Kristeva in America 9783030599119, 9783030599126

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Praise for Kristeva In America
Contents
1 Kristeva’s Theories on Motherhood and Abjection: Spillers and Halberstam
References
2 Kristeva’s Impact on Film Studies: Orson Welles and David Lynch
References
3 “Allow Me a Confession: I Love America”
References
4 The Fiction: A Modernist View of America
References
5 Re-Envisioning World Literature and Film: Rochefort, Savoca, and Lentricchia
References
Conclusion
Index

Citation preview

PIVOTAL STUDIES IN THE GLOBAL AMERICAN LITERARY IMAGINATION SERIES EDITORS: DANIEL T. O’HARA · DONALD E. PEASE

Kristeva in America Re-Imagining the Exceptional Carol Mastrangelo Bové

Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination

Series Editors Daniel T. O’Hara Temple University Philadelphia, PA, USA Donald E. Pease Department of English Dartmouth College Hanover, NH, USA

This series will present new critical perspectives on the histories and legacies shaping the divergent visions of America in the world within literary texts. Texts that re-envision America and its relationship to the larger world, in ways other than exceptionalist, will provide a point of critical focus for these cutting edge scholarly studies. Using the unique format of Palgrave Pivot to make an incisive intervention into current scholarship, the stress in these books will be on how American literary texts have and continue to contribute to the reformation of the vision of America in the world from roughly the antebellum period to the present. As “transnational” approaches to scholarly production have become mainstream, Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination considers the complexities of such an appropriation and, instead, develop alternative global perspectives. All American genealogies from the New England preeminence through the mid-century modern cold war consensus to post-modern dissensus, transatlantic, global/transnational turns (and counter-turns) would be tapped and the word “American” in the title will include all of North America. All critical perspectives would also be welcome, so long as the focus is on the question of how the texts and subjects discussed bear on the question of the global American literary imagination. Finally, the authors will demonstrate how to read their chosen texts, revealing the ways these new interpretations foster informed critique and revised critical methods. Books published within this series should fall within the Pivot length limits of 25,000–50,000 words.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15082

Carol Mastrangelo Bové

Kristeva in America Re-Imagining the Exceptional

Carol Mastrangelo Bové Department of English University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA, USA Faculty of French Westminster College New Wilmington, PA, USA

Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination ISBN 978-3-030-59911-9 ISBN 978-3-030-59912-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59912-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Pattern adapted from an Indian cotton print produced in the 19th century This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Paul

Acknowledgments

I dedicate this book to Paul A. Bové, who has been my consort in writing and in life for many years—we celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary in 2020! I also want to acknowledge Michael Hays for having introduced me to Kristeva’s work back in the early 1980s, an introduction that has become an enduring relationship of a different kind. Daniel T. O’Hara and Donald E. Pease, co-editors of the Pivot series “The Global American Literary Imagination,” have been supportive in every way in bringing this book to print. I’m grateful for the opportunity to be part of a series that reaches out for dialogue with those beyond the United States at a time when such conversations are increasingly rare. I thank Rachel Jacobe, Assistant Editor in Literature at Palgrave Macmillan and the team at the press for their support and flexible schedule in working with me to have this study of the response to Kristeva’s work in the United States appear. The University of Pittsburgh’s faculty and administration provided the resources to fund the Kristeva Circle Conference in 2017, which confirmed in my mind the productive debates deriving from her work in this country. I include the conference poster here: it makes reference to two of the major figures I have singled out in discussing the influence of Kristeva’s writing in America, Hortense Spillers and Jack Halberstam. Frank Vroegop’s painting of the Stabat Mater Dolorosa, which appears on Marco Rosano and Andreas Scholl’s album cover for their version of the musical composition, is a striking

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visual for the title of what is arguably Kristeva’s most famous essay, “Stabat Mater.” The following link displays Vroegop’s colors in all their glory. https://tinyurl.com/y6dbn4dz Finally, I thank Scott Davidson and John E. Drabinski, editors of the University of Pittsburgh publication, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, for making the conference proceedings available: Vol. 26, 2 (2018). They provide further evidence of the substantial influence of Kristeva’s work in this country including several of the authors mentioned in this book.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Funding Provided by:

Fig. 1.1 Stabat Mater Poster from the 2017 Kristeva Circle Conference at the University of Pittsburgh. Frank Vroegop (painter)

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Introduction

This book studies the influence of Julia Kristeva’s work on American literary and film studies including, for example, innovative approaches to Paule Marshall’s fiction and Orson Welles’s films. Critics in the United States receive the thinking of arguably the best representative today of French feminism, semiotics, and psychoanalytic writing in complex, controversial ways, especially on the question of marginalized populations. Like the critics analyzed here, I incorporate her thought in my own creative readings of relatively little-known authors and directors including Christiane Rochefort, Nancy Savoca, and Frank Lentricchia in these pages.

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Praise for Kristeva In America

“Carol Bové’s Kristeva in America: Re-Imagining the Exceptional is a work of great critical importance. In it, she explores the relationships between Kristeva’s work and the experiences of marginalized populations: African American, immigrant, woman as mother. At this particular moment, readers need to grapple with these complex relationships. Bové also explores American’s political identity and structural composition in light of Kristeva’s work, reinforcing the relationships between the psychoanalytic, semiotic, and political identities of both an individual and a nation.” —Gina MacKenzie, Associate Dean, School of Arts and Sciences, and Associate Professor of English at Holy Family University, USA “Carol Mastrangelo Bové braids together two strands of reflection in Kristeva in America. The first is a survey of Kristeva’s reception and use by US literary and cultural critics, including Hortense Spillers, Kelly Oliver, Benigno Trigo, and Jack Halberstam, among others. The second is an analysis of selected works of Kristeva herself that bear on the question of the psychic life of power in the United States. Given the rise of the socalled culture wars and their current political consequences in our country, Bové’s contribution is especially pertinent and timely.” —John Beverley, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh, USA

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Contents

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Kristeva’s Theories on Motherhood and Abjection: Spillers and Halberstam

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Kristeva’s Impact on Film Studies: Orson Welles and David Lynch

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3

“Allow Me a Confession: I Love America”

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4

The Fiction: A Modernist View of America

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5

Re-Envisioning World Literature and Film: Rochefort, Savoca, and Lentricchia

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Conclusion

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Index

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CHAPTER 1

Kristeva’s Theories on Motherhood and Abjection: Spillers and Halberstam

Abstract This chapter shows how Kristeva’s theories on motherhood in the essay “Stabat Mater” as well as her writing on abjection in Powers of Horror have stimulated new directions in American literary studies. Hortense Spillers’s Black, White, and in Color and Jack Halberstam’s Skin Shows, for example, draw on a psychoanalytic approach shaped by her theories to address especially the race question. I discuss primarily Kristeva’s essays from the 1980s in dialogue with two American critics who bring their creative versions of Neo-Freudian thought to bear on Paule Marshall’s and Bram Stoker’s novels. Keywords Motherhood · Abjection · Race

Theories on motherhood in the essay “Stabat Mater” (Kristeva 1987, 234–264) as well as her writing on abjection in Powers of Horror (Kristeva 1982) have stimulated new directions in American literary studies. Both Hortense Spillers (2003) and Jack Halberstam (2012), among others, draw on Kristeva’s theory in significant ways in their writing on literature and race. Considering Spillers’s and Halberstam’s work in their connection to her theory enables a psychoanalytic approach to address especially the race question hovering over literary studies and beyond. In © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. M. Bové, Kristeva in America, Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59912-6_1

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building on the work of Kristeva, these two critics reshape our understanding of the related questions of the human as well as of American national identity and demonstrate the compelling beauty of literary texts. In this chapter, I will examine Kristeva’s presence in Spillers’s and Halberstam’s writing. My examination considers these texts as literary criticism with the potential for reducing racial discord in the body politic. Given that psychoanalytic writing by definition turns primarily inward, I will necessarily discuss how best to understand past and present mistakes in understanding, confronting, and dealing with internal conflict. The psychoanalytic model is valuable precisely because it locates the sources of human activity in the psyche. The implication here is that ultimately, we are in control, or at least have the possibility of understanding, confronting, and reshaping unconscious motivations, that is, of rendering them conscious, along with the behavior and phenomena to which they lead. This potential and desired outcome is in fact the reason for my examination of Kristeva’s impact on literary studies in this volume. Her work in “Stabat Mater,” Powers of Horror, and beyond is substantive and prolific. It has engaged American studies in critical dialogues in an impressive array of fields including literature, film, philosophy, and religious studies as I will discuss in the chapters that follow. To consider one of the best examples, taken as a whole, Spillers’s Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (2003) implies a careful psychoanalytic critical theory and practice. The University of Chicago Press states (back cover) that she “is best-known for her race-centered revision of psychoanalytic theory.” In more precise terms, this chapter will show that her writing in this volume builds upon Kristeva’s version of Freud to better address questions of race. Considered together, Spillers’s essays provide an important instance in my examination of Kristeva impact, though they appear somewhat unconnected and directly mention her work only a few times in connection with motherhood. Black, White, and in Color includes indirect references to abjection, as Kristeva understands it, in the analysis of African-American fiction throughout the volume, along with explicit discussion of her ideas on motherhood in “Stabat Mater” in Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry and especially Paule Marshall’s novel The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (Spillers 2003, 133, 288–290). In terms that point to Ellison’s Invisible Man as a model of successful storytelling, Spillers indirectly refers to Kristeva’s theory of abjection in

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analyzing Toni Morrison’s Sula as a novel communicating the protagonist’s failure to tell her story (Spillers 2003, 8–9, 93–118, 1983). Building on Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater,” Spillers’s fifth chapter in this volume, “An Order of Constancy: Notes on Brooks and the Feminine” (2003, originally appeared in 1985, 131–151), examines motherhood as a paradoxical overlapping of nature and culture in Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry and its complex links to Anglo-American traditions. Spillers returns to the influential essay on motherhood and its contradictions in the eleventh chapter, “Black, White, and in Color, or Learning How to Paint: Toward an Intramural Protocol of Reading” (2003, 1993, 277–300) with a brilliant analysis of Paule Marshall’s novel, The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, as an exploration of black women’s lives and their relations with children. The intricate paradoxical web of biology and culture as Kristeva presents motherhood in the West enables Spillers to understand, for example, Marshall’s depiction of a seemingly minor character, the anonymous Canterbury woman, and her failure to comprehend her story adequately or to articulate it to her lover (Spillers 2003, 279–287, 289– 294, 296–298). In this reading, the Canterbury woman’s loss of her child combined with her limited education and paltry financial resources means that her life, including the way in which the Father of her child tries to destroy her toy dolls, would go unheard were it not for Marshall’s compelling fiction. It is thus because of psychological, physical, and social conditions linked to motherhood that the character is unable to understand the truth of her experience and to recount it, while the author herself is. On the one hand, Spillers focuses on Kristeva’s theories of motherhood in her reading of Marshall. A careful study of Black, White, and in Color, as I will show, reveals the influence of Kristeva idea of abjection as well and the ways in which it derives from relations to the Mother. Halberstam’s Skin Shows , on the other hand, recognizes primarily the theorist’s useful theory on abjection without examining its links to the Mother. He demonstrates how it brings insight to Bram Stoker’s Dracula as an embodiment, confrontation, and critique of racist behavior and attitudes in 1897. According to what may be Kristeva’s clearest and fullest discussion on the topic in the first section of Powers of Horror, abjection is a complex experience deriving from the infant’s feelings of attachment and repulsion for the Mother’s body at the time of terminating symbiosis with her at birth. Resurfacing later in life, these emotions and sensations develop

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into psychic conditions in which the individual, recognizing the Father’s authority, acquires the ability to function rationally and to speak in a reasoned manner. This process of development and acquisition will be less or more difficult. For some, it will remain impossible. Thus, abjection in Kristeva’s theory takes on precise definitions going well beyond and overlapping the more general idea of severe depression. Fundamental in her understanding of the concept is the undeniable impact of JudeoChristian traditions linking women to the body as impure (Bové 2006, 6, 83–86, 91). Halberstam analyzes Kristeva’s writing on abjection, the Jews, and Céline’s fiction as a critical study of problems of race and gender. According to his reading of Stoker’s monstrous tale, an interpretation inflected by Powers of Horror, the protagonist, Jonathan Harker, represents the patriarch par excellence, intent on purging the world of non-white, bisexual desires in the form of Dracula, whom he perceives as a threat to the racial and gendered hierarchies of Western societies especially in the nuclear family. Halberstam’s interpretation, despite his at times reductive and critical comments on Freudian thought, brings a psychoanalytic perspective to Stoker. Skin Shows problematizes Western ideas of “white,” “Jewish,” “gypsy,” “masculine,” and “feminine,” and especially distinctions between good and evil as well as between subject and Other. For Halberstam, Stoker’s novel goes beyond the reading of Dracula as the epitome of evil and violence tout court to show how English and American cultures unconsciously construct the foreigner, homosexual, and especially those with non-white characteristics, as morally reprehensible. Spillers and Halberstam focus on fictions set outside the most powerful Anglophone countries and indict colonial and postcolonial hierarchical behaviors that are quintessentially Anglo and more recently primarily American. Marshall does not give a precise location for The Chosen Place, the Timeless People. The setting resembles that of Grenada or Barbados in the 1950s, highlighting the presence of an English cane factory along with American social science researchers on the Caribbean island. For Stoker, Dracula’s location, in London and Transylvania, also has a focus on England and the United States. In this way, both critics choose novels that use setting to reinforce their insights in a dialogue on the treatment of the Other both outside and within the psyche. Without making explicit reference to Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory in their criticism of the United States, Spillers and Halberstam share her critique of the

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United States’ brand of Christian materialism. The prevalence of a white, heterosexual, Christian identity for the capitalist nation depends in part on racism, sexism, and Protestant intolerance deriving in part from a Puritan history. In a particularly clear and compelling form of psychoanalytic literary criticism, Spillers provides both historical/material context and support for her insights as well as a theoretical probing of internal conflict. Thus, Spillers’s approach is not vulnerable to the charge often leveled against such readings that they are overly general and neglect specific characteristics of time and place. Historical analysis, factual data, and psychoanalytic theory together enable her to argue that the best African-American writing constitutes aesthetically significant texts creating an oppositional tradition, a revolutionary site of resistance to racism’s harmful social stratification. Her analysis of Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance, emphasizes the ways these foundational novels of African-American life reveal how Christian thought buttresses the institution of slavery. In their works, it becomes clear that the Protestant idea of divine ordination and its linking of skin color to status helps create the horrific myth that white supremacy justifies the keeping of slaves. This section provides specificity to support her readings. Chapter 10, “Moving on Down the Line,” contributes to this historical base as well by identifying and analyzing the black sermon in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Spillers sees the sermon as one of the complex Protestant practices of African-Americans struggling in the throes of slavery and its legacy to understand, confront, and resist their oppression as a minority group, in other words, to acquire and/or maintain psychological and physical health. According to Spillers, the sermons create a sense of community enabled but also conflicted by ideas of “American” and “African.” The African component provides a critique of white America while the American contributes the possibility of struggle and movement, in other words, liberation. Spillers’s analysis of Bowen’s sermons, for example, shows how they use the metaphor of the Israelites’ escape from Egyptian control as well as the memory of a golden African past to speak of the need of AfricanAmericans to confront and to attempt to get beyond the legacy of slavery. She goes on to analyze a second component in the struggle: along with violence, the sermons advocate the “female” strategy to listen, to

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meditate, and to help cure the wounds of persecution by non-violent means. Along with Kristeva, Spillers also draws on Žižek, Habermas, and Althusser to provide theoretical support for her reading of history and the material conditions of black lives (Spillers 2003, 18, 394–395, 440, 451). She focuses on their ideas of the construction of both object and subject in the pursuit of knowledge in ways that emphasize difference in a discussion of more general patterns of knowledge production, power structures, and social strife. The turn to Kristeva’s theory in particular enables Spillers to be more precise and philosophically grounded in the analysis of ethical and political questions, which novels raise. “The political,” for example, has a long history dating back at least to Plato and the idea that literature is dangerous to the body politic. In drawing on philosophically informed writers, especially Kristeva, Spillers demonstrates an awareness of the body of humanistic thought, which makes her writing on the subversive voice in Marshall a compelling read. In later chapters, Spillers’s key words, “matrifocality,” “interior intersubjectivity,” and “lifeworld” (2003, 228, 397, 407), contribute useful terminology to a complex dialogue on African-American literature. With a broad, creative sweep of her pen, building on Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Ibrâhîm Sow’s Les Structures anthropologiques de la folie en Afrique noire, and MarieCécile and Edmond Ortigues’s L’Oedipe africain, she contributes to an important revision of Kristevan theory. Racism has made gaining access to the symbolic a very different and nearly impossible process for AfricanAmericans, as Spillers also emphasizes in her earlier studies in the volume, for instance, of Sula and of The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, the novel that figures prominently in my essay. Here, Spillers’s theory corroborates, as she herself acknowledges (2003, 171), that of other African-American feminists like bell hooks who state that feminist thought often neglects the specificity of black women’s lives and their challenges. A seminal text in Spillers’s reading of African-American literature, Invisible Man, appears again in Chapter 9, “The Permanent Obliquity of an In(pha)llibly Straight,” along with Alice Walker’s “Child Who Favored Daughter,” as a confrontation with incestuous desires. The fundamental taboo of psychoanalytic theory raises its head in writing. The subject’s psychic identity is in question as he or she struggles to develop agency, a process with particular challenges for the descendants of slaves. Spillers reminds us of this fundamental prohibition in her analysis of the paradox

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of motherhood (“the maternal body”) as a web of bodily and cultural threads described by Kristeva in “Stabat Mater” (Spillers 2003, 288). Slavery’s removal of the Father from the household, along with that of the child from the Mother, damages familial relations with undeniable negative consequences, including incest. Such harm often devastates necessary development in the “lifeworld”—to use Spillers’s term for what Kristeva might call “the social contract”—in subsequent generations for Ellison’s and Walker’s African-American protagonists, as well as for Marshall’s Canterbury woman. Kristeva’s theory of the paradox of motherhood, the idea of the “unspoken person” who must be spoken, as well as the Mother’s derivation from both biological and cultural sources, influences Spillers in her take on Marshall’s The Chosen Place, as a close reading of Black, White, and in Color makes clear. Underlying my analysis of Marshall’s impressive novel are significant elements of Kristeva’s theory, including primarily “the maternal,” which Spillers discusses explicitly, and “the abject,” implied in her treatment of the text. The Chosen Place asks how women, especially black women, are to develop their humanity, their status as subject able to understand and articulate their lives for themselves and others. This status will include the need to go beyond individual development to forge a community of subjects. For Spillers, Bournehills, the poorest region of the island, is at the heart of Marshall’s novel about black women and “the maternal” in the context of racism, that is, white men’s taking possession of black women and the aftermath of this crime. Jane Olmsted’s article recognizes Spillers’s strong analysis in 1985 of the novel’s overall structure and rich resonances but does not mention the emphasis on black women’s motherhood and sexuality. (She does make, however, an important reference to a minor character, Harriet’s, early relations with her Mother [Olmstead 1997, 256].) Nor does Olmsted speak of the novel’s psychoanalytic framework. “The Pull of Memory and the Language of Place” does a close reading of the omniscient/limited narrators, of the major characters, Saul, and especially Merle, reading her appearance, speech, body language, and close links to Bournehills as part and parcel of her resistance to the United States’ and England’s acquisitive ideologies and behaviors. Olmsted’s focus further documents my sense of Merle’s function as a nuanced and complex mouthpiece for Marshall, who narrates the need to recognize, confront, and embrace the differences and conflicts within and without, including the ties between the Caribbean and Africa. The article states, “Given the identification between Merle

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and the island, it seems to me that Merle speaks the language of the place itself. She may adopt island speech for her own ironic purposes, but the way Merle communicates–the heat and range and pace of her voice, the effusiveness and inability to hold anything in check except for her secret losses–is the voice of the land and sea itself” (Olmstead 1997, 254). Olmstead goes on to demonstrate convincingly that the novel’s latent message, incorporated in Merle and her increasing agency, is to resist colonial and postcolonial racism. Building on Spillers, I would add that Marshall underlines the need to combat the psychological formations underlying both racism and sexism. In a novel replete with images lending themselves to a psychoanalytic reading—a surging sea is often a metaphor for the unconscious and the death drive here—The Chosen Place’s characters, especially Merle, the Canterbury woman, and Vere, are puzzles resistant to deciphering. The second never receives a name, designated only by the term used for a unique group of Bournehills inhabitants whose skin is reddish, a designation (along with others in the text such as Westminster hill) underlining the island’s colonial status as well as Native American blood. Vere, a young black, pursues and succeeds in developing a relationship with the Canterbury woman, becoming the Father of her baby who dies soon after birth. The novel tells us little about the woman, but the information is very pertinent—both she and Vere grew up in poor and abusive homes. In virtually her only significant dialogue, the narrator relates her outburst when Vere visits to find himself rejected after he had left her to go off to Florida to work for three years. Her cry of anger “I got something belonging to you?” alludes to the loss of their baby and to motherhood, a major theme in the narrative (Marshall 1992, 192). Marshall connects the Canterbury woman’s puzzling character to those of Vere and Merle, as I will explain. The narrator tells us in the opening section that the young man’s dreams “will come to naught.” Vere and the Canterbury woman appear to be emblematic of the blacks’ predicament in Bournehills as in many other places. Beset by the legacy of racism, which imposes poverty and a lack of education on them, they are unable to articulate their situation in the world, that is, to understand who they are, how they might improve their plight, and how to become a viable family. Vere and the Canterbury woman care a great deal about objects that represent the colonizing cultures and the power they wield over identity and gender/sexuality. The first is attached to his car, a Ford Opal, the second to her blue-eyed, golden-haired dolls. This attachment indicates

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that their poverty, lack of education, and familial abuse are in large part the result of imperialism. These possessions reveal what is arguably the worst effect of colonialism, the interiorization of the colonizer’s values. The novel recounts Vere’s silent stalking of her, his leaving her behind once she is pregnant, and his wordless return to her apartment, communicating only an indifferent smile when she screams at him in distress at his behavior. What is especially puzzling about him is his attack on the Mother of his child, the woman he has hotly pursued only to beat her and destroy one of the objects she most loves, her extensive collection of dolls, and then leave her once again (Marshall 1992, 276). Vere has also become obsessed with the American Opal he repairs, to the astonishment of everyone else who sees the decrepit state of the car. He manages to get it to start in order to compete in the yearly race but dies once the brakes fail during the competition. The apparent puzzle that is Vere becomes clearer in light of Kristeva’s theories on motherhood and abjection. This theory helps one understand the difficulties Vere, the Canterbury woman, and especially Merle, face in developing psychological well-being to emerge as speaking subjects. Kristeva’s writing also provides a context for comprehending the novel’s themes of the sense of a universal human community along with that of national identity, both sorely lacking on the Caribbean island. The Chosen Place, the Timeless People presents the Canterbury woman’s and Vere’s dilemma, both linguistic and political, as a foil to Merle Kinbona’s problems in confronting racism and personal conflicts with her ex-husband and daughter. She becomes a mouthpiece for Marshall, not without complexity and nuance, in the author’s examination of race relations, motherhood, and sexuality. Marshall presents Merle Kinbona in medias res in the opening chapter in which she attempts without success to reach the airport to pick up two Americans, Saul Amron and Allen Fuso. The road having collapsed as roads invariably do on the island given the tropical rain—the collapse becomes a metaphor in the realistic and poignant conclusion of the novel—Merle must coax her old Bentley to climb the hill. She then needs to go in reverse to find the telephone—a rare commodity here—to call Lyle to ask that he pick up Saul and Allen. Her actions and speech in this opening define her as a feisty woman—it cannot be easy to drive an old, banged up Bentley through a mountainous terrain in rain and mud. Her face is a complex combination of sadness and beauty, with light shining from her eyes. A woman “of a certain age,” as the French say, her legs

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retain their youth and graceful lines. She appears primarily as a talkative, funny person, curious about everything and everyone, with a keen intelligence and a deep personal experience of racism on the island. Arriving at a reception that night for the newly arrived social scientists, Saul and Allen, Merle comes to represent the best of Bournehills, the part of the island that the British and Americans have occupied and studied. Her unusual clothing includes a brightly flowered dress such as a West African woman might wear, very feminine mules on her feet, and silver earrings depicting suffering Christian saints. The narrator tells us Merle has perhaps chosen this attire to bring together the disparate elements of her life and—I would add—the mix of Western and non-Western elements prevalent throughout much of the world. Her silver earrings allude to the religion informing the island’s colonial past as well as to images of abjection prominent in the novel. With a bit of “black” humor, Marshall emphasizes this significant Christian aspect of the past by having Saul refer to a ducking stool, the Puritan punishment for “witches”—a plank that submerged the woman in water, at times drowning her–in discussing Merle with his wife Harriet. He exclaims, “she needs a goddam ducking stool” (Marshall 1992, 74) joking that this is the way to keep Merle under control. The apparent joke is a significant reference to the Protestant component in America’s nationhood and sense of itself as white and male. As we will see, Merle as the principal “unspoken woman” needing to be spoken enables Marshall to raise the problem of racism as one of the foundations of dominant forms of national identity, especially in America’s Protestant ethic. Marshall manages to incorporate many of the questions raised throughout the novel in Merle’s appearance and story. The latter includes her memories and continuing experience of America’s unsuccessful attempts to help Bournehills and her affection for the people of all races and classes living on the island. A failed marriage to an African who left her after learning of her relationship with a woman, the unsuccessful attempt to keep her daughter with her, and the struggle to make a living on the island by renting out her house are other memorable episodes in Merle’s life. Beginning with the significant epigraph from the West African Tiv people, Marshall expresses the need, which her protagonists will discover, to remember past tragedies and their part in creating the identity of a person, a group, and a place. How is one to acknowledge past defeat, to accept it in the present, and to keep working to overcome it in the

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future as well? Slavery and its legacy loom over the people of Bournehills and their problems. At the reception for the newly arrived social scientists, subtle images like the red, white, and blue lights, which are somehow also black, and which become amber, resembling flames, signal the presence of America and Marshall’s talent as a creator of metaphors. The lights reveal the destructive force in part responsible for Merle’s dilemma and that of Bournehills (1992, 91). Merle, we learn, witnessed the shooting death of her Mother. The white wife of her Father, Vaughn, also white, whose English family owns the sugar factory, the only source of income on the island, probably arranged the murder. After her childhood lacking in love, Merle’s Father sends the very intelligent girl to study history at London University where she also develops a close relationship with a woman. Marshall is thus able to have Merle portray fundamental, inhumane components of African-Caribbean experience, namely, white men taking black women, i.e., her Mother; loss of parents; as well as dominant elements of human experience more generally, that is, hurtful homophobic attitudes. In this context, criticism that the novel as a whole portrays a negative image of homosexuality, for example in its depiction of Merle’s own critique of her former female lover, and I would add, of the often-abject Allen, seems unwarranted. In any case, the references to homosexuality have led to a complex discussion of the ways in which Marshall raises questions about same-sex relations, racism, colonialism, and feminism, for example by Spillers (1985, 172–174) and Jane Gallop (1982, 159). Marshall skillfully embeds the story of Merle’s life as well as that of the other major protagonist, Saul Amron, in a narrative of the internal lives of the people of Bournehills, and of exploited persons everywhere. As I demonstrate below, one of the ways in which the novel achieves this is by referring to forces of nature like the sea and the Freudian death drive. Amron, anthropologist and social worker, brings intelligence and care to his work, proposing helpful programs for Bournehills to the Center for Applied Social Research. Personal tragedy marks much of his perspective. After growing up in a Jewish district in Brooklyn, Saul leaves the woman he loves when he completes his work in Peru and decides to return to the United States. He sorely regrets this decision as he thinks back to his unfilled commitments, including helping the poor and working for the nationalist party along with his lover. He also feels he played a part in his first wife’s and infant’s deaths in Honduras because of over-involvement in work when his spouse needed him. Via Saul’s story of his family, including

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that of his wife who had been a survivor of the horror of the Birkenau World War II camps, Marshall links the plight of the people of Bournehills to that of the Jews as well as that of the poor of Peru and of Latin America more generally. A particularly moving episode echoing and developing the theme of human suffering of both poor and wealthy occurs on one of Saul’s many visits to Stinger, a worker and manager in the sugarcane fields. Marshall’s third-person narrator, both omniscient and at times limited, connects Saul to Stinger’s defeated spirit in ways that also link it to that of his pregnant wife, Gwen, to Saul’s own suffering, and to that of Merle as well. My analysis of this severe depression sees it, in the context of Spillers’s use of Kristeva in approaching the novel, as an example of abjection and the way it connects to the parent who “is unspoken but must be spoken.” The fact that the cane bundles, which the suffering maternal figure Gwen transports on her head, weigh about 200 pounds combines with the metaphor-rich description of these four individuals to move the reader. Saul likens Stinger’s defeat, for instance, as he cuts the interminable rows of cane, to that of a wrestler confronting an enemy of indomitable size and strength. The compelling narration continues to describe Gwen’s eyes as she attempts with great difficulty to lower herself and her unborn child down the hill with “the waving green forest” on her head. They appear to be those of a sleeping or dead person whose head is drawn back to reveal a “slightly turned up, fixed, flat stare” (Marshall 1992, 163). Marshall has Saul identify with Gwen’s and Stinger’s suffering to such an extent that memories of his own pain come flooding back, reminding him of his Mother’s strange tale of her ancestors’ flight from Spain— Sephardic Jews fleeing the Inquisition—into South America and the Caribbean. As a child, Saul had connected their flight from persecution to the Holocaust and to the image of an old senile neighbor seated in the window above the candy store of his childhood. The little boy Saul had seen him there beating his breast in a constant show of penitence for the sins of humankind. Pulling together all of the threads of the sequence, Marshall offers a microcosm of the novel as a whole with its multiple images of people and places lacking a voice and/or struggling to speak and be taken seriously, including Gwen of the dead stare, the senile neighbor silently expressing his mea colpa, the Bournehills neighborhood, the major characters Saul and Merle, and even Saul’s Mother. The narrator explains, for instance, how his Father disparaged his wife’s moving tale, which “came to embody,

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without [Saul’s] realizing it … all that any other people had had to endure. It became the means by which he understood the suffering of others. It encompassed them all. It had even, suddenly, reached across the years to include within its wide meaning what he had just witnessed on the hill,” that is, Stinger’s and Gwen’s hardship (Marshall 1992, 164). Continuing this ingenious sequence of links, the novel depicts Saul’s longing for Merle’s car to come by, as it often does, offering to give him a lift home. Her arrival reveals a reciprocal tenderness, both sexual and maternal, as she offers to drive him back without her usual nonstop chatter, something she rightly perceives as unwelcome by Saul in his overwhelmed state. Here the lack of speech nevertheless resonates in Marshall’s depiction of the struggle with abjection and the need to speak. It is also significant that Saul removes Merle’s suffering-saint earrings when they make love, signaling their transformation of an abject mentality and progress toward plenitude. Later in her story, Marshall has the narrator convey Saul’s sense that there is something undefinable in Bournehills’ failure to grow and overcome its poverty and atmosphere of defeat, an awareness shared by Merle and the omniscient narrator, which surfaces more than once in the tale. Here, Merle angrily explains, “It’s that we live practically one on top the other because the place is so small and yet we don’t see each other, we don’t ever touch. Instead of us pulling together when we need each other so much, it’s every man for his damn self” (Marshall 1992, 211). Her words are part of an angry outburst after learning that Lyle, a local government official and former lover and friend, supports yet another plan to have American and English businesses invest in the island on terms that further impoverish its inhabitants. Marshall emphasizes the lack of community in private and public affairs via Merle’s comment. The implication is that the island is increasingly adopting the American capitalist model persuading individuals to seek resources that may be helpful to themselves and the corporations but exploitative of the majority of the indigenous population. In a complex web of memories, Saul reflects on Merle’s comments as scenes from the past replay in his head. It becomes clear that relations with his parents, girlfriend, and first wife remind him of episodes in which he failed to respond to the needs of others. His Father’s ambitions for him, his Peruvian girlfriend’s desire that he remain in Peru to work with her, his first wife’s suffering and eventual death in childbirth along with the baby’s demise from the harsh conditions of life he had imposed

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on his family in Mexico—all arouse guilt in him for failing to forge ties with others. The narrator states, “Under it [his first wife’s, Socha’s, dead gaze, another abject ghost], he felt the numbness that had formed a hard protective shell around his heart, a carapace that had deflected all feeling and memory, slowly begin to crack” (Marshall, 169, 218). Here, Marshall uses Sosha’s look as she dies—recalling Gwen’s—to have the reader feel Saul’s distress, arising from a recognition of a form of defense mechanism and death drive, which had probably contributed to his failed relationships. He also appears to be increasingly aware of similar psychological formations underlying the people of Bournehills and their stalemated condition (Marshall 1992, 106, 214, 221). Kristeva’s theory of abjection provides a helpful context for understanding Marshall’s character Saul, as well as Spillers’s analysis of the novel as a whole. The reference to the ominous Atlantic Ocean (Marshall 1992, 106) combined with allusions to the Middle Passage helps link Saul’s abjection and especially that of Bournehills to that of humanity in general. This passage gives a sense of Marshall’s powers as a storyteller with the ability to convey complex development in Saul, Merle, and Allen as the characters help raise a consciousness of community, thus moving toward that most human of social structures: It was the Atlantic this side of the island, a marauding sea, the color of slate, deep, full of dangerous currents, lined with row upon row of barrier reefs, and with a sound like that of the combined voices of the drowned raised in a loud, ceaseless lament–all those, the nine million and more it is said, who in their enforced exile, their diaspora, had gone down between this point and the homeland, lying out of sight to the east. The sea mourned them…. As they [Merle, Allen, and Saul] watched, a huge, white-crested breaker, which looked as if it had been gathering force and power and speed across the entire breadth of the Middle Passage broke with the sound as of some massive depth charge on the most distant of the reefs…. Saul, feeling the thunderous impact in the chambers of his heart, suddenly remembered how, during the war, he used to feel the earth shudder and recoil under him as the bombs struck. (Marshall 1992, 106–107)

These memories, and those of the sea mourning the drowned, threaten Saul with moral death as the reference to “the thunderous impact in the chambers of his heart” indicates. The description also connects this

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episode to the later one mentioned above which states that a hard carapace had covered his heart. The covering begins to crack as he remembers: his heart comes alive and his love for others, especially the people of Bournehills, survives. Marshal’s sea metaphor makes clear that reliving his past will inform his thinking and enable him to empathize with the islanders and find better ways to support them, namely helping them to help themselves. Marshall thus signals Saul’s progress beyond the United States’ (and Britain’s) neglect of a suffering people. The eye images in Saul’s memories of Gwen’s dead stare in the sugarcane field episode along with that of Sosha on her deathbed help portray the commonality of the suffering of the indigenous people of Bournehills and of the Jews. In a similar way, Marshall portrays their pain in the frequent mention of teeth-sucking (Leesy, for example [1992, 143]; Kinitra Brooks calls attention to Marshall’s “From the Poets In the Kitchen,” which discusses teeth-sucking as a component of black women’s language of resistance [Brooks 2008, 18]). Part of the complex and ironic context for these images—only their eyes and teeth appear to link them—is the absence on the island of the quintessentially human characteristics that could relieve the suffering. The novel implies that what is absent is voicing one’s psychological and political state and situation in the world as well as working together as a community, in this case, the indigenous population both by themselves and with the British and Americans. Marshall places the eyes and teeth against the backdrop of slavery’s legacy along with that of the persecution of the Jews, and the exploitation of Latin America. Ultimately the context emphasizes a psychic formation, what Spillers might call “interior intersubjectivity,” in which one confronts death conjoined with life, that Other within the psyche. The goal of such a confrontation is to understand conflict and to work to achieve a break-through to overcome it, for instance, the cracking “carapace” around his heart, of which Saul has become aware. In this way, Marshall compels the reader to see psychological problems that are political, that is, psychic formations both personal and social. The lack of community also takes its toll on Saul’s wife, Harriet, who is no less a cipher than the Canterbury woman, Vere, and Merle, but who has far more resources—economic and educational if not psychological— to combat her problems. Marshall engages the reader in putting together the puzzling pieces of her characters, including the minor ones, as the best novelists are able to do. The novel introduces Harriet as the person with whom Saul attempts to create a new life after the failed relationships with

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parents, first wife and baby, as well as girlfriend. While their relationship, especially its physical and sexual relations, appears positive, their respective interactions with the people of Bournehills lead to discord and eventually to suicide. Their treatment of the island’s inhabitants is very different, in part because of their reasons for coming to the island but primarily because they are not alike in their dealings with others. Saul has come to study the island as part of his project for the Center for Applied Social Research. Harriet has accompanied him as his wife, having promised not to interfere in the work. She suffers from a psychological weakness that often leads her to control others in order to relieve herself of feelings of abjection deriving from early conflicts with her Mother as the narrator indicates (Marshall 1992, 197). Her first marriage had begun in a relationship in which she initially thrived in helping her struggling partner, an atomic physicist, to succeed. The relationship faltered once he began working on the first nuclear bomb. Her attitude toward the indigenous people on the island appears to rest on her need to help in the form of control. She views them as the Other, imposing her values on them, as in the episode in which she cooks eggs for a neighboring family struggling with hunger who consider such food sacred and inappropriate for consumption. Worst of all, once she learns of Saul’s affair with Merle, she offers to pay Merle out of jealousy to get rid of a rival. The novel portrays her less as a racist person whose behavior deliberately harms the island’s blacks than as a conflicted individual. She gives up trying to understand the indigenous population as well as the contradictions within herself. Marshall’s novel ends realistically, carefully tying the threads of the many interwoven plots including, beyond the major protagonists Saul and Merle, Vere and the Canterbury woman, Saul’s wife, Harriett, as well as the British sugarcane factory. Against the tragic backdrop, Harriett’s drowning herself in the sea and the factory’s closing, Saul and Merle emerge making tentative and limited progress: Saul will return to the United States to work with indigenous groups to enable them to attempt some economic improvements on their own and Merle will go to East Africa to try to reconnect with her daughter. Spillers’s interpretation of the novel’s end, and in fact, of the novel as a whole, fleshes out Kristeva’s theories on motherhood and abjection. The chapter on Marshall concludes with the statement: “the fugitive poet takes up the vocation of the enunciative/enunciating in certain danger by ‘revealing’ her or his whereabouts and that of significant others, the

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interior landscape” (Spillers 2003, 299). Here Black, White, and in Color, indirectly building on Kristeva’s thought on a complex speaking subject, acknowledges the novel’s emphasis on interiority and its subversive voice. Marshall’s concluding chapters convey the maternal presence fundamental to Spillers’s reading and its Kristevan components in examining the novel: that “unspoken person who must be spoken.” Merle has experienced separation from the Mother’s body with which she has both enjoyed symbiotic pleasures and perceived as shameful—experiences required as part of her acquisition of language. After living through multiple episodes of abjection beginning at birth and frequently arising from racism, she needs to go back to her Mother in the sense of confronting and accepting the witnessing of the traumatic murder at the age of two. In this way, Kristeva’s theories inform Spillers’s reading of Marshall’s narrative as an exploration of “interior intersubjectivity,” of the attempt to understand internal conflict. Saul expresses this psychological necessity when he explains: “This with your mother is all part of your attempt to come to terms with the things that have happened in your life. To go back and understand … sometimes it’s necessary to go back before you can go forward, really forward…. And that’s not only true for people–individuals–but nations as well …. Sometimes they need to stop and take a long hard look back. My country, for example. It’s never honestly faced up to its past, never told the story straight, and I don’t know as it ever will. The juggernaut’s going too fast for that. It’s not likely to make it though …. But do you know something …. Mis-Merle’s going to make it. She’s going to come through.” (Marshall 1992, 359)

“Speaking the unspoken mother,” that is, what Saul describes as “your attempt to come to terms with”—the ramifications of the murder she witnessed, means accepting the contradictions within herself. She has, for instance, been unwilling to reflect on the early event because she cannot recall the murderer’s face. Though such a memory would be unlikely for a two-year old, one part of herself blames the other. Marshall, as in earlier episodes, gives Saul the explicit insights—in this case echoing the Bournehills cane worker, Stinger—that apply to both his struggle to comprehend his internal conflicts as well as Merle’s when the limited 3rd person narrator asks, “What had Stinger said that day on the way to Brighton about a man not understanding himself?” The question refers primarily to his simultaneous grieving for Harriet and desire to see Merle.

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In the context, however, it also signals the contradictions within Merle: she both wants to go to Africa to reunite with her daughter and desires to stay away from a rejection, which will probably be painful if not deadly for her psychological well-being. While Kristeva’s thinking on motherhood and the related theories of abjection shape Spillers’s reading of Marshall, it is primarily the theorist’s idea of abjection that influences Halberstam’s analysis of Dracula in Skin Shows . He states that in writing on Céline in Powers of Horror, Kristeva, having defined horror in terms of the abject, goes on to link both to the Jew of racist discourse. Halberstam acknowledges her insight “that antiSemitism functions as a receptacle for all kinds of fears–sexual, political, national, cultural, economic …. [and] is important to the kinds of arguments that [he is] making about the economic function of the Gothic monster” (2012, 18, loc. 577). Despite his explicit comment on the limits of a psychoanalytic reading and at times reductive interpretation of Freud, he uses the abject to identify (1) the unconscious psychic formations out of which the Gothic monster arises and (2) in particular Stoker’s Dracula as a harmful product of a practice that belies national myths of freedom for all (2012, 11, loc. 435; 24, loc. 691). Nina Auerbach also speaks of Dracula as a psychic formation in her feminist analysis, Our Vampires Ourselves, for example, “every age embraces the vampire it needs” (1995, 145). She does not, however, focus on unconscious structures. In fact, like many American feminist literary critics, she is critical of psychoanalytic readings. I discuss this critique in the context of the dominant qualities of thought in the United States in Chapters 3 and 4 where the focus is Kristeva’s writing on American culture and national identity. It will become clear that American feminist literary critics often reflect the pragmatic, positivist tendencies of Christian monotheism and materialism. One notices these characteristics and the way they become linked to a reductive version of psychoanalytic thought in the 1960s, for example, in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Lolita, and in Hitchcock’s film, Marnie, though the former presents psychoanalysis in a more complex way, problematizing it. Our Vampires Ourselves concentrates on historical differences in versions of the monster. In her fine, clear linking to material conditions, Auerbach notices the Puritan trappings of Stoker’s vampire and the degree to which the monster represents Britain’s nationhood. Referring to Halberstam’s earlier work on Dracula in 1993, “Technologies of Monstrosity,” however, she reduces his examination to the study of the

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figure of the Jew, without acknowledging that he does refer to specifics of place and date, as well as to questions of national identity, all of which are prominent in her own analysis. The fundamental role that the psychoanalytic model plays in Halberstam’s later Skin Shows , which appears in the same year as Auerbach’s book but apparently without her having had access to it, manifests itself in its representation of the monster as a technological machine, the product of an oppressive economy, as are psychological including unconscious formations. I would argue, following Kristeva and Spillers’s reading of her, that a more likely and productive formulation, cognizant of a degree of freedom, would be that the psyche shapes the economy and technology. Dracula, with his “child-brain” (Stoker 2015, 361; Halberstam 2012, 93, loc. 1974), may possess and represent unconscious drives in the way that children do. We are familiar with those “polymorphous perverse” creatures Freud describes in “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” before they have acquired the ability to inhibit “deviant” behaviors. Halberstam’s discussion of Dracula in connection with another of Freud’s essays, “The Uncanny,” makes clear the psychoanalytic model underlying much of the analysis. Here Skin Shows points out the relevance of the Freudian uncanny to a lack of place, emphasizing the monster’s connotations as “wandering Jew” (Halberstam 2012, 98, loc. 2070). In moves parallel to Kristeva’s in her analysis of Céline’s portrayal of Jews in Journey to the End of the Night, Skin Shows explores the ways in which the novel’s demon emerges from the psychic drives of white, heterosexual, middle-class males. In this context, Stoker’s construction of the Count as a monster emphasizes what that demographic excludes, that is, non-white, female, homosexual, working-class characteristics, and as in Kristeva, anti-Semitic connotations. The clearest example of abjection motivating Stoker’s creation of Dracula may be the journal entry in which Jonathan Harker speaks of his impotence, his doubting of the evidence of his senses, the groove of his life no longer availing him, and his mistrusting himself in general (Stoker 2015, loc. 2987). The sexual vocabulary is strong and suggests that the encounter with Dracula constitutes a form of death of the body and the mind. In other words, the monster serves as a defense mechanism to protect himself (and the Western patriarchal cultures he represents) from psychic and physical enemies threatening from within. From Halberstam’s perspective, Stoker creates a violent, sexual predator out of Jonathan’s state of abjection.

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This shift in Halberstam’s analysis of the encounter with Dracula from questions of race to those of sex indicates the importance of Kristeva’s theory on motherhood, though Skin Shows does not address it. In other words, the identification of the sexual vocabulary in Harker’s journal entries signals that the encounter with the Other and the racist development in this encounter are in fact connected to the construction of sexuality/gender and its beginnings in the relations to the maternal, as Kristeva documents in “Stabat Mater.” Christian perspectives on the woman’s body as impure play an important role in forging this connection. Skin Shows identifies what is most desirable in human aspirations as an ethics of love and inclusion, both psychic and social, a global community that is as sorely absent in Western societies whose monsters reveal hate and exclusion as in many Caribbean islands, despite apparent Christian beliefs to the contrary. Spillers also demonstrates, as we have seen, the devastating effects of such a construction of the Other and its overlap with religious attitudes in her references to slavery’s legacy in excluding blacks, for example, in Marshall’s “it’s every man for his damn self” (1992, 211). As one might expect in a book analyzing monsters in literature and film, Halberstam puts the question of the human front and center especially when he addresses exclusionary practices in the most powerful Anglophone nations. Basing his theory in part on that of Michel Foucault as well as of Kristeva, he states, “Monsters and the Gothic fiction that creates them are therefore technologies, narrative technologies that produce the perfect figure for negative identity” (Halberstam 2012, 22, loc. 640; 89, 1880). That Halberstam builds upon both a Neo-Freudian like Kristeva and an anti-Freudian like Foucault appears unlikely until one considers a possibility that Joel Whitebook points out as a fact, that Foucault’s work reads like a “struggle with Freud” (2005, 313). The monster is a form of technology for Halberstam, indicating the unconscious psychic formations, which make possible the conflicted emotional and physical experience, including fears and fantasies of the characters. Such a technology explains, as Skin Shows indicates, the apparent enigma that Dracula will be able to exercise a form of seduction over Mina and Lucy, together the epitome of Western womanhood, both blond and brunette. Against the backdrop of technological phenomena, Halberstam identifies the mechanism by which the vampire’s perverse biological desires come to represent not a particular sexual orientation but rather the

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construction of sexuality itself and its connections to Christian ideology (2012, 100, loc. 2099). Skin Shows demonstrates how abjection and an inhuman absence of community develops in a particular historical, material form, Christian materialism and its Puritan ethic of individual effort, with the individual and his family constructed out of that environment. According to Halberstam, “Monsters like this vampire have to be everything the human is not and, in producing the negative of human, these novels make way for the invention of human as white, male, middle class, and heterosexual” (2012, 21, loc. 638). This passage reveals the exclusionary implications and foundations in Jonathan Harker’s sense of himself and his promotion of inclusion in the Anglophone Christian myth of freedom for all. An early example occurs where Jonathan speaks of the monster as he finds him in his casket as “the being I was helping to transfer to London, where, perhaps, for centuries to come he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless” (Stoker, loc. 583). Stoker’s language suggests the Christian notion of a circle of hell filled with devils replacing the God-fearing Londoners. After attacking Mina, Dracula makes a statement resonating in its ending with Adam’s romantic and sexual connection to Eve, “You, their best beloved one, are now to me, flesh of my flesh” (Stoker 2015, 4546). Stoker thus incorporates the Christian message linking sex to the woman and sin. Because of the psychic transformation of Adam/Jonathan into Dracula, distinctions between subject and Other blur and the monster’s “Christian perspective” collaborate with evil intentions and behavior. Later examples make the Christian component more explicit with Van Helsing’s use of the wafer and crucifix to combat the monster and Jonathan’s statement “May God give him into my hand just for long enough to destroy that earthly life of him which we are aiming at. If beyond it I could send his soul for ever and ever to burning hell I would do it!” (Stoker 2015, loc. 4875). Here Jonathan strikes a Christ-like figure kneeling and embracing his wife Mina who, like the Madonna, urges pity. John Seward then speaks of leaving the couple “with their God.” Against this backdrop, it is significant that, as Skin Shows points out, “Lucy and Mina are both seduced by the vampire and they fail to distinguish between his bite and the proper penetrations of their husbands and

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fiancés” (Halberstam 2012, 38, loc. 932). Underlying the stark opposition between good and evil is a commonality revealing conflicted psychic formations: that is, Stoker presents Dracula, Jonathan, and Arthur as virile male partners for their female counterparts. While Halberstam uses Stoker’s essay, “The Censorship of Fiction” to discuss Dracula as a critique of vampire-like behavior, overall Skin Shows reads the novel as an expression of Stoker’s and Western cultures’ fears and fantasies of being one of the various versions of the Other. Skin Shows echoes the often-repeated idea at the center of abjection that there is a link between desire and repulsion, “Horror, I have suggested, exercises power even as it incites pleasure and/or disgust. Horror, indeed, has a power closely related to its pleasure-producing function and the twin mechanism of pleasure-power perhaps explains how it is that Gothic may empower some readers even as it disables others” and “Gothic monstrosity may intersect with, participate in, and resist the production of a theory of racial superiority” (Halberstam 2012, 17, loc. 563; 16, loc. 543). The study of the monster emphasizes the multiple layers of meaning in him in nineteenth-century fiction, including primarily the race and class dimensions often lost in film (2012, 3, location 290), but also sexual and gendered connotations, according to Halberstam. Thus, Skin Shows , revealing a psychic confrontation with a complex foreigner both within and without, contributes in significant ways to studies of Dracula, revealing the continuing validity of the psychoanalytic model including Kristeva’s elaboration of motherhood and the abject. Halberstam demonstrates that the monster threatens Stoker’s identity as Christian, white, middle-class, heterosexual male, resulting in his projection of an abject mentality onto the hateful being. That is, Stoker transforms Jonathan’s abjection, reifying it and rendering it exterior. In this context, the creation of Dracula emerges from Stoker’s notion of the human being’s abject sense of himself as embodying the undesirable characteristics that Western cultures need to reject in order to exist, or so they believe. Halberstam’s development and application of Hannah Arendt’s examination of anti-Semitism provides insight into Stoker’s London and the United States including the Trump era (2012, 15, loc. 524). Skin Shows emphasizes the psychological impulse to designate as perverse and to deport a foreigner who threatens the nation-state characterized by a “superior” race and heteronormative sex enjoyed primarily for reproduction of the desirable tribe. Both Halberstam and Arendt manage to discuss

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psychic formations without neglecting historical and material conditions, for instance, in the context provided by Skin Shows in its description of the rise of the middle class. Thus, it identifies the specific Victorian, English conditions of Stoker’s writing and its exclusionary elements (Halberstam, 90, loc. 1904). In conclusion, taken together, Spillers and Halberstam’s work on Marshall and Stoker demonstrates a pattern of influence emerging especially from Kristeva’s writing on motherhood and abjection in the 1980s. Other evidence of the influence on American literary studies of Kristeva’s theories on these themes in “Stabat Mater” and Powers of Horror appears in several other critics including Ewa Ziarek, Kinitra Brooks, and Masoumeh Mehni. Her essays from the eighties are the primary texts engaged here in the dialogue with two American critics in their projects bringing creative versions of Neo-Freudian thought to bear particularly on the critical question of racism. Kristeva’s thinking on symbiosis with the Mother, how it comes to take on the form of conflicting feelings of disgust and pleasure, and especially the ways in which a voice of protest struggles to make itself heard, underlies Spillers’s analysis of AfricanAmerican and Afro-Caribbean fiction. Kristeva ideas on the abject supply Halberstam with a lens through which to interpret narratives of the monster and especially Dracula as defense mechanisms to cope with fears and fantasies embedded in racism turned against non-Christian cultures. Now, maybe more than ever, racism is a problem for many creative writers and, in fact, for American citizens as a whole. It remains to be seen whether literary studies in its turn to Kristeva’s theories may effectively offer some redress. Given the impact of Kristeva work, which goes well beyond the two texts from the 1980s discussed here and their influence on literary criticism per se, I will discuss next readings in fields related to literature in significant ways, that is, film and philosophy. My focus will be the work of Kelly Oliver and Frances Restuccia, whose writing merits more attention, as I will show.

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References Auerbach, Nina. 1995. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bové, Carol Mastrangelo. 2006. Language and Politics in Julia Kristeva: Literature, Art, Therapy. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. Brooks, Kinitra Dechaun. 2008. “The Black Maternal: Heterogeneity and Resistance in Literary Representations of Black Mothers in 20th Century African American and Afro-Caribbean Women’s Fiction.” Ph.D diss., University of North Carolina. https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/indexablecontent/uuid:cd9b06d7830b-43e6-96b3-285ce36d4da1. Gallop, Jane. 1982. Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory. London and New York: Routledge. Halberstam, Judith. [1995] 2012. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kindle Edition. Kristeva, Julia. [1980] 1982. Powers of Horror. Translated by Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. [1976] 1987. “Stabat Mater.” In Tales of Love, translated by Leon Roudiez, 234–264. New York: Columbia University Press. Marshall, Paule. [1969] 1992. The Chosen Place, the Timeless People. New York: Vintage. Marshall, Paule. 1983. “From The Poets in the Kitchen.” In Merle: A Novella and Other Stories, edited by Paule Marshall, 1–12. New York: The Feminist Press. Olmstead, Jane. 1997. “The Pull of Memory and the Language of Place.” African American Review 31 (2): 249–267. Spillers, Hortense. 1985. “Chosen Place, Timeless People: Some Figurations on the New World.” In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, 151–175. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Spillers, Hortense. 2003. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Stoker, Bram. [1897] 2015. Dracula. OwlClassics.com. Deluxe Kindle edition. Whitebook, Joel. [2005] 2006. “Against Interiority: Foucault’s Struggle with Psychoanalysis.” In The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, edited by Gary Gutting, 312–347. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521840821.

CHAPTER 2

Kristeva’s Impact on Film Studies: Orson Welles and David Lynch

Abstract This chapter studies Kristeva’s influence in film studies including Kelly Oliver and Benigno Trigo on Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil as well as Frances Restuccia on David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Oliver and Trigo situate Welles’s movies in the film noir genre while demonstrating that unconscious anxieties over sexuality and race lie at the core of these texts in ways that are at odds with the patriarchal values associated with that form of cinema. Restuccia places Mulholland Drive in the context of Kristeva’s writing on film to show how an examination of different kinds of fantasy reveals Lynch’s movie to be a cautionary tale. My analysis of an important passage in her “Fantasy and Cinema” makes clearer the contributions of Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory and criticism to questions of race in film. Keywords Film noir · Anxiety · Thought specular

Kristeva’s influence on some of the best work of recent years in film studies has been considerable. I am thinking in particular of Kelly Oliver and Benigno Trigo on Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (2000) and Touch of Evil (2000) as well as Frances Restuccia on David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001). My first chapter finds that it is especially © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. M. Bové, Kristeva in America, Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59912-6_2

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Kristeva’s theories on motherhood and abjection that have contributed most to literary criticism in the United States. Here I am testing the hypothesis that this is true also for Oliver, Trigo, and Restuccia who creatively enlist Kristeva’s thought to analyze three provocative movies by Welles and Lynch. Abjection in the sense of severe depression and difficulty to articulate one’s problems, along with the maternal, are common themes in many films. Here I am using them in the specific sense understood by these writers: such depression, the abject, arises in no small part from birth and the separation from the Mother’s body. Furthermore, I argue here and in my earlier treatment of Hortense Spillers and Jack Halberstam that Kristeva’s contributions to our thinking on the maternal and abjection serve to demonstrate the usefulness of psychoanalytic critical reading in confronting racial problems, contrary to what some readers think, especially in assessing Kristeva’s writing (see, e.g., Gayatri Spivak 1987). Welles’s The Lady From Shanghai from 1947 is on one level a love story depicting a distraught Michael O’Hara, played by Welles himself, and equally distraught Elsa (his wife, Rita Hayworth, then in the process of separating from the director/actor), who become lovers. Their physical attraction for each other is very clear, especially in the early carriage scene where the camera lingers over their engaged faces and the soundtrack conveys their flirtatious banter when they first meet. However, once Michael begins to work on the yacht conveying the trio to San Francisco, abjection prevails. Their dismay and difficulty in articulating their situation characterize each individual, threatened by Elsa’s husband and Michael’s engagement in a fake plan to kill Arthur. Welles links his portrayal of the emotionally distressed characters to questions of gender and race, with his female lead introducing Chinese ethnicity. Her sphinxlike mystery serves to connect such questions given that it stereotypes both women and the Chinese. Motherhood is a frequent theme in the film, for example, in the comments of one of Elsa’s husband’s employees, Bessie, who, seeming a stereotype especially of African-American women, functions as a maternal figure for Elsa. Early on in the film, Bessie tells Michael that Elsa needs someone to care for her. Michael himself appears to have that need as well, including the need to look after himself better, as both he and Elsa say. Appearing six years earlier, Casablanca (1942) is an important precursor for The Lady From Shanghai and film noir: the female protagonist is “Elsa” (very close to “Ilsa”) and the man who loves her has

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murdered a Fascist in Spain and, known for being Black Irish, has fought for Ireland’s independence as well. Both image and voice-over effectively associate Michael with individual and social values—he is the romantic hero and the defender of democracy, like Rick in Michael Curtiz’s iconic film. Those values, the film tells us with subtlety—as does Casablanca— are not without their patriarchal oppression of minorities and women. Furthermore, despite his morals, he agrees to kill to earn the funds to go away with his beloved. Oliver and Trigo find Kristeva’s categories of the maternal and abject helpful in their approach to this film in Noir Anxiety (2002) as one that problematizes patriarchal psychological formations and the film noir genre built upon them. Michael survives in the film’s tragic ending in the fun house hall of mirrors after Elsa and her husband die, with Elsa’s death signaling film noir’s repudiation of the femme fatale, according to Oliver and Trigo. We learn via Michael that it is Elsa who has been plotting to kill her husband but it is not entirely clear whether Elsa planned to leave Michael or go off with him. Welles leaves his viewers contemplating this and, more generally, the problem of evil, that is, how to live a decent life in the throes of love and in the face of a corrupt world and its oppressive practices. Making creative use of Kristeva’s categories of abjection and the maternal, Noir Anxiety situates The Lady from Shanghai in the film noir genre while carefully and convincingly demonstrating that unconscious anxieties over sexuality and race lie at the core of the movie in ways that are at odds with the patriarchal values of that kind of movie. They show how Welles’s unconscious, or at least that of his protagonist, surfaces in the film’s juxtaposition of the voice-over of Michael’s authoritative male perspective with the visual images and voice representing Elsa as Chinese-American femme fatale. This juxtaposition reveals the tenuous power structures underlying Western cultural practice including private and public relations, both sexual and racial. In other words, the interplay between voice-over and image along with Elsa’s death in the end demonstrates what the powerful male oppresses and repudiates in order to reign. Oliver and Trigo understand the psychological strategy of repudiating the other in order to sustain one’s identity in the context of Julia Kristeva’s theory in Powers of Horror and, I would add, Strangers to Ourselves . They write:

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Kristeva defines a notion of abjection with which she diagnoses separation and identification in both individuals and nations or societies.… the abject is … what calls into question borders and threatens identity.… Ultimately, the abject is identified with the maternal body, since the uncertain boundary between maternal body and infant provides the primary experience of both horror and fascination. The maternal body is the most powerful location of abjection because it poses the greatest threat to the borders of every individual who was once part of the maternal body and born out of it. (loc. 230)

Oliver and Trigo go on to examine what we call metaphor and metonymy in literary and film studies in terms of psychoanalytic theory, that is, the condensations and displacements of the primary processes of unconscious drives and their links to the maternal and abjection. They study the marginal references to mothers and minorities appearing so often in film noir, with The Lady from Shanghai as an example. Movie critics nevertheless have usually overlooked these allusions, as Noir Anxiety indicates. Oliver and Trigo in this way engage with Kristeva’s theory of the abject and the Mother to make a significant contribution to cinema studies. Lucy Fischer has creatively analyzed the film from a Lacanian perspective, which overlaps with Oliver and Trigo’s but is also different. In the context of her study of myths of women, she focuses on Elsa as a sphinxlike and maternal figure who poses hurdles for her “child” Michael in his progress toward manhood. According to Fischer, Elsa functions negatively in the movie—as women often do in a Lacanian framework—in her capacity as femme fatale in film noir. She makes it impossible for Michael to perform as the male authority figure underlying the symbolic order. Kristeva’s notion of the maternal is frequently a positive entity despite oppression as Oliver and Trigo demonstrate in their analysis of the film, more convincing than Fischer’s. The former also notice the Orientalist element in Welles’s reference to the Far East in portraying Elsa as Chinese and sphinxlike. Oliver and Trigo show that emerging in the movie’s contrapuntal style and in the dominant story in the film taken as a whole is the possibility of a better social practice in which one attempts to create a bifid language including both self and other. This is a version of Kristeva’s idea of the voice of the Mother, for example, in her autobiographical essay in The Crisis of the European Subject (2000, 166–170), cited in Noir Anxiety. A

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bifid language in a similar sense emerges in Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands: La Frontera, which Oliver and Trigo also cite (2002, location 1817). The passages from Kristeva and Anzaldua mentioned in Noir Anxiety refer to both the Bulgarian and Chicano Spanish that these two authors speak along with French and English, respectively, and also a universal double tongue. A bifid language in this sense voices a split psyche. Oppressed, the Mother nonetheless speaks a strong and confrontational language, voicing a complex formation incorporating both the social contract and its underbelly or violation. According to Oliver and Trigo, this bifid language emerges in three significant scenes: the opening carriage episode, the Chinese theater sequence, and the final mirror maze, in which Elsa and Arthur kill each other. I have been arguing that Oliver and Trigo find Kristeva’s categories of the maternal and abject helpful in their approach to this film as one that problematizes patriarchal psychological formations and the film noir genre built upon them. My own reading of The Lady from Shanghai is different from theirs to the degree that I see Welles’s movie as aware of film noir’s limitations while Noir Anxiety argues that it is mostly unaware. In other words, to the degree that the movie incorporates patriarchal psychological formations and film noir cinematography as problematic, it displays an awareness of the genre’s weaknesses. More than once, Michael, appearing as spokesperson for Welles, refers to the Bible’s canonical parable of cannibalistic sharks, a fitting metaphor for the film’s depiction of patriarchy’s exploitative psychological formations and behavior. The difference in our readings poses a thorny question about psychoanalytic criticism: To what degree is an artist aware of elements problematized in the work he or she has created if the problematization takes the form of unconscious drives? Oliver and Trigo also creatively press into service Kristeva’s concept of a bifid language to read another complex film by Welles from 1958, Touch of Evil (2000)—once more against Welles’s overt “film noir” messages and thus raising again the problem of the director’s awareness of his film’s problematic content. For them, the later film is a fresh version of the testimony to unconscious drives, in particular the human desire for the maternal. As in their earlier analysis of The Lady from Shanghai and building on Kristeva’s theory, the Mother signifies a heterogeneous life including both adhering to the social contract and violating the law to live the body in its resistance to control. Touch of Evil is the better known and more timely film by Welles not for its repressed desire for a maternal figure but rather for its direct reference to border and immigrant crises,

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continuing today in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. The two topics are not unrelated, as the quotation above from Oliver and Trigo on abjection, separation, and identification in both individuals and societies reveals, and as I am arguing in my analysis of the question of race in Welles’s versions of film noir. In other words, I see both movies, via their incorporation of unconscious drives, opening up a dialogue on both gender and race in ways that subvert the patriarchal values and behavior characterizing the genre. Oliver and Trigo see Touch of Evil as the epitome of film noir at its best, with Welles creating a detective intent on fighting crime and, in doing so, conquering the femme fatale with whom crime is often connected. Tanya and ironically enough Vargas’s innocent wife Susie, “touched by evil” along with him, represent this figure. Quinlan—Welles again plays a major role in the movie—is the notorious police chief of the US town on the Mexican border who epitomizes both abjection and the evil to which it sometimes leads. He has suffered much as a result of his wife’s murder—a death drive directed against both self and other appears increasingly to lead to his eating and drinking too much as well as to planting evidence to “solve” crimes. Yet, many of the townspeople and his assistant, Sergeant Menzies, whose life he saved in an earlier case, admire him. Oil rigs figure prominently throughout the film, often the soiled background in filming Quinlan who speaks of his dirty job as he looks up at the pumps as Eric M. Krueger has noted (1972, 58). Mike Vargas is the Mexican law official played by Charlton Heston in brown face tracking down a criminal in Quinlan’s border town. He works for the Mexican government and for the international organization, the Pan-American Narcotics Investigatory Commission. He espouses an ethic of justice and freedom, which inverts the idea that Mexico represents illegality and the US legality as Jack Beckham (2005, 131) points out. Vargas in fact cites the practices of the United Nations and represents an idea of justice that is both Mexican and global, as I read the film. Here too Welles compels one to ponder the problem of evil: how to confront the skeletons within, especially when unaware of the death drive directed against both self and others, and how to live a just life engaged in an unjust world. However, the emphasis is much more on national identity, the function of “democratic” values, and a critique of the United States than in his earlier film. In other words, the death drive is directed against nations and societies rather than individuals. Given the ironies he embeds in his movie, unlike Oliver and Trigo, I see Welles as

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most likely aware of the limitations of film noir and its arguably white, patriarchal, and capitalist values. In this context, as Donald Pease notes (2001, 94) Welles and his wife at the time, Rita Hayworth, supported Mexican-American rights in the Sleepy Lagoon case. While he could have chosen a Mexican to play the role, Welles has foregrounded racial and ethnic difference with some irony by choosing Heston, the actor known for his performance as the iconic figure of Western culture, Moses, in The Ten Commandments, as Oliver and Trigo notice. Vargas’s spouse, Susie, a blond both naïve and feisty, played by Janet Leigh, simultaneously on her honeymoon and accompanying Mike in his work, supports his apparent ethics. She also represents the “perfect Anglo wife,” a representation adding additional irony. Quinlan and Vargas quickly come to blows over the case of the murder of Lennaker, a local wealthy businessman, depicted in the film’s opening, with the police chief planting evidence as he has often done to conclude an investigation. The subplot has Grandi, the brother of the criminal Vargas is pursuing, intent on discrediting the Mexican officer with Quinlan’s help by kidnapping and drugging Susie in order to implicate her husband in the sale of drugs. Normally the perfect defender of the law, nattily dressed in a suit with calm, polished manners, Vargas comes undone, no longer a cop but instead “a husband.” Removing his jacket and speaking Spanish, he attacks others at Grandi’s club in an attempt to find his wife. Getting Quinlan’s assistant and best friend, Sergeant Menzies, to wear a bug, with Quinlan constantly on the verge of discovering him in a gripping scene leading to the conclusion, Vargas records the chief confessing his crimes, including the murder of Grandi, the man who could reveal Quinlan’s role in Susie’s kidnapping. The compelling performance by Marlene Dietrich as Tanya in a black wig and with a Roma identity incorporates the maternal and the sense of belonging to a home in this complex portrayal of the shifting character of border life. Here we have another instance of Welles’s irony and complex messages on race, given her association with a minority group without a country. She is the good prostitute who has serviced Quinlan in the past and beyond that, has provided him with affection and the possibility of goodness. She reappears in the ending as Quinlan finally falls to his death after Vargas has completed the recording. It is difficult to decide what we are to make of the chief, though he is clearly more bad than good in the context of the film as a whole and Tanya’s concluding comments. She seems to be a mouthpiece for

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a conflicted Welles, like Michael in The Lady from Shanghai. Tanya comments on Quinlan’s having been “a bad cop” after another police officer, Al Schwartz, states he was a good detective. More revealing of the movie’s ambiguities, especially as film noir with its gendered stereotypes, she says he was “some kind of man” and “what does it matter what people say about a man?” Mike and Susie return to Mexico City where they can begin their married life, having ostensibly eliminated Quinlan, one source of injustice at least. In this ironic version of film noir, Welles is asking how to confront evil, both unjust others like the police chief, and also the other within, often buried in the unconscious, the psychological formation leading one to oppress, for example, Mexicans and women, in order to live. The director depicts both forms in his cautionary tale portraying Quinlan, whose death drive has taken over his behavior evident in his murdering Grandi, and especially attacking the Vargases. Noir Anxiety does not discuss the ironic elements in Welles’s version of film noir, which I argue demonstrate the director’s degree of awareness of unconscious drives, for instance, in repudiating others in order to maintain one’s identity. Oliver and Trigo do focus on other subtle elements in the movie, for example, Vargas’s speech. Charlton Heston’s Spanish, according to Noir Anxiety, comes across as “unnatural,” a learned, foreign language, to which he has an ambiguous relationship, at times resembling Quinlan’s association of Spanish with an inferior Mexican race. Oliver and Trigo hear this tongue as evidence of the split language characterizing the maternal, as Kristeva understands it (2002, location 1873). In a context underlining Vargas’s police state mentality, Donald Pease (2001, 93) mentions the ways in which the Mexican officer distances himself from Sanchez in the scene in which Quinlan has the dynamite planted in the apartment. The differences in their Spanish, prominent in this episode, may be one of Welles’s methods of distancing. Vargas may also speak a more formal language, that is, “unnatural” according to Oliver and Trigo, because of social class difference, his status as high-profile Mexican police officer. The use of the idea of the bifid language in Noir Anxiety enables a fuller understanding of the movie’s many ambiguities created not only by different forms of Spanish but also by the feminine. The latter, both maternal and sexual, undercuts the patriarchal and masculine, and in fact, subverts the film noir genre as Oliver and Trigo understand it. The movie often shows Quinlan near the head of a bull and/or photos of toreadors

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reinforcing the idea that resisting control and following bodily instincts are masculine traits undesirable in women according to Western cultures (we remember Tanya’s closing comment “he was some kind of man”). The fascinating and dangerous image of the maternal, for instance, in the figure of Tanya as a version of a lost Mother for Quinlan, resists this focus on the oppressive male in the visual and audio elements of the film. Noir Anxiety in fact insightfully calls attention to the haunting melody associated with her and the soft focus on Tanya’s face, despite her heavy make-up: If outside Quinlan is a bully, inside Tanya’s place he is … under the spell of nostalgia for a lost past, emphasized by the old sound of a pianola, and by the title of the tune played on it: “Avalon,” an island from Arthurian legend thought to be an earthly Paradise (Comito 1998, 189)… She is a maternal figure twice fallen from Paradise: she is a femme fatale, and she is a Gypsy, a member of a nomadic race of unknown origin. When Quinlan looks at Tanya… we see her in soft focus, idealized. Quinlan’s gaze goes through her in what seems a failed attempt to regain that lost Paradise. In the absence of this paradise, the film warns us, we “will wish [we] had never been born.” Abjected rather than born into a world of Gypsy femme fatale mothers, Quinlan’s perspective turns Hobbesian. “Mean, brutish, and short,” his life is determined by a struggle for survival of the fittest… The loss of Paradise, represented by Tanya’s racial indeterminacy and by her sexually fallen body, is the force behind Quinlan’s natural law. (Oliver and Trigo 2002, loc. 1783)

Oliver and Trigo’s collaborative psychoanalytic reading, both philosophical and literary, incorporates Kristeva’s theory of the maternal and abjection. In this passage, they link both ideas to a lost paradise and reveal the complexity of Welles’s depiction of the conflict of good and evil especially in its connections to gender and race. In a similar manner in their reading of the film, Susie too, along with her husband, provides resistance to the film noir attack on the femme fatale. Janet Leigh projects a beautiful, sexual image serving to undercut her husband’s primarily rational presence. She brings ambiguity to Welles’s apparent melodramatic message promoting the good, that is, of male reason sanitizing the world of its female corruption. Kristeva’s theory of the maternal and the abject shapes some of the best criticism on Lynch’s Mulholland Drive as well, compelling the viewer

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to think creatively about psychic health despite the movie’s violence and apparent lack of values. The tone of the film, like that of Touch of Evil and The Lady From Shanghai, is primarily melancholic. It expresses a longing for professional and personal happiness in conflict with suicidal drives in a corrupt, materialist film industry. Once again, the issue of how to manage interior evil surfaces. Lynch poses precise questions about sexuality and race, namely, how to cope with the demons of both unrequited bisexual desire and, more indirectly, racism. The film represents abjection and the maternal in the Kristevan sense in its story of Betty/Diane, the aspiring actor from a small town in Canada who develops a love/hate relationship with another woman bent on a successful career in the movies, Rita/Camilla. The aesthetic of this film is very different from that of Welles’s more realist and subversive film noir, though the term has sometimes been used to describe it. Postmodern might be a more appropriate label, given its undercutting of nearly all values, its frequent reminders that it is a film, and nearly impossible to interpret. An example of its difficulty is the box and key, which mysteriously turn up in Rita/Camilla’s and Betty/Diane’s handbags, respectively. In the context of Betty/Diane’s fantasy life where they appear, these objects suggest a process of unlocking, freeing the unconscious, and offering it up to interpretation. The fact that Lynch films them in the handbags, an icon of female sexuality early on in Freud and later in films such as Hitchcock’s Marnie, is meaningful in the context of the movie’s critique of patriarchal norms. The first two-thirds of the film depict Betty’s fantasy, an exuberant quest for a Hollywood career interrupted by the mysterious arrival of an unknown woman suffering from amnesia. The filming of the two women is striking in its contrasting images: the beautiful blond representing Anglo small-town Canada played by Naomi Watts and the equally attractive brunette, the stranger without an identity played by the Mexican-American actor Laura Elena Harring. They are set in Los Angeles around 1990, a city associated with a large Mexican and MexicanAmerican population. Lynch has the unknown woman convey Mexican ethnicity along with a more mature intense female sexuality in juxtaposition to Betty/Diane’s Anglo, Pollyanna, and childlike purity. Along with the casting of Harring, he has Rita murmur the Spanish words “Silencio… No hay bando… No hay orchestra,” which become prominent in the critical Silencio club scene just after that in a crucial portion of the film about two-thirds of the way through. Her English is as flawless as

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her Spanish, indicating that she is bilingual or has an uncanny access to Spanish, at least in Betty’s fantasy. Not knowing who she is and clearly distraught, Rita is often unable to speak, suggesting the Kristevan abject, especially because of the child/Mother relationship she comes to share with the Canadian. Functioning as a Mother, tucking the “child” into bed, and covering her to keep her warm, Betty is protective, urging the visitor to accept her help in discovering who she is. References to the Mother, this a more distant one, surface in Betty’s aunt, who has provided her with the Los Angeles residence. The stranger chooses the name Rita after observing the picture of Hayworth on the movie poster for Gilda in the apartment. The famous actress’s Father was Spanish Roma, another relevant element in the immigrant subtext in Mulholland Drive, as well as in Touch of Evil and The Lady From Shanghai which features Hayworth in a leading role, as we have seen. Rita/Camilla also appears to be Betty’s double and vice versa, as later scenes reveal, for example, when Rita dons a blond wig and Lynch photographs them side by side once again. Finally, Rita becomes Betty’s love object as she falls in love with the stranger and they have sex. Here Lynch has Betty invite Rita to share her large, comfortable bed rather than to sleep on the sofa as she did on their first night together. Once they begin to embrace, Betty asks, “Have you ever done this?” alluding to the taboo of gay sex and, in the context of a Mother/child relationship, that of incest. Afterward, Lynch films their faces very close together combined in one frame with Betty’s a little out of focus and Rita’s clearer and in profile, highlighting her power. They appear peaceful and happy in their union. The last third of the movie reveals a very different Betty, the reallife Diane who struggles with a failing career and unrequited love for Camilla. The death drive surfaces in scenes depicting Diane’s plot to hire an assassin to kill the now successful actress Camilla/Rita. Guilt over the murder and her suicide convey abjection in this portion of the film in contrast with the frequent bright images and easy chatter of many of the opening scenes showing Betty arriving in L.A. Here the film becomes a complicated interweaving of images of an abject Betty who appears frail and inarticulate as she hallucinates the return of Camilla and masturbates to ease her anxieties of separation but with no success. Angelo Badalamenti’s soundtrack appropriately grows increasingly ominous as it develops from the upbeat 1960’s rock and roll opening accompanying

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Betty’s winning a dance competition and many of the audition scenes later. Lynch introduces a haunting melody early on leading to the car accident on Mulholland Drive, which recurs more often later in the ethereal yet sensuous swelling music accompanying the passionate sex between the two women and in the melancholy accompaniment to their travel through wind-tossed leaves in deserted, dirty streets to club Silencio. There the talented Mexican Rebekah Del Rio sings the Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s lament, “Crying.” Finally, there is a return to the haunting melody from the early depiction of the car accident leading to Camilla’s amnesia, bringing the film nearly full circle. I say “nearly” because the closing images are of Diane’s and Camilla’s happy faces as they appeared in the former’s fantasy, of the word “Silencio,” and finally of a purplehaired woman associated with the club—all images which convey an enabling message as I will explain. Without discussing directly abjection and the maternal, which are explicit in my discussion above, Frances Restuccia’s reading in “Kristeva’s Intimate Revolt and the Thought Specular” enables the viewer to understand better the film’s complex portrayal of Betty’s fantasies and reality. This includes the key and box in the significant Rebekah Del Rio scene and its aftermath as I have described. Her essay places the movie in the context of Kristeva’s writing on film, “Fantasy and Cinema,” in The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis (2002) to show how an examination of very different kinds of fantasy reveals the import of Lynch’s cautionary tale of Diane’s tragic life. Restuccia writes: Given that the thought specular engages an interiority Kristeva wishes to rehabilitate that depends on accessing one’s preverbal psychic history and is intricately, intimately tied to one’s singularity, it is difficult to exemplify its specific operations. But I want to examine a film—David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001)–that demonstrates Kristeva’s idea of the thought specular insofar as it deploys the specular to challenge fetishism. Being about fantasy’s paralyzing takeover of the psyche, Mulholland Drive would also seem to have the capacity to enable a viewer to free (or work toward freeing) himself or herself from the illusion of a fantasy that puts one in a stranglehold—by presenting the Nothing that has the power to unloosen the fixation. (Restuccia 2009, 70)

Kristeva’s idea of “thought specular,” according to Restuccia, serves to construct images enabling one to go beyond abjection and to live more successfully both within and outside of the social contract. Both writers

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distinguish this category from the unhealthy fantasies of contemporary life and its “society of the spectacle,” which Guy De Bord has examined. In order to create such constructive visuals, one must “access one’s preverbal psychic history.” It is clear without her mentioning the maternal directly in this essay, that Restuccia is alluding to the early connection to the Mother’s body—“actualizing preverbal meanings, ‘instinctual impulses and affects’—what Kristeva is now famous for calling the semiotic (19),” as her “Kristeva’s Intimate Revolt” puts it earlier in the more theoretical part of the essay (Restuccia 2009, 67). According to Restuccia, Lynch’s film implies that Betty’s fantasies could have enabled her to control her suicidal drives and enjoy better mental health on the model of those projected in cinema. On the one hand, she succumbs to destructive fantasy fueled by abjection and the death drive. The last third of the movie in particular projects images of Diane’s misery, her inability to speak, to think, or to sustain fantasies to cancel her love object. The ending of the film mostly narrates her severe depression and aggression against Camilla, the plot to have her killed. The potential positive alternative, on the other hand, appears primarily in the first two-thirds of the movie and also in the last images of the conclusion. These include the projection of the two actresses’ happy faces, along with that of the blue-haired woman and the word “Silencio” both associated with the club. The blue box epitomizes these images. Betty finds it in her handbag at that location once the constructive fantasies have reached their climax, literally, in the sexual encounter in her bed. For Restuccia, they are like cinema’s imaginary visuals at their best. Along with the blue key discovered earlier in Rita’s bag—she will use it to open the container—the blue box represents the lost possibility of escape from the trap of Betty’s love affair with Rita. As Restuccia explains, Betty missed the opportunity “To work through them [psychic fixations], to enter eventually into a new psychic space.” The empty box and the word “Silencio” also indicate that a fetishistic love object is baseless to the degree that it may be founded on a lack of substance, of reality, of “true” language (2009, 76). According to “Kristeva’s Intimate Revolt,” Lynch’s film proposes the move to a less painful psychological formation. For Slavoj Žižek as for Restuccia, Mulholland Drive reveals how fantasy, based on a Real devoid of reality, may be constructive. Organs without Bodies (2012) likens the “virtual” sound of Del Rio’s voice at the club Silencio to the fiction (mis)perceived in reality in the psychoanalytic process of transference.

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Thus, Restuccia focuses on the way Mulholland Drive raises the question of the creative power of fantasy. Homosexuality and race too lie at its heart, though Restuccia, indirectly highlighting Kristeva’s sense of the maternal and the abject in her essay, does not address these issues. Betty/Diane’s unrequited love for Rita/Camilla is clearly central and the latter appears to display a degree of homophobia. She says “We have to stop doing this. ..” after having sex with Betty and having admitted to being “driven wild” by her before choosing instead the relationship with her director Adam Kesher. Her preference reveals as well the tendency to have sex in order to succeed professionally and also the frequent turning over (no pun intended) of sexual partners prevalent in certain circles of the heterosexual male-dominated film industry. Furthermore, with Rita/Camilla, Lynch projects a Mexican image, as I have said, and the last third of the film, a key—this time metaphorical only—to its meaning as a whole, features Rebekah Del Rio’s song in Spanish, “Llorando,” with la Llorona the mythical Mexican weeping woman who, having killed her children, haunts the night. For those familiar with Aztec thought, she derives from the ancient goddess Coatlicue, understood to be weeping for her children at the time of the Spanish conquest of Mexico. There are also several references to the film director’s, Adam’s, Japanese gardener, Taka, portrayed as an immigrant whose English is limited and whose attitude toward his employer appears deferential and unaware—stereotypical references which needed to be cut for the television version. The two Italian-American Mafia-like Castigliane brothers, Luigi and Vincenzo (Angelo Badalamenti, the composer of the fine soundtrack, plays Luigi), whose money and violence appear to control the film Adam is directing, also enable Lynch to create the context of a problematic “melting pot” in the United States. The brothers remind the viewer of Scorsese’s metaphor of the Mafia for a corrupt America in which both racism and corruption abound. The monstrous faces flashed on the screen in the early Winkie scene, in the dead body episode in Diane Selwyn’s bedroom, and elsewhere are dark and ape-like, suggesting the racist stereotypes of people of color. Though Restuccia does not address the question of race, her analysis of “Fantasy and Cinema” constitutes a valuable contribution to Kristeva studies for its insight into Lynch’s film and thought specular. In the essay, Kristeva explains how Neo-Freudian writing understands psychic life as complex, acknowledging not only biological and symbolic forces, but the whole array of social factors including the treatment of minorities, for

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instance. “Fantasy and Cinema” thus raises the issue of fantasy and race indirectly via a quotation from Freud. Kristeva writes: Freud never attributed fantasies solely to instinctual impulse (biology), or solely to symbolic formation (parental restrictions, religious and moral ideology, etc.), but always suggested an interdependence and translatability among all levels of psychical life. The fantasy as construction/crossroads is one of the favored examples of this work of translation: “We may compare them with individuals of mixed race who, taken all round, resemble white men, but who betray their coloured descent by some striking feature or other, and on that account are excluded from society and enjoy none of the privileges of white people.” (2002, 66)

This important and rarely cited passage from Freud constitutes a basis for Paul Ricoeur’s and Jürgen Habermas’s insights into the parallel, problematic though it may be, between psychic and political structures in the former’s “The Question of Proof in Freud’s Psychoanalytic Writing” (see my Language and Politics in Julia Kristeva 2006, 13). The dyad psyche/society is central to Kristeva’s work as I demonstrate in Chapter 3 below. Furthermore, the passage lends support to the hypothesis I am testing throughout this book, namely that Kristeva’s work and psychoanalytic theory in general contributes to, rather than neglects or misrepresents questions of race. In this context, Betty/Diane’s desires, as well as the racial subtext of the movie, constitute the longing for not only the same sex but also the other race, both of which are often denigrated in the Hollywood of the 1990s and in many places today. The film, especially its portrayal of Diane, raises a version of the question often uncovered in psychoanalytic readings: how to confront the evil within—aggression against others and the self—in order to live more constructively, both as an individual and in a group, in a corrupt world. Lynch compels us to think with more precision about this question by focusing on Diane’s death drive in the context of the Southern California film industry representing the worst aspects of America’s materialist culture, both homophobic and racist. The lights of Hollywood including the illuminated name itself flash multiple times in his film. In the depiction of the illusion of the so-called American dream, both Anglo and Mexican are obliterated. Diane kills herself unable to deal with her failed career and unrequited love for Camilla. Camilla “sells herself” by sadomasochistically flaunting in front of an abject Diane both her “successful” profession and

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engagement to Adam Kesher, the film director. One recalls her apparent love for Diane including her confession “You drive me mad…” Later in the movie, her kissing of another actress, despite the announcement of her upcoming marriage to Kesher just moments before, suggests that instead of a meaningful relationship with one individual, she adopts the marketplace mechanism of fungibility. She replaces one person for another for pleasure and profit whenever possible. In conclusion, it is clear that Kristeva’s ideas on the maternal and the abject have shaped the response to Welles’s and Lynch’s films in important ways. Furthermore, Oliver, Trigo, and Restuccia are not alone in demonstrating that Kristeva’s thought contributes in significant ways to film studies. A Google search reveals 250,000 entries for Julia Kristeva and Film Studies! To take a few important examples, Tina Chanter examines her contributions to psychoanalytic thinking, race, and film (2005). According to Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake, Stephen Heath, the influential authority in film studies, follows Kristeva in his emphasis on subjectivity and the reading process rather than the structure of films (2006, 48). Finally, Patricia MacCormack sees a parallel between Kristeva’s idea of the chora and film studies’ concept of the “virtual,” which is also prominent in Žižek’s analysis of Lynch as explained above (2009, 279). Oliver, Trigo, and Restuccia in particular serve to reaffirm that theory and critical readings from a psychoanalytic perspective on the best of film noir contribute to our understanding of the destructive consequences of misunderstanding psychological formations, especially inflicting pain on others and ourselves. These critics help the viewer understand how Kristeva on the abject and the maternal advances our knowledge of the complex issues concerning sexuality and race raised by the movies.

References Beckham, Jack. 2005. “Placing Touch of Evil, Border, and Traffic in the American Imagination.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 33 (3): 130–141. Bové, Carol Mastrangelo. 2006. Language and Politics in Julia Kristeva: Literature, Art, Therapy. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Chanter, Tina. 2005. “The Exoticization and Universalization of the Fetish, and the Naturalization of the Phallus: Abject Objections.” In Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis, edited by Tina Chanter and Ewa Ziarek, 149–180. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

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Comito, Terry, ed. 1998. Touch of Evil: Orson Welles, Director. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Curtiz, Michael, dir. 1999/1942. Casablanca. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video. DVD. Kristeva, Julia. 2000. “Bulgaria, my Suffering,” translated by Susan Fairfield. In Crisis of the European Subject, edited by Samir Dayal, 163–183. New York: Other Press. Kristeva, Julia. 2002. “Fantasy and Cinema.” In her Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, translated by Jeanine Herman, 63–80. New York: Columbia University Press. Krueger, Eric M. 1972. “Touch of Evil: Style Expressing Content.” Cinema Journal 12 (1): 57–63. Lynch, David, dir. 2001. Mulholland Drive. New York, NY: Criterion Collection. DVD. MacCormack, Patricia. 2009. “Julia Kristeva.” In Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers, edited by Felicity Colman, 276–285. New York: Routledge. Oliver, Kelly, and Trigo Benigno. 2002. Noir Anxiety. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Kindle. Pease, Donald E. 2001. “Borderline Justice/States of Emergency: Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil.” CR: The New Centennial Review 1 (1): 75–105. Restuccia, Frances. 2009. “Kristeva’s Intimate Revolt and the Thought Specular.” In Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Work of Julia Kristeva, edited by Kelly Oliver and S.K. Keltner, 65–78. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Robert, Lapsley, and Michael Westlake. 2006. Film Theory and Introduction. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press. Spivak, Gayatri. 1987. “French Feminism in an International Frame.” In her In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, 137–140. New York: Methuen. Welles, Orson, dir. 2000. The Lady from Shanghai. Columbia TriStar. DVD. Welles, Orson, dir. 2000. Touch of Evil. Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures. DVD. Žižek, Slavoj. 2012. Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 3

“Allow Me a Confession: I Love America”

Abstract This chapter examines Kristeva’s take on the United States, providing a vital part of the dialogue with American critics’ engagement with her thought. I focus on fundamental concepts underlying her writing, for example, the relationship between the psyche and the external world as well as the power of metaphor. Especially in her essays, Kristeva also elaborates in clear and cogent terms an oppositional idea of freedom as our most valuable strength as human beings via a discussion of the philosophical foundations of her thinking. Such freedom is unlike the American notion of liberty, which often engages one in pragmatically adapting to the marketplace. I demonstrate that, beginning with the 1998 essay, “Europhilia-Europhobia,” Kristeva’s analysis of the dyad psyche/society continues to be powerful, if to some extent problematic, for American writers. Keywords Freedom · America · Metaphor

Kristeva, “Europhilia-Europhobia” (2002).

This chapter examines Kristeva’s thinking on the United States as part of my study of a fundamental but problematic idea in her work. I also study American literary and film critics’ response to her ideas and the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. M. Bové, Kristeva in America, Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59912-6_3

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basic concept underlying them, namely, her grasp of the relationship between the psyche and the external world. With roots in Freud, the theory of the connection, for example, between the psyche’s repression of “unacceptable” desires and fears, on the one hand, and society’s banishment of undesirable individuals, on the other (see Ricoeur 1978, 197–198), permeates her writing and is, I believe, a significant factor in understanding the reception of her work in the United States. As I showed in Politics and Language in Julia Kristeva: Literature, Art Therapy (2006), for her, language is at the crux of social change. Transforming society hinges on linguistic transformations of thought and the psychological formations underlying consciousness. American critics’ dialogue with and on Kristeva during the last decades reveals her concept of the relationship between psychic formations and the social structures to which she ties them. Alice Jardine’s timely new biography, At the Risk of Thinking (2020), exemplifies this dialogue and is a rewarding read in general. Jardine cogently illuminates the connections between the psychological and the social by tracing such matters as the centrality of institutions including the church and the university in Kristeva’s life and writing. “Europhilia-Europhobia” (2002) poses the problem of the relations between psyche and society clearly and compellingly. What precisely are these connections? How does psychology shape society in ways that are demonstrable and convincing? These questions lie at the heart of the many fine creative approaches to literature and film in the United States that have built upon Kristeva’s work, as I showed in discussing Hortense Spillers and Jack Halberstam in chapter one as well as Kelly Oliver and Benigno Trigo in Chapter 2. Kristeva’s linkage between psyche and the social also informs the analysis in Chapter 4 on the principal themes of her fiction and in my concluding chapter. Spillers, for example, revises the Kristevan concept of the maternal as a significant element of oppositional thinking to read Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, the Timeless People as a fundamental contribution to Caribbean literature. “Black, White, and in Color, or Learning How to Paint: Toward an Intramural Protocol of Reading” (2003, 277– 300) reveals the ways in which the novel’s protagonist, Merle Kimbona, in many ways a mouthpiece for Marshall, develops her psychological resources to combat the racism that had both murdered her Mother and eaten away at her own consciousness. In other words, Spillers’s analysis, briefly stated, aspires to ameliorate relations among the races via the strengthening of psychological formations.

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Alice Jardine’s new biography is laced with the dyad psyche/society as she constructs Kristeva’s life and work over a long career including the importance of the analysis of religion in her writing (2020). The theory of the links between psychology and society is also at the center of some of the finest critics who recognize the strengths of her work but with grave reservations, like Jacqueline Rose, in addition to those who have rejected her thinking almost entirely, namely Gayatri Spivak and Judith Butler. Maria Margaroni (2007) examines the ways in which critics, including some Americans like myself, understand the relationship, explaining that the parallel they establish between them is problematic, that is, not sufficiently clear or convincing. She does not discuss Freud, but rather books and collections of essays on Kristeva from the last twenty years, including my Language and Politics (Bové 2006). For Margaroni, many of us oversimplify the parallel Kristeva posits to the degree that we perceive the two domains metaphorically, with one the mirror of the other. She writes: The problem that needs to be acknowledged here is not the trans-position itself (i.e., the move across, transference, or displacement of the psychic onto the social) but our tendency to reduce this transference to the metaphysical concept of metaphor, one dependent (as Jacques Derrida, among others, has shown) on analogy, that is, on the recognition and establishment of likeness (see Derrida 1982). But “is the subject like the nation… ?” (95) Sara Ahmed asks in her contribution to the 2005 collection of essays edited by Tina Chanter and Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis. (794) The attention Ahmed pays to what she calls the “metonymic” relation between the subject and the nation (a relation based not on mirroring but on proximity and on “how bodies come into contact with other bodies,” 95) does justice to her hermeneutics of complication and is valuable to those of us who are committed equally to the intimate language of psychoanalysis and to the inter-ested discourse of politics.8 (798)

Margaroni’s analysis of the relations between psyche and society in Kristeva’s theory identifies the metaphysical nature of “mirror” and “metaphor” as the principal issue. She valorizes Ahmed’s “metonymy” because of its apparently more adequate consideration of the material, historical components of the relationship. In her attempt to pay attention to specific

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conditions of time and place, as Margaroni points out, Ahmed deals with the headscarf issue in her analysis. The distinction between, on the one hand, “mirror,” “metaphor,” and “analogy,” and, on the other, Ahmed’s “metonymy,” emphasizes the metaphysics and apparent lack of precision in these recent readings of Kristeva’s theory of the relationship between psychological formations and social structures as well as of the critical impact of the first on the second. Margaroni is right to call attention to readings of Kristeva that enable a more precise understanding of the relations between the psychic and more purely social formations, like Ahmed’s. The use of metaphor and metaphysics, however, to approach the relations may be equally illuminating. To what extent does the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, the former lending itself to metaphysics, have influence in our understanding of Kristeva’s theory, especially of the degree to which psychological formations shape social structures? In the frame I provide in this book as a whole, I ask how the dyad psyche/society has influenced the response to her work in the United States and beyond, especially in a nation characterized by strong tendencies to pragmatic and positivistic thinking, which have arguably penetrated the globe. By “pragmatism,” I mean the reduction of knowledge to causes outside of the self, divine, or moral, and increasingly associated with the economic. As I read Kristeva, such a reduction has led to the dominance of a psychic formation in which one primarily pays attention to factors exterior to thought, especially to the dollar. Margaroni’s valorization of metonymy over metaphor constitutes such a reduction to the degree that she identifies the power of primarily external factors to shape the psyche, though the analysis of the nation’s impact, for example in her presentation of Ahmed, is not limited to the marketplace. Furthermore, the discussion of metonymy versus metaphor does not sufficiently recognize the potential for psychic phenomena to influence the social. As a reader of world literature, I remain convinced of the power of metaphor, metaphysics, and mirroring to shape both the psyche and society. This conviction underlies my sense of the importance of Kristeva’s elaboration of the link between the two, a theory that is both ethical and political in my reading, and that argues convincingly for literature’s power to have an impact on social structures. As I will demonstrate, beginning with “Europhilia-Europhobia,” published in French in 1998, her analysis continues to be powerful, if to some extent problematic, for American writers.

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This essay opens with a simple, lyrical expression of love for the United States and Kristeva’s early years lecturing at Columbia University. “Openness” including that of our landscapes and a “fresh” quality are the two attributes mentioned in the first lines and developed in the complex and— for Kristeva—accessible text, which follows. She derives the open, fresh audience for her work experienced in the United States from the Greeks and their idea of hospitality. Her audience here was originally the 1997 New York University Conference on French Theory. She goes on to aspire to a sense of freedom that enables one, including the nation as a whole, to listen to the other and to allow that other to shape one’s thinking—a sense which exists to a lesser extent in France from her point of view in 1997. At the same time, she acknowledges the need to respond to some extent to causes outside of the self, especially the economic factors that individuals increasingly allow to determine their behavior and to reinforce their values based on the marketplace. Given that throughout her writing for about the last forty years her principal influence is Freud, it is no surprise that the essay begins with an analysis of strong emotion, a broad embrace of the United States, i.e., “I Love America.” In the middle of this text, she identifies the Kristevan theories with which most writers in the US engage, including some of the participants at the conference she addresses: intertextuality, the symbolic/semiotic, the abject, and the stranger. She connects each of these theories to her Neo-Freudian context—Bakhtin (thought to be Volosinov, the author of an important book on Freud); the archaic relation between Mother and child; the Maternal container as the first “ab-ject”; restoring confidence in the nation’s treatment of strangers as the Other, respectively. Her concluding remarks mention the central psychoanalytic concepts of free association and transference. Listening to the Other both within and without engages consciousness with someone fundamentally different from oneself. For this reason , Kristeva uses the term “hybridization” to describe this exercising of freedom, a quality she sees in America’s diverse population and its ability to transplant, not clone, the ideas of others. Furthermore—and here her prose becomes more complex, problematic, and difficult to document— engagement with the Other derives from the early relationship to the Mother and to the semiotic. Opening oneself up to the language of the Other constitutes a revisiting of the earlier emergence of meaning out of physical experience, in other words, the birth of being. Transforming more purely bodily experience into language distinguishes human beings

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from other species and is in a sense sacred. Not a believer, and often critical of its cathartic function, Kristeva nonetheless returns repeatedly to religion because of its cathartic function and its aspiration to transcend the physical in a discourse that pays attention to the soul or psyche. “Europhilia-Europhobia” explains that we should not be afraid of examining threatening, “profane” texts like Céline’s political pamphlets. The explanation reveals a significant component of the dialogue between Kristeva and her American critics, namely a misunderstanding, as she herself calls it, based on a reductive view of her study of the psyche and its dangerous underbelly. She states that the progressive magazine The Nation accused her of excusing or forgiving Céline for the collaboration with Fascism evident in his pamphlets. Referring to Paul De Man’s commendation of Kristeva’s reading of Céline in Powers of Horror, Jon Wiener accuses her in this magazine of anti-Semitism in the treatment of the controversial novelist (1988). In his positive comments on the book jacket, De Man recognizes that Kristeva’s reading of Céline is “indispensable” for an understanding of the novelist. In response to Wiener’s accusation, Cynthia Chase incisively calls attention to Kristeva’s “selfcritical” instruments for comprehending the conditions of anti-Semitism and Fascism (1988). In my view, De Man’s and Chases’s perspectives on Céline are correct. Wiener’s accusation derives from a perspective prevalent in the United States. That is to say, the accusation is an example of the American tendency to avoid examining the psychological too deeply. It is after all capable of descending into madness, as one of Kristeva’s most influential mentors, André Green, emphasizes. Instead, one tends to focus on events and experience in the world, that is, outside of the psyche. America’s tendency to think of the psyche in reductive ways, as Kristeva reveals in her 1998 essay, resurfaces in the negative response of more than one critic in the United States to Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones and its psychopathic Nazi narrator. For Kristeva, the novel deserves praise for its achievement in confronting and revealing a psychological formation underlying certain totalitarian behaviors, as Jardine states (2020, 292). This section of the essay dealing with some of those American writers like Butler and Spivak—arguably American-Indian given her many years in the American academy—who reject most of her work also refers to a New York University professor who accused Kristeva and other French theorists of adopting a pseudo-scientific model. Her response is significant and clearly inscribes the production of knowledge in the discipline

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of literature. She writes: “a prankster from New York University claimed to unmask ‘French imposters’ by refuting formulas where there were only metaphors” (261). Later in the essay she in fact assigns the privileged mode of acquiring wisdom to fiction and its metaphors, i.e., novels produce knowledge via the process of listening to the other within and without (266). Jardine shows how Kristeva’s writing increasingly addresses the epistemological as well as aesthetic and political functions of the novel more directly in the years she embarks on both her own fiction and Intimate Revolt in which “Europhilia-Europhobia” appears as the concluding chapter. In a striking parallel, Daniel O’Hara in fact focuses on fiction as a representation of listening to the Other in these senses to contribute an incisive analysis of Henry James’s novels in his “Empire Baroque: Becoming Other in Henry James” (2003, 237–300). While he does not draw directly on Kristeva’s theory of the novel, like her, he derives his insights in part from a reading of Heidegger’s “being of language.” While not offering a detailed demonstration of the metaphorical power of fiction to produce truth, “Europhilia-Europhobia” convincingly outlines the philosophical foundations in Kant and Heidegger of what I have been calling the “dyad psyche/society.” In the former Kristeva finds one of the origins of her notion of freedom in his formulation of “self-beginning” as an “enterprising subjectivity” (262). Examining Heidegger’s reading of Kant, she builds on the concept of “the being of speech” which yields to itself and to the other, a form of “endless questioning” (263). Her remarks on Kant and Heidegger underpin the analysis of the psyche including its mirroring of the functioning of the social world, in which ideally, nations would engage in a serious dialogue with each other, enabling each to push the other further in the pursuit of truth and the peaceful resolution of conflicts. In the concluding pages of the essay, Kristeva promotes a form of solidarity based on her sense of the interchange between self and Other both inside and outside of the psyche. Such a solidarity would replace the current prevalence of liberalism that has persisted in the States and in Europe since the earlier 1990s, a world view that continues to rely on the market to motivate behavior and “progress.” Convinced that it would be utopian to hope for a world without nations, one government for the planet, she supports the idea of the nation that would maintain human rights for everyone while requiring a degree of integration, some conformity to a social contract, including for

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instance her controversial, problem-ridden view of the need to forbid the wearing of a headscarf. In addition to the earlier discussion of Heidegger on Kant, in the second half of the essay, she calls on Baruch Spinoza’s work to strengthen the philosophical foundation of her theory, especially his “third kind of knowledge,” intuitive understanding of the most important values of life and the freedom and peace of mind which they bring, for instance, via novels. The essay’s conclusion comes full circle to her foundations in Freud. The paragraph on Spinoza speaks of the psychoanalytic concepts of free association and transference (266). In other words, she refers in concrete terms to the processes underlying the psyche, including their manifestation in literature and therapy as well as in the concomitant social interaction that is often harmful. These functions are the key to unlocking the problematic dyad I am examining. Her final passages summarize her findings, returning for example, to what she loves about America, to conclude that the openness and fresh quality have been lost in a pretension to respect that is in fact an indifference to others. This is a conclusion that rings particularly true in 2020 in the reign of Trump. She turns hopefully to the possibility of the European Union and within it France’s project to debate the human sciences focusing on “facts and interpretation.” In other words, the French plan to examine scholarship including scientific research and attending to the interpretive process involved in doing it is a mark of genuine progress. The hermeneutics she has in mind are especially the methods of psychoanalysis. With considerable insight, Jardine notices that Kristeva’s writings on both Europe and the United States recognize the contributions as well as the harmful undertakings of the two powerful regions. Attacks on her work as Eurocentric including her attempts to speak of Chinese culture may well indicate a problematic aspect of her thought but are also blind to her non-reductive, complex perspective on both Europe and the United States (2020, 289), and, I would add, China. It is significant in the context of the connections between psyche and society and the response to her work in the United States that Kristeva herself identifies the increasing engagement of American critics with continental philosophy as the most adequate way of responding to her writing. The birth of the PhiloSophia (including the latter’s journal of the same name) and Kristeva Circle collectives of scholars focused on her work in 2007 and 2012, respectively, gives evidence of this fresh turn, for instance, in the work of Kelly Oliver (a founder of PhiloSophia and the

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Circle) and Maria Margaroni. Kristeva states in a long quotation that illuminates a number of the important components of the American response to her writing: There is also another model of freedom. It appeared in the Greek world at the heart of philosophy with the pre-Socratics and developed through Socratic dialogue. Without being subordinate to a cause, before the concatenation of Aristotelian “categories” that are themselves the premises of scientific and technical reason, this basic freedom is in being and in the being of speech that surrenders itself, gives itself, presents itself to itself and to the other, and in this sense liberates itself. This liberation of the being of speech was brought to the fore in Heidegger’s discussion of Kant’s philosophy (the 1930 seminar, published as Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom). It inscribed freedom within the essence of philosophy as endless questioning, before freedom was subsequently fixed in the chain of causes and effects and in their mastery. (2002, 263) I have evoked at length (though insufficiently) the political implications of this version of freedom that European culture conveys to us, because this way of being free is profoundly inscribed in our social experience as well as in our way of thinking. Isn’t this why a certain segment of the American university has proved welcoming in regard to our work? They have noticed in our research, in the face of the economic, political, and academic establishment of American society, this attitude of freedom that often takes on the aspect of political protest but is fundamentally a way of being that is revealed when in revolt. Moreover, politics, strictly speaking, may also be a betrayal of this freedom of thought. Thus I have emphasized the idea that political revolution (the 1793 French Terror and, more dramatically, the 1917 Russian Revolution) has managed to strangle revolt in the sense of free questioning and permanent unrest. Nevertheless, the horror of totalitarianism that has seized revolt and erected it as deadly dogma, does not forever discredit the possibility of freedom in revolt being inscribed in the political arena as well and not only in the life of thought. American universities have therefore developed a true Francophilia or Europhilia (for the research in question is indeed called “continental philosophy”). As a sign of protest against the limitations of American consumerism and positivist reasoning, you have examined our research and clearly seen its ethical as well as theoretical nature. (2002, 265–266)

Here, Kristeva clearly and convincingly affirms the value and power of psychic life (“endless questioning”), thinking freely and creatively, and their linkage to social structures (“social experience” and “a way of being

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that is revealed when in revolt”). Furthermore, she points to the centrality of the relation in recent writing on her work and on other continental philosophers, as I am arguing. Her work on Hannah Arendt provides support for clarifying and strengthening this connection by illuminating the potential role of narrative in making public the existence of marginalized individuals and their right to be included and/or accorded more visibility in the community. Storytellers may “actualize individuals and make them political beings,” as Eva Ziarek and Tina Chanter point out in the introduction to their collection of essays. The volume discusses Kristeva’s engagement with Arendt’s work in the context of the problem I am addressing including Ahmed’s insight on metaphor discussed above (2005, 4). Alice Jardine makes reference to the critical connection between psyche and society in Kristeva’s theory throughout her new biography and, in my reading of it, is a clear illustration of Arendt’s idea that narrative has the power to make the individual visible and influential in the political realm. In other words, At the Risk of Thinking is biography as a literary and political act. Jardine’s references to the dyad demonstrate the ways in which thinking, in this case, analyzing Kristeva’s life and work in the form of a biography, constructs and actualizes her as a political being. I argue that these references reveal the complexity in the linkage, including both its insights and its likely problems, beyond repeating the subject’s and her biographer’s belief in it and in its effects. Jardine recreates the writer and her experience as someone who lives in and shapes our world, in line with Arendt’s theory of the impact and public nature of narrative, that is, in this case, that the biographer’s subject becomes more influential. Jardine’s volume, like Kristeva’s writing which she cites and illuminates extensively, has an impact on social structures by encouraging the American intellectual community to listen to her. She is sometimes marginalized as an insignificant or utopian French theorist, as are many psychoanalytic thinkers. In recent months, her substantial corpus is reduced to that of a Bulgarian Communist spy—a reduction that is an even greater distortion. Jardine speaks clearly and convincingly on this controversy pointing to the defamation of character in a large number of such accusations by the Bulgarian government. She also suggests that a degree of American resistance to Kristeva’s thought, whether because of misogyny, jealousy, or anti-intellectualism, has distorted the response in the United States to the Sabina controversy (2020, 310).

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While At the Risk of Thinking does not focus primarily on the United States, it is clear that the American market economy and its emphasis on efficiency, technology, and consumerism—in other words, the pragmatic/positivist tendencies of behavior in the United States—are central in the biography’s discussion of the critique of contemporary society in Kristeva’s work. The centrality of America in her writing as well as in a significant subtext in Jardine’s biography—I hope I have made clear—is critical to the thesis I am arguing in this chapter and in this book as a whole. Implicit in Jardine—including the title of her work—is the sense that psychic phenomena influence sociopolitical structures, i.e., the consumerism, technology, and hyper-connectivity, contribute to a form of totalitarianism threatening to make robots of us all. The dyad is fundamental to Kristeva’s ethical and political perspective and goals. Furthermore, Jardine’s analysis of her life and work understands both the complexity and potentially problematic character of the connection between psyche and society: economic factors do play a role, according to Kristeva, along with psychic phenomena, but not the dominant role often assigned to them. Jardine also does not discuss directly or at length how one assesses the impact of the psychological on the social, an omission that calls attention to the problematic nature of the relation (2020, 245). She summarizes Kristeva’s analysis of Mallarmé and Lautréamont and their contributions to the crucial thinking on the Fascist movement to come—insights essentially ignored in the Europe of the early decades of the twentieth century. Her summary suggests that for Kristeva one evaluates the influence of the psychological on the social by examining the writing of creative writers. In other words, if readers had been more aware of the importance of Mallarmé’s and Lautréamont’s thinking in their poetry, they might have been able to resist more effectively the rise of Fascism. Furthermore, At the Risk of Thinking implicitly evaluates the ways in which the psyche’s critical reflections shape sociopolitical realities in its discussion of the impact of the critique of the Soviet regime in the 1980s in bringing about the fall of the Berlin Wall. Jardine cites Kristeva’s analysis of the beginnings of this critique in the 1960s: the significant dialogue among public intellectuals in Eastern Europe—journalists, writers, and artists—led over time to the opening of the barrier between East and West Germany in 1989. In a note to this quotation, Jardine includes her subject herself before she left for Paris, pointing out that her critique,

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despite its probable disguise in dense prose, may have led to the Bulgarian government’s recent release of supposedly damaging evidence on “Sabina, the spy.” My argument here is to acknowledge that the discourse of creative writers like Mallarmé, Lautréamont, and Kristeva provides the best evidence of both the potential and the actual ways to intervene in world events in a constructive, ethical manner, both combative and defensive, in other words, writing as a martial art. In identifying the connection in clear and cogent terms throughout the volume, Jardine’s biography does not, as I have indicated, directly recognize the significant presence of the United States in Kristeva’s social critique. Jardine does nonetheless uncover the reasons why and how American critics engage with Kristeva’s writing. She traces several important sources for Kristeva’s thought and in particular for her linking of the psychological and the social. While she does not cite Ricoeur and Habermas on Freud, she does discuss the force of Mikhail Bakhtin, Tel Quel and Philippe Sollers, Émile Benveniste, and André Green in shaping Kristeva’s thought, in both her early writing in the 1960s and 1970s and also in her move from linguistic to more psychoanalytic methodologies (2020, 121–128, 153–156). Briefly stated, Kristeva’s focus on language’s power to bring about social change—a theory informed by the important influences Jardine identifies—attracts the attention of both American writers engaged in psychological readings of language and literature as well as those who remain content with a focus on external factors in their practices. At the Risk of Thinking points to Kristeva’s discussion of the rare analyses of the figure fundamental to the emergence of language, that is, the Maternal. These few examples appear primarily in the fields of science and religion: scientific disciplines often relegate “the Mother” to nature, for example. Jardine points out that, according to Kristeva, both Protestant and Catholic religious studies have produced the relatively unusual examinations of the figure of the Mother, conferring a sacred character upon her (2020, 177). At the Risk of Thinking states: Kristeva’s reasoning relied on a psychoanalytic interpretation of how infants become invested in things, including themselves, but she did not hesitate to extrapolate from this interpretation to a much larger argument about belief and its vicissitudes. She explained that the problems facing civilization today cannot be solved politically, that while remaining a firm atheist, she could perceive that the widening gap in Western democracies between

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secular politics on the one hand and religious belief on the other has caused the ethical dimension of politics to recede from view, making it impossible for “the need to believe” to transform into “the desire to know.” Kristeva agreed that we all have an obligation to continue the critique, the deconstruction of world religions, and of Christianity in particular, in order to understand better all the ways in which they have been destructive. Christianity, for example, has an ugly history from the Inquisition and witch hunts of earlier times to the denial, control,and even abuse of the body and its sexuality today (which has been especially detrimental to women). At the same time, she insisted that Freud’s examination of religion (as not only an illusion) is crying out to be continued today because only psychoanalytic work on the psychic mechanisms of belief—work interrupted by the horrors of World War II—can resist the rising destruction of psychic space which is also a spiritual space. She stated in different ways that she wanted to mobilize her insight and knowledge as an atheist, a psychoanalyst, and a woman to explore these problems. She had to constantly insist that her interest in religion did not mean that she was getting “religious.” She pointed out that the Catholics were much more accepting of her as an avowed atheist than the mainstream press. I would argue that Kristeva’s interest in spirituality over the course of the 2000s resulted principally from two by then deeply entrenched experiential components of her life. First, there was her experience as an analyst. But the second, and perhaps deeper port of entry into the question of faith was the one that she had entered as a child via her father’s deep religiosity. She draws a link between these two influences as follows: “During my childhood, my father’s faith not only seemed incomprehensible to me, but also irredeemably archaic—no point in knowing about it or in questioning it. It was only my discovery of Freud later on that was going to clarify things for me as to the interdependence of faith and reason.” (270–271)

A microcosm of the overall approach of the biography, this excerpt reveals both Jardine’s comprehensive description and analysis of Kristeva’s work over several decades and her subtle reflections on the underlying sources of it. In other words, At the Risk of Thinking examines the work’s trajectory from the study of the emergence of language in the infant and child to that of the development of language in the adolescent and adult as a ramification of those earlier moments. Jardine then goes on to imagine the ways in which psychoanalysis, especially reading Freud and working with her patients, enabled Kristeva to understand her Father’s strong

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Catholicism in its connections to the rational mind. Briefly stated, psychoanalysis led her to see the necessity to acknowledge and explore the emotional and physical, including unconscious drives, in order to best facilitate the transformation of such hidden sources into an aware intelligence, as At the Risk of Thinking concludes, based on a careful reading of her theory, fiction, and interviews. The Kristevan terminology describes this process in precise terms as a shaping of “the need to believe” into “the desire to know,” Jardine indicates. She points to the contributions of the feminist philosopher, Kelly Oliver, who explains that the Mother’s critical presence and gradual separation as the infant grows into the speaking child, adolescent, and adult functions as a metaphor in Kristeva’s theory. For Oliver, the contemporary world needs to model itself upon a “motherly” role patriarchal cultures most often reject (151–152), in other words, to transform itself via a relationship in which one listens to the Other both within and without. In this context, those who build upon her writing, for example, Spillers, Halberstam, Oliver, Trigo, and myself see the maternal and the personal history of one’s connections to “the Mother” as well as to the “good Father” of individual pre-history as integrally embedded in Kristeva’s concept of the abject, arguably the part of her theory that has been most useful to writers in the United States (see my first two chapters and Kristeva’s own recognition of this above). The difficulty of separation from the Mother, for example, may lead some subjects to suffer such debilitation that they are unable to articulate their thoughts, in other words, they undergo the severe depression Kristeva understands as abjection. The focus on language’s power to transform precisely such linguistically disabling mental states, that is, to represent them in artistic creation, and to bring about social change is arguably suspect, however, among those writers who are not in search of a different approach to “freedom.” That is to say, they conform in a climate that relegates and reduces the forces capable of such transformation to factors outside of the psyche, as do the hard scientists and religious studies scholars mentioned above. In addition, critics increasingly tend to focus more heavily on the marketplace pervasive in American culture and its dissemination in the world. The earlier version of this tendency to see the impetus for change coming from outside of the self is the God of the Puritan/Protestant worldview, as Kristeva herself has explained in her analysis of Weber (1974). I argue as well that the affinity with madness in Green’s work and its influence on Kristeva’s helps to explain why certain critics turn away from her thought,

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as Jardine implies (2020, 154). Such writers refuse to confront the violent drives lurking in some of the most creative and honest texts, such as those of Céline and Jonathan Littell. Psychologists and psychiatrists in the United States often buy into a culture that transforms the psychological into a more purely biological phenomenon and inadequately deals with mental illness and, more generally, with the potentially harmful psychological formations underlying sociopolitical structures. According to Jardine, Kristeva’s faith in the psyche and its power to transform the world gains credibility in her examination of memory and time (2020, 72, 138). The critical references to historical events demonstrate that in fact, thinking, i.e., remembering and assessing the past, leads to consciousness raising, knowledge of the world, and more just political and ethical practices. At the Risk of Thinking discusses, along with its subject’s personal introspection, for instance, Kristeva’s analysis of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1986 and the ways in which those writing on the Soviet Union’s totalitarian regime helped bring about the critical event. Earlier in her monumental study of Mallarmé and Lautréamont in Revolution in Poetic Language, she demonstrated the critique of demagoguery in the poetic traces prefiguring the rise of anti-Semitism, Stalinism, and Fascism, a literary path that unfortunately went unheeded. Making time for close, careful reading of substantial texts can, nevertheless, initiate constructive change—the removal of the wall—and help to forestall violent persecution. I have discussed her analysis of these historical events in order to argue the efficacy of substantive writing in bringing about social change—books can change the world. Here I am arguing with Jardine that Kristeva’s focus on memory and time, both chronological and synchronic, makes clearer and more convincing the links she establishes between the psychic and the social. Most important for the future of the human race, remembering and evaluating such crises as Soviet tyranny under Stalin and Gorbachev, as well as Fascism, and anti-Semitism—such memory and evaluation are clearly lacking in America under Trump—can pave the way to avoid them and to move forward rather than to repeat past horrors. Jardine indicates the complex ways in which Kristeva urges her readers to think about memory not only in terms of chronology and historical time but also in terms of Proustian instants when one experiences multiple events/experiences simultaneously (2020, 221). Such spatialization of time is the mark of many of the finest literary works, epitomized in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, a work she has studied extensively.

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For Kristeva, these precious moments are a fundamental component of the personal and public memories that enable human well-being. This means not only a healthy internal life that brings a sense of plenitude and identity but also the possibility of a less chaotic and violent world. Kristeva’s writing on the United States, especially in the concluding chapter “Europhilia-Europhobia” of her 2002 Intimate Revolt , provides a vital part of the dialogue with American literary critics and their engagement with her theories of the Maternal and the abject. Her remarks including the discussion of the philosophical foundations of her thinking in such authorized figures as Freud, Kant, Heidegger, and Spinoza elaborate in clear and cogent terms an oppositional idea of freedom as our most valuable strength as human beings. The liberty to question any and all ideas, coupled with the responsibility to listen to the perspectives of others, grounds Kristeva’s thought solidly in the complex if problematic dyad psyche/society, yielding a number of fresh, creative readings of literature and film.

References Bové, Carol Mastrangelo. 2006. Language and Politics in Julia Kristeva: Literature, Art, Therapy. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. Chase, Cynthia. 1988. “Letters: ‘In Defense of Kristeva.’” The Nation (246, 124, April 9), 482. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy.” In Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass, 270–271. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jardine, Alice. 2020. At The Risk of Thinking. New York: Bloomsbury. Kristeva, Julia. 1974. “D’Ithaca à New York.” Promesse (36–37, Spring), 123– 140. Kristeva, Julia. (1998) 2002. “Europhilia-Europhobia.” In Intimate Revolt, translated by Jeanine Herman, 255–268. New York: Columbia University Press. Margaroni, Maria. 2007. “Recent Work on and by Julia Kristeva: Toward a Psychoanalytic Social.” Signs (32, 3, Spring), 793–808. O’Hara, Daniel. 2003. “Empire Baroque: Becoming Other in Henry James.” In Empire Burlesque: The Fate of Critical Culture in Global America, 237–300. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. (1977) 1978. “The Question of Proof in Freud’s Psychoanalytic Writings.” In The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Works,

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edited by Charles E. Regan and David Stewart, 197–198. Boston: Beacon Press. Spillers, Hortense. 2003. “Black, White, and in Color, or Learning How to Paint: Toward an Intramural Protocol of Reading.” Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, 277–300. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Tina Chanter and Ewa Ziarek. 2005. “Introduction.” In Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis, edited by Tina Chanter and Ewa Ziarek, 1–1. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Wiener, Jon. 1988. The Nation (246, 1, January 9), 22–24.

CHAPTER 4

The Fiction: A Modernist View of America

Abstract This chapter focuses on Kristeva’s fiction, especially the most recent, The Enchanted Clock, as her preferred medium for a resistance to forms of orthodox American thinking. In her fiction as in her essays, she consistently raises the question of the psyche’s power to resist the onslaught of factors outside of the subject, especially economic and consumerist, and the pragmatic thinking on which they are based. Her most recent novel, one of whose principal characters is arguably an astronomical clock, enables her to explore notions of time, especially the teleology underlying the hard sciences, and American pragmatism. The early separation from the Mother and the threat of abjection, fundamental to her theory of subjectivity, provide the context for her critique of the American model of liberalism, and, I am arguing, have engaged writers in the United States in the study of her writing. Keywords Fiction · Time · Science

Empirical thought and pragmatism, removed from their context in the human sciences, are frequent themes in Kristeva’s fiction and often the target of its critique. I am using pragmatic and empirical not in the sense in which philosophy uses the terms, for example, in referring to

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. M. Bové, Kristeva in America, Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59912-6_4

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the writing of William James or John Dewey, though there are connections to it. Instead, I use them to refer to a central, problematic idea in Kristeva’s thought, the reduction of knowledge to causes outside of the self, divine or moral, and increasingly associated with the economic. As I read her, such a reduction has led to the dominance of a psychic formation in which one adapts primarily to the dollar. She discusses the development of liberal democracy and its connections to what I see as American pragmatism in her “Europe Divided: Politics, Ethics, Religion” (2000). Her essay analyzes the roots of Christian materialism and its idea of a freedom that is dependent on the market place, citing Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the foundational text tracing the roots of capitalistic thought and behavior in Protestantism (2000, 120–121). Furthermore, in “Europhilia-Europhobia” (2002), Kristeva, in a move parallel to Claude Richard’s understanding of the sources of oppositional writing in Epicurus, refers to the Greek conception of “ethos” and hospitality along with the Socratic dialogue in her critique of American freedom, that is, to be free to adapt to the market of production and profit (2002, 257–262). In her essay, opposition to America’s model of liberalism and freedom as well as its connections to a dependence on external, economic factors, has foundations in classical thought. Ethos and the Socratic dialogue as understood by the Greeks, according to her reading, means opening your mind to that of another, in other words, a “second conception of freedom, quite distinct from liberalism, which is given in the being of speech through the presence of the self to the other” (2002, 263). In her “Europhilia-Europhobia,” Kristeva also points to fiction (2002, 266) as a form particularly well-suited to combat the harmful model restricting thought and behavior to economic causes, despite the fact that the genre develops as a middle-class phenomenon within capitalist culture. I see this reference to the suitability of fiction for the resistance to a form of orthodox American thinking as a major objective of her novels, and especially of her most recent, The Enchanted Clock (2017). She has, however, displayed a balanced interest in essays, poetry, and fiction in both her theory and creative writing. The narrator of her 1991 novel The Old Man and the Wolves in fact speaks disparagingly of distinctions among the literary genres as “the frontiers once drawn up between the different genres for the benefit of lazy schoolboys” (1994, 62). Kristeva is more interested in examining the idea of literature as resistance rather

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than the particular genres included in that category, as I have explained elsewhere in my essay focusing on literature and philosophy in her work (Bové 2019). Also, her reference to fiction’s suitability points to its accessibility compared to other literary forms, as she has stated in describing her turn to the novel from theory in an interview with Elisabeth Bélorgey (Kristeva 1996). Empirical thought and pragmatism, targets in her novels, are components of the hard sciences and technology in the United States and, I argue, building on Kristeva’s thinking, derive in part from American Christian materialism and versions of it abroad. I will examine Kristeva’s perspective on American pragmatism in her fiction and how it may inflect the reception to and engagement with her thought. My focus on the novels, especially her most recent, The Enchanted Clock, includes their implied theories of abjection and the maternal, closely related to the critique of American empiricism. These are the theories that have been most influential in the United States, as I have demonstrated in Chapters 1 and 2 above. An examination of Kristeva’s thinking in her fiction on not only American pragmatism, but also on the components of her theory that literary and film critics most often take up, enables a fuller understanding of psychoanalytic approaches and their contribution to the production of knowledge. Examining her novels in this light raises significant questions of history, national identity, and gender. The analysis of Kristeva’s latest novel provides an important part of her side of the dialogue with literary critics in the United States who have engaged with her theories of the abject and the maternal. That is to stay, her thinking on the United States, especially on its brand of capitalism, imperialism, and excessive consumerism in her fiction, helps to explain why critics have focused on those components of her theory closely connected to certain American tendencies of thought and behavior and on the psychic formations they have shaped. She consistently argues for the need to understand the psyche including unconscious drives in the face of the onslaught of factors outside of the subject, especially economic and consumerist, and the thinking on which they are based. The early separation from the Mother and the threat of abjection, fundamental to her theory of subjectivity, are at the heart of her thinking, provide the context for her critique of the American model of liberalism and freedom, and, I am arguing, have engaged American writers like Hortense Spillers in the study of her work, as discussed in Chapter 1.

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The tendency toward pragmatic thinking in the United States has roots in Puritan monotheism, that is, in the dominant religion promoting a particular form of work ethic and, more generally, in the American patriarchal state to which it is related. Kristeva’s Neo-Freudian framework, arising out of an oppositional tradition whose source in Claude Richard’s psychoanalytic reading of American literature is Epicurus, runs counter to the pragmatic tendency of thought in the United States. Richard incisively documents this significant trait, for example, in his analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in which the Puritan patriarchs fetishize the idea of the absolute spiritual truth communicated in language. In Hawthorne’s and Richard’s critique of fetishism and their reductive ideas concerning knowledge, both the son/narrator and the woman/Hester become the Other, especially the guilty sexuality latent in language (Richard 1998, 55). The Puritans preached hypocritically against materialism even as they, along with the Transcendentalists who followed, arguably lay the groundwork for capitalism and a work ethic focused on profit and the acquisition of physical comfort. This is so, despite the fact that certain Puritans contributed to mystical thought and produced beautiful poetry, for example, Anne Bradstreet. Puritan roots have also, I am arguing, cultivated a tendency toward nationalism and exceptionalism in the United States, which is an additional factor shaping the reception of Kristeva’s work. Her thought is very different from that of many American literary critics, marked by the patriarchy of the state as well as that of its primary religion, despite the church’s apparent autonomy. I am thinking in particular of the theme of the exceptional in literary studies in the United States, documented and critiqued, for example, in Donald Pease’s article “Re-thinking ‘American Studies After Exceptionalism’” (2009), in which he analyzes the discourse underlying transnational scholarship including both national politics and art. While mindful of the need to focus on the histories, strengths, and weaknesses of individual nations, especially the positive qualities of France, Kristeva’s perspective in her fiction is fundamentally global, as I understand it. For her, we are not primarily citizens of a nation but rather citizens of the world. She has a background in linguistics, speaks Bulgarian, French, and English, and has also written a novel on Teresa of Avila that illustrates a reach beyond the national and exceptional. In Teresa, My Love (2014) Kristeva’s narrator Sylvia, based on the author herself, makes frequent reference to the saint’s original Spanish texts

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and examines their cultural and historical contexts in sixteenth-century Spain including the connections between Judeo-Christian and Islamic Sufi mystical thought. In this context, I will study the theme of the United States often implicit in her fiction with a focus on The Enchanted Clock. I examine how her work foments constructive debates on pragmatism/materialism in contemporary life with special emphasis on gender in France and the United States. Benigno Trigo’s introduction to his volume of collected essays on Kristeva’s fiction (2013, 8, 13) notes her references to the 2001 bombing of the world trade towers, to Christian fundamentalists in the United States, and to the use American literary critics and theorists make of her theory of the semiotic. The mention of September 2001 as well as of Christian fundamentalism is part of her critique of the hegemonic presence of American materialism and particularly the authoritarian thinking and terrorism it has in part unleashed. Literary criticism, especially on codeswitching, bilingualism, and border literature, makes reference to her theory of the semiotic as an oppositional form of language in Trigo’s collection. While the only in-depth analysis of The Enchanted Clock of which I am aware does not directly mention the American subtext, it does discuss the rise of consumerism and the society of the spectacle, arguably products in large part of the United States and its influence throughout the world. Miglena Nikolchina (2017) focuses on the book as enabling a fuller understanding of Eastern European countries and their attempts to install a rebellious ideology and to resist this influence. She includes Bulgaria, her own and Kristeva’s birthplace. Her 1991 novel, The Old Man and the Wolves is, I believe, her best representation of the American threat to the peoples of both Eastern Europe and of the United States, as I have explained (Bové 2006, 122–126). “Santa Barbara,” the name of the city in which the novel is set in the original French version, makes the reference to America explicit. In the wake of Eastern European countries’ failure to achieve revolution, Nikolchina cites as a cause “the new world order of spectacle and consumerism whose ideological vacuum is continually tempted by varieties of nationalism and religious fundamentalism” (2017, 82). The United States and its capitalist ideology deriving as I am arguing from Christian materialism—“more goods and services for everyone”—as Kristeva puts it (1991, 195) has contributed much to this order.

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The Enchanted Clock is a compelling novel, narrated by a unique and brilliant woman of a certain age recounting and contemplating her life with focus on the eighteenth-century astronomical clock of the title and its inventor Passemant. The protagonist Nivi confronts the temporal in the form of the clock as she engages in strengthening her relationships and in understanding the world as she speaks. Her well-being, physical, emotional, and intellectual derive from interaction with her son, Stan; with Theo, who literally saved her life while she was swimming in the Atlantic and becomes her lover; and with Marianne, her friend and colleague. Committed to her work as a psychoanalyst much like Kristeva herself in this autobiographical narrative, Nivi examines especially psychology and astrophysics, the latter because of Stan’s fascination with the eighteenth-century astronomical clock and Theo’s work in astrophysics. It is also relevant to the embedding of science in the novel to point out that Kristeva’s Mother had read the work of many scientists, especially Darwin, and that the daughter herself had contemplated a scientific career (Miller 2007, Samoyault 2016). Engagement with others along with the examination of scholarship across disciplines including the sciences leads Nivi to discover a theory that brings excitement and coherence to her life. These practices underlie a project to combat the contemporary world’s excessive pragmatism, consumerism, chaos, and violence, as well as the abjection to which they often lead. The novel opens with the word “time” and a satiric introduction to life in the twenty-first century, cleverly badgering the reader with the media, consumerism, and technology that, in the context of the rest of the narrative and of Kristeva’s oeuvre, conjures up the United States and its impact on other countries: products, computers, e-mails, iPhones, trains, planes, videos, markets, supermarkets, hypermarkets, connections, depressions, corruptions, few conversations, miniscreens, giant screens, a few books, fast foods and more or less organic bars. . . . No men, but a mass of chargés d’affaires . . . Women, a few—more and more—who hold, carry, and transmit. (2017, 3)

This is the “mechanical world,” which the novel will trace back to eighteenth-century France and its clockmaker, Claude-Siméon Passement (2017, 32–33). While Kristeva does not use the word “pragmatic” in the narrative, in the context both here and in her other fiction and essays,

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“the becoming-mechanical of the world” (2017, 33) in the age of Louis XV and the “applied research in our time” (2017, 266) reveals a common thread leading back to the United States and pragmatism. This opening also introduces the “woman question” central to the narrative: France, bombarded by consumer products and technology, has increasingly lost its men who have become business types. In a positive development, however, it has acquired more strong women (2017, 3). The comment on the sexes calls attention to Nivi’s at times reductive thinking but takes on specific meaning in the context of the novel taken as a whole. I am arguing that Kristeva connects the patriarchal society recreated here, twenty-first-century France and its roots in the age of Louis XV, to that of the United States. Implicit in this novel is the idea that Western governments and churches, founded as they are on monotheistic religions, shape a set of values which associate men, especially white men, with intellect, power, pragmatic expertise, business, and nationalism. These institutions associate women with sexuality, manipulability, fantasy, and, increasingly, with the development of feminism, critical thinking, and a more global perspective. The Enchanted Clock goes on to explore questions of gender as well as time and memory in today’s complex environment, mentioning the United States often in connection with its space program and astrophysics despite the fact that there is not much direct discussion of the country. Indirect references, however, appear in nearly every chapter, most frequently in relation to the work of Theo, a Frenchman who has studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley with American astrophysicists and/or in NASA laboratories equipped with telescopes like the Hubble in such places as Harvard, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Seattle, and Peru. In my reading, these allusions emphasize that the United States contributes to the hard sciences (especially astrophysics), technology (particularly information technology), and more specifically to discoveries of the state of the universe thirteen billion years ago. Represented in this novel as still the strongest superpower with positive impact on other countries, America provides economic support in many venues including Apple’s subsidies to PsyMagazine, which publishes some of Nivi’s articles and for which Marianne is especially grateful (2017, 56). In a more negative light, the novel implicitly criticizes US military research, which especially has become, along with information technology, the principal goal of its space program, neglecting fundamental aspects of astrophysics, including the

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philosophy of science (2017, 151–152). In other words, this development is part of the dangerous emphasis in America on pragmatism: science, technology, and military dominance increasingly in isolation from the contributions of the humanities. Furthermore, Nivi considers Goldman Sachs’s practices as a later version of the eighteenth-century John Law’s disreputable behavior (2017, 65) and in this way calls attention to the exploitative nature of American multinational investment banking. Thus, Kristeva links American pragmatism to predatory capitalist ventures. An additional indirect reference to the United States appears in the Convulsionaries of the French Enlightenment period who attracted a large following among Parisians. The novel relates the Sunday outing of the major character Passemant, an unenthusiastic, temporary participant in his family’s visit to the church of Saint Médard. In context, it is difficult not to read the Convulsionaries, especially their faith healing and celebrity status, as a covert allusion to American Evangelicals, one of the contemporary American Christian sects deriving from Transcendentalism and Puritanism (2017, 128). The most extensive reference to the United States appears in a minor character, Bill Parker, one of the colleagues of Theo, Nivi’s astrophysicist lover. Bill visits Paris, expresses interest in meeting a young woman upon her leaving Nivi’s office, and discusses theories of time with the narrator. Bill is an unusual combination of sexual licentiousness, intellectual ability, and playfulness. Kristeva’s Nivi feels affection for him, despite his hurtful tendency to deprecate her discipline, psychoanalysis, and to address her in the capacity of journalist (2017, 214). His behavior implies, in the novel’s critique of masculine tendencies, the difficulty many men have in seeing women as intellectually strong, doing important work, and attractive at one and the same time. Appropriately enough in a novel whose introduction highlights strong women while noting the lack of real men, Bill’s wife arouses Nivi’s unqualified admiration. An American, she may speak little, but is brilliant and shares her husband’s passion for astrophysics, examining along with him the telescopic data. As a representative of the United States, Bill serves to confirm that Kristeva’s perspective is not reductive, though she is clearly critical of America’s predatory capitalism, revealed in its excessive consumerism and imperialist behavior. We recall that the earlier novel, The Old Man and the Wolves , portrays the devastating invasion of American consumerism into Eastern Europe. Yet, the American jazz singer Billie Holliday’s voice, as

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a source of beauty and strength, resonates frequently in the Old Man’s head through much of the narrative. Kristeva’s earlier autobiographical novel depicting her early years in Paris, The Samurai, also portrays the United States in complex and ambivalent terms, referring to its inhabitants as “Algonquins crossed with Protestants” (1992, 223). One of her protagonists, Olga, is eager to lecture in New York, citing the openness of students to ask constructive questions and to engage with her writing (1992, 223). She also falls in love with an American, Edward Dalloway, an international lawyer. At the same time, her colleagues and friends remind her of the unsavory aspects of America, including its imperialistic behavior, for example, during the Vietnam War in progress at the time (1992, 21). In the ending of The Enchanted Clock, Nivi relives her childhood pleasure among the laurel roses and its persistence in her memory once her cousins have the bushes removed. She in this way is able to re-experience the joy in precious moments in the present even as she exists in chronological time. She likens the phenomenon to Theo’s perceiving the origins of the universe and its expansion in the gravitational waves he obtains via telescopes along with his Harvard colleagues. He too experiences ecstatic instants of wonder in contemplating the world outside of himself, especially the telescopic images, while at the same time cognizant of history. His conversations with Nivi reveal an in-depth knowledge of eighteenthcentury Paris. In other words, like his partner, he too lives both in the moment and in historical time. Kristeva experiments with narrative voice and intertextuality in The Enchanted Clock, including both first- and third-person narrators. She also recreates the detective figure from three of her earlier novels, The Old Man and the Wolves , Possessions (1998) and Murder in Byzantium (2006). In fact, the plot possesses some elements of the crime or mystery novel, including possible murders and thefts, like that of the other three. Kristeva builds on the detective as a model for the search for truth as well as on Modernist innovations like those of Virginia Woolf. The Enchanted Clock makes clear that multiple perspectives, including not only that of the detective but especially those of a female psychoanalyst, at times acting the detective herself, along with the arresting and shifting of time, enable a profound examination of the human as well as human relations both local and international. Furthermore, albeit indirectly, her most recent novel continues to study subjects introduced, for example, in her compelling earlier novel,

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The Old Man and the Wolves , and, I am arguing, problematic for many American critics of literature and film. That is to say, she studies the exportation of capitalist, predatory values from the United States and their connection to psychic formations of abjection and separation from the maternal. She continues to make a compelling case to go beyond pragmatic worldviews, especially that of the very controlling Passemant, including linear time and the isolation of disciplines, particularly astrophysics. These tendencies work against hermeneutical thinking across the arts and sciences and their categories as well as across national boundaries. The perspectives of Nivi, the third-person narrator, and in particular Kristeva as understood in the novel taken as a whole, oppose such worldviews. In this sense, I am speaking to the need to address an important issue in American literary studies, the degree to which pragmatism, empirical thought, and disciplinary commitment, with roots in American Christian materialism, inflect the reception to and use of Kristeva’s thought. This is especially relevant for her thinking on gender, on national (French/American) and global identity, and on history. American pragmatism and revolution are opposing subtexts in the novel, as it becomes clear that personal and public crises are imminent. The private include doubts about Theo’s honesty and behavior, and especially Stan’s serious illness (2017, 159). The worldly encompass the attack at the Louvre, the possible murder of a colleague, Loïc, and the theft of the astronomical clock. Thus, via Nivi, Kristeva struggles to bridge the gap between the singular and the collective. A strengthening of individual and collective consciousness is taking hold of the narrator, suggesting the best way to deal with such crises. The prose, at its best in its lyricism, for example, in the passage I will describe below, is moving and compels us to empathize with Nivi and to think more deeply about her experience and theories. They offer the opportunity to energize a resistance to the pragmatism, lack of order, and aggressive behavior characterizing life in the twenty-first century including the depression that frequently results, destroying the ability to think creatively. In an interview discussing The Enchanted Clock, Kristeva says: The novel remains the privileged genre in which inner experience can crystalize. Such experience definitely exists in us, at least in those of us who will not submit. It reveals itself, timid but imperious, at the intersection of scientific audacity (biology, cosmology. . .), virtual realities,

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hyperconnection, blended families, insecure borders, inexpressible anxiety, and unspoken hope (Translated by Bové). (2015)

Given her commitment to literature and the novel’s accessible language and popularity, it is not surprising that she returns to the topic of its suitability, as in her remarks in “Europhobia, Europhilia” discussed above. Here, her analysis of the nature of fiction is more precise and convinced of its strengths: it has the potential to shape the psychology of the reader, including unconscious drives, in response to those of the author. It can both incorporate and resist aspects of the contemporary, including economic factors that challenge and also offer opportunities for creativity and loving behavior. Maria Margaroni has identified a significant characteristic of Kristeva’s theory of a fiction of resistance by calling attention to its visceral character. According to “The Vital Legacy of the Novel,” Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt insists on the need for the literary critic and theorist to go beyond more purely textual questions. For Margaroni, Kristeva emphasizes narrative’s ability to have readers feel the psychic, sensorial experiences the text recreates for both the author and themselves, as in the laurel rose conclusion (Margaroni 2013, 168–169). Kristeva’s writing thus inscribes a form of modernist lyricism into the prose, enacting the successful integration of body, heart, and mind characterizing her protagonist, as in the novel’s ending: Nivi’s sadness, always fleeting, lost, on the lookout, has molted into something luminous, unheard of, and fabulous. Not really a destiny but a unique reality, almost exalting, somewhat like morning, for which a single word comes to her lips: serenity. That vision makes her possible. In the sun-splattered street alongside the Lux, under her window, she sees a green hedge, the most delicate there is. Vibrating cords caressed by the breeze, foraged by clouds of bees. At the bottom of this cloth of transparent threads, scarcely higher than the height of a little girl of three, a rose laurel. Unique, slim, adorned with smooth dark green foliage, crowned by curly petals of cherry color. Which open to the pure light, the first light of the world.

This is the last paragraph of the final chapter devoted to Nivi’s familial life in the apartment above the Luxembourg Garden, a setting that reappears in many of Kristeva’s texts including, for example, The Samurai, where

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the park provides the title for an entire section (1992, 291–341). The passage achieves a moving lyricism in its reference to the way in which a delicate laurel rose bush recreates the narrator’s joy at the age of three in her family’s garden. Kristeva uses primarily the visual to create Nivi’s experience of déjà-vu and also the touch and sound the young bush “feels” and “hears”: “In the sun-splattered street. . . .Vibrating cords caressed by the breeze. . . ” (2017, 318). The original French describes an even more beautiful image in the street made iridescent by the sun (“irisée”) (2015, 440). The anthropomorphizing of the bush, an effective use of the pathetic fallacy, aptly conveys the strength and beauty of her pleasure. Beyond the personal precious moment, the passage in context brings together all of the components of Nivi’s complex personality and rich past experience. We recall that her son Stan, unlike Bill who labels her a journalist, sees her as a Mother difficult to categorize, like a Picasso portrait. In the filial observations made earlier in the novel where they appear to be only personal, Kristeva has the question of national identity emerge. Stan asks, “Mom, are you French?” Nivi has made clear in both earlier and later reflections (2017, 14, 153) that this question disturbs her: she is and is not French, does and does not want to be. Not born in France, like the Bulgarian-born author, she explains that she loves the country because of the bewitching Jardin du Luxembourg and primarily because of her son, Stan, born in Paris. In other words, elements of her personal history, especially visceral experiences like the sight of the garden and the relationship with her child, have led to her attachment to the Hexagon. Here she implicitly rejects a nationalistic belief in “my country [France] right or wrong” as she does more directly elsewhere. She makes clear that her experience living in Paris for a long time, “years of study, reading, music, mostly happy love with Ugo [the husband and father of Stan who has left them to return to his native Italy]” (2017, 6) explains the attachment to her adopted country. Beyond the gardens, her son, and her partners, the intellectual and artistic life in the French capital increasingly arouse love for the city of lights. The final chapter fittingly calls attention to the main elements of Nivi’s life and the links she forges among them including Stan and Theo: she hears the words “rose laurels” in connection with the noises in her son’s bedroom, on the one hand. She understands her memory of the garden in relationship to her love for Theo and the stars, on the other. There are also implicit references in the passage cited to her confrontation with abjection, “Nivi’s sadness.” Finally, Kristeva represents Nivi’s existence in

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a chaotic, violent environment in her early years in her cousins’ brutal cutting down of the laurel rose bushes in an attempt to fill the garden’s fountain basin with the cut flower heads. The Enchanted Clock raises many probing questions relevant to today’s world: among the more straightforward, what exactly is the status of Theo’s research, which commands Nivi’s attention? It may appear to be science fiction, as it does to one reviewer (Lasowski, 2015). Theo’s work in fact reveals actual advances in the knowledge and manipulation of the material world, that is, recent developments in technology and astrophysics. He is, for instance, taking pictures that show the state of the universe millions of years ago. The clock which so fascinates Stan and Nivi, and eventually Theo, does exist in the palace of Versailles and is set to tell time until 9999. Though other such timekeepers precede it, they do not portray virility in their form as Passemant’s does, with its globe at the top, broad base in the middle, and large pendulum hanging below, in other words, a patriarchal figure, significant in a novel very much focused on the woman question. Even if the reader is unaware of the reality of the particular science and technology described here, Kristeva’s including them is helpful at the level of one’s imagination in that she examines these fields in relation to psychology and ethics: How do they influence the psyche, human behavior, and the violent directions it is taking? Here, as in her interview with the physicist/philosopher Etienne Klein, Kristeva underlines the parallels between science, especially astrophysics’ discoveries, and psychology, specifically psychoanalysis (2015, Soundcloud). The discussion of the multiverse, of foreign matter, and of the impact of science and technology on humanity’s future is central in the novel, particularly in the context of French and American aggressive behavior. The parallels remind us of similar parallels in Richard’s examination of Epicurus’s atoms and letters (Richard 1998, 18). The most significant problems Kristeva presents in the novel are how best to confront the abject, excessive pragmatism, consumerism, incoherence, and conflicts on the planet. These derive from American predatory capitalism and contribute to unhealthy psychological formations. The Enchanted Clock proposes that one needs to consider, at least to some degree, all of the disciplines and especially their conceptions of time, to confront the danger of believing primarily in the progress made by science and technology alone. Such belief is very much part of the American tendencies to dominate and control. This threat, I am arguing, derives from the ways such behavior and the thought underlying it permeate

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the globe. As Kristeva makes clear in her allegorical portrayal of Eastern Europe in The Old Man and the Wolves , the danger is not confined to the United States and France. These countries are not qualitatively different from the rest of the planet in their potential for both dangerous and positive developments in the psychic formations prevalent in our world. The jump cuts back and forth to Passemant and to a lesser extent, the Bill Parker episode, enable Kristeva to put forward a number of different perspectives for the reader to consider. She filters a variety of points of view on the problems of the abject, incoherence, and conflict through Nivi’s remarks. Passemant understands the most advanced technology of clockmaking and its relation to the discipline of astronomy in mideighteenth-century France and succeeds in creating a beautiful timepiece capable of marking every third of a second as well as the movements of our galaxy until the year 9999. His desire, however, is to control time and to escape from relations with others as well as from the material conditions of historical experience. In this novel, both autobiographical and historical, Kristeva provides an in-depth portrait of not only the historical clockmaker/astronomer Passemant but also the equally little-known Emilie du Châtelet. She is the physicist who created an intriguing theory on “‘the fire’ of desire and reason,” thoroughly understood Leibnitz, predicted the discovery of bosons and black matter, and was also the translator of Newton’s Principia. Furthermore, unlike Passemant, who is nonetheless intelligent and appealing, Châtelet did not strive for control, for instance, of time, and escape from relationships with others. She was the lover and collaborator of Voltaire, had many close relations, and died soon after childbirth at the age of forty-three. Here, Kristeva offers another example, parallel to Bill and his wife, and primarily to Nivi and Theo, of fascinating male/female pairs. Such duos push against the sexist hierarchies of much history and fiction, which often fail to recognize the “female genius,” both hidden in couples and individuals, as Kristeva documents so well in this novel and in her trilogy on Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, and Colette, Female Genius (2001–2004). A more difficult pair to analyze in The Enchanted Clock is Louis XV and Madame De Pompadour. Introduced in connection with Passemant, the king is admirable for his cultivation of knowledge, especially his interest and ability in science. His stature diminishes over time however. Sexual liaisons obsess him—here Kristeva creates another link to the United States and Bill Parker’s womanizing—leading to the

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neglect of his duties and the revolution later in the century. Madame de Pompadour is also admirable for her intelligence in this narrative but, facing more constraints, in part because of her gender and social class, she becomes consumed by jealousy to the point where she attempts to attack Passemant and his invention, the astronomical clock so loved by the king. This novel may be less powerful than The Old Man and the Wolves , despite its considerable strength, for instance, in the intriguing conversations and overall portrayal of the two principal lovers. In the earlier book, both narrator and other principal protagonists come very close to succumbing to abjection at least in part because they are in the throes of attacks deriving from pragmatic, capitalist, and consumerist ideology sweeping across the Balkans after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In The Enchanted Clock, Nivi and Theo are aware of and willing to acknowledge the increasingly greater obstacles one confronts in contemporary life. These protagonists, however, are largely successful in confronting them. The principal narrator in each novel is very close to the “energetic pessimist” Kristeva refers to in describing herself (2016) with the earlier more pessimistic and the latter more energetic, like the respective narratives of which they are a part. This more recent fiction thus lacks some of the visceral struggle and emotional intensity of the earlier book. Its tone, especially in the conclusion, is primarily and more uniformly upbeat. In this narrative focused on time, resistance, American influence, and gender, Nivi and Theo together possess a remarkable understanding of many disciplines, especially psychology (in particular psychoanalysis), and astrophysics. They work together for the most part to examine “truth,” without attempting to control it, time, or each other. Rather than escaping from their situation in the world, they work on strengthening their connections to the maternal, in the form of nurturing others, for example, Nivi’s son Stan and their colleagues. Furthermore, while they cultivate precious moments of arrested time, they also recognize that one enjoys such moments in the context of history and a chronology enabling an understanding of how the past shapes the present and future, à la Proust. They are also fully aware of their aging and decline toward death. Most of all, they love each other and combine their forces to resist submission to abjection and the pragmatism, disorder and violence of contemporary life. In conclusion, Kristeva’s perspective on the United States in The Enchanted Clock contributes to an understanding of how critics in this country engage with her writing, most notably focusing on her theories of

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abjection and the maternal. The focus is not accidental but rather linked to her critique of American capitalism, its promotion of the freedom to profit from adapting to the market place, and the businessman model. The novel at the same time stresses the centrality of a historical consciousness in its representation of eighteenth-century France’s blindness to the connections between the hard sciences and the humanities. Furthermore, in Nivi’s ruminations on the United States and France, Kristeva lays out the distinction between legitimate national pride versus dangerous nationalism. Her novel transcends reductive debates over sexual identity politics by creating a strong female protagonist able to decipher strengths and weaknesses in the singular identities of those around her, and in herself. A version of Chapter 4 appears as “Modernist Trajectories in Time: Kristeva’s The Enchanted Clock” in Understanding Kristeva, Understanding Modernism, edited by Maria Margaroni, Bloomsbury Press, New York and London, 2021.

References Bové, Carol Mastrangelo. 2006. Language and Politics in Kristeva: Literature, Art Therapy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Bové, Carol Mastrangelo. 2019. “Desire Against Discipline: Kristeva’s Theory of Poetry.” In Philosophy and Poetry: Continental Perspectives, edited by Ranjan Ghosh, 296–310. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. (1988) 1991. Strangers to Ourselves. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. (1990) 1992. The Samurai. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. (1991) 1994. The Old Man and the Wolves. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. (1990) 1996. “On the Samurai,” Interview by Elisabeth Bélorgey. In Julia Kristeva Interviews, edited by Ross Mitchell Guberman, 242–253. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. (1996) 1998. Possessions. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. (1998) 2000. “Europe Divided: Politics, Ethics, Religion.” In Crisis of the European Subject, translated by Susan Fairfield, 111–162. New York, NY: Other Press. Kristeva, Julia. (1998) 2002. “Europhilia-Europhobia.” In Intimate Revolt, translated by Janine Herman, 255–268. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

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Kristeva, Julia. (1999-2002) 2001–2004. Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words– Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, Colette. Translated by Ross Guberman and Jane Marie Todd. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. (2004) 2006. Murder in Byzantium. Translated by C. Jon Delogu. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. (2008) 2014. Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila. Translated by Lorna Scott Fox. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. (2015) 2017. The Enchanted Clock. Translated by Armine Kotin Mortimer. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 2015. L’Horloge enchantée. Paris: Fayard. Kristeva, Julia. 2015. “L’Horloge enchantée: Conversation entre Etienne Klein et Julia Kristeva.” Soundcloud, April 25. http://www.kristeva.fr/conversation-eti enne-klein.html. Kristeva, Julia. 2015. “Le Temps du roman: L’Horloge enchantée.” Chroniques de la rentrée littéraire. Accessed July 22, 2020. http://www.kristeva.fr/chroni ques-de-la-rentree-litteraire.html. Kristeva, Julia. 2016. “Je suis une chercheuse d’humanité.” Le Soir, December 22. http://www.kristeva.fr/le-soir-22-decembre-2016.html. Lasowski, Aliosha Wald. 2015. “Alchimie de la science et de l’imaginaire.” L’Humanité, July 28. http://www.kristeva.fr/horloge/LHumanite-Mardi28Juill et2015.pdf. Margaroni, Maria. 2013. “The Vital Legacy of the Novel.” In Kristeva’s Fiction, edited by Benigno Trigo, 155–173. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Miller, Lucasta. 2007. “Mother Complex.” The Guardian, April 7, 2007. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/apr/07/society3. Nikolchina, Miglena. 2017. “Revolution and Time in Kristeva’s Writing.” Diacritics 45 (3): 76–98. Pease, Donald E. 2009. “Re-thinking ‘American Studies After Exceptionalism.’” American Literary History 21 (1): 19–27. Richard, Claude. (1987) 1998. American Letters. Translated by Carol Mastrangelo Bové. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Samoyault, Tiphaine. 2016. “Je me voyage: Julia Kristeva, intelligente et solidaire.” Mediapart, 5 novembre. http://www.kristeva.fr/je-me-voyage-art icle-mediapart.html. Trigo, Benigno. 2013. “Introduction.” In Kristeva’s Fiction, edited by Benigno Trigo, 1–27. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

CHAPTER 5

Re-Envisioning World Literature and Film: Rochefort, Savoca, and Lentricchia

Abstract Informed by Kristeva’s thought, this last chapter offers my own close readings, demonstrating how her writing shines light on works relatively unknown in world literature and film. These include two novels, Christiane Rochefort’s Children of Heaven and Frank Lentricchia’s The Edge of Night, and a film, Nancy Savoca’s Household Saints. The three texts deal with Italian immigrants as “strangers,” understood in Kristeva’s theory and fiction as representative of the human need to come to terms with psychic and interpersonal conflicts that social norms prevent one from confronting. First- or second-generation Italian immigrants, the principal characters are “strangers to themselves” and suffer from abjection. I show how Kristeva’s insights into both the abject and Catholicism are topics at the heart of her thinking and of the response to her work in the United States. The chapter shows how her perspective on these themes brings precision and coherence to my psychoanalytic readings as well as to comprehension of the plight of contemporary immigrants and of us all. Keywords Catholicism · Immigrant · Stranger

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. M. Bové, Kristeva in America, Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59912-6_5

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Kristeva’s work provides a context for a fuller understanding of the presence of Italian immigrants in important twentieth-century novelists and filmmakers who merit more attention. Christiane Rochefort’s Children of Heaven (1961), Nancy Savoca’s Household Saints (1993), and Frank Lentricchia’s The Edge of Night (1994) deal with such individuals as “strangers.” I use this term as understood in Kristeva’s theory and fiction as representative of the human need to come to terms with psychic and interpersonal conflicts that social norms prevent one from confronting. Kristeva’s Carole, Rochefort’s Guido, Savoca’s Catherine, Teresa, and Nicky, as well as Lentricchia’s Frank, all first- or second-generation Italian immigrants, are “strangers to themselves” and suffer from abjection, the psychic formation at the heart of the theorist/novelist’s thinking and of the response to her work in the United States. I have been arguing in this book that religion and Kristeva’s examination of it are significant factors in the reception of her work here, focusing primarily on America’s Puritan roots and Protestantism. In this chapter, I turn to Roman Catholicism. Her examination of immigrants/strangers’ lives and its implications for the upheavals in the minds and societies of our world, including the influence of religious beliefs, enables the comprehension needed to explore and help remedy conditions that threaten the quality of life. Much of Kristeva’s writing deals with the category of the stranger and its connection to abjection that is fundamental to her thought. The three texts examined here, Strangers to Ourselves (1991), Teresa, My Love (2014), and The Samurai (1992) are particularly relevant to my theoretical framework and examples, focusing on the immigrant in France and the United States. The first elaborates a psychoanalytic and ethical theory fostering openness to immigrants and linking such openness to that needed to cope with unconscious elements of the psyche. With a foundation in Freud, Kristeva identifies a similar psychological formation underlying oppressive sociopolitical regimes and repressive internal practices. Philosophers including Paul Ricoeur and more recently Kelly Oliver (1993, 17) and Noëlle McAfee (2004, 124) examine the psychic forces feeding social practices and imagine ways to enable more ethical group behavior. Ricoeur’s work is particularly relevant. For him, psychoanalytic theory, like the social sciences, recognizes the force of self-understanding and focuses on emancipation. One of its goals is to lift repression, to bring banished components of discourse back into the public sphere and in so doing, to redistribute power (Ricoeur 1978, 197–198). In terms of the

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psychic formations on which it rests, the unjust treatment of the marginalized is not fundamentally different from the inappropriate censorship of desire for Kristeva as for Ricoeur. Repression was especially dire in sixteenth-century Spain for the famous Carmelite, the subject of the eponymous Teresa, My Love. Yet, in Kristeva’s hybrid text, Teresa, as stranger to herself, manages to recreate her mystical relationship to Christ, a physical experience replete with sexual pleasure. Set against Western rationalism and its sources in Judeo-Christian thought well before René Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am,” the semi-autobiographical novel and biography of the saint depicts a confrontation with her desire for Christ and lays her open to the Inquisition’s attacks. Here Kristeva’s focus on religion implies that an understanding of the human desire for transcendence, as well as sexual pleasure, is critical in resisting the psychic formations underlying dangerous behavior. An atheist herself, she nonetheless examines Catholicism in much of her writing because she sees religion as cathartic and in need of critique (1982, 17). She points out the connections between Teresa’s mysticism and fundamentalism, dramatizing the saint’s management of her strong feelings and sensations in transforming them in her writing. Teresa succeeds in negotiating her conflicts with the stranger inside herself—something that fundamentalists, both Christian and Islamic, are sometimes unable to do. She accomplishes this through her writing and founding of reformed Carmelite convents. Kristeva’s The Samurai, like Teresa, My Love, is a novel steeped in psychoanalysis and philosophy including the portrait of a “stranger within,” in this case a second-generation immigrant. The Italian-French woman, Carole, an unemployed ethnologist, attempts to save herself from debilitating depression by engaging with her Italian grandmother, linked to Italy’s warmth, flowers, sensuality, and the late Medieval and Renaissance painters, Giotto and Bellini. The narrative focuses primarily on Olga, a writer, and Joëlle, a psychoanalyst, the two strong protagonists/narrators, who manage in the end to overcome upheavals in their private and professional lives. In my reading, a more tragic and compelling drama, however, unfolds in the minor character, Carole, who is Olga’s best friend. Her engagement with Italian culture and history in the course of her friendship with Olga and therapy with Joëlle helps mobilize the fiction and make it an autonomous literary text as well as an illustration of Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory and autobiography during the tumultuous 1960s.

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In this novel as in her theory and fiction in general, Kristeva elaborates the sexual and sensual formations hidden within the psyche whose general characteristics Sigmund Freud developed focusing primarily on men. Briefly stated, these traits, as Kristeva details them in a framework more aware of gender difference, include the recreation of earlier moments of plenitude enjoyed when the infant was part of the Mother’s body. Once he or she learns the rules governing language, passing through a stage of identification with the imaginary Father of individual prehistory, the child is able to recreate such moments (1987, 46). Kristeva describes the processes enabling the return as “semiotic” and “symbolic,” drawing upon Ferdinand De Saussure and Charles Peirce’s work in linguistics and philosophy, respectively. The dangers lurking in these processes include imbalances resulting, in varying degrees, from an inability to reconnect with prenatal maternal memories, on the one hand, and a failure to use language to communicate, on the other. The lack of connection to the Mother and the inability to express oneself may result in the sense of being a stranger to oneself, that is, to experience abjection. Carole is a clear example of such imbalances. With help from Olga, she is better able to understand her past and resist the social norms contributing to her debilitating depression. These include, for instance, the need for a woman to bear children and to tolerate abusive attacks by her partner. The most important source of Carole’s abjection, however, is the Mother who gave her no affection. She had had a child to maintain her marriage to the wealthy, equally distant man who was the young woman’s Father. Here Kristeva makes convincing, indirect reference to her theory of the abject deriving from the difficulties of separation from the Mother’s body in the transitional phases between physical and mental/linguistic experience. Therapy sessions with Joëlle and friendship with Olga eventually enable Carole to progress if not to master her illness. Kristeva has Olga and Carole refer to a healing process in their conversation about the Chinese version of “to believe.” The reference anticipates the novelist’s later elaboration of the crucial “need to believe,” a term aptly alluding also to the controversial prominence of religion in her work. Carole writes to Olga who is visiting China: Make the most of your luck in being able to visit that other world. Does the word “believe” exist in Chinese? I suppose it does, but how do they say

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it, how is it written, and what exactly does it mean? Benserade [the character based on Emile Benvéniste] said in his seminar, years ago, that ever since the dim distant past, credo in Sanscrit means “give one’s strength,” and also “give gifts or offerings” in the hope of a return. In short, “to believe” is to give credit, in both the spiritual and the economic sense. The Indo-Europeans know a thing or two. That argument applies to everyone. At any rate, it applies to me and everyone I know in Paris. Rosalba is immortal, and so are the Fiesole roses, and Giotto’s Christ and Virgin, and my own shame at being born and having this body with its need to eat and love. (1992, 203)

Olga responds: My dear Carole, I’ll be seeing you before you get these cards, for we’re just about to fly off. But I absolutely must tell you one thing: the imaginings that come from too much self-love cause a lot of unnecessary trouble. “To believe” is xinfu in spoken Chinese, in written form: 信服. It is made up of “a man of his word” and “to marry” (or ‘to abandon oneself to’). No giving is involved, only a linking to the word. Begin rather by creating an empty space: qixu or 氣虛, and don’t forget that emptiness isn’t nothing—it’s a tiger on a mound, the breath of the yang ready to leap on the yin. Look for that primitive emptiness inside yourself, we’ll try to find it together. I’ll phone as soon as I get in. I think of you all the time. Love Olga (1992, 209)

This substantial quotation testifies to the critical need for emotional intelligence in Kristeva’s theory, though she does not use that term. In my reading, “to believe” points to the desire for emotional and physical well-being, deriving from the connections to both the Mother’s body and to the imaginary Father of individual prehistory. Carole and Olga’s conversation suggests precisely that need, with Carole seeking a sense of well-being in her grandmother, roses, and Italian painting—from an abject position. Kristeva also mentions religion in Carole’s belief in the immortality of Giotto’s Madonnas. Olga’s response offers a precise, pragmatic strategy for her friend to overcome debilitation by clearing the mind before creating new words to begin again. Beyond the notion of the Other within the subject, in this passage, Kristeva incorporates

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the different person one finds in a friend, and also in another culture including its language. Emotional health emerges from a careful study of such contact with these three “Others.” Carole develops an ability to deal honestly with issues that social convention encourages a young woman to avoid or deny. She makes progress in fighting her illness by acknowledging and confronting her “abnormal” desire not to bear children and instead to pursue her research on the Wadani tribe of Papua, New Guinea. She also comes to realize she loves her abusive former partner Martin but will no longer tolerate his abuse. Most importantly, she begins to talk about her pain-inflicting Mother. Significant American critics who write in the wake of Kristeva’s thought, for example, Daniel T. O’Hara (2003), contribute to an understanding of the theory underlying Carole’s abjection and feelings of strangeness to oneself, though he does not discuss The Samurai, Rochefort, or Savoca. While my reading of the nature of this debilitating formation, which lies at the center of the discussion of these texts, differs from his, elements of his critical position on globalization, ethnicity, and social class inform my own. The experience of abjection lies at the center of O’Hara’s discussion of Lentricchia and more generally of global America and the ways in which literature, literary criticism, and theory have developed in a world bullied by the market and the United States. His Empire Burlesque demonstrates how the movement from Cold War liberal democracy to globalization has brought about a debasement of the individual and the persistent psychological malaise that causes one to feel that no matter what one does, one is no different or better than anyone else except in terms of the market. Lentricchia’s Frank, Kristeva’s Carole, Rochefort’s Guido, and Savoca’s Catherine, Teresa, and Nicky all display evidence of this malaise or abjection, including the dimension related to it—Italian immigrant status, as I will show. O’Hara uses globalization in the sense of the ways in which societies distribute economic resources and assign value to objects and people. In an attempt to resist the market’s power, O’Hara places his faith, limited and marked by irony, in Henry James and Frank Lentricchia, for their potential to shape political consciousness and behaviors, to take two of his best examples in this volume. O’Hara proposes adopting an ironic stance embodied in the title Empire Burlesque in confronting globalization’s destruction of knowing, a significant cause of abject feelings. He speaks convincingly of the nature

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of language as play, of the necessity to interrupt oneself for reordering and of being open to difference, including the possibility that one’s own statements as well as those of an interlocutor may be different from what they seem. Empire Burlesque skillfully places James in the history of literature, criticism, and theory. O’Hara reveals how James shapes Wordsworth’s idea of aesthetic judgment based on nature and recollection to include an awareness of how class difference, understood in the sense that goes beyond the socioeconomic, helps to form such judgments. It is clear from my close readings that in Lentricchia, and in Rochefort and Savoca, Italian immigrants, that is, often working-class individuals and their children, generally find it more difficult if not impossible to confront psychic instability and to engage in aesthetic judgments as described in O’Hara. For him, those who educate themselves in the art of reading aspire to the luxury of a fiction replete with nuance and ambiguity, to a dialogic play of selves permeated by passion, irony, and distance. O’Hara’s approach to Lentricchia’s autobiographical novel and many of the other texts analyzed in Empire Burlesque reveals how they confront abjection and the homogenizing effects of multiculturalism and of the global America of which it is a part. Italian immigrant status plays an important role in Edge of Night as well as in O’Hara’s version of Kristevan theory in enabling this confrontation. He refers to Lentricchia’s ItalianAmerican working-class background as making it possible for the novelist to understand and appreciate the existence of a “medium of kinship” for different peoples, even as it makes the development of aesthetic judgment more difficult (2003, 75). While both O’Hara’s theory and Lentricchia’s novel provide models for resisting abjection, they both fail to recognize the extent to which gender and sexuality are fundamental components of abjection. O’Hara writes, “abjection concerns number, an elementary mathematical equation, and not a natural dynamic of the family romance. … Whatever is first must become last, and whatever is second must become first, and so on, ad infinitum.” I agree with O’Hara that it is not “a natural dynamic of the family romance” in the sense that abjection is not biologically determined. It is, however, gender-inflected historically within Western patriarchies, which have contributed to women’s experience of this debilitating state. As I read him, O’Hara recognizes this later (2003, 191) in his discussion of femininity and the death drive in Freud’s “Analysis Terminable and Interminable.”

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According to Empire Burlesque and despite its statement that abjection is not a gendered category, both gender/sexuality and irony are fundamental components, for instance, in the ethical and political ideas underlying James’s fiction. His thought, in O’Hara’s reading, enables not a recognition and/or redressing of oppression as many multicultural approaches repeatedly find in literature, but a questioning of aesthetic judgment in which one is able to learn from another and to recognize the differences in intelligence and experience—differences not primarily socioeconomic but cognitive, political, and ethical—making dialogue difficult. As I read O’Hara on James, learning from another demands that one assume the passive position that Western cultures traditionally associate with the feminine. Our culture has understood these characteristics as womanly since the time of the biblical tale of Adam and Eve though such gendered ideas are slowly changing. In Empire Burlesque, passion as opposed to reason, along with bewilderment, and abjection rather than clarity of thought, characterize such passive moments. Kristeva’s theories on resisting abjection, developed in O’Hara’s insights into the debilitating influence of globalization and into ItalianAmerican ethnicity, provide a rich context for reading Rochefort’s seemingly simple story. About thirty years earlier than The Samurai, Rochefort’s Children of Heaven (1962), more realist in its approach and focused on the working class, uses a handsome, passionate, young southern Italian to reveal how developments in French society after World War II shape the psyche of a smart and sensitive adolescent girl. Josyane is a protagonist as affection-starved as Carole and at a greater disadvantage because of her working-class status in Paris in the 1950s. A positive maternal presence is lacking in both cases. To portray the girl’s plight, Rochefort’s semi-autobiographical novel draws on episodes describing Guido, a construction worker who comes to Paris for employment. The Italian immigrant enables Rochefort, like Lentricchia and O’Hara, to reveal the impact of social class and ethnicity on confronting and resisting abjection, an impact missing in Kristeva’s novel. Guido’s catalyzing function resembles the use of the Father in The Edge of Night to show his narrator’s identity shifting between the writer Frank and the lower class Frannie with whom he shares a positive work ethic. In Children of Heaven, however, both narrator and catalyst are working class. Guido is a lifeline, at least temporarily, enabling the young girl to transcend her hostile environment, including the limited opportunities contained in the French government’s construction of low-income

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housing or HLM on the outskirts of Paris and its family subsidies to increase the birthrate. Rochefort uses a first-person narrator, the young girl, Josyane, to raise the question of how to give a voice to unconscious fears and desires driving one’s behavior, beginning with the eleven-year-old’s response to the architecture around her. The author combines brutal economic reality with subtle feelings, sensations, and ideas in Josyane’s narration: “I was born of the family Subsidies and a holiday morning stretching comfortably to the tune of ‘I love you and you love me’ played on a sweet horn. It was early winter, the bed felt good, there was no hurry” (1962, 1). In a narrative in which unconscious drives play a central role, as I will show, Rochefort appropriately starts with the image of lovemaking, uniting man and woman, and also the child they conceive. The episode reveals the drive for love, showing affection in the midst of economic hardship, finding a time for pleasure, and giving rise to new life. The novelist herself recognizes the force of blind desire in her fiction, remarking that her characters escape, obeying unknown laws (Sagaert 2004, 26). Despite the propitious opening, the narration stages primarily the inhumanity of Josyane’s life: the constant bickering at home by parents with few resources or skills to cope with the difficulties of rearing a family with eleven children other than by smacking them, for instance, in the first sections of the novel. Rochefort has her protagonist’s confrontation with the new high- rise housing that has sprung up near Josyane’s own older building convey her psyche, a strange mixture of horrified pleasure culminating in fear, “Long, tall, set on the flat plain like that, they made me think of ships. The wind blew across the level ground between the houses. I like going through there. It was big, and beautiful, and terrible. When I walked right close to them, I felt as though they were going to fall over on me” (1962, 10). The passage, moving from pleasure to fear, describes the threat posed by the new architecture which not only isolates the poor from the wealthier French living in the beautiful French capital but also isolates the individual from herself. Josyane experiences the buildings as a large object about to crush her from above and thus her fear distances her from the girl initially enjoying her walk among the homes in the HLM. The rest of the paragraph emphasizes this anxiety as Rochefort has her describe everyone as minuscule, like insects swarming around a lamppost, herself nauseous and very far away, a clear example of abjection in her inability to express her distress.

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In depicting Josyane’s courageous resistance to this state, Rochefort will carefully reintroduce the idea of a soul that the catechism teacher had planted in the girl’s mind along with the doctrine to be memorized, “Man is composed of a body and a soul” (1962, 9). Some will remember this sentence in their own catechism drills as I do. A few paragraphs later, Josyane remarks that she may be sick in her soul rather than in her stomach (“mal au coeur” in French) in walking among the tall concrete blocks. The detail demonstrates Josyane’s struggle to make sense of the Catholic category. Rochefort adds humor via the French expression for “nauseous,” “mal au coeur” (literally sick in her heart). She has Josyane, in referring to her nausea, playfully substitute “soul” for “heart.” The substitution also provides a link to the unconscious voice latent in herself and in the novel as a whole. Her sickness is a form of abjection in which she is only beginning to understand and express in language the severe physical and mental anguish she feels. “Soul,” Rochefort reminds us soon after in her protagonist’s increasing awareness, is in fact the rich life of the psyche, the dynamics of our feelings, sensations, and ideas, including the unconscious fears and desires of our dreams, daydreams, and moments of pleasure. Like Kristeva, Rochefort, an atheist, recognizes the importance of understanding Catholicism and the ways in which it reveals deep-seated, including unconscious, emotions that influence behavior. Josyane, though not religious, begins to be aware of her “soul” in a more secular sense, with the catechism doctrine as her point of departure. It is Nicolas, the fifth child born to a family growing to include eleven children, who will initially enable her to become more aware of this richer life beyond her mostly threatening environment. Contraception (and abortion, to which the novel later makes an indirect reference) not being widely available in this Catholic country in the 1950s, Rochefort, like Kristeva, implicitly criticizes the damage religion inflicts on women’s lives. Donald Trump’s regime, supported by many Evangelical Protestant Fundamentalists, currently denies such reproductive rights, especially to working-class and poor women in the United States, a fact which attests to the direct relevance of Kristeva’s and Rochefort’s thought for us today. Furthermore, without providing adequate childcare assistance in addition to abortion rights even as it encourages population growth through its subsidies, the French state leaves the care of baby Nicolas to Josyane, the eldest girl of eleven years. Fortunately, however, it is while caring for the infant that she finds a listener who loves her and enjoys her maternal

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touches as she diapers, dresses, and cuddles him. It becomes clear that language is at the heart of this formative visceral experience for Josyane as she comes to understand her loving relationship with her brother, particularly as one who listens to her thoughts. As he grows older and understands more, she tells him the story of the king who reveals his secret to the blades of grass, like a seed he is planting, only to have the wind scatter and send it to everyone. The wind in context is not unlike her bickering family often destroying her attempts to find love. Sight, hearing, touch, and especially the beautiful narrative combine in the episode as she kisses him goodnight in the moonlit room. It is with the Italian that Josyane discovers a fuller understanding of what it means to “have a soul” as well as a body. Rochefort reinserts the key word into the narrator’s early conversations with Guido as they reveal what nourishes their humanity: for him, the music from his old phonograph, for her, Nicolas. She also gains sexual experience with the Italian, a problematic partner given that she is barely eleven and he nearly thirty. Rochefort, in light of Kristeva’s theories, confronts one of the continuing social taboos that our cultures tend to avoid facing and thus acknowledges the problem, the first step in dealing with it. Beyond physical intimacy, Josyane learns through Guido that others, too, realize that you need to love something, and ideally, to love someone, in order to have a valuable life. She discovers that it is in language, in this case, conversation with her friend and brother, that one learns such lessons. Talking with Nicolas later on, and after having her bickering family nearly destroy the memory of the significant moments with Guido, Josyane is no longer reduced to living “like an animal.” She is instead able to recollect the self as a precious human being and the stranger she discovers in herself with him. The immigrant makes it possible for Rochefort to portray more than France’s increasing mistreatment of those who enter its borders. By including Guido, she stages Josyane’s discoveries of self, including the sexual taboo of sex between an eleven-year-old girl and a thirty-year-old man. This appears to be oral without penetration though the description is not entirely clear, with Guido on his knees in front of Josyane. The novel, as do the other two texts I will be reading in light of Kristeva’s theories, implies that one must at times call into question political correctness. For Kristeva and Rochefort, social policy on immigration and the psyche’s confrontation with previously unknown pleasure, often labeled “perverse,” derive from psychic formations that are parallel or overlapping. In other words, avoiding the issue of the exploitative

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employment of young immigrants is not unlike denying the existence of inappropriate sexual experiences that are often part of psychic development. Such attitudes make the exercise of genuine freedom, the liberty to examine encounters with the Other, both in the world and in more interior states, all but impossible. Along with the category of “the soul” in dramatizing Josyane’s growth, Rochefort cleverly combines the Italian “ciao” with Chinese philosophy in the young girl’s nickname for her new friend. In having Josyane tell Nicolas of her encounter with “Tao,” lost in Asher’s translation, the novel magnifies his status as stranger and image of the inner identity to which the young girl has been blind. Furthermore, Rochefort speaks of “the planet Mars” to describe not only a foreign country, Italy, but also the stranger within her narrator, her new world, including unconscious drives. The novel has Guido state that soon everyone on earth will be living as those in the new apartments do and that those with food in their bellies will have to go to Mars. For Josyane, picking up the metaphor, Guido becomes a Martian. The following passage begins with an ironic allusion to the apartment complex’s advice, shouted out over the loudspeakers, on how to find happiness via white teeth and shiny hair—in reality supporting the false advertising of toothpaste and shampoo companies. It ends with her comments on the loss of “the Martian”: Happiness kills me. I cried. I don’t even know if it was Guido I cried for. Maybe after calling him a Martian so often I was ending up crying for the planet Mars and for everything I had put on it, that wasn’t on this one. I would walk around between the buildings and I would cry. Those buildings were really strange. I don’t know where in the world you’d have to go to find something so strange. I’m positive that a desert is just nothing at all next to them. “Chow is gone, Nicolas. He went back to Mars. He had enough.” (1962, 59)

Here Rochefort links the earlier description of the uncanny new architecture arousing fear and awe in the young girl, along with references to the consumerism and globalization to which it is connected, with the categories of “soul” and “Mars” to evoke the murky feelings, sensations, and ideas she is experiencing. O’Hara’s insight into the debilitating effects of the global market reveals Rochefort’s novel to be prescient in

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1962 in its depiction of Josyane’s plight as she suffers from the attacks of a growing consumer society. Her love for Nicolas and Guido and her growing awareness and ability to articulate her emotions develop into a resistance to the dehumanizing environment which has been shaping her being, including the low-income housing, advertising, and her parents’ inability to provide a nurturing home. Rochefort signals that, like Guido, Josyane is ready to move beyond the impossible relationship and more generally, the conditions of her life. In the conclusion of the novel, briefly put, Josyane falls in love with Philippe, a Frenchman a few years older than herself, a worker in a television factory. Many critics see this as an ending pessimistic about the plight of the working class, both indigenous and immigrant, in that the pregnant girl is following her Mother’s footsteps in marrying and planning to live in the newest HLM, while Guido is unlocatable, exploited in a different housing complex or having returned to poverty in Italy. Yet, Rochefort’s perspective on class, the immigrant, and the stranger in the novel taken as a whole is less clear-cut than these critics find. Among the many articles and books on Children of Heaven—relatively unknown in the States but both popular and controversial in France— Martine Sagaert’s stands out: she sees the ambiguities in her writing in the fine preface to the 2004 edition of Rochefort’s Oeuvre romanesque (Sagaert, 17). André Durand’s remarks on the novel’s appreciation of singularity in the face of the damaging practices of the state, church, and global economy confirm the relevance of Kristeva’s theory to Rochefort, though he does not mention the theorist (Durand 2003–2009). He discusses, for instance, the dehumanizing impact of the state, responsible both for the allocations promoting large families and for the Algerian war killing off many of their sons. In fact, one of Josyane’s best friends, Frédéric, loses his life in that war. These are the institutions making it difficult if not impossible to be creative and to achieve autonomy. Instead, they create a toxic environment, which often leads to abjection, especially for the lower classes, both local and immigrant. Josyane may well end up miserable as implied in the reference to the girl’s friend, Liliane, who, it seems, dies as a result of her pregnancy or of an illegal abortion (“she had died, and in a rotten way, the poor girl” [1962, 118]). The fact that Josyane now knows what her life can be makes it possible to interpret Rochefort’s ending in a more positive or at least ambiguous light. In the Italian, she found affection, concern, opportunity for dialogue, that is, more precisely, a previously unknown and partially

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unconscious identity and world. With Philippe, Josyane may continue to resist the dehumanizing life in the HLM ghetto, to develop the dialogue with another that she had begun with Guido, and with herself as stranger. Her new lover is mature, like Guido, though younger, and has returned seemingly healthy from his military service, unlike Frédéric. Not only does the hair on his chin prick in a good way, but Philippe is also critical of the rigid and clichéd morality that would dictate a quick marriage in a white dress. He does want to marry her right away and to have her dress in white but explains that this is in order to create together the beautiful image of Josyane as a precious memory to sustain their future life, which will no doubt be difficult. In other words, with him, Josyane may continue to resist the dehumanizing life in the HLM ghetto, to develop the dialogue with another that she had begun with Guido, and with herself as stranger. Kristeva’s theory of abjection as well as her insights into Catholicism brings precision and coherence to the reading of film as well as to Rochefort’s novel, including Nancy Savoca’s Household Saints (1993). The movie is a thought-provoking and troubling blend of humor, tragedy, realism, and fantasy, focused primarily on Catherine Falconetti’s life as a wife and Mother. The considerable visual power of cinema portrays the young woman’s struggle to achieve and maintain mental health. Often whimsical and sometimes somber jump cutting to have the viewer experience the characters’ at least partly unconscious desires invites a psychoanalytic interpretation. The independent, award-winning film based on Francine Prose’s novel by the same name depicts Catherine’s and her daughter Teresa’s battles in the net Italian-American culture weaves around its girls in Manhattan’s Little Italy. The movie is set in roughly the same time period as that of Children of Heaven, the 1950s. These are the final years of the great wave of poor immigrants from Southern Italy begun in the second half of the nineteenth century and ending in the aftermath of World War II. While many men like Rochefort’s Guido live abroad by themselves, sending money home, others, like Savoca’s Catherine, are the second generation of an Italian family permanently settled in a new country. The film affirms Kristeva’s recognition of the value of examining Catholicism to understand better the heart and the mind—in this case, Catherine’s and Teresa’s, whose ethnicity helps to explain the impact of their faith. As Kristeva’s work makes clear, devotion to Mary and the female saints is strong in Catholicism but not in the Protestant faith. Alice

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Jardine’s new intellectual biography draws attention to this in discussing the theorist’s early essay on Samuel Beckett (Jardine 2020, 177). Savoca shows that the ways in which Italian-America shapes young women derive in part from the cult of Mary and the female saints modeled on the Madonna, like Anna and Thérèse of Lisieux. Such a formation poses a serious threat as well as opportunities for the working-class girl. The film creates striking images, which convincingly convey especially Teresa’s devotion, replaying that of her grandmother Carmella. The representation of Carmella’s prayers to Saint Anna complete with icons and lights communicates the strength of Italian women’s worship of the Mother of God and the female saints, which takes on an exotic intensity particularly for many American viewers in a predominantly non-Catholic United States. Savoca provides an engaging opening to a provocative and controversial story about the lives of Italian-American young women. She frames her film with a conversation grappling with memories of Teresa among the primarily female members of her Italian-American neighbors in the next generations. The frame’s image of the prosperous grandmother seated at a picnic table in a spacious suburban patio with her husband pouring the red wine and interrupting his wife to “tell [the story] it right” engages the viewer’s curiosity. In the context of Kristeva’s theory, Catherine and her daughter Teresa, feeling themselves to be strangers to their desires, especially unconscious ones, confront an increasingly threatening component of immigrant culture, which contributes to their experience of abjection. That is to say, they encounter the all-too-familiar repressive attitudes toward young girls including the view that they are possessions to be used as their fathers and husbands decide. Savoca demonstrates a significant component of that culture in Catholicism’s view of women as Madonnas and its failure to provide care and support for their physical, emotional, and intellectual development to the point of their suffering abjection and/or mental illness. While there has not been much research on Household Saints , Jacqueline Reich’s article on Savoca points out that her films contribute a welcome exception to the plethora of movies depicting Italian-American women as either Madonnas/overbearing mothers or prostitutes (Reich 2011, 300). Furthermore, throughout the film, Catherine tries to articulate a lifeaffirming sense of self as a working-class Italian-American woman even as the Father, husband, and mother-in-law around her impede that attempt.

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Like Savoca in her film taken as a whole, Catherine strives to salvage the vestiges of cultural inheritance that may enable a life worth living including, to take two important examples, the tasty sausage and the lively pinochle games providing the families with enjoyable rituals in the simmering heat of New York City. Both meat and cards are fraught with dangers for the women, with the first an obvious Freudian image for the patriarchal moves limiting their development. Humor and realism prevail in the first part as Catherine marries the man she loves, Joseph Santangelo, unaware that her Father had put her up as the stake in his pinochle game with the young suitor. Savoca creatively uses visual resources to dramatize this in the scene in which the young girl enters his butcher shop. A jump cut to Catherine in a bridal gown depicts Joseph’s desire for the young girl. The comedian Tracey Ullman’s little-known strengths as a dramatic actress, along with the more wellknown acting skill of Vincent D’Onofrio as Joseph, come across in this early scene from their everyday life in which man and woman confront each other in a playful and powerful way. The butcher, for example, uses his thumb to hold down the scale employed to determine the cost of the sausage as well as to make salacious comments about the finger in foreplay. Catherine, who does not understand the comments, or at least pretends not to, succeeds in trumping him by abruptly leaving after paying him less than the amount requested for the meat. Carmella Santangelo, Catherine’s mother-in-law, is the principal enemy of her psychic and physical health in the first half of the film with the battle growing increasingly intense and shifting primarily to the daughter Teresa in the second half. Irena Makarushka examines Carmella’s and Teresa’s religious beliefs and behavior as fetish, understanding them in the context of Freud’s work. The film critic points out the impact of both nurture and nature in referring with nuance to culturally shaped religious practices, which are also part of a collective unconscious. Carmella is in large measure the agent of the male-dominated Catholic culture pressuring the pregnant Catherine to think of herself primarily in relation to her child, a version of the Madonna. Later, family and friends discuss Teresa’s future: she could go to college and get her certification to teach while waiting to get married and become a Mother. Carmella torments Catherine with a toxic blend of Italian-American superstition and Catholic dogma. The filmmaker has the viewer see, feel, and hear a witch—a negative take on one of the clichés of the Italian Mother cooking for her family—as Carmella mixes her “nutritious and delicious” blend of

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sausage for her family and family business. Savoca’s voice-over repeats the mother-in-law/witch’s recipe after her death when Catherine herself prepares the sausage. Finally, the film jump cuts to Carmella, cooking her sausage while Catherine observes Teresa doing so, demonstrating that powerful superstition and dogma may survive in the next generation. Savoca goes on to show that their consequences are sometimes even more damaging in the future. As in Kristeva’s complex theory in which nature and nurture both play important roles, the film indicates that behavior, in this case, religious practices, are both biologically determined and socially constructed. Carmella convinces Catherine that her behavior, including being present while Joseph beheads the turkeys in his shop and watching a blind black man in the street, causes her baby to be still-born. Catherine suffers significant depression for a long period as a result: she remains essentially bed-ridden for eight months, saying only “What pinochle game?” when she reappears on the screen. In this scene, Carmella has invited her daughter-in-law’s Father and brother to dinner in the hopes of reviving the young woman. She utters this question in response to her Father’s banter revealing the secret card game from many years before. Via visual cues, Savoca presents Catherine, and later her brother Nicky, displaying a form of abjection, including the linguistic disability and separation from the Mother that Kristeva describes in her theory of this psychic formation. Savoca depicts it cinematographically by placing the two siblings in a motherless household. She further stages abjection in Catherine’s withdrawal to bed, in speech limited to the question fundamental to her marital state, and also in the dead plants littering the home now that the nurturer is no longer watering them. It is only after Carmella’s death and Joseph’s patient displays of love that Catherine recovers. Here the film depicts the disappearance of “the bad Mother,” Carmella, and the emergence of “the good Mother,” surprisingly, out of a man, on the very same day, Easter morning, marking another important Resurrection. Savoca creates a patriarchal figure, Joseph, replete with contradictions. He has managed to win his wife in a pinochle game and will display a tyrannical face in the second half of the film in refusing to allow Teresa to become a Carmelite. He nevertheless functions as a nurturing husband, indicating that a healthy life depends on the care provided by others, including men. One of the most powerful scenes in its visual and aural effects shows Catherine waking up to find flowers blooming throughout the house, the

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“miracle” brought about by a maternal Joseph who replaced the plants she neglected in her suffering. Stephen Endelman’s soundtrack perfectly accompanies her awakening with a gradual, striking rhythm. Along with the music, Savoca viscerally rivets the spectator’s attention by having plants flower, die, and come back to life in response to a “Mother’s,” that is, a caregiver’s, attention. The viewer recognizes the figure from the beginning of the film: Catherine had appeared for the first time watering a single geranium on her kitchen windowsill. The burgeoning consumer society depicted in primarily negative terms in Children of Heaven appears in a more productive light in Savoca’s film where it serves the caregiver. Catherine, pregnant for a second time, enters with her shopping bag into a kitchen complete with electric toaster and other appliances helpful to the modern housewife in the 1950s. Contemporary pop music appropriately accompanies the scene. In an ironic twist, the child who lives poses the major dilemma for Catherine after her second pregnancy, despite household conveniences and upbeat new music. Teresa becomes totally taken up in the cult of Mary and especially of Saint Thérèse, the Little Flower. Savoca provides a rich historical context for the character including Teresa’s intense participation in the contemporary popular Catholic belief that the Pope would reveal the third secret of Our Lady of Fatima. His failure to do so arouses Teresa’s deepest fears that she is personally guilty. The solemn, guilt-ridden little girl develops into the accomplished high school senior who receives a copy of the autobiography of Sainte Thérèse, The Story of a Soul, as the award for her own writing. The inspiration for many Catholic girls in the 1950s, as Savoca has Teresa’s boyfriend Leonard remind us later, Saint Thérèse, the Little Flower, is the perfect embodiment of the submissive woman who devotes all of her energy to serving Jesus by serving the people around her. Teresa “Santangelo,” literally the “holy angel,” tells her parents she wants to become a Carmelite but Joseph adamantly refuses. His increasingly excessive responses elicit similarly escalating acts in his daughter. Her fasting and other obsessional behaviors follow, especially housecleaning. Teresa’s symptoms reveal the pathetic nature of abjection in a person unable to articulate, reflect on, and manage her conflict in words. The linguistic skills to think through her dilemma break down as she engages in activities that increasingly alienate her from reason. Joseph, in a continuation of his Phallic Mother Carmella’s reductive, harmful perspective on a woman’s role, explosively rejects his daughter’s desire to become a nun. The scene provides an essential, ironic, and comic

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piece of the puzzle that is Household Saints . In an outburst claiming he knows women, a variation on a male response to the question Freud was unable to answer, “What do women want?”, he states from his experience as a butcher, that women want sausage and are emotionally unsettled when they do not get it. According to the handsome Joseph, they also want to flirt and receive compliments on their dress. The nuns who enter the butcher shop—not real women from his point of view—are indifferent to the supply of sausage and simply leave when none is to be had. Savoca has Joseph say, not without irony given his inability to recognize the drives of his daughter, that women “all desire something,” but that nuns don’t. After responding that they want God, Theresa is most often silent, with the voice-over revealing her submissive, inner thoughts. Instead of confronting her conflict, she considers her fate to be God’s desire that she become a more ordinary woman, engaging with Leonard in a relationship that leads to her feeling guilt for having sex. Soon after, she develops a psychosis in which she believes that Jesus is visiting her. Kristeva’s theory provides an answer to the question of what a woman wants, helping to explain Teresa’s statement before her breakdown that nuns want God, by addressing it in terms of human desire, both female and male. The response depends on the singularity of each person to some extent but also engages one in satisfying drives deriving from the early attachment to the Mother’s body and the transitional states in which one acquires language. Such phases also include desire for an androgynous figure, the Father of individual prehistory. Teresa becomes alienated from her Mother’s care as her macho Father increasingly and continually imposes his systematic refusal to listen to his daughter’s wishes. Language, which is both semiotic and symbolic, enables one to articulate conflicts obstructing the satisfaction of these drives, to think them through, and to find a way to deal with them in a loving way toward self and others. Savoca indicates that Teresa, like her uncle Nicky later in the movie, is unable to manage impediments to her desire in a creative productive manner, as Kristeva’s theory proposes. She submits to the overtures of Leonard, giving herself to him as a passive object. The youthful Michael Imperiali, later Christopher in the HBO award-winning television series, The Sopranos, superbly portrays the intense Italian-American student who wants to fight prejudice against his ethnicity, work in “television law,” and go to bed with Teresa. The critical bedroom scene depicts a woman struggling to believe without success that sex with Leonard may be God’s will since her Father forbids her to enter the convent. She cries afterward,

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fears that she will go to hell, and proceeds, against Leonard’s protests, to pursue her housecleaning obsession by washing the bloodstain from the sheet. Savoca paints the emotional void of this scene, mostly colorless and static, with Teresa’s face empty of affect, signaling the psychotic breakdown to come in the vivid episode that follows. The young woman becomes eager and willing to talk with a handsome, blond Jesus with a British accent—both comic and uncanny—who visits her while she is alone in the apartment she shares with Leonard, ironing his shirt while he goes off to class. Savoca films Teresa’s face—in contrast to it in the preceding scene—alive with happiness in the midst of a multitude of proliferating red-check shirts, a variation on the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish in the biblical story. The fabric also reminds the viewer of the stereotypical Italian-American tablecloth and the metaphorical function of the immigrant to depict a woman as stranger to herself. She offers to wash Jesus’s shroud at the close of this fantasy just before Leonard, followed by her parents, arrives and realizes that she is now mentally ill. They check her into a Catholic hospital where they learn, during their final visit, that she believes she is playing pinochle with God the Father, Jesus, and Saint Theresa. In an important conversation between Catherine and Joseph at the dinner table, the more lucid Mother realizes that they should have allowed their daughter to follow her desire to join the convent. Savoca brings the tragic second half of the film to a close by drawing the final curve of a spiral, once more representing the struggle for lucidity in Catherine amid the persistent human rituals and cultural stereotypes of Italian-American life: the return of spring, family meals, and seeing women as saints. The film’s nuances lie especially in its visuals, especially the jump cuts to neglected, dying plants reappearing during Teresa’s deterioration. Catherine and Joseph return to the hospital, arriving to find flowers blooming where just the day before, according to Joseph, there were none. The “miraculous” flowers resonate with earlier scenes of Catherine’s recovery and Joseph’s care, adding a poignant element to the tragic ending. Joseph, catching the scent of roses emanating from Teresa’s body and seeing bloodstains in the palm of her hand, believes his daughter may in fact be a saint. Catherine rejects this unlikely view, affirming, in an infelicitous but accurate remark, that her daughter “was crazy.” Savoca uses a fade-out for the closing shots of the family who opened the film, gathered around the table eating together, and trying to understand Teresa as saint, victim, or something else. The final scene

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encourages viewers to consider that Teresa was following her unconscious desire to become a nun despite the apparent acquiescence to her Father’s prohibition. The grandmother narrates the closing remarks giving a positive spin to the girl’s plight, “she saw God in her work, how many of us can say as much?” In the minor but significant character, Nicky, Catherine’s brother, Savoca draws a parallel to the enigma that is Teresa, grappling with the conflict of her desire. Together, the two characters lend coherence to the film’s depiction of the unconscious as an exotic, problematic part of the psyche. A decorated World War II veteran, Nicky’s love for Italian opera, and in particular, Madame Butterfly, is an obsession. Savoca’s editing seduces the viewer from early on in the film’s occasional magic realism with scenes from the opera centered on the beautiful arias of CioCio San. Nicky explains at the meal in which it becomes clear to him that in marrying Joseph, Catherine’s days will bring only sausage and pinochle, that he wants something different. He is unable to understand what that might be and how he might obtain it. The jump cuts indicate that he imagines himself Lieutenant Pinkerton in Puccini’s famous opera. The viewer sees Nicky’s love for Madame Butterfly in this light and empathizes with the troubled bachelor as he descends into increasingly erratic behavior. He pursues without success the Chinese girl in the local laundry, whom he sees as the closest version of the Japanese Cio-Cio San in lower Manhattan. Savoca portrays a deluded Nicky who, unable to talk about his frustration and responding in a monosyllable to his Father’s question about the radio’s needing repair, carries it in the pouring rain to the Chinese laundry to communicate his love for the young woman by playing Madame Butterfly for her. Powerful in its pathos, the scene’s image and sound convey him as a Quasimodo-like figure with the broken radio on his back. Increasing alienation sets in as the radio emits only Chinese music in the laundry. He returns home silent, again capable only of unintelligible monosyllables in response to his Father’s continuing questions about the state of the radio. He enters his bedroom and feebly sings an aria from Madame Butterfly. Hearing this, followed by silence, his Father opens the bedroom door to find Nicky lying in blood, having thrust a knife into his stomach, as Butterfly had done in a Japanese ritual suicide. Unconscious drives both life-affirming in the case of Catherine’s love for Teresa and Joseph, and his love for them, and tragic, in the case of the delusional daughter and her uncle, erupt as physical and emotional

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experiences difficult to identify, process, and integrate, in other words, as abjection in Kristeva’s sense. In the case of the women at the center of her film, the encounter with the stranger within the psyche, including engagement with Catholicism, may become enabling as in Catherine’s life, or, unfortunately, destructive, as in her daughter’s. By including the writer in The Edge of Night, Lentricchia, like Kristeva, in the autobiographical works The Samurai and Teresa, My Love, is able to add another layer of complexity to an examination of the marginalized. In all three novels, the figure of the writer raises the question of how the foreigner may use his or her status as stranger to produce a form of life writing. Kristeva, born in Bulgaria and now living in Paris, relegates her use of the second-generation Italian immigrant to a minor character in The Samurai, Carole, whose career as a writer is only beginning and who is less directly connected to the principal plot. Lentricchia, whose parents emigrated from Southern Italy, places the immigrant/writer front and center in his protagonist, Frank. In an effort to be honest to feelings difficult to define, Frank reaches out to the reader, like this novel as a whole, to explore emotions and ideas surfacing in part from the unconscious. Lentricchia’s story is particularly powerful in showing the ways in which ethnicity, social class difference, and especially gender inflect unconscious desire in the writer’s mind. In The Edge of Night , the firstperson narrator, Frank, attempts to maintain relationships with his wife and daughters as he completes his work and confronts the dilemma posed by multiculturalism and political correctness. His gender, ethnic, and social class identifications function as fundamental elements in his portrayal, representing the foreign within himself that resists categorizations, for example, as male authority, female listener, bigot, and politically correct avenger. Lentricchia shifts back and forth in time as he unfolds his plot in Modernist fashion. The narrator opens the tale with a Christmas dinner with his extended family from five years earlier in which his Mother makes critical comments on the men in the family: they resist involvement in family life and mistreat the women. She asks, “Why are they like that around us?” (1994, 4). Contradictions abound in this first in a series of memories as Frank compares her sense that he is like his Father to his Father’s belief that the son is like his Mother. Memories of his parents’ competing views indirectly pose two of Frank’s central questions in the book, besides realistically representing the disagreements of long-married

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couples: “Who am I?” and “Am I a man or a woman?” Many of the memories recounted in Part One indicate stages in Frank’s becoming and sustaining his life as a writer: the stories of his influential kindergarten teacher, Miss Beach; his high school teacher, Senatro LaBella, reading Shakespeare; his trips to Mepkin Abbey and to Yeats’s home in Ireland to escape his family in order to nurture his writing. In other words, the narrator begins by recollecting episodes in his developing identities as writer, husband, and Father. While Catholicism does not figure prominently in Italian-American life in these memories as it does in Household Saints , Lentricchia recognizes its impact: his narrator values the time at the abbey as well as the writings of the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton. The detailed description of his trip to the monastery emphasizes its silence, his punctual attendance at the rituals, and pleasure in their music. The Trappist abbey fosters the emotional well-being and psychological state of “believing” as Kristeva’s character Olga had defined it for her unsettled friend Carole in The Samurai. One begins by clearing the mind of identities that do not serve the intellectual, in order to think more creatively. In this sense, religion for Lentricchia, as for Kristeva, is an exorcism (Lentricchia 1994, 119), a cleansing of disturbing emotions attached to narcissistic selves—cathartic, according to Powers of Horror (17). Part Two reveals primarily a distressed, angry Frank, unable to write. He feels anger toward his daughters, his work, and the fact that he feels guilt not while he is in this state, but afterward, implying why he has trouble restraining himself. Here and throughout, Frank narrates as if he were having a painful dialogue with himself, a psychoanalyst, or a demanding editor. The reader recalls the one he had in the first few pages with the editor who wanted him to put a greater amount of explicit biographical material in his writing to make it more marketable. Thus, from early on, this is a book dramatizing the autobiographical novelist’s inner conflicts between his personal relationships and his work. It becomes clear that the issues his Mother raised in the novel’s opening—male resistance to engaging in family life and the mistreatment of women—are serious problems for the writer who is often not home when his daughters need him. The memory of the fifth birthday of one of his daughters frequently arouses his guilt. Helping him prepare her cake, she loses a good deal of her hair as the mixer catches it. He also writes of the guilt experienced by many autobiographical novelists—Proust comes

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to mind—that he has “murdered and eaten” his friends, that his writing is a form of violence, even cannibalism. Part Three adds a historical and public dimension to Frank’s plight via a bizarre nightmare. He appears in it as the multicultural avenger wanting to rape an obese bigot rejoicing over the death of John Kennedy. Afraid that he will reveal his sadness and weakness if he speaks to the monster and lets him know that a part of himself may have died with Kennedy, Frank remains poised to allow the bigot to embrace him. Internal conflicts continue in Part Three as the writer struggles to recreate his confrontations with his daughters’ hostility. Lentricchia takes us into the throes of the writer’s difficult craft where Frank is unsure how to represent the quarrels in an honest and accurate way. Referring to Frank’s obsession with preserving his manuscripts by storing them in the refrigerator and also revealing more awareness of how the narrator exploits his relationships with his wife and daughters in his writing, Lentricchia has one daughter complain, “Now it’s genitalia in the refrigerator, both sexes, the cannibal without prejudice. … You want people to think you’re capable of this sickness, is that it? We know who you are . … You persist, this we, this bullshit: one of them doesn’t speak to you” (1994, 141). The last sentence voices Frank’s sense of failure in portraying his daughters’ voices and is an example of the crises and abjection he confronts throughout the novel as he struggles to articulate his relations with the female members of his family. The book ends with memories of his second divorce and a trip with his Father to a Hollywood film studio not long after the time of the Christmas family dinner in the novel’s opening. Lentricchia has Frank identify with his Father’s love for the creative and illusory act of filmmaking, and more precisely, with his pleasure and enchantment expressed in the remark, “Madon’, Frank, the fakery!” The use of ‘Madon’ is not without meaning as both a realist Italian-American expletive and as a reference to the image of the Virgin dominant in Catholicism in that ethnic group and appropriate in a novel raising questions about gender. In Frank and his status as Italian-American male intellectual, Lentricchia thinks through the way in which the sense of being an immigrant writer enables one to confront strange elements within the psyche. The novel frequently stages the narrator’s dilemma, caught between the working-class Frannie and the upper-middle-class Frank. It is clear from my close readings that in Lentricchia, and in Rochefort and Savoca, working-class individuals generally find it more difficult if not impossible

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to confront psychic instability and to engage in a play of selves, as O’Hara theorizes the dilemma in Empire Burlesque. Following the episode of the hostile daughters, Lentricchia has his narrator go back from the third generation to the first in a moving passage in which he feels connected to and disconnected from daughters and parents. When university acquaintances visit, his parents disappear “without preface: because they feel out of place.” The narrator then says that his Father called his son’s house il palazzo: “Where else should he live, this son like the son of a padrone who is not the son of a padrone?” The Father speaks “without resentment.” The narrator tells us what he does not say when his parents escape upstairs, “take me with you.” A few lines later, he asks, “Why doesn’t my father ever show resentment for the material conditions of his youth and middle age? I resent his lack of resentment, I don’t know why. I want him to be angry” (1994, 147). Lentricchia conveys his narrator’s emotional recognition of and reaction to ethnic and class difference in simple, restrained language peppered with Italian, expressing love for his parents and bewilderment at his own resentment. The most problematic episode because of its implied critique of multiculturalism in a book that reveals the plight of the marginalized, including the struggle to identify foreign elements within oneself, tells of a nightmare. In the dream, the multicultural avenger desires to rape the bigot. Here, Lentricchia has Frank confront the unconscious fear that he will become like the bigot. It is clear from the context that while the avenger represents the good in the eyes of those who attempt to promote ethical behavior including Frank, this avenger is ultimately not a positive force. Displaying the worst aspects of multiculturalism, that is, its tendency to adopt a politically correct agenda instead of carefully examining an event, the avenger resists thinking through the specifics of conflict and does not recognize the forms of bigotry that lie hidden within him, especially his desire for rape. Frank wants to punish the bigot by raping him while at the same time fearing that he is becoming like his enemy to the extent that he does not carefully examine an event in its particularity and is contemplating sexual assault. In the ending of the scene, the bigot increasingly resembles the worst version of the stereotypical Italian-American gangster. Still rejoicing over Kennedy’s death, he extends his arms in an embrace and Frank appears ready to accept him. Fred Gardaphe documents a similar ambivalent identification with the violence, machismo, and ignorance of the gangster in Lentricchia’s later novels (Gardaphe 2011, 60–74). Here

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and throughout The Edge of Night , the narrator grapples with ethnicity, social class, and especially gender/sexuality as inter-related components of the multiculturalist movement and in general of identity politics. The reader thus becomes engaged, along with Lentricchia, in thinking through their meaning and connections in Frank’s confrontation with his inner ghosts and demons, especially those linked to the women in his life. The narrator is frequently silent on questions of gender, especially when he refers to his wife and daughters. They are, however, clearly connected to the theme of masculinity intertwined with his Italian-American status as in the multicultural avenger episode in which he considers rape. A male authority figure is positive, for instance, in the pen described as pleasurable in an early passage affirming his masculinity. There, Frank is the tool doing the writing. In one of the last descriptions of his pleasure—and this time it is his greatest—he assumes a feminine position. Misreading his work taken as a whole, critics focus on what they see as sexism in Lentricchia. They call him “the Dirty Harry of contemporary literary theory” as Frank mentions (1994, 100). The name refers to Lentricchia’s apparent attempts to certify his manhood threatened by the growing importance of women in American culture (Fjellestad 2000, 863–874; DePietro 2011, 18). Here, Frank states, “this writing is unleashed, and the passive voice is right, because I can’t claim to be the unleasher, I am the unleashee, it’s some Higher Power, and it pours forth, the best time I’ve ever had as a writer. I became a surfer of infinite finesse, carried by a wave of inexhaustible power, the Higher Power of the Wave God of Writing” (1994, 175–176). The passage reveals a significant component of his psychology to the degree that he may recognize in lyrical mode the woman within him, though without full consciousness. Daniel O’Hara and Gina Masucci MacKenzie analyze this feminine component in his conception of the writer in terms of the muse herself becoming the author (DePietro 2011, 131–144). In other episodes demonstrating a crisis of sexual identity, Frank is torn apart by a kind of interior male authority figure who forces him to feel guilty and abject about his pleasure in writing that often entails being apart from his family, as I have explained, and about his unfinished book on Modernism. This authority figure exercises a power difficult to evaluate. In some passages of the novel, it is punitive and negative. Frank indicates that when he is not writing, he becomes a man of ice with a brutal face for both himself and his Mother like that other writer, his paternal grandfather, Tomaso.

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While the novel does not indicate the absence of a loving Mother in the development of abjection as do The Samurai, Children of Heaven, and Household Saints , there is some indication of a troubled relationship between Frank and his Mother. She is the one who poses the question of the men’s abusive treatment of women in the family. Like his daughters and wife, she represents the woman as a source of the abject writer’s guilt: resembling Tomaso, he becomes a man of ice confronting his Mother and himself with a brutal face. Given that the narrator’s primary psychic conflict emerges from his male and female components, it becomes increasing clear that the problem consists in confronting his bisexuality. Kristeva’s theory implies that such a confrontation engages one in an identification with the androgynous Father of individual prehistory. The subtle references to feminine and masculine in the novel taken as a whole, have us ponder the plight of the marginalized and also the psyche’s repression of unconscious desire and fear, as in Kristeva’s, Rochefort’s, and Savoca’s texts. An important example of the first is the scene in which Frank’s parents withdraw because they feel out of place; a significant instance of the second is Frank’s nightmare that he will embrace the monstrous bigot. The narrator attempts with great difficulty to create a text establishing his identity as an Italian-American man. His expectations upset, he struggles to listen to his wife’s and daughters’ partially unexpressed point of view as well as to confront emotions that resist ethnic, class, and particularly gender identifications. This often painful play of selves makes itself felt throughout The Edge of Night . The protagonist/writer lives through difficult transitions: between critical and creative writing, between married and single life, between the pleasures of writing and the despair of the morning after. Concrete and precise, from the sixties’ soap opera that the narrator’s grandparents watched, the title, suggested to Lentricchia by Don DeLillo (O’Hara and Pease 1994, 5), conveys movement through an uncertain boundary. Lentricchia introduces the connection to a monstrous Americanization in the image of mutilated sexual organs in the daughters’ outcry over Frank’s storing his manuscripts in the refrigerator (1994, 141). They debase their Father, calling his manuscript “genitalia”: the organs of both sexes are stored like food in the refrigerator. The novel develops this link in the multicultural avenger scene and its obese bigot, that is, the Father, avenger, and bigot are equally abject. Lentricchia connects the avenger to the bigot by having the two “compari” about to embrace.

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Frank, however, does not wallow in abjection. He gives voice to his daughters’ anger and shapes his own fury into a fight with himself, incorporating the passive listener O’Hara’s theory proposes. Frank recreates himself as a passive interlocutor by reflecting on his enabling his daughter’s voice to be heard, in other words, he becomes a kind of text, as he anticipated earlier in his reference to himself as a kind of difficult to control Hamlet. He introduces his daughters in a comparison with T. S. Eliot’s metaphorical child, his poem. Frank sees his children connected to him in a relationship that exhausts the three of them: they are “not metaphorical.” He describes a game in which he catches them as they jump from the stairs inside their home, a game begun in giggling, continuing in hysteria, ending in pain and, despite his efforts, in soap opera and Italian opera, that is, in conflicts with his first wife over the children. Thus, when not metaphorical, daughters make it difficult to create metaphors. They bring about pain by themselves and by involving the narrator in disagreements with his spouse, taking him away from writing or making him feel guilty when he goes off, for example, to the abbey to work. The writer, Italian-American, a dedicated professor, Father, and husband, is also frank in O’Hara’s pun (2003). At least, the narrator tries to be frank in this “confession” which is part of the novel’s title. He confesses his guilt over leaving his daughters when they need him and creates for them the appropriately hostile voice they would use if they could speak for themselves in Part Three. A careful reading of Lentricchia’s depiction of Frank’s relations with his wife—and this part of the text is seemingly inscrutable and resistant— reinforces the extent to which gender and sexuality surface in his behavior as husband, Father, and writer, and especially in his bouts of abjection. Frank offers apparent reasons for his reticence in telling the story. Careful to protect her privacy and intent on avoiding sensationalism and melodrama, he barely introduces his spouse as “his wife, late thirties” (3) who is half of the “us” of whom he says “I don’t have to remind you who ‘us’ is” (5), “(no, I won’t tell you her name, you don’t need to know that, either)” (15). His wife is probably the “she” in the conclusion when he says, “she took it” referring to the pain he could not contain in writing his book on Modernism (172). He mentions his wife and more often his daughters several times, but does not discuss their gender/sexuality. Even more significantly, in this story of the growth of a writer, he offers little commentary on their success as writers, though he believes his wife’s

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writing is superb. His daughter Amy’s announcement on the telephone in Part Two that her book which is all about him will be coming out with Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, the company that’s not interested in his work, is met with silence. Earlier in Part One, when he is considering how to present himself to his students in New York without “singing the multicultural rag” (109), we are reminded that his wife is “not an Italian-American” and we learn only that “she has written the two best Italian-American short stories you’ve ever read.” In other instances in which Lentricchia’s writing shows less reticence or repression, sexuality is prominent as an unpleasant fact, a joke, and, especially as a pleasure, the pleasure of writing, as announced in both the first and last pages of the novel (7, 175–176): I’ll tell you what I like about writing. When I’m doing it, there’s only the doing, the movement of my pen across the paper, the shaping of rhythms as I go, myself the rhythm, the surprises that jump up out of the words, from heaven, and I am doing this, and I am this doing, there is no other “I am” except for this doing across the paper, and I never existed except in this doing. I’ll tell you what I hate about writing. Finishing it. It comes to an end. You can’t come forever. (7)

Despite his insistence on “telling,” the reader nevertheless senses what the narrator is not revealing here and throughout most of the novel. He does not make or seem able to make the connections among the various references to gender and sexuality in these episodes dealing with his daughters, wife, and writing. While this earlier passage depicts the writer in the masculine image of the pen, the later one describes him in more feminine terms. It is in the passive voice, revealing him to be the “unleashee,” the “surfer of infinite finesse, carried by a wave of inexhaustible power, the Higher Power of the Wave God of Writing” (176). Reading carefully, one discovers that both passages describe Frank’s writing experiences at roughly the same time, September 1992, after his separation from his wife. One understands after completing the book that the writer reveals both masculine and feminine components of his personality indirectly in his attempts to convey his practice. The earlier passage focuses on the male—the later one on the female. The second appears near the end of the book at a point where the reader has come to understand Frank’s difficulties with his sexual and gender identities.

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In this context, just after the earlier passage, he tells of a telephone call to his parents to check on an Italian-American word dancing in his head as he writes. It is a word that means, according to his Mother, “pecker, your pecker,” but it is unclear whether it is male or female. Later in the novel, the word reappears in his description of a visit to Angelo’s, an upscale Italian restaurant in Manhattan’s Little Italy. When the waiter asks after his wife who has gone to the restroom, a large man seated near the narrator in the restaurant responds, using the Italian-American word, “Attenta alla sua minccia” (attending to her cunt). In a convoluted description of the relationship between the man, his wife, and their daughter who has gone to the ladies’ room with her Mother, Frank states that the wife is now unreadable to her husband and suggests that the women are no longer “his” and that the man has somehow lost his sexuality. He has become la signora number 3. When Frank’s own wife—who is equally unreadable to the narrator to the extent that he is unable to articulate the links between their relationship and his writing—joins him, he tells her he has been writing about “cunt.” She responds, “What else is there?” (95) It is clear in my psychoanalytic reading that, by this point in the novel, Frank answers “both” to the question, “Am I a man or a woman?” indirectly posed early on in recounting his parents’ different perspectives on whether he is more like one or the other. This androgynous writer is also a Father who, despite leaving his daughters when they need him, does love them. He tells of Amy’s calling to say that something bad happened. In a maternal identification with his daughter, his voice immediately becomes “pitched up and distorted,” like hers (129). Thus, the writer, both an individual and representative of masculine, Italian-American, upper-middle-class identity, attempts to reconcile his craft with marriage and fatherhood and achieves some success. Sexuality surfaces primarily as pleasure attached to and sublimated in the writing process, enabling him to express what he represses when he talks about his wife, daughters, and extended family: the confrontation with the feminine component of his personality. Lentricchia shows the narrator finally achieving a delicate balance in the conflicting demands of male and female, as well as of id and superego. Frank manages to reconfigure his love for his family and especially for his work, implicitly recognizing his bisexuality. In the end, he is creatively engaged in forging fresh and more ethical relations, as The Edge of Night would have the writer do in its ironic play of selves.

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References DePietro, Thomas. 2011. Frank Lentricchia: Essays on His Works. Canada: Guernica. Durand, André. 2003–2009. “Christiane Rochefort.” Comptoir Littéraire. Accessed May 6, 2020. http://www.comptoirlitteraire.com/docs/272-rochef ort-christiane.pdf. Fjellestad, Danuta. 2000. “Intellectual Self-Fashioning: The Case of Frank Lentricchia and Ihab Hassan.” The European Legacy 5, no. 6, 863–874. Gardaphe, Fred. 2011. “Lentricchia’s Gangsters.” In Frank Lentricchia: Essays on his Works. Edited by Thomas DePietro. Guernica. Jardine, Alice. 2020. At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva. Edited by Mari Ruti. London: Bloomsbury. Kristeva, Julia. (1980) 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. (1983) 1987. Tales of Love. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. (1988) 1991. Strangers to Ourselves. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. (1990) 1992. The Samurai: A Novel. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. (2008) 2014. Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Life of Saint of Avila. Translated by Lorna Scott Fox. New York: Columbia University Press. Lentricchia, Frank. 1994. The Edge of Night: A Confession. New York: Random House. McAfee, Noëlle. 2004. Julia Kristeva. New York and London: Routledge. O’Hara, Daniel and Donald Pease. 1994. “An Interview with Frank Lentricchia.” boundary 2 21, no. 2 (summer 1994), 5–39. O’Hara, Daniel. 2003. Empire Burlesque: The Fate of Critical Culture in Global America. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Oliver, Kelly. 1993. “Introduction.” In Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing. New York & London: Routledge. Reich, Jacqueline. (1995) 2011. “Nancy Savoca: An Appreciation.” In American Woman, Italian Style: Italian Americana’s Best Writings on Women, edited by Carol Bonomo Albright and Christine Palamidessi Moore. Fordham University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13wzxj1.32. Ricoeur, Paul. (1977) 1978. “The Question of Proof in Freud’s Writings.” In Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Works, edited by Charles E. Regan and David Stewart. Boston: Beacon. Rochefort, Christine. (1961) 2004. «Les Petits enfants du siècle.» In Œuvres romanesques, 207–298. Paris: Grasset.

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Rochefort, Christine. (1961) 1962. Children of Heaven. Translated by Linda Asher. New York: David McKay Company, Inc. Sagaert, Martine. 2004. “Oeuvre Romanesque.” In Oeuvres romanesques. Christiane Rochefort. Paris: Grasset. Savoca, Nancy. 1993. Household Saints. New Line Productions, Inc. Videocassette.

Conclusion

I conclude that Kristeva’s writing nourishes a resistance to mainstream American pragmatism and Christian materialism in literary and film critics in the US. My study of the influence of her work on such writers as Hortense Spillers and Kelly Oliver reveals how its thought-provoking ethic shapes critics who are exceptional. They achieve a singular strength that does not attempt to dominate others. Instead, they probe our inner demons and engage creatively in international dialogue with those whose perspectives are different from our own. Briefly put, Kristeva’s work brings greater imagination, psychological depth, political insight, and beauty into American literary criticism, theory, and film studies.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland 2020 C. M. Bové, Kristeva in America, Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59912-6

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Index

A Abjection, 1–4, 9, 10, 12–14, 16–19, 21–23, 26–28, 30, 33–37, 56, 63, 66, 70, 72, 75, 76, 80, 82, 84–88, 91–93, 95, 96, 100, 102, 105, 106 abject, 7, 11, 13, 14, 18, 22, 23, 26–29, 33, 35, 38–40, 47, 56, 58, 63, 73, 74, 82–84, 104, 105 America, 5, 10–12, 15, 38, 39, 47, 48, 50, 53, 57, 62, 65, 67–69, 80, 93 exceptionalism, 64 globalization, 84, 86 technological, 19, 20 technology, 53, 63, 67, 68, 73 See also Consumerism; United States Arendt, Hannah, 22, 52, 74 Atheism atheist, 54, 55, 81, 88 See also Religion Autobiography, 81, 96

autobiographical, 28, 66, 69, 74, 81, 85, 86, 100, 101 B Bové, Carol Mastrangelo Language and Politics in Kristeva: Literature, Art, Therapy, 4 C Capitalism, 5, 13, 31, 62–65, 68, 70, 73, 75, 76 Christian materialism, 5, 21, 62, 63, 65, 70, 111 See also Materialism Class, 10, 19, 21–23, 62, 75, 84–86, 91, 98, 100, 102–105, 108 working-class, 85, 86, 88, 91, 93, 102 Consumerism, 51, 65, 66, 68, 90 technological, 19, 20 technology, 53, 66, 67, 73 United States, 53, 63, 65–67

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland 2020 C. M. Bové, Kristeva in America, Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59912-6

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See also America Continental philosophy, 50, 51 See also Kristeva Circle

D Demagoguery See Totalitarianism Dyad psyche/society, 39, 45, 46, 49, 58

E Empiricism, 63 empirical thought, 61, 63, 70 pragmatism, 61, 63, 70 Epicurus, 62, 64, 73 Ethnicity, 26, 34, 84, 86, 92, 97, 100, 104 See also Race Europe, 30, 49, 50, 53, 65, 68, 74

F Fantasy, 34–39, 67, 92, 98 Father, 3, 4, 7, 8, 11–13, 35, 55, 72, 82, 86, 93–95, 97–103, 105, 106, 108 See also Imaginary Father of individual prehistory Feminism, 6, 11, 18, 56, 67 Fiction, 2–4, 20, 22, 23, 37, 44, 49, 56, 61–66, 71, 73–75, 80–82, 85–87 See also Novel Film, 2, 18, 20, 22, 23, 25–40, 43, 44, 58, 63, 70, 92, 93 jump cut, 74, 92, 94, 95, 98, 99 France, 47, 65–67, 74, 76, 80, 89, 91 French, 9, 29, 47, 48, 50–52, 64, 65, 68, 70, 72, 73, 81, 86–88 Freedom, 18, 19, 21, 30, 47, 49–51, 56, 58, 62, 63, 76, 90

See also Liberty Freud, Sigmund, 2, 18, 19, 34, 39, 44, 45, 47, 50, 54, 55, 58, 80, 82, 85, 94, 97 Fundamentalism, 65, 81, 88 Christian, 65, 81 Islamic, 81 G Gender, 4, 8, 20, 26, 30, 33, 63, 65, 67, 70, 75, 82, 85, 86, 100, 102, 104–107 See also Sex Globalization, 84 America, 84, 85 global, 20, 30, 64, 67, 70, 90, 91 See also United States H Halberstam, Jack, 1, 2, 4, 18–23, 26, 44, 56 Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters , 3, 4, 18–23 History, 5, 6, 11, 36, 37, 55, 56, 63, 69, 70, 72, 74, 75, 81, 85 Humanities, 7, 14, 68, 73, 76, 89 I Identity politics, 76, 104 Imaginary Father of individual prehistory, 82, 83 See also Father Immigrant, 29, 35, 38, 80, 81, 89–93, 100, 102 stranger, 35, 80, 89, 91, 93, 98 See also Italian immigrant Imperialism, 9, 63, 68 Italian immigrant, 80, 84–86, 100 stranger, 80 See also Immigrant

INDEX

J Jardine, Alice, 44, 45, 48–50, 52–57, 93 Judeo-Christian thought, 81 K Kristeva Circle, 50 See also Continental philosophy Kristeva, Julia The Enchanted Clock, 62, 63, 65–67, 69, 70, 73–76 “Europe Divided: Politics, Ethics, Religion”, 62 “Europhilia-Europhobia”, 44, 47–49, 58, 62, 71 “Fantasy and Cinema”, 36, 38, 39 “From Ithaca to New York”, 56 Intimate Revolt , 37, 49, 58 The Old Man and the Wolves , 62, 65, 68–70, 74, 75 Powers of Horror, 1–4, 18, 23, 27, 48, 101 The Samurai, 69, 71, 80, 81, 84, 86, 100, 101, 105 Strangers to Ourselves , 27, 80 “Stabat Mater”, 1–3, 7, 20, 23 Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila, 64, 80, 81, 100 L Language, 7, 8, 15, 17, 21, 28, 29, 32, 37, 44, 45, 47, 54–56, 64, 65, 71, 82, 84, 85, 88, 89, 97, 103 Lentricchia, Frank, 84–86, 100–108 Edge of Night , 80, 85, 86, 100, 104, 105, 108 Liberalism, 49, 62, 63 liberal, 62, 84 Liberty, 58, 90

115

See also Freedom Lynch, David, 26, 34–40 Mulholland Drive, 25, 33, 35–38 M Margaroni, Maria, 45, 46, 51, 71, 76 Marginalization marginalized, 52, 81, 100, 103, 105 Marketplace, 40, 46, 47, 56 See also Society Marshall, Paule, 3, 4, 6–18, 20, 23, 44 The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, 2–4, 6–9, 44 Masculinity male, 10, 19, 21, 22, 27, 28, 33, 38, 74, 94, 97, 100–102, 104, 105, 107, 108 masculine, 4, 32, 33, 68, 105, 107, 108 Materialism, 18, 64, 65 See also Christian materialism Memory, 5, 10, 12–15, 17, 57, 58, 67, 69, 72, 82, 89, 92, 93, 100–102 Metaphor, 5, 8, 9, 11, 12, 15, 28, 29, 38, 45, 46, 49, 52, 56, 90, 106 Modernism, 104, 106 Modernist, 69, 71, 100 Monotheism, 18, 64 Mother, 3, 7, 9, 11, 12, 16, 17, 23, 28, 29, 35, 44, 47, 54, 56, 66, 72, 82–84, 91–98, 100, 101, 104, 105, 108 maternal, 7, 12, 13, 17, 20, 26–29, 31–34, 36–38, 40, 44, 47, 54, 56, 58, 63, 70, 75, 76, 82, 86, 88, 96, 108 motherhood, 1–3, 7–9, 16, 18, 20, 22, 23, 26 separation from, 17, 26, 56, 63, 70, 82, 95

116

INDEX

Multiculturalism, 85, 100, 103, 104 multicultural, 86, 102–105, 107

N Nation, 5, 22, 45–47, 49, 64 national identity, 2, 9, 10, 18, 19, 30, 63, 72 nationalism, 64, 65, 67, 76 Nature, 3, 11, 45, 51–54, 68, 71, 84, 85, 94–96 See also Nurture Novel, 2–19, 21, 22, 44, 48–50, 62–76, 81, 82, 85–92, 100–108 See also Fiction Nurture, 94, 95, 101 See also Nature

O O’Hara, Daniel T., 49, 84–86, 90, 103–106 Oliver, Kelly, 23, 25–33, 40, 44, 50, 56, 80, 111 Noir Anxiety, 27–29, 32, 33 Oppositional writing, 62 Other, 4, 15, 16, 20–22, 47, 49, 64, 83 marginalized, 52, 81, 100, 103, 105

P Patriarchy, 29, 64, 85 patriarchal, 19, 27, 29–32, 34, 56, 64, 67, 73, 94, 95 Political correctness, 89, 100 politically correct, 100, 103 Politics, 45, 51, 55, 64 political, 6, 9, 15, 18, 39, 46, 48, 49, 51–53, 57, 84, 86, 111 Pragmatism See Empiricism Protestantism, 62, 80

Protestant, 5, 10, 54, 56, 88, 92 Psyche psychic formation, 15, 18, 20, 22, 23, 44, 46, 62, 63, 70, 74, 80, 81, 89, 95 psychology, 44, 45, 66, 71, 73, 75, 104 self, 39, 46, 49, 62 subject, 4, 6, 52, 53, 57, 63, 81 subjectivity, 40, 49, 63 See also Unconscious Psychoanalysis, 45, 50, 55, 56, 68, 73, 75, 81 Neo-Freudian, 20, 23, 38, 47, 64 psychoanalyst, 55, 66, 69, 81, 101 psychoanalytic, 1, 2, 4–8, 18, 19, 22, 26, 28, 29, 33, 37, 39, 40, 47, 50, 52, 54, 55, 63, 80, 81, 92, 108 R Race, 1, 2, 4, 9, 10, 20, 22, 26, 27, 30–34, 38–40, 44, 57 See also Ethnicity; Racism Racism, 5–11, 17, 23, 34, 38, 44 Rationalism, 81 Religion Catholicism, 56, 80, 81, 88, 92, 93, 100–102 Christian, 4, 5, 10, 18, 20–22, 68 Christianity, 55 Islam, 65, 81 monotheism, 18 See also Atheism Resistance, 5, 7, 15, 29, 33, 52, 62, 71, 75, 88, 91, 101 to pragmatism, 70, 111 Restuccia, Frances “Kristeva’s Intimate Revolt and the Thought Specular”, 36, 37 Richard, Claude, 62, 64, 73 Ricoeur, Paul, 44, 54, 80, 81

INDEX

“The Question of Proof in Freud’s Psychoanalytic Writing”, 39 Rochefort, Christiane, 80, 84–92, 102, 105 Children of Heaven, 80, 86, 91, 92, 96, 105 Rose, Jacqueline, 45 S Savoca, Nancy, 80, 84, 85, 92–99, 102, 105 Household Saints , 80, 92, 93, 97, 101, 105 Science, 4, 50, 54, 61, 63, 66–68, 70, 73, 74–76, 80 Semiotic, 37, 47, 65, 82, 97 See also Symbolic Sex, 11, 20–22, 35, 36, 38, 39, 89, 97 sexual, 13, 16, 18–22, 27, 32, 33, 37, 38, 68, 74, 76, 81, 82, 89, 90, 103–105, 107 See also Gender Society, 104 social, 3–7, 10, 11, 14, 15, 20, 27–29, 36, 38, 44–46, 49–54, 56, 57, 75, 80, 82, 84, 86, 89, 100, 104 sociopolitical, 53, 57, 80 totalitarian, 48, 57 world, 49, 80 See also Marketplace Spectacle, 65 society of the, 37, 65 Spillers, Hortense, 1–8, 11, 12, 14–20, 23, 26, 44, 56, 63, 111 Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, 2, 3, 7, 17 Stoker, Bram, 4, 19, 21–23 Dracula, 3, 4, 18–20, 22, 23 Stranger, 34, 47, 80–82, 90–92, 100

117

Italian immigrant, 80 See also Immigrant Subject, 4, 6, 7, 9, 17, 21, 45, 52, 53, 56, 63, 69, 83 subjectivity, 40, 49, 63 See also Psyche Symbolic, 6, 28, 38, 39, 47, 82, 97 See also Semiotic T Technology, 19, 20, 66, 67, 73, 74 America, 19, 20, 53, 67, 68, 73, 74 technological, 19, 20 United States, 53, 63, 66, 67 See also Consumerism Time, 3, 5, 31, 38, 46, 53, 57, 66–70, 72–75, 86, 87, 92, 96, 100–102, 104, 107 temporal, 66 Totalitarianism, 51, 53 totalitarian, 48, 57 See also Demagoguery Trigo, Benigno, 25–33, 40, 44, 56, 65 Noir Anxiety, 27–29, 32, 33 U Unconscious, 2, 8, 18–20, 27–30, 32, 34, 56, 63, 71, 80, 87, 88, 90, 92–94, 99, 100, 103, 105 See also Psyche United States exceptionalism, 64 globalization, 84–86 positivism, 18, 51, 53 Puritan, 5, 10, 18, 21, 56, 64, 80 reception of Kristeva, 64, 70 response to Kristeva, 50 technology, 20, 53, 63, 66, 67, 73, 74 See also America; Consumerism

118

INDEX

W Wells, Orson The Lady From Shanghai, 25–29, 32, 34, 35 Touch of Evil , 25, 29, 30, 34, 35 Women, 3, 4, 6, 7, 11, 15, 26–28, 32–34, 36, 55, 67, 68, 85, 88, 93, 94, 97, 98, 100, 101, 104, 105, 108 feminine, 4, 10, 32, 86, 104, 105, 107, 108

reproductive rights, 88 woman, 3, 7–11, 15, 16, 20, 21, 34, 36–38, 55, 64, 66, 68, 73, 81, 82, 84, 87, 92–99, 101, 104, 105, 108 World, 4, 8, 10, 15, 27, 30, 33, 39, 44, 46, 48, 49, 52, 54–58, 64–66, 69, 73–75, 82, 84, 90, 92 sociopolitical, 53, 57, 80 See also Society