Zones of Focused Ambiguity in Siri Hustvedt's Works

Interdisciplinary Essays

Johanna Hartmann, Christine Marks, Hubert Zapf, Johanna Hartmann, Christine Marks, Hubert Zapf

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9783110578690
• eBook ISBN: 9783110407761
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

This collection comprises essays from various interdisciplinary perspectives – e.g. literary scholarship, intermediality, art history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and medicine – to analyze and interpret the fictional and non-fictional works by Siri Hustvedt, an author whose reputation and public presence have been growing steadily in the 21st century and who is recognized as one of the most widely read and appreciated contemporary American writers. In her significance and stature as a public intellectual, she is not merely an American writer but a transnational, cosmopolitan author, who develops new forms not only of literary narrative but of interdisciplinary thought and writing, bringing together otherwise separated genres and branches of knowledge in a broad spectrum between literature and philosophy, historiography and art, psychoanalysis and neuroscience, narrative and medicine. The present volume is structured into the parts "Literary Creation and Communication, " Psychoanalysis and Philosophy, " "Medicine and Narrative, " "Vision, Perception, and Power, " and "Trauma, Memory, and the Ambiguities of Self" and closes with an interview of Siri Hustvedt by Susanne Becker in which Hustvedt elucidates her personal conception of her own creative processes of writing.

Psychoanalysis and Philosophy

Lucien Mélèse

The No Truth about Siri

Foreword

When a psychoanalyst writes about a novel or an essay, he must not be considered as representing psychoanalysis.

He is only proceeding inside a ‘transitional’ space created by the writer to address the reader. This being so, the reader (psychoanalyst or not) is not given the opportunity to modify the game setting or the rules. This intermediary space – signs on a page, eyes to read – could more rightly be called ‘transitory,’ implying a compulsory need to re-enact ‘writing,’ putting signs on page after page, in the hope that ‘reading’ will occur again.

But in fact, this re-enactment finds no ending on its own.

“Starter”

Dear Siri,

You asked me to take part in a book ‘about’ your work; however, knowing me, you know this means writing ‘to’ you. Here I go!

In order to give me freedom in my search for ideas, let us consider from now on that the sign ‘SIRI’ designates the abstract subject of your works – and of my writings – and that I shall refer to you in the third person.

I*

Nothing other than my own dream, starting in November 2010 in Tangier, Morocco.

Reading The Shaking Woman: I had brought this book with me (the French translation) because of my nearly half-a-century experience in ‘epilepsy,’ as a practicing psychoanalyst. At that moment, as I sat reading in a splendid park, overlooking two seas, something happened to me.

Something I didn’t expect, that made me start to write to her immediately. Indeed, I found this book written ‘for me,’ as Paul Valéry says of books one feels to be almost written ‘by me’ (Not to compare talents, of course!).

Afterwards, I read everything she had written and published in French, and later in English, too. I also went back to Paul Auster’s books, and enjoyed reading his new ones. I was fascinated by The Sorrows of an American, which I read three times. This and several other books of hers became companions and references in my seminars (in Paris and Brussels). I had the opportunity to tell Siri in person that Sorrows was, for me, one of the best books ever written, as it describes and delves into psychoanalysis as I imagine it should be.

Fictional works, essays, and other texts by ‘Siri’ I read as ‘fragments of a dream,’ in some kind of shared ‘transitional space,’ neither mine nor hers (or belonging to another, as I define the other of body, of sex, and of time). ‘Siri’ compels those different bodies to share this transitional space with her.

As a dream, did I say, but also as a ‘Panic Journal,’ – remember the god Pan, swift escape and wild eroticism, paradox of ‘homogeneous otherness.’

Here are parts of my first letter (written in French, my translation):

Madam,

As I read “a history of (your) nerves,” so elegant and rich, I was delighted as a reader, and stimulated as a researcher; in my own work, (psychoanalyst), though reading is not separated from practice nor from self-analysis. […]

“A History of my Fears” could be the effect of that reading.

(October 2010) I dream of a difficult situation, a frightened small boy, whom I try to notice behind M. (my second wife), hiding him partly.

(September) a few days before, housed by friends, I see their grandson, named Vito (vital, living), playing. I cannot hold back my tears as I imagine and see T.

(July 16) T. is killed in a car accident, in South America, the father being partly responsible. T. was a “solar” child, aged 10, always open to everyone, playful and creative. He was the first grandchild of M., who had always been anxious about the “borderline” father, her son. […]

(M. and I were by then to be separated, in a very hostile atmosphere, which made me be more absent than I should have been).

The ashes were brought back to France to our village, while in the church (requested by the South-American mother) I was overwhelmed with emotion, and turning aside, I sobbed for long minutes. Then I felt an arm, a breast: it was a friend of the mother, I did not know her, “there she was,” that’s all.

After the October dream, I acknowledged, talking with my analyst, that the young boy was myself, hidden behind M.’s grief. I was 8 when WW II ended, Vito’s age, by that time my mother was constantly ill […] as a result of horror and fear. We were refugees in the Pyrenees, both protected and threatened; at the worst period (spring 1944), my elder brothers hid on mountain farms, and I was sent to stay with some women who belonged to the Resistance in Bordeaux, with false papers. In September 1942, an aunt and her four children were deported to Auschwitz; later, in July 1944, just before the liberation of Paris, my mother’s parents…

I have no conscious remembrance of terror, but I can reconstruct that in winter ’42 I was severely ill with whooping cough, I remained unconscious for several days. When I woke up I didn’t know where I was, or how much time had passed. As another “proof,” photos taken with cousins at the end of ’41, all of us smiling, and other photos of us taken at the end of ’42, our faces gloomy, wry, with an absent expression. We were not supposed to “know” the tragedy, our parents’ silence; adults underestimate the ability of children for empathy and foresight. (Today, in 2014, I have finally come to realize that in the autumn of ’44, after a minor accident, I had to receive tetanus serum. Luckily enough! Since afterwards I had a moderate tetanus attack and had to spend a week alone in a darkened room, with episodic “tetanic” fits at the least intrusion of light or sound. I was therefore supposed to be unaware of the last July deportation. Proof that post-traumatic work is infinite.)

In this psychoanalytic session I found again the terrified child, frozen and paralyzed. Unable to feel empathy for this mother burdened with mourning, cold and out of reach despite her “normal” kindness, but also subject to violence (I understood later she had three generations of tragedy to cope with). This very day I understood that my mother was unable to look at me without seeing ghosts (ghosts became my main analytic research). I had assumed she was depressed, not taking into account her real traumatic experiences. Thirty years later, on a photo where she looks at my two-year old son, she stares to the side with a frantic gaze. Almost all her life she took refuge in migraines – and so did my first wife.

I endured multiple psychosomatic “acting-ins” until I started psychoanalysis, but I had to identify unaided my own migraines as signals of unconscious survivor’s guilt […]: having survived the war, that gigantic murderous orgasm; and having survived the sorrows of my mother, and her murderous but unconscious eyes. (She said about my father, a kind of anxious and somewhat hysterical chap, full of energy and resources: “nothing will put him down,” as a reproach, not as recognition of a resource).

My refuge was an armor, although my skin suffered and all my senses were awakened almost too much, as you, S.H., describe it so well. My ability to perceive the inner state of others became useful later in my practice, but for a long time I remained inhibited with women, of course.

You can guess that Jacques Lacan’s intuition was good when he sent me to work with “epileptics.” From 1966 on this has been very fruitful. […]

From this session on, that is, with a delay of about 70 years, I stopped being that unknowing terrified child, refusing emotional sharing and fleeing under the bombs (which I experienced close by in Bordeaux, living very near the submarine base under bombing).[…] My gratitude for having me write this letter! Maybe it will find its way to your memory box. […].

As I go back to Siri’s first novel, The Blindfold, I am astounded by the accuracy of her quasi-clinical description of ‘migraine,’ feelings, delusions, and hallucinations, and generally pain, suffering and anxiety, all of it bound up with intimacy and humor. Psychiatric-psychoanalytic literature is far from achieving this effect. In fact I hear, see, feel, and almost smell her progression along the pages.

In vivid contrast to this, I remembered the attitude of one of my analysts, quite renowned under his non-Jewish alias. One night, I had a gigantic dream, many episodes of going through the Auschwitz Camp, toward the “HÔTEL DES ÂMES MORTES,” the Dead Souls Hotel. He remained silent, then said “well, we shall stop this analysis now!” Yet another ‘expulsion,’ this time by an analyst overwhelmed by his own history, reduced to silence. Gathering myself up from the couch, I again found myself alone, having to cope with the history ‘before’ the Camp, this camp that had caused my mother to pace up and down within her dreams and nightmares, trying to find her parents, so long that she wore out her knees’ cartilages.

Alone, I was to explore hidden deaths in both parental lineages, going back at least three generations (later becoming the ‘young dead woman’ complex: a lost woman in both branches; a fiancée for my father and an aunt for my mother aged five, whose suicide was of course concealed – both named Gaby (Gabriela/ Gabrielle), which makes a bond, unconscious and thus stronger). And all this buried under the Nazi madness, but neither blurred nor erased.

For me, the creative results of encountering Siri’s writing did not stop at exploring horror. Art, and the practice of my ‘art,’ were enriched too. Here is an excerpt from another letter:

… I finished reading (partly in English) all your published work, except Mysteries of the Rectangle, which I shall read tomorrow. Always a pleasure, and an enormous stimulus which helps me prepare my seminars for the coming years (Paris, Brussels, and maybe Rabat). (I also found pleasure and stimulus in Timbuktu, Invisible, and especially Man in the Dark, you know the author18…)

The following story might interest you, and explains why my first letter was written from Tangier.

Around 1970, I started the psychoanalysis of a young woman; she came from Morocco, was very beautiful and especially active as a student in psychology and sociology – so exciting in that rich period – and also, or mainly, as an ardent militant against the royal dictatorship; her husband was a comrade of Ben Barka, and was also condemned to death. They had a baby girl, and were divorcing or divorced.

She came from a very modest, even poor family, with an illiterate mother, a passionate, severe and non-religious father, and many children, all well-educated and having attained high social positions. During Mo.’s very regular analysis, five or six years, there were of course many painful or dramatic episodes; in the end, she left and went back to Morocco. She started as a psychotherapist in Rabat and Tangier, married a second time and brought up her girl Y. (who, now aged 41, is a world-famous photographer). From time to time Mo. invited me to exhibitions of her paintings and sculptures in Paris (talented). Later she asked me to see one of her daughters-in-law for severe physical and mental illnesses (she tells me I helped).

Then, about 1982, she phoned me in a situation of great emergency, arriving in Paris for medical care following a third or fourth miscarriage: she didn’t succeed in having another child. I went to her clinic and we had sessions every day by her bed for a week or so. We went back through her analysis, and one day I said “I have a good image of your father, but I just can’t see your mother!”; she instantly replied “but I have no mother!” To my surprise she explained that with so many children her mother had no time for her; so her real mother was her goat, which she suckled and played with all days long. I then asked – not knowing what I was saying – “how long does a goat bear the foetus?” “five and half months,” she replied; “and when do you lose your babies?” “at five and a half months”!!! Well, it was too late for that time, but her next baby was born at term: her son Ch., now 28 or 29, who runs a big stud-farm with great success, and sells horses the world over.

End of this episode. A few years ago she wrote me again, wanting to meet me (in Paris: they have an apartment), and she then explained that she had created a (most remarkable) NGO in Tangier, for lost children, persecuted or errant women, and later female students. It functions, of course, in very liberal and creative ways, and has great success (and little money; her rich husband helps a lot). For this, she even acquired “la Légion d’honneur,” given by Chirac!!! (and no money from the King, but she is rather influential on the liberal – even leftist – side).

Two years ago (2009) she invited my wife and me to visit her (and Morocco), and we were very impressed by her firm and subtle strategy as director of those numerous houses, workshops, pension, restaurant, educational garden, and more.

PS: Mo. wrote her own story, at length and with family history, too, gave me the manuscript 30 years ago, and forgot it. I found it not long ago, gave it back to her, and she chose to hand it to my elder daughter (who was then scouting for film locations in Tangier: houses, brothels…). So her book might become a film some day…!

As I went on reading The Blindfold, the strange pleasure of familiarity, or rather uncanny ‘intimacy,’ with this kind of ‘Bildungsroman’ was growing. I expressed this in a letter written a few months ago:

This summer I felt so close to you that I could not avoid writing. Of course, you may read this or discard it, but just before my 77th birthday I give myself the pleasure of “talking” to you.

Re-rereading What I Loved, in this fine late summer in the Luxembourg Gardens, I found this man Leo unbelievably close to “myself,” just as if you, the writer, had been to some extent “my own.”

I had to go to California in July, my elder brother seeming to be close to death; I stayed in Oakland for 12 days, until he was out of (immediate) danger. Then I could travel in France with “a friend” (see below).

But with so much time lost in planes, hotels, and hospitals, I managed to read in English, first Mr. Vertigo by Paul Auster (crossing through slang and idiomatic phrases!) and Fault Lines by Nancy Huston (for the third time). But Tout ce que j’aimais in French, by Siri H., or maybe “written by me” in some dream I had unknowingly!

Your description of the delicate interweaving relations between some level of American (occidental) culture not so long ago, and history, tragedy, war, and exile, is a masterpiece of invention. I shall cite again sentences and remarks (after The Shaking Woman and The Sorrows of an American) in my ongoing seminar (Paris and Brussels), still about Crisis and Trauma. Mainly their effects on subsequent generations: my own, the first, and my Armenian (French) friend’s, the third. Hatred uncontrolled, destruction and false “normality.”

You insist on hunger, be it “portrayed” by anorexia or obesity: showing that beyond all pertinent mother-child questions, it remains the history of extreme poverty, wars, and panics, insisting silently through generations. Hunger also for love, respect, and consideration. You have divided the feeling of “indignity” between the two friends, Leo, more introspective, and Bill, more creative, at a heavy cost. But both are running desperately after such tragic events (“Mutti!”). Quite a dull and sterile future for these friends...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Literary Creation and Communication
• Psychoanalysis and Philosophy
• Medicine and Narrative
• Vision, Perception, and Power
• Trauma, Memory, and the Ambiguities of Self
• Interview with Siri Hustvedt
• List of Contributors
• Footnotes