Word of Mouth

Food and Fiction After Freud

Susanne M. Skubal

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415938501
• eBook ISBN: 9781136713361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

An examination of the importance of oral experience as reflected in literature, Word of Mouth extends psychoanalytic theory as forwarded by Freud, Karl Abraham, Melanie Klein, and Julia Kristeva. The meaning of oral experience is explored with reference to several texts, looking at the oral bond between mother and child in Proust and questions of disordered eating, raised by aggressive orality, found in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Throughout, the author draws forth the myriad expressions relating the desires and dramas of the mouth, its pervasive pleasures and its dreads.

CHAPTER ONE

Repast: Mother, Identity, and Memory

Hunger is memory.

—Ernest Hemingway, A Movable Feast

I thought to begin with a poem I would devise that could at once usher us into the subject of this chapter and convey the ineffability of it—its special resistance to logos. The poem, simple but strong, would have recalled my experience as a nursing mother—first cautious and concerned, then confident, and finally downright cocky. I would have used that word “cocky” teasingly, remembering and offending Freud and his friends in a single word. The poem would have to be about my early maternal part in the mother-infant moment because the other perspective, the infant’s, is beyond all conscious recall. In some sense it is literally beyond me, and that would be an essential point. I would no doubt project a bit, or attach, to the babe at my breast, some amount of pleasure and satisfaction in the nurturance, though I wouldn’t call it that, and some amount of frustration and anxiety, maybe even anger, at my clumsiness or delay or haste. But this poem wouldn’t linger there. It would move to a certainty I experienced as first my son and, two years later, my daughter fell asleep at my breast, their little mouths moist with the last pull of milk that never quite made it in, and so announced mutely they’d had enough of me and my warm offering for the time being. The poem would shift a decade, almost two, as I did then and must do now, to the thought of the thing. And I would remember thinking and sometimes saying to their soft little heads: It’s okay. This is free. There is no bargain being struck here, except that you live and grow. It doesn’t matter if someday you are nasty or unappreciative or an adolescent know-it-all sarcastic shit. This much is truly free and gladly given. This yes, this love, this much of me is yours. Go you will, in peace or passionate rending. It’s okay.

The poem might have been more allusive: my little pre-genital yes taking on Molly Bloom’s, like some David standing up to Joyce’s literary Goliath. And there would be alliteration and surely assonance enough to go around. But mostly it would kick things off right. This oral business is beautiful and magical, a wellspring of mystery. The bond at the breast is immutable, and no amount of logic and language can quite get there. The poem would own up to that somehow, and then, with that much benediction, I could begin.

Much of what we know about the human experience, about ourselves, our bodies, our quantities, capacities, inclinations, aversions, dreads and desires, we know from science, its mathematics and methods, and from language, its constructs and the culture it conveys and which contains us. While once we might have referenced the great repositories at an Alexandria or Oxford, or the laboratories and lecture halls of universities, ancient and new, or the metaphysical and literary canons of human thought, we now need only to mention the microchip and the Web to confirm how much it is that we know or might, by the double flexing of a finger, learn about human life. But before we can take the first step in this infinity of knowing, we already know and learn that which makes our human identity possible.

It happens, has happened for millions of years, without a script and most often without a record. A baby is born and takes in the universe. Biblically “to know” is to know sexually, but psychically as Edenically “to know” is to know orally. During even the first moments and months of life the human infant has a sustaining pre-verbal wisdom of the body, starting at its mouth. There is the look, the smile, the smell, the sound, the touch and the taste of life. But from the first this is conditional. Human life happens only in the presence of an object/other—the breast or its surrogate. Before the eyes have opened or cleared, the rooting reflex tells the infant which way to turn to find the breast. Thus, the international sign in deaf for “mother” strokes the cheek, imitating the touch that turns the baby’s head to seek the nipple of the nourishing other. From the very beginning, it would seem, biology dictates a bond. And in this paradigm, the place of connection is the breast and the mouth. Constitutionally, if the infant isn’t fed, it dies. But more than a matter of nourishing survival, it is this same connection which creates humanness.

Reflected in the art and icons of the centuries, we find whole epochs of valorization of this relational space—babe at breast. And it is by virtue of these first acts of taking nourishment that we begin to have knowledge of life. In this regard, British psychoanalyst John Bowlby asserts that body intimacy in the feeding embrace not only elicits a first, radical knowledge, but that it is essential for the entire psychological and physiological organization of the infant.

Bowlby’s research on human attachment, published in a three-volume work bearing the titles Attachment (1969), Separation (1973), and Loss (1969), describes a range of components, conditions, and implications of this initiating human bond. He identifies the most crucial component of successful human development to be the dyadic nature of the relationship. The mother (biological, adoptive, or surrogate) and child attachment, which Bowlby insists is distinct from dependence, provides the greatest promise of psychological health and resilience throughout childhood and into adulthood. This may not be surprising, or even remarkable, except that his research establishes that there are measurable differences in infant ego development as early as in the second month of life between infants who are being nurtured institutionally (and therefore, because of multiple caregivers, unable to experience attachment) and infants who are being nurtured in families with a predominant caregiver. These differences are manifested in such areas as response to stimuli, soothing response time, and the ability to track motion. Although these differences are apparent as early as two months, Bowlby establishes that the prime period for attachment formation extends through the first six months of the infant’s life. What’s more, his study allays the fear that this strong monotropic tendency or need in the human infant will result in a lessening of the ability to attach to other figures. In fact, Bowlby points out that a child with a strong attachment to a primary figure is more likely to direct social behavior and attach to subsidiary figures than the child who has had little or no primary attachment. The mother-infant bond, cemented in the feeding embrace, is not only a rehearsal for other love relationships, but constitutes the fertile ground for all psychic development.

In some sense Bowlby’s observations and research shed little new light on the subject of human development and the critically oral nature of infantile acquisition of character and culture. The incorporative oral nature of early development is common knowledge, refined even reified by psychoanalytic theory. Freud named the oral as the oldest instinct, the first libidinal stage. And following Freud other psychoanalysts have theorized the complex and crucial oral underpinnings to human character formation. Karl Abraham assembles a skeletal framework of the oral as having both an incorporative, sucking phase, followed by and overlapping a destructive, biting phase. Melanie Klein’s work fleshes out the picture of infantile psychic development. Not only does she assert, as Bowlby will affirm, that human psychic development is dynamic from the start and that it is rooted in the oral experience, but she too insists on the relational quality of the oral.

Setting the course for object-relations theory, Klein posits a picture of humanness that begins with the infant’s phantasy of omnipotence and universality, but which is early and often shaken by the reality of the object that cannot conform to and confirm the phantasy. It is this relational space, of mouth and breast, that will be the domain of psychic negotiation and hence development.

Klein’s theory describes the infant as one who phantasizes an interior and exterior world that both responds to and refuses its desires. The breast and its milk—the quintessential first object or part-object—come to stand for love, goodness and security. Yet they can never be enough. In part this is, of course, because of the objective reality of di-fusion, of separation at birth, but also because the nurturing other cannot fulfill the phantasy of non-separation and totality. The baby isn’t everything, no matter how loved or well-attended, and this is repeatedly demonstrated to the infant because its urges, manifested largely in the oral, are not simultaneously felt and met. Klein describes the ensuing infantile scene: “the infant’s feelings seem to be that when the breast deprives him, it becomes bad because it keeps the milk, love and care associated with the good breast all to itself. He hates and envies what he feels to be the mean and grudging breast” (1963:42). The psychic and developmental process Klein describes has the infant not only taking nourishment and affirmation at the breast, but also phantastically enacting an aggressive devouring and “spoiling” of the breast. Her theory continues with the infant projecting this aggression onto the object/breast and then fearing retribution from the breast. The infant psyche will cope with these crucial conflicts of love and hate, nurturtive feeding and destructive devouring, by splitting the object imagos into the good and the bad, until such time as it can tolerate and reconcile this profound ambivalence toward the object without, as well as the object within.

The common ground of Bowlby’s attachment theory and Klein’s object-relations theory include not only their insistence on the relational, dyadic requisite of infantile development and their similar assertion that this dynamic is at work even in the neonate, but also that the bond or relation is, by necessity, covalent; aggression in whatever manifestation is complicit in attachment. This is supported by ethologist Konrad Lorenz in his investigation of the relationship between bonding behavior and aggression in various animal species. In his 1953 publication of On Aggression he writes: “Intra-specific aggression is millions of years older than personal friendship and love.… Thus intra-specific aggression can certainly exists without its counterpart, love, but conversely there is no love without aggression” (217). And to this we can add Freud’s two-drive theory, all of which yields a portrait of humanness that consists, even before and outside of culture’s considerable control, of a psychic interdependency, a pas de deux, that negotiates love and hate, desire and dread, incorporative identity and immemorial loss, nurturing presence and devouring destruction.

The importance, then, of the attachment, achieved in large part through the feeding embrace of mother and child, can hardly be overestimated. But as is true of much of what we can know and say about the oral, this is not often mentioned critically, and rarely foregrounded.¹ Because early infant nurturance and attachment occur more or less routinely, pre-culturally and pre-linguistically, most accounts are casual or clinical. It is when something goes wrong that our attention is drawn there. Certainly, when babies starve, we know something is socially, politically, morally disturbed. When a single baby is starved, we might look to the pathology of the caregiver. But what of the baby whose basic nutritional needs are met but who experiences little or no attachment? The disorder may be asymptomatic or masked for months, years, even decades. But we encounter it nonetheless—often in prison populations, in mental institutions, or on the margins of society.

Selma Fraiberg’s account of the diseases of non-attachment in her 1958 publication, Every Child’s Birthright, borrows from and synthesizes a large number of studies which have appeared since World War II dealing with the absence or rupture of human attachment in infancy. Several of these studies—including Bowlby’s—were conducted in infant institutions, while others followed child subjects who had passed their infancy and early years in serial foster care. Among the grim findings of these studies, which consistently indicate the irreversibility of the results of deprivation of attachment during infancy, Fraiberg cites three areas of particular damage: permanent impairment in the ability to attach to any persons, long-term impairment in intellectual and language function, and chronic disorders of impulse control. The non-attached possess an impoverished, even absent, emotional range; humorless, griefless, guiltless, remorseless, profoundly joyless, these hollow figures are mostly anonymous strays. But periodically they confront us in their surge for an existential jolt. Characteristic of the brutal acts of the non-attached, these eruptions of violence seem indiscriminate, purposeless, and affectless. In the fictions of Robbe-Grillet, Jean Genet or Celine we might come across them, and in the news stories and real-life accounts of incidental brutality or baseness we are sometimes forced to face the amoral, non-attached agent, who, as Fraiberg notes, is like the killer in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, saying of his victim: “He was a very nice gentleman.… I thought so right up to the minute I cut his throat” (302).

Though the failure of adequate attachment to a nurturing other more often produces a less graphic condition—an attitude of indifference, an absence of human connection or affinity—it is the abnormality if not brutal aberrance of those hollow figures in our human landscape which elucidates, in the negative, the monumental significance of early attachment through nurturance. Of course human beings are subsequently subject to an amazing array of disorders and deviances, some little more than quirks or creaks, others lethal and loathsome. But my point here, early on in this discussion, is that the oral bond is first and foremost that without which what we recognize as humanness cannot fully occur. It’s that basic.

This chapter, then, takes as its subject the profound and permanent effects of the orally bonded nature and origin of human identity. This identity-producing past, that is with us in memory and in our hunger that is memory, is pursued, evaded, appeased, displaced, and repressed into the food we eat and the stories we tell. In this chapter I look at four such stories. First I consider Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, finding his ultimately evasive meditation on the past to nevertheless point to the trinity that is mouth, mother, and memory. Next I turn to William Faulkner’s Light in August with its startling orality—benign and accursed—and trace the narrative’s invocation and exploration of memory that should be maternal. Then I take up F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby for its glimpse at the mythic and mundane of incorporative eros and identity. And finally, I consider Katherine Mansfield’s short piece, “Bliss,” as it brings these matters to their manic state.

Few moments in fiction have had the nearly universal nod of recognition that greets a short passage in the “Overture” to the seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s opus, Remembrance of Things Past (A la Recherche de Temps Perdu), published during the period from 1913 to 1927. I refer, of course, to the passage in which the narrator, Marcel, describes the transportive and evocative effect of incidentally eating a tea-soaked bit of a shell-shaped cake—the petite madeleine. Mysteriously, almost magically, he experiences, more than just a recollection or deja vu, a re-embodiment, as it were, of times past. These resurrected times were the boyhood summers he spent with his parents and beloved grandmother at the home of his Aunt Leonie in the village of Combray. This moment of remembrance—the oral nature of which should not be underestimated—becomes a veritable touchstone of validity, referred to scores of times in the volumes which follow. The experience of the madeleine-induced memory will serve as a register of the “real,” authentic past as contrasted with the “superficial,” constructed past that is the best that conscious effort at remembering can produce. Proust makes his valorization of the oral lyrically explicit:

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. (I: 36)²

The madeleine moment reveals the special power of nostalgic longing. But more than a catalytic conveyance of memory, the taste is itself an embodiment—a soul—ready to return to life. And as Proust will pursue it, it has about it much of what we’ve come to associate with the uncanny.

There is another momentous recollection from Marcel’s childhood at Combray that is recalled throughout the work but which, unlike the remembrances which are lost to us unless and until the madeleine equivalent experience unlocks them, was already available to Marcel in vivid detail. In fact it was this recalled scene that constituted Marcel’s chief recollection of his childhood at Combray until the little tea-soaked cake brought back its expansive set of memories. In the “Overture” he describes an evening at Combray when Monsieur Swann, a family friend, has come to dinner, resulting in Marcel’s being sent to bed early and without being able to give a talismanic goodnight kiss to his mother. Unable to endure this deprivation, Marcel desperately risks what he is sure will be his father’s wrath and his mother’s certain banishment of him and enlists the cook to slip a note to his mother asking that she visit him before she retires. When this strategy fails, the anxious boy resolves to risk all past and future pleasure by having the temerity to present himself to his mother when she ascends the stairs for bed. Sitting at his window, he hears the bell on the gate, signaling the departure of Monsieur Swann and the imminent encounter with Mamma.

At first mother is angry and refusing, but unpredictably Marcel’s father responds to the sobbing boy and sanctions not only the longed for goodnight kiss, but an entire night of comfort for the distraught child: “Go along with him, then; … stay in his room for a little.… There’s no question of making him accustomed.… You can see quite well that the child is unhappy” (I: 28). Mother does as father bids. After a fashion. She spends the night with her son, but rather than offering the boy a flood of maternal warmth, lullaby, and embrace, she offers instead to read one of the books that was to be a birthday gift from his grandmother, George Sands’ Francois le Champi. Marcel will often refer to this night, his other touchstone, “the sweetest and saddest night in my life” (II: 1006), invoking it to add special significance to later events in his life.

The contrast between the madeleine which serves to recapture the otherwise lost past, and the ever-present memory of the night of maternal presence, which serves to confer meaning on subsequent experiences, is intriguing. But what is perhaps more striking is that, despite the narrator’s more than ample insistence on and pride in his central quest for the “meaning” and significance of these special memories, he never really arrives at any epiphany of knowledge, self or otherwise. Considering that the narrative is one of the longest ever penned, this may be remarkable indeed. But allowing for the integrity of the project (we can’t insist on a Bildungsroman), we still have a text that is incredibly stunted in its refusal to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One Repast: Mother, Identity, and Memory
• Chapter Two Consuming Culture: The Linguistics of Location
• Chapter Three Lesser Crimes: Anorexia’s Plea
• Chapter Four It Goes Without Saying: Oral Aggression and Its Mutterings
• Afterword Last Suppers: Final Words
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index