Derrida’s work is written throughout all these discourses, and his writing and style themselves weave continuously in and through these disciplines and regimes of discourse.

To look into these two Derridean logics, obsequence and pregnancy, as they are incarnated in modernist literature, Elisabeth Bronfen’s Over Her Dead Body gives us a first systematic view of the issues involved. In this rich volume, Bronfen gives an extensive account of the ways in which women’s bodies are sites of inscription for the writer-son, where he can negotiate not only his birth and separation from all that presided him (tradition included) but also his death. While her focus is not directly on the writer-son’s mother’s body but on different kinds of feminine bodies affected by desire and masculine apotropaic tendencies, she presents clearly the significant importance of the maternal body for the writer and gives us an explanation of the anxiety that the obsequence of the mother can generate:

Because the “mother” grounds and confirms subjectivity and culture given that she is always already dead, renounced from birth on (as the navel indicates), and present as an endlessly receding entity, her death can not be reversed or repeated. It is not a question of killing maternity but of avoiding the resurrection of the maternal into a fully present body. (ODB, 137)⁷

This description of the continuous danger of the resurrection of the maternal body as the site of the grounding of the subject introduces the essential reaction of the writer: matricide. However, as we will see in Chapter 4, it is not clear if this murderous attempt is at killing maternity itself, the mother, or both—nor if we can ever clearly distinguish between them within these texts.

Bronfen’s exposition of matricide as an essential signifying knot of modernist literature exposes a link that Amber Jacobs analyses in great detail in On Matricide: the relation between phallogocentric matricidal tendencies and the founding of knowledge, or at least of the male subject supposed to know. Through a comparative examination of different Greek myths within the writing of psychoanalysis and theory, Jacobs exposes a foreclosure of matricide within the male foundation and claim to knowledge and wisdom. She examines the repression of the matricidal crime of Oedipus, and then the path and destiny of Orestes as an enactment of the forgiveness and erasure of the crime of matricide. But it is by focusing on the enigmatic birth of Athena that Jacobs presents what may be the reason for attempting to erase this foundational crime. While it is custom to think that Athena was born directly and only from Zeus’ head in the most intellectual of births, Jacobs points out how before birthing Athena, Zeus had eaten Athena’s true mother, the Titaness Metis: “Zeus put her away inside his own belly so that this goddess should think for him, for good and for evil, then from his head, by himself, he produced Athene of the gray eyes” (Hesiod, quoted on Jacobs, 63). As Jacobs shows, this inaugural repression of the maternal origin of Zeus’ favourite child exemplifies and begins a series of continuous incorporations attempting to deny not only said origin but also and especially the intellectual dimension of the maternal body, underlined by Metis’ significant wisdom and cunning knowledge.

Zeus achieves his power through rape, incorporation, and appropriation of the woman/mother. He cannibalizes Metis in order to rob her of her knowledge and wisdom, together with her reproductive capacity. From then on, she is silent and invisible, an internal source of power that Zeus will claim as his own. Her existence is obliterated so that not even her daughter will ever know of the maternal body in which she was originally conceived. Zeus, in his violent operation, succeeds in taking total possession of the (m)other, whose power he both envies and desires. His initial lust or desire for Metis quickly turns into aggression that results in rape, followed by incorporation. He moves the womb of Metis into his brain. (Jacobs, 63)

As we know, this displacement of the womb into the male’s brain can be translated into that old trope according to which the writer or artist gives birth to his works as a mother would her children. Thus, through Zeus’ murderous incorporation of Metis, the maternal metaphor of artistic and intellectual creation avows its violence and denial. In other words, “giving birth” to artistic works is not just a metaphor but also a reaffirmation of a continuous murderous violence and a constant attempt at its repression. According to Derrida’s logic of pregnancy, this continuous violence against and repression of the mother cannot but return to the writer-son following the surface of a maternal Mobius strip where he himself is inscribed. Thus, if the logic of birth and death is inextricably linked to the mother, it is because through the inescapable logic of obsequence that makes us always follow her who will follow us, all the writer-son’s attempts at capturing and incorporating her revert back to him, bespeaking his non-existence and disappearance. And since the writer-son’s attempts at crimes and repression are done through language, this return and mortal folding, or invagination,⁸ of the writing surface signify for the writer the unnameable or unaccountable knot of his existence as both son and creator. This is the crux of the writer-son in front of his birth and death as they are necessarily spoken in his mother tongue and this is what makes his attempts at naming or describing this condition modern, or in other words, attempts at rebirth.

In this light, Rimbaud famous decree that “one must be absolutely modern” (“il faut être absolument moderne”), usually cut off from its context in Une saison en enfer, can be read again and better within its originating work:

J’ai essayé d’inventer de nouvelles fleurs, de nouveaux astres, de nouvelles chairs, de nouvelles langues. J’ai cru acquérir des pouvoirs surnaturels. Eh bien ! je dois enterrer mon imagination et mes souvenirs ! Une belle gloire d’artiste et de conteur emportée !

(…)

Oui, l’heure nouvelle est au moins très sévère.

Car je puis dire que la victoire m’est acquise: les grincements de dents, les sifflements de feu, les soupirs empestés se modèrent. Tous les souvenirs immondes s’effacent. Mes derniers regrets détalent, —des jalousies pour les mendiants, les brigands, les amis de la mort, les arriérés de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Anxiety of the Son
• 2 Baudelaire’s Mother as Counterfeit Coin
• 3 The Age of Grammatology and the Epoch of the Writer-Son
• 4 Writing without Matricide
• 5 The Logic of Pregnancy, Beckett’s Œuvre Inside Glas
• 6 Writing as Image: The Maternal Tattoo
• Index