Aesthetic Hysteria

The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama and Contemporary Fiction

Ankhi Mukherjee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135860523
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Aesthetic Hysteria is a deconstructive psychoanalytic study of hysteria, using literary texts to foreground a telling encounter between two growing discourses within English studies: that of emotion/affect and trauma studies. It brings together several academic foci - the history of medicine, aesthetic theory, speech act theory, feminism, and gender and performance studies. The study uses its theoretical and philosophical questioning of a cultural phenomenon to interrogate the politics and ends of theory, and is timely in addressing similar anxieties dominating contemporary critical and cultural theory.

Chapter 1
Introduction: “Stuck in the Gullet of the Signifier”: Desire, Disgust, and the Aesthetics of Hysteria

In their critique of Kafka in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari mention the emancipatory potential of writing “like a dog (but a dog can’t write—exactly, exactly)” (26). Mystifying and absurd as this suggestion is, it yields, on further reflection, a very savvy theorization of formless expressivity, or the practice of opposing “a purely intensive usage of language to all symbolic or even significant or simply signifying usages of it” (19). Deleuze and Guattari here are discussing the possibilities of “minor literature,” a singular and minor usage of a major language. Minor literature does not necessarily rise from a minor language, and is rather that which a minority (though not necessarily an ethnic one) constructs within a major language.

he who has the misfortune of being born in the country of a great literature must write in its language, just as a Czech Jew writes in German, or an Ouzbekian writes in Russian. Writing like a dog digging a hole, a rat digging its burrow. And to do that, finding his own point of underdevelopment, his own patois, his own third world, his own desert.

(18)

Writing like a dog, for Deleuze and Guattari, is similar to writing like a foreigner, sans entitlement or identity papers. When they enjoin us to write like an animal, the emphasis is not on like, but on animal, on metamorphosis, not metaphor or acting like something. It is a model of writing without subjectivity or agency, and of traversing zones of indetermination that lead to new synapses and new connections. The writer is not a master but an animal and a writing machine, aiming for perfectly unformed and materially intense expression, signs that do not designate. Like Kafka he makes a minor use of a major language (Prague German). Like Artaud he wrenches cries and gasps from French. Like Woolf she wallows in a rich destitution, coaxing a schizophrenic mélange out of an arid language. The writer of minor literature is a foreigner, forced to live in a language not his own. Or she feels like an outsider in her own language, like a nomad or immigrant, inhabiting the margin without a sense of belonging in its crammed space.

Minor literature, thus, is an unlimited becoming, a “deterritorialization” (16) which invents creative lines of escape for language. It dismantles subjectivity and disorganizes syntax to make it coincide simultaneously with “the barking of a dog, the cough of the ape, and the bustling of a beetle” (26). It brings language “slowly and progressively to the desert” (26), to its inherent underdevelopment, and attunes it to the polylingualism of repressed voices. This book looks at texts that practice the politics of what Deleuze and Guattari identify as minor literature, through representations of hysteria. Hysteria can be seen as both the consummation and ruin of the signifier. It signifies spectacularly through the symptom, yet cannot be interpreted away in the manner of other linguistic phenomena. The hysteric evokes ontological uncertainty, the terror that “behind the multiple layers of masks there is nothing; or, at the most, nothing but the shapeless, mucous stuff of the life-substance” (Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment 150). Yet we cannot look away, for, by its very constitution, the symptom implies the field of language and presupposes an interlocutor: the hysteric coerces the witness to get involved in the plot, and retroactively confer meaning to a staging where the agent of an action was also its object.

In this introductory chapter I catalogue psychoanalytic appraisals of hysteria and its wider significance as aesthesis—lived experience not solely mediated by intellection, which is, however, not entirely resistant to conceptualization. I chose to begin with an extreme example of the post-structuralist prioritization of non-identity over identity—writing like a dog. My interpretation of hysteria, as summarized in the following claims, evokes familiar Deleuzian themes: hysteria deterritorializes the very language that it seeks deliverance in and supplants transcendental logic with a logic of multiplicities; it disinvests the body of fantasies of cohesion, language of stratification, and dialectics of narcissistic projection. But, if hysteria performs a critique of identity, and gives full play to its irreducible contradictions, it does not completely relinquish the subjective principle, and this is where it humanizes the impossible Deleuzian ideal. Rather, hysteria chooses what Adorno insists is the only option for the modern subject—it uses “the force of the subject to break through the deception of constitutive subjectivity” (Negative Dialectics xx). Hysterical identity is predicated on and presupposed by moments of non-identity, not eradicated by them: hysteria is in fact a prolepsis of identity that reveals identity to be nothing but prolepsis.

“There is aesthetics because there is art,” I hear Jacques Rancière stating (From an Aesthetic Point of View 13), only to argue against the colonization of aesthetics by art. It is important that I clarify my use of the term “aesthetics,” if I am to use it to describe not just (hysterical) narrative and art, but a more insidious hysteria of the signifier. Allow me a brief digression. If hysteria inspired the surrealism of Aragon and Breton, in the 90s it seems to have been reappraised to masquerade speciousness as substance. A few years ago, a label called “Hysteric Glamour” arrived on the sake-and dance music-soaked catwalks of Tokyo. Fashionistas call its merchandise “terminally cute,” roughly translated as that which is so cute that it is not cute at all, but knowing, ironical, and political. This brand of philosophical, if playful, activism, the same fashionistas warn, is a big no-no for anyone a day over thirty. An examination of literary representations of hysteria must, at some level, equate style and proliferating surface with substance, but while I draw attention to a lasting cultural fascination with hysterical performance and play, I also question the robust hermeneutic disgust of hysteria catalogued by the history of psychoanalysis. In this study hysteria is read as phenomenology and pathology. Hysteria has been associated for too long with a certain obdurate, debased materiality: this project is not about valorizing the (hysterical) body over its deconstruction in language. As I show in the following chapters, the corporeal body in hysteria has less substantial density than the body of language which surfaces in its lesions and breakdowns. I would like to say, as Maud Ellmann does of her book, The Hunger Artists, that this study is “concerned with disembodiment, not bodies” (4): the text follows the misadventures of metaphors, to borrow another phrase from Ellmann, or of the symbolic displacements of hysteria as metaphor.¹ I am also deeply ambivalent about projects that seek to reclaim hysteria for identity-mongering on behalf of disarticulated and displaced peoples. As a diasporic intellectual seeking a foothold in the Anglo-American academy, I see no merit in speaking in mangled tongues, cultivating a nervous disposition, or maintaining a permanent breach between the signifier and the signified in speech-act situations—definitely not recommendable for anyone a day over thirty.

William James, in his 1896 lectures, defined hysteria as the “hyperaesthetic” disorder (Taylor 60). Aesthetics in this usage is much more than sensory cognition, or the sensory cognition of art: it can be placed in the tradition of Adorno, to signify, in the words of Martin Jay, “a certain type of relation between subject and object” (The Dialectical Imagination 66). According to Kant, the aesthetic is a distinct faculty of ‘non-conceptual’ or indeterminate judgment, which brings together sensibility, understanding, and reason. This cognitive indeterminacy or ambiguity in the aesthetic sphere has inspired alternative formulations of the philosophical project. As Peter Osborne states in the introduction to From an Aesthetic Point of View,

Hermeneutics, dialectical logic, Nietzschean affirmation, negative dialectic, deconstruction, a Lyotardian thinking of ‘the event’, and even Deleuzian materialism, all take their cue, in one way or another, from Kant’s conception of a judgement which is reflective and undetermining in its logical form. ‘Continental’ philosophy, one might say, views the world from an aesthetic point of view.

(4–5)

Osborne’s book project evolved out of a conference at Middlesex University entitled “Where Theory Ends, There Art Begins,” a modernization, he explains, of Friedrich Schlegel’s aphorism, “Where philosophy ceases literature must begin.” A contemplation of hysteria as an aesthetic must also begin with the limits of philosophy, and in the ruins of theory. Hysteria as a literary trope or artistic sensibility initiates a negative dialectics between abstraction and reality, and prompts a reflection on the limitation of knowledge. It uses discursivity to go beyond discursivity, “concepts to pry open …[what] cannot be accommodated by concepts,” as Adorno stated in Notes to Literature (28). The nonconceptual in question is the (fleeting) object of hysterical desire, the thing itself, the indigent particular that inspires art; it is my argument that hysteria subscribes to a philosophy that remains committed to leaving this object nonidentical to itself.

I. Lacan’s Hysteria

Hysteria is both a disease, a nosological entity, with its own unspeakable or unspoken agonies, and a stifled language, which tries to recover the ineffable in pathological signs. The semiotics of hysteria baffle interpretive effort because of its paradoxical nature: hysteria’s claims seem to be both somatogenic and psychogenic, it is both incommunicably private and spectacularly public, ambiguously signifying desire and disgust, “a category without content,” as G. S. Rousseau states, while also possessing “an amorphous content incapable of being controlled by a clear category” (Hysteria Beyond Freud 93). Roy Porter eloquently reflects on the epistemological uncertainty that the historian of hysteria must grapple with:

is it a veritable joker in the taxonomic pack, a promiscuous diagnostic fly-by-night, never faithfully wedded to an authentic malady—or worse, a wholly spurious entity, a fancy-free disease name [ …] independent of any corresponding disease-thing, a cover-up for medical ignorance?

(Hysteria Beyond Freud 226)

Is hysteria a disease of the imagination, a mess of images and rogue ideas? Or is it only too real and yet undiagnosed? Is the female hysteric a madwoman or an actress? These and other questions shaped and deconstructed the politics of medicine, the protocols of culture, and the stylistics of literature, which have, from Hippocratic times, been complicitous in seeking to define and institutionalize the hysteric’s reality. Hysterical (non)signification perplexes understanding in its unsteady shuffling between seeming and being. One is reminded of Adorno’s description of art beauty, where he cites the ephemeral yet unforgettable phenomenon of fireworks as prototypical for artworks. As he states, “They appear empirically yet are liberated from the burden of the empirical, which is the obligation of duration; they are a sign from heaven yet artefactual, an ominous warning, a script that flashes up, vanishes, and indeed cannot be read for its meaning” (Aesthetic Theory 81). The theatre of suffering that hysteria performs in language alienates it from itself; to adopt Adorno’s position of bemused spectatorship again, the glittering, artefactual moments of hysteria “are not only the other of the empirical world: Everything in them becomes other” (81).

Definitions of hysteria suffer from the excesses of the disorder itself. A full-frontal attack is impossible on this category with shifting contents. Its Protean ability to mimic the symptoms of other diseases has prompted some historiographers to call it a “Zeitgeist” disease, where every society has its particular contemporary disorders darkly mirrored in hysteria. To briefly consider an example, in the eighteenth century, the gendered language of medicine assigned hysteria to women, and rerouted unmanageable nervous disorders in men towards the symptom pool of hypochondria. By 1873, however, we have the term “neurasthenia” in America, which not only legitimized hysterical innervations in men, but also valorized them as hallmarks of evolutionary progress, signifying superior brain force and exquisitely refined sensibilities. Not surprisingly, the ranks of neurasthenics swelled, while hypochondria fell into disfavor. Writing of what she identifies as contemporary hysterical epidemics, Elaine Showalter says:

patients learn about diseases from the media, unconsciously develop the symptoms, and then attract media attention in an endless cycle. The human imagination is not infinite, and we are all bombarded by these plot lines every day. Inevitably, we all live out the social stories of our time.

(Hystories 6)

We are not all hysterical, at least not always, and what Showalter means by this generalization is that hysteria provides us nevertheless with a linguistic matrix where what is foreclosed in the socio-symbolic can nevertheless be verbalized, experienced, or enjoyed. The hysterical narrative has value not necessarily because it refers to a primordial truth, whether in organic or psychic disease, trauma or the fantasy of trauma, but because it stands for a complex, prohibited, yet sometimes predictable negotiation or contestation between the subject and his or her milieu. Imagination is not infinite, Showalter states, so we collectively inhabit the gray area between law and jouissance and iconically express in “hystories” what is denied in social communication.

The hysteric both says too much and can’t say enough. In hysteria, an idea becomes pathogenic because it is experienced in a psychic, unconscious state occluded by the ego. The ego prevents this unconscious idea from becoming conscious and surfacing in language, and a somatic defence is formed. The vast set of physical, verbal, or gestural symptoms associated with the disorder—stutters, seizures, coughs, paralyses, enervation, hyperactivity—reenacts a scene which, as Monique David-Ménard theorizes, “has never been elaborated in language” (28). To illustrate her point David-Ménard cites Freud’s case history of Elisabeth von R. in Studies on Hysteria (1895). Elisabeth felt stabs of pain each time Freud aroused a memory by a question. The pain persisted for the duration of the recall, and disappeared when she finally mastered it. What is interesting in Freud’s elaboration of this coincidence is that he no longer presumes a causal relation between the physiological symptom and its psychic history, but sees the (bodily) pain coexisting homogeneously with an unspeakable (psychic) pleasure. The pain, in fact, perversely, and continuously, speaks of the pleasure that has been revived in the symptom. The hysterical symptom is over-determined yet unnarratable, and this, in turn, binds the hysteric to the analyst, the subject-supposed-to-know, as also to the discourse of the historian, the critic, and the student of literature.

Freud famously compared hysterical narratives to “an unnavigable river whose stream is at one moment choked by masses of rock and at another divided and lost among shallows and sandbanks” (SE 2: 160–61). The stories he heard were riddled and raddled, and Freud chose a position from which he had no choice but to provide a consistent and unbroken case history: “Once we have discovered the concealed motives, which have often remained unconscious, and have taken them into account, nothing that is puzzling or contrary to rule remains in hysterical connections of thought, any more than in normal ones” (161). Freud’s compulsion to mediate or hypostatize narratives, and attenuate the pain or obscene pleasure of his patients should be seen against his perfection of the psychoanalytic method and subsequent discoveries of the unconscious, repression, transference, telepathy, and resistance. Psychoanalysis was thought up as an indispensable paradigm for interventions in hysteria, whether objectivist, scientific, or aesthetic.

Freud was a student of Jean-Martin Charcot, the French clinical neurologist, who theatricalized phases and facets of hysteria during the 1860s and 1870s through his hysteria shows at the Salpêtrière. Charcot brilliantly systematized the symptomatology, stages, and diagnoses of hysteria, but as Mark S. Micale points out, his “achievements were medico-scientific and not therapeutic. Believing hysteria to be constitutional and degenerative, he held out little hope for its cure” (25). Freud used Charcot’s neurological analyses to construct a psychological model of nervous illness that situated the psyche at the juncture of the body and discourse. The psychoanalytic method evolved as Freud tried to desublimate the rich and strange symptoms of his patients in the analytic question in a series of essays, the most controversial of which are Studies on Hysteria (co-authored with Josef Breuer, 1894) and Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (the “Dora” case, 1901). “Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences,” Freud postulated in Studies on Hysteria, and went on to explain how painful memories in the distant past of the hysteric, where libido and disgust are associatively and agonistically linked, are incapable of articulating themselves. In the Freudian reconceptualization of hysteria, the “hysterical body thinks,” says Monique David-Ménard; “a thought, which is initially psychical becomes a physiological mechanism without ceasing to be thought” (13). The beyond of language—heterogeneous fragments that cut and split the signifier—gets converted into bodily innervations: intense libidinal urges manifest themselves in signs of disgust. Freud held that the repressed memories were those of childhood sexual trauma, but rejected the seduction theory in 1897 to claim instead that the traumatic core was actually a realm of satisfaction that dared not speak its name. The hysteric, Freud diagnosed, denies the distinction between the phantasmatic and the real, and remains fixated in his or her demand for the (unreal) object of desire, stubbornly refusing to represent it, for every act of signification kills the thing itself and acknowledges lack. He or she is also inhibited in the choice of a sexual object, for no reality measures up to the perfection of phantasmatic representation. Believing that the repressed material had to be reintegrated in the conscious...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: “Stuck in the Gullet of the Signifier”: Desire, Disgust, and the Aesthetics of Hysteria
• 2. Too Much, Too Little: The Emotional Capital of Victorian Melodrama
• 3. “Missed Encounters”: Repetition, Rewriting, and Contemporary Returns to Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations
• 4. Broken English: Neurosis and Narration in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy
• 5. Emetic Theory: Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index