To answer these questions, we need to enter the furthest recesses of the mind, first via Sigmund Freud, whose work was one of the most important starting points of these debates; then into the heart of literary modernism; and finally into more recent writing by women. It is in order to wrest language from the historical violence of slavery that Toni Morrison twists her language to purpose. And Eimear McBride, as we have already touched on, creates a new form of writing to match the violence of our times. She is, by her own account, the undutiful daughter of modernism, who tears language apart in the face of the sexual abuse of women and girls.
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To start, then, with Freud. If 1922 is one of the key years of modernism – Ulysses, The Waste Land – Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle came barely two years before (it was first published in English in 1922). Beyond the Pleasure Principle is the text that marks the division between Freud’s first and second topography or schema of the mind, ushering in the concept of the death drive which indicates the human tendency to destruction, the demonic principle in woman’s and man’s deepest relationship to others and to themselves. In this text, Freud introduces something radically unmasterable about human subjectivity which goes beyond the concept of the unconscious on which his previous work, indeed the very founding of psychoanalysis, had been based. These new ideas were precipitated by the traumatic aftermath of the First World War, which led to a run of papers on mourning and melancholia and on war and death, all of which were written during that war. As Eric Hobsbawm observed, the twentieth century which gave birth to modernism ushered in new forms of prosperity in the Western world, but also witnessed killing on a scale never seen before.5
Freud died weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War, so he did not live to see the worst. But, in one of his most poignant meditations, ‘A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis’, written in 1936 when the war was already on the horizon, it is almost as if he did. At the very least, this short work suggests some foreboding of the lengths the mind will go to in its efforts to master itself. Like the writing on the death drive, this text pushes the limits of the psyche beyond where he had previously taken them. It is a story about memory. Freud arrives at the Acropolis with his brother as a man of forty-eight and is struck with amazement at the reality of the monument he sees before his eyes: ‘So all this really does exist, just as we were taught at school.’ He did not believe it really existed, because, he now remembers, as a boy, weighed down by a father who had not roamed the earth, he never thought he himself would, or should, get there. At its simplest, therefore, this is a story of a son who cannot bear to outdo his father – a classic, if somewhat restrained and well-behaved version of the Oedipal drama – but who can only recognise the inner conflict to which this pain had subjected him as a young man when his own ‘powers of production’, as he puts it, ‘are at an end’.6 Freud is near the end of his life. He offers this memory – a memory of a disturbance of memory – to his friend Romain Rolland on Rolland’s seventieth birthday, although it can equally be read as Freud’s own double-edged eightieth birthday gift to himself.
What makes this text stand out for me is the effect of this set of strained recollections and moments of disenchanted recognition on Freud’s mind. He calls it ‘derealisation’ (‘Entfremdungsgefühl’), a term he has hardly ever used before, to indicate that something is not just being repressed, but being blotted out – scotomised – as if it was never, had never been, could never be, there. These ‘derealisations’, he comments, are ‘abnormal’ mental structures, ‘remarkable phenomena that are little understood’.7 Way beyond the creative fantasy of the hysteric, the elaborate rituals of the obsessive, the artistic night-stalking of the dreamer, he is therefore talking about what the mind will do to avoid what it cannot bear to know about itself. The world fades and goes blank, wipes itself off the page. There is a violence in this story. Better the world or this bit of the world cease to exist, rather than be confronted with what I, as a flawed, divided human subject, cannot bear to contemplate.
If I see this late work as brushed by the war on the horizon, it is because this wipe-out, this ruthless, world-destroying ego will go to any lengths to ward off any challenge to its own deluded comfort. In this, it surely bears a resemblance to John Gray’s account of the false unity of the post-Enlightenment world, and the potential for terror it contains – by which I mean the terror of totalitarianism and state violence, being unleashed at the time Freud was writing, as much as terror in the sense in which it is most commonly used, and misused, as a term today. It is one of those moments in Freud’s thinking when the borderline between history and psyche is paper thin. Freud knows that his attempt to read this moment in terms of guilt towards the father is too neat. He knows that this is a case where the law of the father does not quite do the trick (even if he offers it as the key to the mystery). Instead, hovering on the edge of that too predictable Oedipal interpretation is a world that disappears, carrying off the supreme symbol of Greek civilisation with it, all because of something which an over-defensive mind simply cannot tolerate.
This suggests a very specific way in which the question of modernism and that of memory are inextricably linked. Modernism is not a set of formulae about the modes of writing that best match the disenchantment of the world. It is not just a way of registering that world in the form of its disenchantment, a kind of laying down of arms before the world’s unwillingness to be subdued to thought. More than that, it is a way of recording – although that is not quite the right word – a failure of historical memory in the formation of memory itself. That, as I see it, is what Freud’s paper is touching on. To put it another way, a key driving question for modernism is: how can the mind take the measure of history, when history will submit neither to the reason of the world nor to the mind that confronts it?
To take another moment, this time from the very heart of the modernist canon, when the reference to the Second World War is explicit. Virginia Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts, recounts the staging of a pageant in an English country house in the summer before the war. The programme for Miss La Trobe’s performance announces: ‘The Present Time. Ourselves.’ The narrator then questions: ‘“Ourselves…” But what could she know about ourselves? The Elizabethans yes; the Victorians perhaps; but ourselves; sitting here on a June day in 1939 – it was ridiculous. “Myself” – it was impossible.’8 The novel was mostly written, in the words of Frank Kermode in his introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of 1992, at a ‘desperate time, when France had fallen and Britain was under heavy attack from the air’. But as he also suggests, the summer of 1939 where it was set was perhaps the real moment of crisis, the moment when war became inevitable: Barcelona fallen to Franco, Austria and Czechoslovakia swallowed by Hitler, and Poland under threat – ‘unmistakeably’, Kermode writes, ‘the last moments of the old world’. So Woolf situates her novel not in the midst of the war, the moment of writing, but on the threshold ‘between a known past and an unknown but probably appalling future’.9 Pushing this slightly, we could say then that she makes the tense of the novel the future perfect as defined by Lacan. Not what I was in what I still am (repetition), nor what I once was but am no more (repression), but what I will have been in the process of what I am becoming.10 For Lacan this is analytic time. If it is the tense of hope, it is also ghostly: the future shadowed by a past still struggling fully to be born. In Between the Acts, Woolf brings out its gothic potential, appropriately enough at a historical moment when it is unclear whether what one was ‘in the process of becoming’ is something she or anyone else could, or would, survive.
The violence of that moment to come, or intimations of it, are also to be found inside the narrative of Woolf’s novel. In the middle of this story of English lawns and pageantry, blood stains the page. A newspaper report tells of a girl raped by a soldier; a snake suffocating with a toad in its mouth is stamped on by one of the garden party, who then strides to the barn with blood on h
is shoes: ‘Action’, we are told, ‘relieved him.’11 Thus Woolf reminds us that the violence of the coming war is not alien to the country that will have right on its side but has its place too at the heart of England (Woolf’s scandalous argument in Three Guineas, her essay on women and war, written two years before).12 Virginia Woolf is not the only woman writer to tread this path. There are echoes here of Rosa Luxemburg writing on the ethics of violence: ‘a man who hastens to perform an important deed and unthinkingly treads on a worm on his way is committing a crime.’13 In the hands of Woolf, the world crumbles and precariously restores itself, in response to a history to which she could not possibly know if literature would any longer be equal (even asking the question does not wholly make sense). History is not backdrop. More like an unwelcome visitor, grinding all certainties into the dust; or a snake suffocating on its own prey. That image might do as a less lyrical, profane version of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’ with his face turned to the past as the wreckage of history piles up at his feet.14 In Woolf’s hands, the historical crisis and the collapse of belief in the integrity of the self are inseparable: ‘“Myself” – it was impossible.’ This is a late work by Woolf, but it casts its shadow back across the century. What it suggests is that the famous loss of authority, proclaimed by modernism, is visceral, neither measured nor polite, and inseparable from forms of historical violence for which we are accountable, but which the mind finds almost impossible to get the measure of or fully to countenance (the two points are the reverse sides of the same coin).
A striking instance of what I am trying to convey occurs in Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism, in which he laments its passing. He is commenting on Rosalind Krauss’s reading of Picasso’s 1912 collages, in which drawings of a violin are intercut with pieces of newspaper. The fragments are replete with the horrors of the Balkan war which had started that year. After Krauss, Josipovici concludes that we cannot read them either as a statement of Picasso’s pacifism nor even, as some critics have suggested, as conversation pieces with left-leaning friends who shared his antipathy to war. ‘Both’, Josipovici asserts with dismaying authority, ‘are false conclusions, both deny the radical multivoicedness of Picasso’s collage.’15 But if you go back to Krauss’s Picasso Papers, the break-up of the visual space and the Balkan atrocity are more deeply connected than this might suggest. This is Krauss: ‘Another depth speaks as well from the very surface of the newsprint fragment […] This is the “depth” – historical, imaginative, political – of a place to which the word Tchataldja [which stands out on the page] refers, the name of the battle site in the Balkans from which this dispatch was sent.’16
At the moment of the collages, André Tudesq, editor of the avant-garde magazine Les Soirées de Paris, one of Picasso’s friends, was reporting on the wars. In one of his dispatches, he tells the story of a battle in which the Turks were routed. ‘A pursuing Serb,’ Krauss continues, ‘obeying the rules of combat, asks a wounded soldier: “Christian or Muslim?” Receiving no answer he lops off the soldier’s head.’17 Krauss is indeed impatient of those who, drawing on the history she has herself so meticulously documented, would conclude that what we are listening to is Picasso’s beliefs – including, presumably, his hatred of war. These paintings are not statements. But what seems to be missed in this discussion is the possibility that there might be the most intimate relationship between, on the one hand, the disintegrating form and, on the other, the history, dense to the point of illegibility, which is being offered, but also torn to pieces, on the page. Picasso is multi-voiced. Of course. But how and why? A soldier either will not answer a death-dealing question or is unable momentarily to find the strength and voice of his own faith. What does lopping off his head – crushing snakes – have to do with the difficulty of modernism? Everything, I would suggest. Freud’s moment on the Acropolis, Woolf’s snake in the garden, are telling us that the effort to get our minds around history comes at a potentially deadly cost. Which is why describing modernism in terms of the loss of literary authority, or as an inability to subdue history to the word, strikes me as insufficient. What I have been describing is more delirious than that. If we resist knowledge of the violence of history, then what does such violence, when it makes its way onto the page, do to literary writing? We can hardly expect it to remain demurely in place.
From inside another suppressed history, Toni Morrison’s 1996 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Beloved, makes this delirium palpable. This should be enough to secure her place in any pageant of troubled writing, as she bears witness to our inability to confront one of the worst chapters of Western history. Morrison is enjoining America to remember slavery. In interviews she has explicitly stated that this was her intention. She then gives us that history, not as document or in the form of realist narrative, but as a hallucinogenic trans-generational haunting over which the story, the reader, the characters, can get absolutely no grip. ‘Nights are becoming sleepless,’ she writes of the novel. She is bringing racial trauma out of the dark, since ‘race’, she suggests, is still ‘a virtually unspeakable thing’.18 The book tells the story of Sethe, who murdered her baby rather than allow her to be taken back into slavery and who is then visited by that child as a young woman ghost. Already we are in a world which defies comprehension and whose story can barely be told. The book begins: ‘124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.’19 In a brilliant article on her own writing, Morrison comments on why she chose to open her novel with numbers rather than words: ‘numbers have no adjectives, no posture of coziness or grandeur or the haughty yearning of arrivistes and estate builders for the parallel beautification of the nation they left behind, laying claim to instant history and legend.’20 No beautification, no instant history, nothing cosy or grand. If you are going to tell this history, it cannot be in the old forms. This is the modernist question deflected through the annals of race. In those first words – ‘124 was spiteful’ – she took the risk, as she puts it, of confronting the reader ‘with what must be immediately incomprehensible’. That ‘must’ is wonderfully ambiguous: ‘should’ or ‘cannot help but be’. As if to say: This you cannot, should not, try to understand, but I will nonetheless take you there.
At one point in the novel, Sethe is talking to her other, living daughter Denver. Denver has hallucinated another young woman, Amy, who once long ago rescued Sethe. With no foreknowledge of who this woman is, or of the event lost in her mother’s past, Denver sees her, in a white dress, wrapping her arms around her mother, massaging her swollen legs and feet. How can this be? How can you see what is not there? On the other side of repressed memory. Beloved presents us with memory in your face. Not too little memory, but too much. Memory which, like the murdered baby, has insanely become flesh. How can you, can anyone, get their mind around this? Far from being dropped from contemporary writing, this fundamental question of modernism, under pressure of an unspeakable history of violence, has been raised by Toni Morrison to a new pitch. Sethe is talking:
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What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there … And you think it is you thinking it up … But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else … if you go there – you who was never there – if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So, Denver, you can’t never go there. Never. Because even though it’s all over – over and done with – it’s going to always be there waiting for you.21
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Morrison’s writing stitches the question of what can be verbally transmitted through the generations into the fabric of the words. Today we know that this legacy of slavery is still with us given the return of slave labour, whether in the form of Thai fishermen, subjected to inhumanly degrading treatment, whose catch feeds the prawns which land on the
dining tables of the West; or the migrant women workers, lured to Great Britain with the promise of freedom and wages, who find themselves locked into the basements of Knightsbridge and Kensington homes – in one report, round the corner from where Virginia Woolf once lived.22 In 2016, University College London launched the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project, directed by the feminist historian Catherine Hall, which has tracked the material, financial legacy of slavery in Great Britain. It was met with a chorus of denials (‘not in the UK, surely not, this was surely America’s problem’) at the same time as getting over two million hits in the days it went live.23 After the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in the midst of the pandemic, and the renewed confrontation with slavery it has provoked, the organisers found themselves bombarded with media requests, as the site acquired new, urgent relevance.
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As we encountered her first in the previous chapter, Eimear McBride is today’s writer of sexual abuse. She has picked up the trail of literary modernism and shoved it, screaming and kicking, into a new eviscerating phase. When she made her first appearance in 2013 with A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, she proudly trailed James Joyce in her wake, stating her allegiance to European modernism. In this alone, she sees off the argument that modernism has been betrayed by most of today’s fiction (as if, with reference to the UK, literature had prematurely taken the path of Brexit). McBride has stated firmly that she wishes to be considered as a European writer: ‘I’d like to set up my stall as a European writer […] I probably belong in the diaspora set because I only have clarity from a distance.’24 Her greatest debt is to Ulysses. It overturned her universe, changing everything she had ever understood about what language could do. As a woman in her twenties, already intent on being a writer, she opened its first page on a bus in Tottenham, North London, and, when she got off at Liverpool Street, ‘I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say the entire course of my life had changed.’25 In the hands of McBride, modernism is alive and well (although being alive and well is precisely what A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing throws into the deepest question).
On Violence and On Violence Against Women Page 20