Ghost, Android, Animal

Trauma and Literature Beyond the Human

Tony M. Vinci

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000760569
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Ghost, Android, Animal challenges the notion that trauma literature functions as a healing agent for victims of severe pain and loss by bringing trauma studies into the orbit of posthumanist thought. Investigating how literary representations of ghosts, androids, and animals engage traumatic experience, this book revisits canonical texts by William Faulkner and Toni Morrison and aligns them with experimental and popular texts by Shirley Jackson, Philip K. Dick, and Clive Barker. In establishing this textual field, the book reveals how depictions of non-human agents invite readers to cross subjective and cultural thresholds and interact with the "impossible" pain of others. Ultimately, this study asks us to consider new practices for reading trauma literature that enlarges our conceptions of the human and the real.

Part I

Wound and Word

The Posthumanist Ethics of American (Post)Modernists

1 “Almost Human in Their Hysteria”

The Open Wound and Posthumanist Lifeworlds in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses

Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942) is a novel haunted by more than the ghosts of the dead. Not only do the enduring traumas of slavery, the exploitative violence of the American Indian Wars, and the threat of WWII frame the intersecting chronicles of the McCaslins and Beauchamps, but animal-spirits stalk the deep woods, and human and nonhuman machines disturb the mythic county of Yoknapatawpha. Early criticism responded to this complex semiotic field by contesting whether Faulkner’s set of miscegenated narratives should be read as a unified novel or as a cycle of disparate short stories.¹ Throughout the eighties and the nineties, critics moved away from genre-focused inquiries and sought instead to identify the narrative’s thematic heart, debating whether the narrative was more attuned to the racially tumultuous inheritance of the South or the apotheosis of an Emersonian nature and the mourning inspired by its inevitable decline.² Recent critics propose that no such heart exists, or if it does, it is a spectral one that can be located only partially in absence and aporia. Such thinkers map how the novel embraces “incomprehension” (Singal 272); celebrates “instability, permutations, uncertainties, fissures” (Davis 7); and “replicates the process of a mind coming to understanding” (Wanger-Martin 7).

In this chapter, I extend this critical attentiveness to that which eludes comprehension by arguing that Go Down, Moses does perhaps more than exhibit the cognitive maneuvers necessary to “come to an understanding” of the narrative’s engagement with race, economy, and ecology. I argue that it exposes the impossibility of fully grasping the problematics of human (and nonhuman) difference as a means to chart the vexed interaction between the subtle and persistent influence of living within traumatizing systems and the challenges of reconciling the quest for transhistorical truth with the ethical demands of racial and ecological crises. Faulkner’s entangled stories of human and nonhuman persons demonstrate the limits of understanding, but they refuse to allow this critical impasse to impede thought or engagement. In fact, humanist limits in Go Down, Moses mark the entry point into the work Faulkner’s narrative carnival performs, impelling us to breach these borders and risk experimental attempts to imagine what operates beyond and in between them. I am aided here by contemporary Faulkner scholars Greg Forter, Erin Kay Penner, Patricia Rae, Sarah E. Stunden, and Christina Thyssen as they gesture toward posthumanist rhetorics in Faulkner via discussions of wounding. By following Faulkner’s explorations of trauma, grief, and mourning/melancholia as states of experience that rupture and exceed human codes, these thinkers lead us to new formulations of subjectivity, identity, personhood, and vibrant materialisms. Read as a critical constellation of non-anthropocentric thinking, they mobilize Faulkner’s explorations of race, gender, sexuality, animality, mechanization, simulation, and spectrality into a critical orbit of posthumanist possibility. Thus, contesting Judith Bryant Wittenberg’s claim that Go Down, Moses is “a distinctly anthropocentric novel” (51), I maintain that Faulkner’s indefatigable concentration on the fractured and intersectional qualities of human and nonhuman assemblages in Go Down, Moses provides ample reason to read the novel as a non-anthropocentric, if not anti-anthropocentric or posthumanist, work.

Aligning “the human” with male whiteness, Faulkner challenges anthropocentric values by situating the recognizable tropes of the ghost, the android, and the animal as ethical categories that blur the boundaries of human subjectivity and embodiment, making possible an intimate proximity between human and nonhuman otherness via trauma and grief. The novel stages encounters with human and animal ghosts that allow for an unsettling engagement with personal and cultural traumas, typically those experienced by marginalized figures and populations not deemed human enough by dominant culture to be traumatized. More specifically, Faulkner delineates economically and sexually exploited slaves (before and after emancipation) as android figures who exist in the white imagination as unaffected beings capable of executing rudimentary labor but incapable of understating the sociopolitical dramas in which they are imbricated or to perform “proper” rituals of grief and mourning. These human machines carry burdens that not only lack expressive outlets but are linked semiotically with the technological forces of trains and automobiles in the novel that threaten to eradicate the natural and the spiritual, enabling the dominant culture to displace the anxiety caused by their own atrocities onto those whom they victimize and oppress. Between the ghost and the android, there exists the animal. Marked by their conspicuous lack of human language, Faulkner’s animals become powerful mediating figures, enabling interaction between personal loss, cultural atrocity, and posthumanist possibilities.

These three categories—ghost, android, animal—fall into a semiotic system in which they blur and intertwine, enmeshing logics of becoming, unworlding, and decreating that rework hierarchical barriers of social and ontological categories. Such thinking expands the definition of the human in Go Down, Moses from a discrete individual into a complicated network of beings in the continual process of becoming, becoming-with, and becoming-otherwise. Through this experimentation with posthumanist characterizations and relations, Faulkner disrupts traditional geographies of the center and the margins and, in doing so, accesses traumatic energies that have been subsumed and oversimplified under the rubric of anthropocentric humanism. As Minrose C. Gwin argues, Faulkner recognizes the inability to heal trauma; thus, his negotiation of the traumatic in Go Down, Moses seeks to sustain engagement with the “open wound”—personal and cultural experiences of absence and loss that cannot be closed but must be addressed perpetually through the “witnessing to and a listening for the incomprehensible” (32, 21). As the complex psychological and cultural aftereffects of the traumatic are deeply idiosyncratic and can never be traced directly to a singular moment or cause, these wounds—their symptoms and sources—are difficult to locate. However, according to Gwin, these unruly traumatic articulations can be navigated indirectly: “trauma necessitates articulation, but that articulation may be obliquely directed through sites displaced from the wounded one” (22). While Gwin does not address specifically how Faulkner’s text performs this maneuver of displaced articulation, I suggest that he employs ghost, android, and animal as relays to the incomprehensible elements of the traumatic. In this way, trauma is not suppressed or rejected in the narrative; rather, by never situating it solely within the framework of the known and accepted, Faulkner fosters an ethic of radical openness that is free to resonate in both the interstices and imbrications between human and nonhuman embodied subjectivities and, consequently, engages the traces of trauma that reside there.

To clarify Faulkner’s treatment of the spectranimalchine as means to cross-cultural and ontological borders and sustain engagement with trauma, I will single out for comment here the middle chapters of Go Down, Moses—“Pantaloon in Black,” “The Old People,” “The Bear,” “Delta Autumn”—which function as a narrative grouping. Each follows characters who achieve transsubjective engagement with ghosts, androids, and animals and are consequently cast as inhuman or subhuman figures (Ike for distancing himself from traditional white Southern culture; Rider for not subscribing to the white Southern conventions of mourning). However, while Ike’s becoming-with nonhuman otherness facilitates his baptism into a transhistorical realm of universality, divine communion, and assurances of a life immune to death, Rider’s opens him to both cultural and metaphysical realms of extraordinary violence and alienation. This intertextual relationship codes Ike’s nature as a site through which Faulkner articulates a vision of the trauma of the black subject, enabling a transformative interaction between the white imagination and the unseen effects of its traumatizing systems. While this posthumanist intervention signals new arenas and registers of hurt with which we must reckon, it also authorizes, at least, a trace of radical authority to emerge through the expansive vulnerability of traumatized spectranimalchines. More than post-traumatic growth, the posthumanist lifeworlds of trauma in Faulkner embark on new ontological, social, and ecotonal territories that compel us to chronicle, if we cannot understand, the paradoxical pain/power of “warped” personhood.

“‘Because They Aint Human’”: Black Grief and Posthumanist Vulnerability in “Pantaloon in Black”

“Pantaloon in Black” is often thought of as the anomalous chapter in Go Down, Moses.³ While its primary thematic concerns—racial trauma, the relationship between white male privilege and games of chance, and the impenetrability of the other’s experience—resonate throughout Go Down, Moses, its characters are conspicuously absent from the rest of the novel, and its technical relation to the narratives that proceed and follow it is uncertain at best. Perhaps most notably, neither Isaac McCaslin nor Lucas Beauchamp enters the narrative, but this is precisely Faulkner’s purpose: to rupture the McCaslin family narrative, “traumatize” it through a narrative intrusion that not only refuses to be subsumed into the traditional framework of the novel but successfully haunts that dominant narrative from both center and margins. Beginning with Walter Taylor’s early article on “Pantaloon,” the chapter has been read as Faulkner’s exploration of the radical black subject in contrast to his position within the white imagination.⁴ However, Faulkner does something more radical than posit a reductive black/white binary and grant his black subject counter-hegemonic force: he tests the limits of anthropocentrism by exploring the “impenetrable” nonwhite person as something more, less, and other than human, figuring spectranimalchines as means to destabilize both social and ontological borders and articulate traces of trauma that would otherwise remain unseen.

A number of recent critics have commented on Faulkner’s treatment of Rider as a being who resists containment within the categories of the human. Judith L. Sensibar argues provocatively that Rider deconstructs the cultural authority of white myth by creating “his own myth, one which violates white culture’s racial laws” and becomes himself a “lawmaker” and “Old Testament God-figure” (118). This radical power originates from a mode of embodiment wherein Rider’s mind becomes animalized through grief: “no language can express it; thus his body speaks. [. . .] All his senses take command to speak an image of the body in pain and conflict” (117). Contrarily, Tracy Bealer locates Rider’s power in a highly exploratory inner life that extends beyond the body: “By the end of his night of drinking, the boundary between [Rider’s] body and the outside world seems to have dissolved completely” (126). These containments and disintegrations of Rider’s “humanity” can be better understood via a reading of Faulkner’s title, which intimates the types of multivalent subjectivities and embodiments with which Faulkner experiments.

“Pantaloon” in Faulkner’s title alludes to the standard character from commedia dell’arte typically defined by his greed and foolishness. An influence on his early plays and drawings, commedia dell’arte provided Faulkner with a set of stock characters that highlight the artifice of social performance. Within that particular narrative context, the pantaloon can unveil cultural structures and flatten hierarchical distinctions through comedy; however, Faulkner removes the pantaloon archetype from the comedic narrative structure and recontextualizes it “in black,” a move which resonates, at least, on three significant levels. First, it acclimates the reader to traditional and familiar coordinates of power, identifying the dominant white male at the center and the “impenetrable” black male on the margins. Then, it signals the crossing of this racial border, from the white point of view established in “Was,” to the alternating and intertwining white and black points of view explored in “The Fire and the Hearth,” to the “wholly” black point of view of Rider. This “pantaloon” is “in” black, coding blackness as a racial identity category that exists in contrast to dominant white culture as well as an indication of a subjective space that exists meta-culturally, a free-flowing subjectivity uninhibited by racial orientations or even species boundaries. Lastly, “in black” casts Rider to be “in mourning.” These three registers of Rider’s subjectivity—a culturally located racial identity, a meta-cultural subjectivity of mobile and fluid borders, and the disorienting internal space of coping with severe loss—can be linked to a traumatic break that disimbricates Rider from the anthropocentric humanism that contains and inhibits his personhood. Thus, Rider can be viewed not as Faulkner’s attempt to construct an “authentic” black male subject but as his exploration of the black male lost in an alien geography, unknowingly ostracized from cultural touchstones in a world of confused symbols and codes without a cipher.

Faulkner positions Rider at the crossroads of two types of trauma, punctual and non-punctual, that thrust him into multiple realms that operate beyond the human. Greg Forter defines “punctual trauma” as the “unprocessed memory-trace that returns unbidden, as delayed effect, in an effort to force the mind to digest this previously unclaimed kernel of experience” and non-punctual trauma as “those forms of trauma [. . .] that are more mundanely catastrophic [. . .] such traumas are also so chronic and cumulative, so woven into the fabric of our societies, that they cannot count as ‘shocks’” (“Freud” 259–260). The punctual trauma of losing Mannie, his wife of only six months, intermingles with the pervasive and persistent non-punctual trauma of living and working within the confines of the racially subjugating culture of the post-slavery South, relegating Rider to a subjective space without a clear center or boundaries. Before he encounters Mannie’s ghost, Rider experiences the punctual trauma of her loss. The normal is shattered, and Rider is left in psychic, temporal, and geographical spaces that close him off to the domestic and the social but open him to a spectral realm of fragile connections and possibilities.

What Rider has lost in Mannie is more than a domestic partner or a stabilizing social presence that legitimizes his place in the socioeconomic realm. As Christina Thyssen argues, “Mannie’s death plunges Rider back into a space of radical abjection” (98). What he has lost is a part of his own subjectivity and personhood that resides within Mannie. In Precarious Life (2004), Judith Butler argues that when one dies,

[i]t is not as if an “I” exits independently over here and then simply loses a “you” over there, especially if attachment to ‘you’ is part of what composes who “I” am [. . .] perhaps what I have lost “in” you, that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related. (22)

Butler points to the lived overlays between beings, but in order to recognize this, we must “dislocate human subjectivity” (5) and disrupt the concept of the “secure unitary personality” (6).

Without access to this subject-structuring mechanism offered by his living wife, Rider begins to “dislocate”—a process that offers access to subjective experiences beyond the “human,” but is also extraordinarily disorienting and painful. He becomes representative of a type of “blackness liberated from figures of nature, the human, history, mourning—a kind of prefigural which refuses integration into historical narratives and models of identity” (Thyssen 89). As Kuyk argues, in Go Down, Moses, “No voice [. . .] fully expresses Rider’s pain” (70). Not only does his pain exist in spaces beyond articulation, but it is fragmented and multivalent—no single voice could possibly utter its complexity. Faulkner responds to this limitation of voice by constructing Rider’s post-traumatic world from shards and fragments that indicate a dual reality—one of sight and the other of obfuscated significance—accessed via the ghost.

Mannie’s presence in “Pantaloon” functions both as a Gordonian ghost that “speaks” for the historically disremembered as well as a Derridean specter that offers access to the multivalent spaces (subjective, cultural, and ideological) that Rider navigates as a mourning (black) subject. Mannie’s grave is “marked off without order about the barren plot shards of pottery and broken bottles and old brick and other objects insignificant to sight but actually of a profound meaning and fatal to touch, which no white man could have read” (129). Faulkner complicates these disjointed realms of sight and significance by adding an overtly racialized dimension that marks the white gaze as limited and blinded (a point that will surface at the story’s end). Through the optic of race, Faulkner’s description of Mannie’s grave indicates the subworld of the black subject within the dominant sphere of white influence, clarifying from the chapter’s opening lines the type of non-punctual trauma Rider experiences and compounding it with the obvious punctual trauma of Mannie’s death. The result is a subjective experience in which what Rider sees is fragmented, as if Mannie took with her the connection of sign and referent, breaking the semiotic code by which Rider constructs his identity and his world. Once this rupture takes place, Faulkner positions Rider within these semiotic gaps—a disorienting and traumatic space, to be sure, but one that offers access to registers beyond culture and ide...