Two novels from that 2018 prize shortlist push trans and abuse in the reader’s face, as incontrovertible truths of our world. Each of them does so in a way that talks back to, while also going beyond, what I have been trying to explore in this chapter. So first, what if Oedipus were trans? What if Tiresias entered the body of Oedipus, usurped his skin? This is the wager of Everything Under by Daisy Johnson, who tried to write this novel three times and destroyed each version before lighting on this final tale.47 Everything Under mainly takes place on the waterways of England, on canals and barges, a life that dips beneath the solid surfaces of the world. It describes the anguished search of a young woman, Gretel, for her mother who, after they had first lived together on the rivers, disappeared from her life when Gretel was thirteen. This it turns out is a pattern. The mother had abandoned her first baby, also originally named Gretel, who the narrator manages to trace to her adoptive family, where she was renamed Margot. They have not seen her since she left, suddenly and with no explanation, as a young teen. Slowly we discover that the family’s next-door neighbour, a male-to-female trans soothsayer who was the only person Margot had ever trusted as a friend, had told her to leave after warning her of a threatening Oedipal fate. In flight from her destiny, Margot begins her own transition and becomes Marcus, shedding all the insignia of the sexual identity she has been made to fear (an added twist to Oedipus’s no less failed attempt to spare himself).
What happens next is of course predictable. Lighting on the river, Marcus is taken in by an old man who, unbeknownst to him, is his father (still mourning the disappearance of his baby and her mother years ago) and whom Marcus accidentally kills. Appalled at his deed, he moves downriver, where he finds the second Gretel and her mother, with of course no awareness of the affinity between them. He and his mother become lovers. Somewhere the mother knows, as she was bound to discover, that he had once been a girl, and also – perhaps – that this is her own first, long-lost child. Since Marcus has to this point been portrayed as a young teen, the novel at least raises the question as to whether the mother, knowingly or unknowingly, has sexually abused her own daughter (an idea that had not occurred to any of us on the Booker jury till the chair shockingly raised it at our final meeting).
Believe it or not, Everything Under is an easy, often pleasurable read, in which every step of this tortured and tortuously complicated plot, like the waters on which it is set, beautifully and effortlessly flows. This is a retelling of Oedipus for our time. It lifts the figure of Tiresias – the man-woman, struck blind for telling the truth of women’s sexual pleasure – from the fringes of the classic tale and into the heart of the story, where the sexual positions of male and female are muddled beyond recognition or repair. In doing so, the novel scuppers once and for all any normativity which, in the psychoanalytic reading, this mythical tale – despite the catastrophe to which it unfailingly attests – is somehow intended to embody as a lesson for us all. It is a kind of imaginative gambit: if Oedipus were trans? What does this do to the story in which we, as Western subjects, have been asked to recognise ourselves? ‘All we ever deal with in analysis, whether therapeutic or so-called training analysis,’ writes Safouan, ‘is with Oedipal dramas that have failed’ (‘des Oedipes échoués’ – the French plural is impossible to translate).48 Whatever our sexual affinities and identities, this novel suggests, there is no comfortable place to be sexually in the modern world. It sets this wager in the disconsolate and yet also magic society of misfits, fringe beings whose marginal existence is intensified by, but by no means reducible to, the theme of trans experience which runs so unerringly through the book (the novel offers a cautionary tale which is as fully social as it is sexual).
Everything Under is agonising. In the end, Marcus drowns, the mother hangs herself. Johnson thus sees off the common charge that trans people are living lives of commodified delusion which pit the idea of free choice in the realm of sexual identity against psychic history and unconscious pain. Trans experience is another way of being, but – as it appears in pretty much all the trans narratives I have discussed so far – like Oedipus, it is in no way a happy solution to everything. To imply as much would align trans subjects with the false perfectibility of a consumer culture in denial of itself, laying on them a no less unjust burden of happiness.49 As if anyone, trans or non-trans, fully resolves their unconscious sexual lives, a tempting prospect to which Freud himself was by no means immune. In his 1924 paper ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’, he suggests that masculinity emerges when Oedipal desire in the male child is dashed to ruins and all traces obliterated. As more than one commentator has pointed out, he is not only offering a false image of masculinity shorn of conflict (heaven help us), but, since nothing ever perishes in the unconscious, he is also going against every fundamental insight of psychoanalysis itself. I read Johnson’s novel as setting us two tasks – allow for the fluidity of the world, trans freedom as we might call it. But recognise that we are not masters of our destiny. Keep the difficulty of the psyche in sight.
* * *
To end, then, with the 2018 winning novel, Anna Burns’s Milkman, whose acclaim and notoriety have been boundless. Readers have been stunned by its prescience in relation both to #MeToo and to the question of the Irish border which has been so central to the fight over Brexit in the UK, more than once bringing the negotiations to a complete standstill. In fact Burns finished her novel in 2014, before either of these hit the news, and then took four years to find a publisher. Milkman has been heralded as the novel of the #MeToo generation. It is a story of ‘encroachment’, a term which I would like to see pass into the common lexicon. ‘Encroachment’ is visited by a paramilitary in his forties on the eighteen-year-old narrator whose unbroken voice tells the tale. He is sinister, invasive, threatening, and even without physical contact, he undermines her body and soul. The novel therefore offers the definitive riposte to those who try to take down the #MeToo movement by arguing that anything other than a violent sexual assault, for which the plaintiff must scour the whole world and her own body for forensic evidence, does not count (Evangelist Franklin Graham and various Republicans have claimed that because Kavanaugh did not actually rape Blasey Ford, but merely assaulted her and then stopped, his ‘honourable’ character was untouched).50 In fact, violent assault against women is also present from the first page of this novel, which opens: ‘The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast…’51 In Milkman there are no proper names. The voice that tells the tale is ‘middle sister’, the encroacher is simply Milkman, which in fact he is not. The novel thereby becomes generic for any sectarian world, even as its place and time are unmistakeably 1970s Belfast in the midst of what has come to be known as ‘The Troubles’. For those who thought the Troubles ended with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, the question the novel raises, the question Brexit has raised with its threat of a new hard border between the North and the South, is whether indeed the Troubles ever truly went away (one of the worst potential disasters of Brexit is what it will reignite in Ireland).
Milkman uses the ambient violence of the city to press his case. He follows her, haunts her, shows up out of the blue in places he should not even know she might be, threatens to have her ‘maybe-boyfriend’ killed. He first pulls up alongside her in a van, when she is walking and reading, an activity she cherishes as her bid for freedom in the midst of a violence-riddled world. As Christopher Bollas argues in his paper on incest, what abuse destroys above all is the victim’s capacity for reverie.52 Until Milkman appeared on the scene, this young girl thrived on her ability to time-travel in her mind (she reads mainly nineteenth-century books because, for good reason, she does not like the twentieth century). Milkman does away with it all. ‘My inner world’, she says in the middle of the story, ‘had gone away.’ He inflicts her with ‘numbance’, another word which needs to pass into the general lexicon. ‘He’d infiltrated my psyche […] This felt an injustice.’53
In fact her love of reading w
hile walking has always been taken as the sign of a risky independence of spirit. She is branded crazy or ‘beyond the pale’ by the surrounding community, which now begins, on the basis of the odd sighting – i.e. no evidence whatsoever – to churn the rumours that she is Milkman’s mistress. Any respect she had once enjoyed starts to wither as she is hemmed more and more tightly into a suffocating psychic and social world. ‘I came to understand’, she comments, ‘how much I’d been closed down, how much I’d been thwarted into a carefully constructed nothingness by that man.’ Any sexual pleasure she took in her young life is destroyed. Her ‘maybe-boyfriend’s’ physical attentions, which she had craved (no ‘maybe’ about it), she starts to find ‘repulsive’.54 Every attempt she makes to describe what is happening to her to anyone else, including her mother, meets with disbelief and a ratcheting up of the sexual slurs against her. Only her own voice telling her tale, its extravagant resilience and humour in the face of all odds, saves her. This is interior monologue as talking cure. It is also a tribute to the power of writing to foster resistance and to create a fairer world.
To circle back to where this chapter began: this is a young girl who is roughly the age of Katharina when she met Freud in the Alps at the turn of another century. We might, therefore, be tempted to lament how little has changed from then to now in terms of the abuse of young women. And yet, Milkman also allows us to marvel at the resourcefulness which such women, in their struggle to be heard, are claiming for themselves today. In one key scene she is confronted by a cohort of paramilitary groupies who abhor the ‘secure, safe bubble, the nine-to-five, decent bubble’ in which women are meant to want to exist, and who relish the potentially fatal dramas of their own freely chosen lives (Eros and Thanatos together). At the same time, finding herself cornered, she begins to feel she is being inducted into a shocking form of sexual knowledge which has come too soon (remember Freud on Katharina). ‘These women’, she laments, ‘were threatening to present sex to me as something unstructured, something uncontrollable, but could I not be older than eighteen before the realisation of the confusion of the massive subtext and the contraries of sex should come upon me and uncertain me?’55 Alongside ‘encroachment’ and ‘numbance’, the book surely takes the prize for the use of ‘uncertain’ as a verb: ‘should come upon me and uncertain me’.
As with Katharina we are faced with the question of what the shock of sexuality does to the unprepared mind; we are also faced with the possibility – which, I have suggested, becomes no less central to psychoanalysis – that sexuality is the one thing for which the mind will never be fully prepared. In Milkman, the violent reality of abuse and the ‘uncontrollable’ ‘contraries’ of sex subsist side by side on the page: ‘my irreconcilables’, ‘those uncontrollable irrationalities’, ‘the ambivalences in life’, or ‘the weird something of the psyche’, to pluck another of my favourite phrases from the book.56 As we have already seen, it is surely one of the biggest challenges of our time to call out the first without feeling one has to silence or sacrifice the complex, uncertain truth of the second. How to fight for the rights of women, the dispossessed and powerless, or anyone who is discriminated against and, at the same time, demand a more psychoanalytically understanding world.
Milkman is not about trans experience, but, sure as hell, it is about borders. Everyone in the novel is living on the border, a border policed by bombs, blasts, killings and atrocities which seem to be as indiscriminate as they are precise in their aim. No one escapes. As I watched this border reap its deadly effects for the duration of the novel, it was impossible not to think of that other border, that of gender, which is today manned no less fiercely and with no less lethal effect. So, to repeat that earlier question, where’s the hope? How to think differently? Or in the words of our narrator, ‘how to live otherwise?’ In her self-blinding world, just having such a thought is enough to drive anyone mad. But ‘This was not schizophrenia,’ she insists. ‘This was living otherwise. This was underneath the trauma and darkness a normality trying to happen.’57 (‘Normality’ is one of my least favourite words but in this case I welcome it.)
Which brings us, finally, to the ‘wee sisters’. I challenge any reader of this novel not to fall in love with the wee sisters, who, in their wildly funny embodiment and spirit, allow us to wend our way back to the idea of trans. Philosophers, lexicographers, classicists, multi-linguists, political thinkers and satirists way before their time, there is no limit to their zany, precocious ‘thirst for knowledge and for intellectual adventure’ (they are seven, eight and nine). To call them genius is not going too far. They are for me the heroines of Milkman. Near the end of the novel, they announce to middle sister that any cuts and contusions she might see on their bodies are the result of them dressing up in the clothes of a grown-up couple – renowned for having abandoned their four teenage sons in Belfast to take up an international dancing career – and prancing around in the streets. And ‘not just in our street but in every street of the area – even across the interface road in defender areas, for I’d had a peek in and noticed them one day as I was walking and reading my way into town.’58
The wee sisters have quite simply flouted the borders, flying in the face of the world’s worst defences. Like transgender subjects, they have transformed the border into something halfway between a joke and a screaming question about itself. ‘They had achieved that outstanding status of straddling the sectarian divide,’ middle sister pronounces, brimming with admiration, ‘a feat probably meaning nothing outside the sectarian areas in question, but which inside equated with the most rare and hopeful occurrence in the world.’59 This is of course ‘play’, which British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott famously ascribed to the transitional spaces of the human mind as the source of all creativity (transitional to trans would be a whole other topic).60 When we find these spaces – in the session, on the page, in the streets – they surely deserve to be ranked among ‘the most hopeful occurrences in the world’. Even if they have never felt more hard to achieve and so urgently needed than in the abusive times in which we are living.
4
FEMINISM AND THE ABOMINATION OF VIOLENCE
When I was working on Sylvia Plath more than twenty years ago, I discovered that, almost simultaneously, the distinguished critic and biographer Diane Middlebrook was working on Anne Sexton. On completion of our books – we shared at least one train ride on our way to readings across England – we were both in a state not only of exhilaration, but also shock. Both poets had required us – a requirement each of us experienced as an exclusive, personal invitation – to immerse ourselves in what it meant to suffer as a woman in the 1950s and early 1960s. But they did so with such vigour and riotousness as to deprive us of, or at least exceed, the most obvious narrative of subordination which you might expect such suffering to evoke. Sexton and Plath were angry – they had a lot to be angry about. But in both cases, the anger did not block, as it so easily can, the complex internal reckoning which as women they conducted with themselves.1
If this central reality united our projects and fuelled our respect and love for the two poets, it also overrode what was the most striking discrepancy between our experiences in writing our books. At every turn, I – like so many Plath scholars – had been obstructed by the Plath estate, Olwyn and then Ted Hughes, who hated my book and insisted it was a biography, which it wasn’t.2 They felt I had transgressed the boundary between literary criticism and life story, a life story whose true version they knew themselves, without reserve, to be in sole possession of. Diane’s problem was the opposite. If anything the Sexton estate had been too co-operative, flooding her with what today we call ‘too much information’, whether in the form of the release by Sexton’s analyst of the tapes she made after her sessions, at his instruction, to prevent her obliterating them from her mind, or in the revelations by Sexton’s daughter, pressed upon Diane, of being intimately invaded by her mother.
If that moment has stayed with me, it is because
of the ethical dilemma we both faced. Neither Sexton nor Plath lived to see the birth of second-wave feminism. It is tempting, and not wholly inappropriate, to think that if they had enjoyed the advantage of feminist insight and solidarity they might both have been alive today. Certainly, their anguish as women was rooted in the perils of domesticity and child-rearing, which would become the target of that wave of feminism’s opening and loudest complaint, and for which they were amongst the first to craft the poetic language, to give it voice. But that was not all. Sexton was an emotional hurricane. At the centre of that hurricane there is a tale of domestic abuse – by her father, possibly by her beloved aunt, later of her own daughter. As this story migrates across genders and generations, there is no neat version to be told. It swallows up too many people, regurgitates through Sexton’s life and writing (such regurgitation is of course recognised today as the hallmark of abuse). Plath, for her part, felt herself trapped by a desire which drowned her in its intensity and left her stranded on the far shore of a domestic ideal which was a travesty of her own fierce and expansive imaginative reach.
What we shared was our respect for the psychic risks that being a poet allowed both these women to take, together with the conviction that the energy with which they both did so is more important than the fact of their deaths. ‘What I most want to know about women in the past’ is not, therefore, as legal theorist and feminist Catharine MacKinnon put it in an article of 2006, ‘how did she die?’ My question is rather: ‘how did she live?’3 And I also want that question to be able to gather whatever it may find, however messy and unexpected, on its path. It is a central proposition of this book that feminism has nothing to gain by seeing women solely or predominantly as the victims of their histories.
On Violence and On Violence Against Women Page 16