NeMLA board of directors 2022–2023
EXECUTIVE BOARD
JOSEPH VALENTE, University at Buffalo President
MODHUMITA ROY, Tufts University Vice President
VICTORIA L. KETZ, La Salle University Second Vice President
BERNADETTE WEGENSTEIN, Johns Hopkins University Past President OFFICERS
CARINE MARDOROSSIAN, University at Buffalo Executive Director
ASHLEY BYCZKOWSKI, University at Buffalo Associate Director
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
DONAVAN L. RAMON, Kentucky State University American and Diaspora Studies Director
THOMAS LYNN, Penn State Berks British and Global Anglophone Studies Director
FRANCISCO DELGADO, Borough of Manhattan Community College–CUNY, CAITY Caucus President and Representative
JULIA TITUS, Yale University Comparative Literature Director
MARIA MATZ, University of Massachusetts–Lowell Creative Writing, Publishing, and Editing Director
KATHLEEN KASTEN-MUTKUS, Stony Brook University–SUNY Cultural Studies and Media Studies Director
JENNIFER MDURVWA, University at Buffalo Diversity Caucus President
YVES-ANTOINE CLEMMEN, Stetson University French and Francophone Studies Director
CHARLES VANNETTE, University of New Hampshire German Studies Director
CHRISTIAN YLAGAN, Western University Graduate Student Caucus Representative
ESTHER ALARCON-ARANA, Salve Regina University Hispanic and Lusophone Studies Director
TIZIANO CHERUBINI, Baylor University Italian Studies Director
JINA LEE, Westchester Community College–SUNY Professionalization and Pedagogy Director
JUSTINE DYMOND, Springfield College Women’s and Gender Studies Caucus Director
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MLS 52.2 contents
Articles
Art Spiegelman’s Maus Lucas Wilson
“Remember, my house it’s also your house too”: Survivor-Family Homes as Postmemorial Structures in
Breton’s Nadja Kelly Baron
Modern Love: Negative Affect in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and André
Foer’s Tree of Codes Barry Laga Fiction & Creative Non-Fiction Lauren Barbato: Dhamma Talks Ruby Zheng: Heaven’s Mouth Review Amitav Ghosh. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis Rajender Kaur NeMLA Notes: On the 54th Annual Convention Theme From the President 10 34 50 70 86 102 108
Aestheticizing Loss: Jonathan Safran
52.2
articles
LUCAS WILSON UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY
Examining the connection between photographs, trauma, and “memory” for the children of Holocaust survivors— those known as the second generation—
Marianne Hirsch proposes the term postmemory, which she defines as “the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated” ( Family Frames 22). Hirsch explains further that postmemory is “a structure of inter- and transgenerational return of traumatic knowledge and embodied experience. It is a consequence of traumatic recall but […] at a generational remove” (The Generation of Postmemory 6, emphasis original). She employs the term structure in reference to the arrangement of relationships between past and present, specifically mediated by the family unit. But her description of postmemory qua structure lends itself well to understanding the actual homes of survivor families as postmemorial structures. I propose the term postmemorial structures to communicate how survivor-family homes—the very physical, domestic milieus in which the second generation1 inhabited and continues to inhabit—have functioned as sites of traumatic and epistemic transference. Household objects, spatial arrangements and negotiations of family members, and domestic architecture have all carried postmemorial significance for many children of survivors, communicating and perpetuating the perceived collapse of past and present that has so defined and continues to define the space of their homes. Building on Hirsch’s theory of postmemory, I not only demonstrate the symbolic relationship between postmemorial structures and those who live within
them but I further establish how sharing space in survivor-family homes and living in such close proximity to survivors shaped and traumatically marked their offspring.
As an emblematic representation of postmemory, Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic narrative Maus—along with its precursor, the original 1972 three-page “Maus” comic presents itself as an illustrative case study for how survivor-family homes can be understood as postmemorial structures. Maus serves as a privileged text to examine postmemorial structures in large part because of the spatial elements of its graphic form. In addition to protagonist Artie’s2 discussions of his various domestic spaces, the visual/graphic elements of the text enrich the spatial analysis of his postmemorial structures.3 In Maus, domestic space can be “read” as a generative entry point into Artie’s relationship to the Shoah from childhood to adulthood. It is through my proposed topoanalysis 4 of Artie’s domestic life that I examine how the shared space of his childhood home assists in amplifying the intergenerational transposition of trauma and Holocaust knowledge. Moreover, I topoanalyze the graphic narrative’s depiction of Artie’s adulthood home, suggesting that his parents’ memories indelibly altered and continue to alter his metaphysical existence—specifically his perception of space and time—long after moving out on his own. Maus presents Artie’s childhood and adulthood homes as spaces that map, mirror, and mediate his postmemorial connection to the Holocaust, revealing how the structures of survivor-family homes are not only fitting metaphors for the psyches of the children of survivors in second-generation literature, but Maus further demonstrates how postmemorial structures operate as integral catalysts in the relay of secondhand
12 Modern Language Studies 52.2
trauma and embodied knowledge—that is, in the creation of postmemory.
To be sure, the text’s presentation of space— specifically its formal use of space as an artistic consideration—is not new in the scholarship surrounding Maus, yet the subjects of domestic space as metaphor for Artie’s psyche and of domestic space as a significant contributing factor in the production of postmemory have not been broached in detail. Several critics discuss Spiegelman’s artistic manipulation of space throughout the Maus project, analyzing, for instance, the four-page spliced-in comic in Maus I, “Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History” (“Hell Planet” from here forward)— particularly its use of dark gutters that distinguishes it from the rest of the text. I focus, however, less on the formal/artistic use of space as it pertains to the comics medium (e.g., panels, frames, bleeding, zip-ribbons), although I indeed incorporate some such elements into my analysis. I instead concentrate on the representation of Artie’s childhood and adulthood homes, examining the affective qualities of his domestic spaces as they are presented in the text. It is with this focus that we are able to see how the subject of space in Maus offers insight into how postmemory ineradicably shapes Artie’s domestic— and, certainly, extra-domestic—lived experiences.
Maus recurrently highlights the connection between space and Artie’s emotional relations to his parents, Vladek and Anja, and to their Holocaust traumas. Barbara Mann throws light on this relationship between space, self, and others, explaining that “the spatial contours of home, in a physical, even architectural sense, often constitute a way of describing relations with other people” (81). Through what one member of the second generation refers to as “wordless osmosis” (Epstein 137)—and, of
course, in part through direct references to the Holocaust—the second generation assumed their parents’ traumas as if they were their own in the shared space of their postmemorial structures. As this “osmotic” process of postmemorial transference found spatial expression in survivor-family homes and as the second generation’s domestic experiences molded their perceptions of the everyday, their inherited traumas were forcibly interjected into their cognition. If we accept Gaston Bachelard’s proposition that the home is a person’s “first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word” (4)—in many ways analogous to the womb—it can be seen how postmemorial structures were and are the foundational frameworks through which the second generation has perceived themselves in relation to their parents and their parents’ Holocaust pasts, as is clear in Maus.
Spiegelman’s work reveals how postmemorial structures—spaces shaped by survivors’ habits, gestures, interactions, neuroses, Holocaust experiences, and traumas—have served as vehicles that often disrupted the second generation’s perception of linear time. It was within their postmemorial structures that the second generation experienced what may be called an incongruous experience of time: a recurrent, perceived collapse of past and present that created a space of unstable temporality. The second generation’s incongruous experience of time—that which precariously extended the past into and perceptually ruptured the present—“thickened,” so to speak, the second generation’s experiences of the here-and-now with a dual valence of temporal simultaneity. Indeed, the present not uncommonly became impregnated with, captive to, and haunted by the second generation’s imagined constructions of their parents’ Holocaust pasts. The
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dearth of an orderly perception of time that was common in postmemorial structures was compounded by what Mikhail Bakhtin refers to as “a hyperbolization of time,” where “the peculiar distortion of temporal perspectives characteristic of dreams” became manifest (154). Indeed, throughout Maus, Spiegelman punctuates his narrative with dream-like moments—most notably in “Hell Planet” and the second chapter of Maus II, “Auschwitz (Time Flies)”—that blur the line between waking life and the dream world, where the nightmarish past impinges upon the present and unsettles linear temporal order in the home. These fantastical moments issue forth in Artie’s postmemorial structures throughout his life as he attempts to navigate traumatic pasts that were never his, pasts that are a function not of firsthand memories but of what he imagines to be his parents’ Holocaust experiences. With such an understanding of postmemorial structures as catalysts and amplifiers of postmemory that have affected the second generation’s perception of time and space, I explore in this study the domesticating effects (and affects) of living in the Spiegelman family home.
ARTIE’S CHILDHOOD HOME
The prologue of Maus I establishes the affective climate of Artie’s childhood home in Rego Park. Spiegelman himself sheds light on how this first scene sets up the ways by which Artie’s childhood (along with his adulthood) is shaped by the recurrent intrusion of his parents’ Holocaust traumas into the present: “The prologue itself is a form of dipping into the past, though not visually represented, but I figured those first two pages would function,
thematically, as a fractal of the whole book. It seemed that positing this sort of normal childhood moment with a chilling shadow cast over it was an appropriate lead-in” (MetaMaus 208). In this opening scene, Artie trips as he is roller-skating with friends— friends who represent the social world writ large and who, like Vladek’s social contacts during the Holocaust, are revealed as untrustworthy. Artie then returns home, whimpering, and approaches Vladek, who asks him to assist with some woodwork. He explains what his friends did, to which Vladek responds, “Friends? Your friends? ... If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week. ... then you could see what it is, friends!” (Maus I 5, emphasis original). Vladek’s request for Artie to hold a plank of wood, to aid him with his physical woodwork, serves as a platform for him to implicate his son into assisting him with the emotional work of listening to his traumatic past. His physical labor mirrors his emotional labor, illustrating how quotidian tasks and everyday events in the Spiegelman family home consistently become vehicles for Vladek to talk about his Holocaust wounds and for Artie to assume such lingering traumas secondhandedly—like, for instance, when later in the narrative Vladek guilts Artie for accidentally dropping ashes on the carpet after he tells him how difficult it was to clean up a horse stable under the supervision of Nazis (52). Vladek’s repeated references to the Holocaust documented in Maus, as well as the myriad references he makes throughout Artie’s life, elucidate why Artie would later say, “No matter what I accomplish, it doesn’t seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz” (Maus II 44). Indeed, as Vladek disregards his son’s pain and forces him into acting as his interlocutor, as one who must listen to his stories from his dark past, the prologue sets up for readers
14 Modern Language Studies 52.2
how Artie functions as a sounding board for his father, not only as one whose pain is minimized in comparison to Vladek’s but also as one who must continually confront his father’s horrific past throughout his youth (and adulthood).
The prologue further establishes how Artie relates to his postmemorial structure and how his relationship to his childhood home reflects his belated relationship to the Shoah. We are first introduced to Artie as he races away from his home in the first two panels; though we do not actually see him departing from his house, it is clear that he has recently left and is heading elsewhere. His domestic departure can be understood in this scene not only as Artie on his way to play with his friends. In truth, he may be trying to avoid helping his father with his woodwork, but his departure can also be read as him escaping his house, his parents, and their attendant traumas. However, inasmuch as he must return home after his roller-skating accident, he must also confront the postmemories that his home both represents and sustains; although escape from his postmemorial structure and his parents’ traumas is desired, he is woefully resigned (as symbolized by his tearful homecoming) to return to and confront both. As he approaches his father “fixing something” in front of the house (Maus I 5), the text visually connects Vladek-as-builder to the building behind him. Such a connection codes the Spiegelman family home in terms of Vladek’s “construction”—or, more accurately, re-construction—of his Holocaust past, particularly in light of how he recounts his memory of hunger and imprisonment during the Holocaust (5). With Vladek’s speech bubbles overlaying the façade of the home in these frames, the content of these speech bubbles colors how we are to “read” the Spiegelmans’ domicile; as
the survivor’s speech bubbles cover the home in this scene, it can be said that their home is “covered,” as it were, by stories of the Shoah. Spiegelman concludes the scene with Artie’s postmemorial structure—that which is covered by and imbued with his parents’ Holocaust pasts—in the bottom frame looming large behind Artie and Vladek. The size of the postmemorial structure in comparison to Artie suggests the enormity of how he must confront his parents’ Holocaust traumas within (and, as is made clear, in front of) their home. By closing the prologue with the image of little Artie and Vladek in front of the large Spiegelman family home in a frame that is twice the size of the other panels on the page, the text emphasizes the large role of Artie’s postmemorial structure in the transmission of trauma and embodied knowledge from parent to child.
The 1972 “Maus” comic offers a portrait of Artie listening to Vladek’s Holocaust stories, albeit inside the home, but in the 1972 comic we are able to see how Artie positions himself in such stories, which frames how he experiences his domestic space growing up. Artie—referred in the 1972 comic to as Mickey (a nod to the American icon Mickey Mouse)—lies in the safety of his father’s lap before bed, listening to him recount his Holocaust experiences (MetaMaus 105). The way in which the narration of the past in the 1972 comic is structured—with Vladek’s words not contained within the actual frame, that is, with his narration situated above and/or below the drawings themselves—demonstrates how although his father’s stories buttress and largely inform Mickey’s/Artie’s imagination, it is Mickey/Artie who reconstructs his father’s stories (and he does so imaginatively), which thereby creates room for Mickey/Artie to adopt such imagined memories as his own. Clearly,
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the separation of his father’s narration and the images themselves could be read as a temporal division between Vladek’s retrospective recounting of the events and the events themselves. But the structuring of the narration in this bedroom scene holds additional implications. That his father’s narration is outside of, though nonetheless connected to, the events/images that Mickey/ Artie imagines affords him the “space,” so to speak, to position himself within his imaginative reconstructions of such stories.
Indeed, despite how the “M” on the mice’s armbands could be understood as standing for “Maus,” the “M” may reasonably also stand for “Mickey” in such an imaginative reconstruction, illustrating how Mickey/Artie inventively attempts to place himself in the shoes of those who went through the Holocaust. His father even says to him, “Children like you still played in the streets sometimes. They played funerals and they played gravedigger!” (106, emphasis original). The comparison he draws between the children of the ghetto and his son serves as an invitation for Mickey/Artie to place himself in his bedtime story specifically and in the narrative of the Holocaust more broadly, which Mickey/Artie does as he imagines a small child playing gravedigger who strikingly resembles the Mickey/Artie we see in bed. Such an imagistic double for Mickey/Artie reveals how Mickey/ Artie figures himself into his father’s stories that give voice—and, as it were, give image—to his postmemories. As the stories he hears aid in laying the groundwork for his postmemories, Mickey’s/Artie’s childhood home assumes the affective quality of what one member of the second generation refers to as “a concentration camp of the mind” (Mason and Fogelman), thereby rendering the Spiegelman family home a space that continually sustains the affective
states of anxiety and fear for young Artie/Mickey. Contrasting how the 1972 “Maus” comic depicts Vladek offering a detailed story to Mickey/Artie, Spiegelman-as-author describes how his “parents didn’t talk in any coherent or comprehensive way about what they had lived through. It was always a given that they had lived through ‘the War,’ which was their term for the Holocaust” (MetaMaus 12). He goes on to explain that he was made aware of his parents’ experiences largely “from passing references in [their] home” (12-13). Such indirect allusions to the Holocaust, which he refers to as “free-floating shards of anecdote” (22), in addition to the actual stories his parents told him (14), contributed to his knowledge of and inherited trauma from the Holocaust. Moreover, particular objects contained within the home offered Spiegelman visual/material connections to the camps. He explains how some of the books and pamphlets published in Polish and Yiddish he found in his parents’ den afforded him insight into what his parents underwent: “Some of those had photographs and drawings too—these gave me my first full and conscious realization that something enormous and devastating had hit my family” (15). The presence of these objects—a presence that ironically spoke of profound absence—further assisted in the imaginative transformation of his home into a site of Holocaust trauma. Artie, who parallels Spiegelman-as-author, explains how he imaginatively transforms his home into Auschwitz—a function of him grappling with his inherited traumas. He describes his childhood home to his wife Françoise: “When I was a kid I used to think about which of my parents I’d let the Nazis take to the ovens if I could only save one of them” (Maus II 14). This description uncovers how his childhood domicile stands as the imagined setting
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of a Selektion in a reversed Sophie’s Choice scenario, a point which Daniel R. Schwarz also notes (295); the home imaginatively becomes the concentration camp that traumatically defined his parents’ lives, the site of atrocity where he deliberates over matters of life and death. This imagined deliberation—that which would have likely taken place at the ramp leading into Auschwitz—then leads to the transmutation of his bathroom into a gas chamber, where victims were sent after Selektion : “Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t obsessed with this stuff … It’s just that sometimes I’d fantasize Zyklon B coming out of our shower instead of water” (Spiegelman, Maus II 16). Here, it seems as if Artie doth protest too much given how his childhood preoccupation with the Holocaust appears quite obsessive; he explains the ways by which his imagination collapsed the past and the present and thereby transmuted the space of the home into a fantastical gas chamber. Such moments reveal how Artie’s childhood home both catalyzes and exacerbates the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Akin to how Vladek turns everyday moments into occasions to talk about the Shoah, so too do daily, commonplace activities like showering engender thoughts of the Holocaust, along with attendant postmemorial anxiety and fear. The affective space that Artie shares, a space where he is in close proximity to and in recurrent contact with his parents, indeed intensifies the intergenerational transference of trauma.
LIVING IN HIS CHILDHOOD HOME AS AN ADULT
Artie’s conflicted relationship to his parents finds additional expression in the brief interlude “Hell
Planet,” where Spiegelman illustrates how, even as an adult, Artie struggles with the domesticating effects/affects of living with his mother and father in Rego Park. Of course, Artie is the one who agrees to return to his childhood home and live with his parents after his time in a state psychiatric hospital (Maus I 100). But as an adult, he is unable to move outside of the emotional and psychological containment of the postmemories that his childhood home sustains. Examining Spiegelman-as-author’s relationship to his parents’ home and what eventually drove him to the psychiatric hospital, Michael Levine explains:
In his essay “Mad Youth,” Spiegelman describes the Rego Park house in which he grew up as a “two-family brick pillbox.” While the pun on “pillbox” depicts the family residence as a place where drugs and the trauma of the war cohabited, this same house is figured elsewhere as a suffocating womb. “What happened to me the winter I flipped out was that I had gotten the bends; I had surfaced too quickly from the overheated bunker of my traumatized family ... into the heady atmosphere of freedom.” Not only is the “pillbox” now an “overheated bunker,” but Spiegelman’s emergence from the oceanic depths of this home is a birth trauma inseparable from the trauma of his mother’s death. (86)
Levine’s discussion of the home qua womb points to the foundational role of the Spiegelman family home in the formation of Artie’s traumatized psyche—a point I discuss in greater detail below. But what is of immediate significance here is how Spiegelman describes his parents’ home as an “overheated bunker.” This description reveals, at
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least in part, how he conceived of his childhood home: a space of postmemorial domestication. Spiegelman employs numerous metaphors to describe his home throughout his work—many of which include sites of Holocaust trauma. Indeed, this description of the domicile-as-bunker (a space of confinement and hiding), which Spiegelman describes elsewhere as “claustrophobic” (“Mad Youth” 22), connects to the other Holocaust comparisons throughout Maus: the home-as-gas-chamber (a space with no escape) and home-as-concentration-camp (a space of containment and enslavement).
Presenting Artie’s childhood home as a concentration camp/prison, “Hell Planet” offers the story of Artie’s recollection of his mother’s suicide as it relates to his inherited trauma.
Prior to Anja’s suicide, we see Artie as an adult wearing a concentration camp/prison uniform (though it is unclear which, and such ambiguity allows for a both/and reading of his clothing) (Maus I 100)—a point I discuss elsewhere (Wilson 89).5
However, at this point, we do not yet see his home represented as a prison. It is not until he recounts his last interaction with Anja before her suicide that his bedroom transforms into a metaphorical
prison-like mise-en-scène. Her suicide, overwhelming him with a large measure of guilt, is also the catalyst that intensifies his already-obsessive preoccupation with death and his parents’ experiences during the Shoah. But Anja’s death is not that which figuratively incarcerates him in the first place. Rather, we see her reading to him in a concentration camp/prisoner uniform as a child (Maus I 103), which signals how his trauma finds its genesis much earlier in his childhood. Since Artie’s childhood home serves as a spatialization of his traumas, cognition, and emotions, Maus’s representation of the Spiegelman family home points to the domesticating—or, more appropriately in the context of “Hell Planet,” the imprisoning—effects/ affects of living in his childhood postmemorial structure while living there as an adult. Though not directly related to postmemorial structures, it is noteworthy how “Hell Planet” offers a developed portrait of Anja’s psychosocial imprisonment of Artie through the off-kilter 1968 photograph of him and his mother (100). The body language of young Artie and his mother in the photograph taken at Trojan Lake, NY, at the start of the four-page spliced-in comic points to the connection he has with her—a connection that Hirsch refers to in a different context as “a self-in-relation” (Family Frames 2). His choice
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to include this photo, with Anja physically touching him as a young boy, announces at the beginning of the comic how he is constitutively a product of both his childhood and his relationship to his mother. Yet, her hand atop his head does not simply signal a benign connection between mother and son, especially given the tilted orientation of the photo that gestures toward a destabilized relationship. The placement of her hand on his head “might be seen as a protective / repressive gesture” (Bosmajian 38), containing what Spiegelman refers to as “some subtext” (MetaMaus 218), insofar as it points to his mother’s cognitive control that over/shadows his psyche. Spiegelman offers insight into his understanding of the photo, explaining:
This image both had the innocence of childhood with my five-foot-tall mother as a large figure with me kneeling next to her, but showed her hand on my head with a certain kind of body language that said: “Stay small, my boy. Don’t grow up.” If I try to understand what happened, part of her suicide had to do with feeling unmoored as I was breaking away from the nuclear family. Keeping a hand on a head is both a maternal gesture, but also a pushing down when somebody’s trying to get up. (218)
His personal reading of the “subtext” sheds light on the multiple ways by which the photo can be interpreted in “Hell Planet.” Susan Jacobowitz suggests that Anja “looks as if she is holding him down” (63). The placement of Anja’s hand can further be understood as illustrating her psychological control over her son’s impressionable mind. As Anja and Artie’s body language can be read as representative of how she passes along her traumatic knowledge to her
son through her contiguity to him, the photo reinforces how we are to view Artie as stunted psychosocially and affectively in an infantilized state of postmemorial struggle in the shadow of his mother. Of course, throughout the rest of the text Artie is depicted “in infantile attitudes and postures; petulance, anger, sulkiness, self-pity, and ingratiating gestures signal the need for the acknowledgment he failed and fails to receive” (Bosmajian 30). But the photo of him and Anja at the beginning of “Hell Planet”—given his childish posture and her position of dominance—serves as the very lens through which we read the entirety of “Hell Planet.” Through this photo we see Artie as one whose existence is defined by his relationship to the past, his relationship to his mother, and, by extension, her experiences during the Holocaust.
This photo sheds light specifically on Anja and Artie’s interaction in his bedroom before her suicide. The exaggerated body-shapes and distorted representation of space, both domestic and extra-domestic, reveal how Artie becomes increasingly psychologically and emotionally unstable after Anja dies. But such spatial embellishment and manipulation can further be seen in the frames that depict Anja before her suicide, demonstrating how living with his emotionally dependent and traumatized mother results in a distorted perception of reality. Anja’s exaggerated size, which Hamida Bosmajian also notes (40), as she enters Artie’s room—starkly larger than the small, hunchedover Artie—almost filling the entire doorframe both vertically and laterally, along with the size of her abnormally large hands, speaks to her immense, overbearing presence in the home as well as her lingering presence after her death.
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Indeed, as the Spiegelman family home stands as a postmemorial structure that mirrors Artie’s psyche, Anja’s entrance into his bedroom—a private space, commonly considered “the innermost part of the home” (Mann 96)—reads as a psychological intrusion that mirrors her trespass into his private thoughts and cognition. Her looming presence as she inches closer and closer to him, dramatically illustrated as she kneels behind her son in the center middle frame, does not seem to be a new phenomenon for Artie. For he angrily turns his back to her for again invading his (psychological) space (Spiegelman, Maus I 103). As he turns his back, both literally and figuratively (Levine 82), he attempts to wall himself off from her domesticating presence, distancing himself in an act of emotional and psychological self-protection. Yet, his clothing, in tandem with how he describes being “resentful of the way she tightened the umbilical cord” (Spiegelman, Maus I 103), speaks to the seeming impossibility of completely separating himself from his mother’s controlling influence. Levine explains how the “asphyxiating umbilical cord” “introduced significantly in the penultimate moment before the mother’s suicide, seems to function less like a nurturing lifeline than a tightening hangman’s noose” (83, 82). The metaphor of Artie’s biological connection to Anja (the “umbilical cord”) gestures toward how his mother continues to “feed” him her death-dealing trauma (epigenetically?). This biological metaphor works in concert with his sartorial connection (the prisoner garb) to her, suggesting that he is symbolically a prisoner to the past like his mother, insofar as he “wears” clothing representing her past that he traumatically inherits. Artie’s attempt to wall himself off proves futile because the moment Anja exits the room, his guilt becomes evident again,
leaving him alone to sort through his competing, ambivalent feelings toward her.
With Anja’s closing of his bedroom door, ushering in the arresting transformation of his bedroom into a prison (Spiegelman, Maus I 103), the text reveals how Artie finds himself isolated and locked inside the prison of his postmemories that he must negotiate by himself. Even though Artie attempts to separate himself from his mother, it is Anja who closes the bedroom door, the door to his “cell,” which demonstrates the central role that Spiegelman depicts Anja playing in incarcerating him in the postmemorial structure that she and her husband, albeit unintentionally, created. Indeed, his postmemories of the Holocaust and his conflicted relationship to her death converge in the top center frame on the last page of “Hell Planet,” which Victoria Elmwood refers to as “a single, very cramped […] square, suggesting the cramped, stifling ‘headspace’ in which this emotional struggle takes place” (711). Also discussing this “headspace,” Hillary Chute explains that “Spiegelman obsessively layers several temporalities in one tiny frame, understood by the conventions of the comics medium to represent one moment in time” (208). The different drawing-style of this top center “headspace” frame contains the bolded and capitalized phrases “MENOPAUSAL DEPRESSION,” “HITLER DID IT,” “MOMMY,” and “BITCH,” which distinguishes this frame from the others on the page (Spiegelman, Maus I 103, emphasis original); this crowded, cluttered, and disordered frame with its multiple temporalities indeed points to Artie’s troubled mental state. However, as this top center “headspace” frame can be understood as representing Artie’s psyche, so too can the frames that follow be read as cognitive “spaces” that reveal the imagined collapse of past
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and present, reinforcing the notion that his bedroom operates as a postmemorial prison cell. The repeated shading of his bedroom walls (103), like the shading of the living room walls (101), in a pattern that resembles thin prison bars—visual precursors to the prison bars we see in the last three frames of “Hell Planet”—again concretizes how Artie’s postmemorial structure assists in incarcerating him. Such imagery points to the destabilization of both time and space in his parents’ home. This destabilization is underscored by the comics medium itself. “In a medium where time and space merge so completely,” Scott McCloud explains, “the distinction often vanishes,” and both time and space are thus “one and the same” (102). This is not to say that there is no distinction between time and space in Artie’s childhood postmemorial structure (nor is McCloud claiming that time and space are isomorphic, as spacetime theorists like Einstein are wont to posit). But there is a perceived collapse of time that throws into chaos a clear distinction between the there/then and the here/now for Artie. This confused temporal division finds further expression through the image of the disembodied slit wrist on the last page of “Hell Planet.” As Artie calls to Anja after her death, he accuses the deceased Anja of murdering him and announces how her emotional grip on him, compounded by her suicide, circumscribes his entire existence (Spiegelman, Maus I 103). This notion of his mother murdering him is reinforced in the top center frame of the last page of “Hell Planet,” where we see a hand slitting a wrist (103); it appears that Anja is slitting her own wrist in the bathroom, but it could also be read—by virtue of these hands/arms being disembodied—as Anja slitting Artie’s wrist. Such a reading opens up multiple interpretations of whose wrist is, metaphorically,
being slit, thus speaking to the intergenerational transference of trauma and the knowledge that led to Artie’s metaphorical death. Artie fights to keep his emotions straight, as he struggles to ascertain where he is, when he is, and ultimately who he is, as the distinction between his historical moment and the defining historical moments of his parents’ pasts is muddied. This image of the disembodied slit wrist therefore gestures toward Artie’s struggle to separate his own subjectivity from the subjectivities of his progenitors, particularly in the space of the Spiegelman family home.
After Anja’s death, we see how Vladek forces Artie to console him, obliging Artie to parent his parent and thereby function as his father’s comforter. That Artie must occupy this parental role is not surprising, for it is quite common for members of the second generation to find themselves in such a position. For example, in Helen Epstein’s Children of the Holocaust, one child of survivors describes her relationship with her parents, stating, “It was not as if they were the parents and we were the children. We became the parents sometimes and I didn’t like that. I would throw tantrums and rebel against the idea of protecting them, unlike my brother, who was always their protector. We often try to protect each other, even now. […] We’re always trying to shield each other from pain” (27). Similarly, as Vladek clings to his son and as he makes Artie sleep on the floor with him (Spiegelman, Maus I 102), along with when he cleaves to Artie upon his arrival home (101), the role-reversal between father and son becomes painfully apparent. Yet, the position Artie is in when he first greets his mourning father— that is, his stooped-down posture on one knee with his gaze directed straight into the eyes of the reader—is an imagistic citation of the position Artie
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assumes when looking directly into the camera in the 1968 photograph of him and his mother at Trojan Lake. This postural connection between childhood Artie and adulthood Artie speaks to the precarious roles Artie is expected to adopt: that of Vladek and Anja’s son and simultaneously that of their comforter/ consoler (seen by how he must both embrace his father and also offer his mother confirmation of his love) (103). Such an impossible dual role—of being simultaneously their child and their proxy-parent— that Artie feels he must assume is one of the many ways he is reminded of his troubled relationship to his parents that is shaped by and in many ways a result of the Shoah. This troubled relationship repeatedly compels him to confront and negotiate palpable “emanations” of firsthand Holocaust memories that were never actually his but nonetheless wounded him as if they were (Hoffman 9).
It is thus understandable why Artie sought out Vladek to tell him more about Anja’s life during the Holocaust: his diligent search for his mother’s stories for the Maus project speaks to his effort to reconnect with her, one whom he tried to (or had to?) keep at an emotional distance for much of his life. Dominick
LaCapra views Artie’s central concern as the retrieval of Anja’s story: “Anja seems to become a phantasmic archive that Artie hopes will provide him with a point of entry into the elusive, seemingly redemptive past that he tries to recapture. Indeed, at times she seems to be her lost papers, and when they are destroyed, she almost shares their fate” (172). In agreement with LaCapra, Hirsch explains:
Maus is dominated by this absence of Anja’s voice, the destruction of her diaries, her missing note. Anja is recollected by others; she remains a visual and not an aural presence. She speaks
in sentences imagined by her son or recollected by her husband. In their memory she is mystified, objectified, shaped to the needs and desires of the one who remembers—whether it be Vladek or Art. (Family Frames 33)
Indeed, Artie’s emphatic preoccupation with his mother’s story that he seeks to hear through his father’s mouth operates in connection to the Oedipal conflict to which a number of scholars point (e.g. LaCapra 144; Hirsch, Family Frames 35; E. Miller Budick 81; Eric Berlatsky 147; Miles Orvell 124; Barry Laga 80-83). His wish to better understand and imaginatively inhabit Anja’s story gives voice to his desire to secure a fundamental sense of safety, security, and comfort of the maternal brand that he was unable to feel fully both as a child and as an adult. But in order to move forward and find a sense of at-home-ness, Artie must first go backwards to “find” his mother and her traumas from the Shoah. In the beginning of “Auschwitz (Time Flies),” Artie is depicted as crying out for his “MOMMY” (Spiegelman, Maus II 42, emphasis original), later explaining that sometimes he does not “feel like a functioning adult” (43). Victoria Aarons describes the scene:
His childish tantrum […] is symptomatically complicated. Not only does he want his mother—a victim of the Holocaust who later committed suicide—to exonerate him, but, very simply, he wants his mother. He is, after all, the abandoned child fighting against the absent mother, which complicates, if not impedes, the “work of mourning.” The absence of the mother is, in some ways, the threatened absence of the self. (108)
Artie is trapped in an infantilized frame of mind,
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and seemingly the key to finding his way out of his regressed state is to “connect” with and thereby understand his mother. Of course, as “Hell Planet” demonstrates, Anja was not overly emotionally present while she was alive. But in her death, Artie nonetheless searches to better grasp his mother’s life before, during, and after Auschwitz. This idea of the domicile qua womb, referenced above, relates to the numerous biological metaphors used by children of survivors to conceptualize the intergenerational transmission of trauma within their families (like Artie’s reference to the umbilical cord in “Hell Planet”); as the second generation developed in their mothers’ wombs—and, as research suggests, they inherited trauma epigenetically (Yehuda et al.)—they parallelly grew up in their postmemorial structures that assisted in the transmission of intergenerational Holocaust trauma. Despite how children of survivors surely received (emotional) sustenance and were nurtured both in their mothers’ wombs and in their homes, their experiences in both were also often defined by loss and traumatic transmission. Although the womb and the home are ideally “spaces” of comfort, safety, shelter, etc., the second generation’s experiences of both not uncommonly resisted idealization. The traumatic breach of the protective womb at birth mapped onto how the second generation, as represented by Artie, perceived their childhood homes through the stories of their parents’ homes being breached. As Holocaust traumas expressed themselves biologically in/ through the womb, survivors’ traumas also found expression in/through their womb-like postmemorial structures.
Freud suggests that “the dwelling-house was a substitute for the mother’s womb, the first lodging,
for which in all likelihood man still longs, and in which he was safe and felt at ease” (13). Yi-Fu Tuan puts it this way:
If we define place broadly as a focus of value, of nurture and support, then the mother is the child’s primary place. Mother may well be the first enduring and independent object in the infant’s world of fleeting impressions. Later she is recognized by the child as his essential shelter and dependable source of physical and psychological comfort. A man leaves his home or hometown to explore the world; a toddler leaves his mother’s side to explore the world. Places stay put. Their image is one of stability and permanence. The mother is mobile, but to the child she nonetheless stands for stability and permanence. […] A strange world holds little fear for the young child provided his mother is nearby, for she is his familiar environment and haven. A child is adrift—placeless—without the supportive parent. (29)
However, as Anja is not represented as one who “stands for stability and permanence”—in tandem with how the Spiegelman family home neither fully functioned as a space that felt “safe” nor allowed Artie to be “at ease”—Artie’s search for his mother in her death can be understood as a belated attempt to feel at home even, and especially, as an adult. Maus thus asks: What happens when the supposedly comforting world of the maternal womb, both figurative and literal, is itself traumatized by the experiences of the Shoah? Though the link between mother and home is something of a potentially problematic and/or controversial idea—and is by no means universal—this connection holds great
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currency when considering Artie’s psyche. Artie’s search for Anja speaks to Freud’s notion of motheras-metaphor-for-the-home, that is, of the womb as the first domestic space; however, Artie’s search requires that he sort out—or come to terms with—the fears and anxieties that so pervaded his domestic existence for much of his life in hopes of reclaiming a sense of home for himself. His search for his mother is thus a search for home, and his search for home— for a sense of at-home-ness and all its accompanying comforting attributes—is indeed a search for his mother. Though Artie desires to free himself from the domesticating control of his parents’ traumas as a child and as a young adult, his search for his mother after her death also functions as a way of attempting to free himself from their passed-on legacy.
However, as noted above, Artie is resigned to search for Anja’s stories through the mouth of his father largely in the Spiegelman family home. As he speaks to Vladek about wanting to record his account of the Holocaust, Artie takes a seat in his childhood bedroom while his father begins to pedal on his Exercycle (Spiegelman, Maus I 12). Here, Vladek cycles while he re-cycles his stories from the Holocaust. Although Vladek works out on his Exercycle and narrates his oral history for his son, the rest of the text suggests he is unable to work out—or, as some like Freud are apt to say, work through—his traumatic past; his ability to exercise highlights, via negativa, his inability to exorcise his traumas from the Holocaust. Maus thus suggests Vladek is simply “going in circles” on his stationary bike—“spinning his wheels,” to put it colloquially— without actually moving forward beyond his haunting past.
More germane to this study, however, is the framing of Artie and his father’s tattooed arm in
this scene, which Chute (203-05) and Levine (76) also note. The framing of Artie and his father’s tattoo present how the Holocaust borders and surrounds, though does not actually touch, the second generation, similar to the separation of narration and image in the 1972 “Maus” comic explored above. Despite never having been physically present in the camps nor having been physically marked himself, Artie is “contained” within his father’s traumas and sense of loss, symbolized here by Vladek’s Auschwitz tattoo. As the tattoo looms above his head in the frame, so too does the past that the tattoo represents figuratively hang over Artie like a banner announcing his postmemories of the Holocaust. It casts its dark shadow over his cognition throughout the narrative, particularly as he listens to Vladek tell his stories. This image that combines spatial enclosure and a visual symbol of Auschwitz points yet again to the postmemorial domestication that has defined, for many members of the second generation, the habitual act of sharing space with survivors in their homes. It can be understood, then, why Artie chooses not to visit his father for almost two years after his mother’s death (Spiegelman, Maus I 11). His eventual return, however, is illuminated by James Baldwin’s following declaration: “[T]hough I may have dreaded going home, I hadn’t left home yet” (682, emphasis original). In actuality, Baldwin is not referring to going to his childhood home. But the particular phrasing that Baldwin uses in a different context, considered in relation to Maus, sheds light on how even as Artie dreads physically returning to his childhood home to visit Vladek, he had not really left psychically . That is to say that life in the Spiegelman family home arrested him in a continuous state of postmemorial confusion long after moving out. By spending two years apart from his father,
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Artie attempts to maintain physical distance from Vladek in hopes of finding respite both from the domesticating effects/affects of his father’s presence and from the home in which he grew up that reminds him of and reanimates his parents’ Holocaust pasts.
ARTIE’S ADULTHOOD HOME
Yet despite such physical separation, the text illustrates the enduring legacy of Vladek and Anja’s traumas in Artie’s life and how his adulthood home (his apartment in SoHo, to which we are first introduced in “Mouse Moles” in Maus I [95]) can also be understood as a postmemorial structure. His adulthood postmemorial structure indeed parallels and continues to sustain the transmission of his parents’ traumas from the Holocaust, notwithstanding his attempts to put such inherited traumas and affects to rest. As I explore in this section, despite how Artie leaves his childhood postmemorial structure, in many ways he also never really does. Although different from his childhood home, Artie’s domestic space in SoHo shares a number of affective and psychosocial qualities that continue to mediate the traumas he assumed as a child in Rego Park. Spiegelman’s representation of his adulthood domestic space largely parallels Bachelard’s notion that people’s first homes shape their domestic experiences in each home they dwell in thereafter. Bachelard explains how people’s memories of their first homes, primarily filtered through their imaginations, inform their perceptions and experiences of each subsequent home in which they live: “An entire past comes to dwell in a new house. […] Through dreams, the various dwelling-places in our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days.
And after we are in the new house, when memories of other places we have lived in come back to us, we travel to the land of Motionless Childhood, motionless the way all Immemorial things are” (5-6). Although Bachelard’s poetics of domestic space idealizes the home as a space of fond memories (“the treasures of former days”)—which contrasts postmemorial structures in a number of ways—his argument that childhood homes “dwell” within latter-day domestic spaces can also be seen in homes marked by traumatic legacies. Bachelard’s idea that “former days” find expression in future domestic spaces holds double significance for many in the second generation: Not only are their childhood homes haunted by vestiges of former days, i.e., emanations of their parents’ Holocaust memories, but their adulthood homes are haunted by their already-haunted childhoods. This multiple haunting pervades Spiegelman’s representation of his adulthood home, as it does in much of second-generation literature’s representation of adulthood domestic spaces. In this light, Vladek’s directive, in his accented English, “Remember, my house it’s also your house too [sic]” (Spiegelman, Maus II 24), speaks not only to how Artie is welcome anytime but, more significantly, to how Artie’s Manhattan apartment is, metaphorically, also Vladek’s. Indeed, his adulthood apartment serves as a simulacrum of the family’s Rego Park home, a version of his postmemorial structure in Queens. Artie’s relationship to and inhabitation of his childhood home shape his relationship to his SoHo apartment, as the trauma and knowledge that Artie inherited in his youth come to manifest spatially within his adulthood domestic space. The affective qualities of Artie’s childhood home—the anxiety, fear, frustration, etc.—are in varying ways retained and perpetuated in his SoHo apartment. From the
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imagined tangled mass of dead bodies beneath his easel and outside his front door to the guard tower in plain view from his window (41), Maus visually registers Artie’s emotional and psychological struggle with his persistent postmemories. These postmemories continue to both populate and alter his perception of reality, within (as well as without) his adulthood domicile, regardless of his efforts to separate himself from his parents’ traumatic pasts.
One particular feature of Artie’s apartment that speaks to his disorderly relationship to the past, specifically his relationship to the Shoah, is the Picasso-esque portrait of a disjointed face hanging in his bedroom (Maus I 96). Many paintings of Pablo Picasso, the Cubist and surrealist artist well known for his anti-war painting Guernica, are defined by fragmented assemblages. Such fragmented or disjointed assemblages, representative in part of a fragmented or disjointed worldview, also characterize the portrait we see above Artie’s bed. This portrait is reminiscent, given its placement in Artie’s bedroom, of the portrait hanging in Vladek and Anja’s bedroom: the portrait of Artie’s murdered brother, Richieu. As these portraits hang in both bedrooms, the text once again visually concretizes the connection between his childhood home and his adulthood apartment, reinforcing Vladek’s abovementioned statement that his home is also Artie’s. The abstract Picasso-esque portrait, though different in content and in style from Richieu’s portrait, can thus be understood as an abstracted and indirect expression of Richieu’s lingering postmemorial presence in Artie’s adulthood home. Indeed, as Artie refers to “having sibling rivalry with a snapshot” of Richieu as “spooky” (Maus II 15, emphasis original), the Picasso-esque painting qua postmemorial recapitulation of Richieu’s portrait symbolizes how Artie’s
murdered brother, along with the Holocaust more broadly, continues to haunt him. The portrait points to how Artie’s decoration of his adulthood apartment materially registers and archives his postmemories, even if obliquely.
Although Artie lives in a different borough of New York City than where he grew up, the psychic distance between him and his father is shortened when Vladek (and Mala) calls him on his landline, revealing how the telephone can serve as a domesticating technology. Offering insight into how phone calls interfere with one’s sense of privacy, Stephen Kern suggests that “[t]elephones break down barriers of distance. […] the protective function of doors, waiting rooms, servants, and guards is eliminated by the piercing of their intrusive ring” (316). Kern further explains how “the intrusive effect of the ringing augments the expectant mode for the person called by compelling him to stop whatever he is doing and answer. He is thrust into a passive role because the caller can prepare for the conversation and control it at the outset” (91). Placing Artie in “a passive role” and sonically controlling him in his own home, Vladek and Mala repeatedly intrude upon Artie’s domestic space by way of telephone, disallowing the psychic distance that he so adamantly seeks. But paradoxically, Artie is placed in not only a “passive role,” but he is also again forced to assume the active role of the parentified child—insofar as he is phoned to come help his father with mundane domestic tasks, to console Vladek after Mala temporarily breaks up with him, and to pick him up to bring him to the Catskills (Spiegelman, Maus I 96-97 and Maus II 13, 121). Through the telephone, Vladek is still able to keep Artie at his beck and call long after he moves out on his own, which thereby offers him both figurative entrance into Artie’s home and
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control over his son and his domestic space, similar to when Artie was a child. Such domestic control again reinforces the idea that Artie’s apartment is, by extension, also Vladek’s. Even though Vladek and Artie do not explicitly discuss the Holocaust during these calls, such sonic intrusions remind him of his fraught relationship with his father—fraught, in large part, because of the Holocaust—while engendering subsequent guilt that comes part and parcel with his postmemories ( Maus I 96-97). Moreover, Mala’s phone calls further connect Artie to his postmemories, given how they obliquely operate as reminders of Anja’s death. As Mala’s very presence emphasizes Anja’s absence (for Mala would not be in Artie’s life as such unless Anja had died), her calls, in lieu of calls from Anja, serve to amplify the void that Anja leaves after her suicide. Mala’s repeated calls continually draw Artie out of the present and force him to contend with the past— especially his memories of his mother’s premature death, along with that which in part led to her suicide in the first place: the Shoah. Because of Vladek and Mala’s intrusive phone calls, it can be seen how Artie’s adulthood apartment continues to mediate his belated relationship to his parents and their painful legacies.
The image/symbol of flies throughout the “Auschwitz (Time Flies)” chapter offers further insight into the ways by which postmemory shapes Artie’s adulthood home. More specifically, Artie’s postmemories transform his apartment and other commonplace domestic spaces into fantastical sites of his parents’ Holocaust traumas. Examining the image of the flies depicted on the title page of “Auschwitz (Time Flies)”—though the following analysis could be applied to the entire chapter—Erin McGlothlin observes, “They are time flies (the
substantive phrase rather than the verbal phrase), buzzing reminders of time passed and a past time that carry the trace of the past into the present” (187, emphasis original). It is unclear whether or not the flies in the beginning of the chapter are imagined (as the pile of corpses surely is) or if they are real (Spiegelman, Maus II 41). But if these flies are indeed flying around him in his SoHo apartment, it can be seen how such an ostensibly insignificant occurrence assumes great postmemorial import. The buzzing of the flies indexically points to death—for in and of themselves the flies do not directly signify death, as do the dead bodies of which they are a function. The presence of the flies thus reveals how such a seemingly inconsequential moment engenders an incongruous experience of time, inviting a rush of postmemories to permeate the here-and-now with reverberations of death and destruction, defining hallmarks of the Shoah. The sight and sound of the flies trigger for Artie an emotional descent into the past, where the very architecture of his home and the space therein are, once more, transformed into an imaginative concentration camp of sorts.
The flies “function as the disturbing residues of a past that, like a pesky insect, will not go away” (McGlothlin 189), and Artie’s attempt to kill the flies at the end of the chapter mirrors his attempt to put his postmemories to rest. While these bugs conjure the presence of Holocaust death, his attempts to snuff them out, along with the postmemories that they evoke, remain for the most part futile. The elusiveness of the flies and Artie’s struggle to control their movement (that is, kill them) mirrors the elusiveness of his postmemories and his struggle to control them (that is, extinguish them). It is, therefore, ironic that Françoise expresses her incredulity at how the Holocaust was ever possible while Artie
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angrily swats at the buzzing insects: “Sigh. It’s so peaceful [in the Catskills] at night. It’s almost impossible to believe Auschwitz ever happened” (Spiegelman, Maus II 74). For Françoise the flies are simply flies, whereas for Artie they are also “residues of the past,” signs that bring him out of the present and remind him that it is very possible to believe Auschwitz happened. That he dismisses her comment (“Uh-huh”) gestures toward his mind being elsewhere (74), for he is disturbed by the flies or, otherwise put, disturbed by the past’s perceived presence in the present. Indeed, for Artie, though the past is not the present, the past is, postmemorially, present. And although Artie does not and cannot live in the past, he seemingly struggles to live in the present beyond the postmemorial confines of his parents’ Holocaust pasts.
CONCLUSION
The varied, yet seemingly constant, reminders of the Holocaust, the “residues of the past,” that Artie and many in the second generation more broadly encounter resist spatial-temporal normalcy in the home and beyond. Indeed, the continuous collapse of past and present typifies postmemorial structures, as well as other domestic spaces (as demonstrated by the flies on the porch in the Catskills), and precludes a defined division between the events of the Holocaust and the present for many children of survivors. Within their adulthood homes, these
members of the second generation experience a continuation of their childhood domestic experiences, where the postmemories of their childhood homes are continually relived. Thus, the second generation’s adulthood postmemorial structures can be read as densely layered spaces of inherited traumas, textured by and filtered through their childhood homes that shape their perceptions of their adopted Holocaust pasts. As domestic space can be understood as psychosocial space, so too can many members of the second generation’s psychosocial spaces be inversely understood as domestic spaces, particularly in light of how they oftentimes “live” within the prison of their postmemories, as demonstrated throughout Maus Spiegelman’s work reveals how, despite most homes being typically perceived as spaces of shelter from the outside world, postmemorial structures resisted such traditional associations. Postmemorial structures often served as constant reminders of vulnerability and threat for the second generation. Made real by their parents’ homes being invaded before or during (and, in some cases, even after) the Holocaust, the second generation came to the knowledge that their homes were also subject to possible incursion. As children, many in the second generation were denied the chance to live in a world of childish idealism and were made aware of the sobering reality that human evil is pervasive and all perceptions of absolute safety were ultimately chimeric fantasies. Postmemorial structures functioned as spaces that afforded few illusions of familial
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permanency or familial safety, thereby familiarizing many children of survivors with an intimate and pervading fear of external threat at a young age.6 Yet, it was not only within their childhood homes that the second generation lived with/in this fear that was sustained by their proximity to their parents but in their adulthood homes as well. The second generation carried into their adulthoods many of the same or similar anxieties and fears of their childhoods that were a result of their parents’ experiences in camps, in ghettos, in hiding, and/or of escaping the Third Reich. As a result, their adulthood homes have continued to function as postmemorial structures, structures that mediate and reverberate the domesticating traumas they inherited in their childhoods, though oftentimes to a lesser, but still significant, degree.
Maus presents Artie’s childhood and adulthood homes as representative of his cognition and emotions, a reification of his interior psychological state that is made manifest in the interior spaces of his childhood and adulthood postmemorial structures. Yet, Maus is not only a document in the study of postmemorial structures as metaphors for a psychosocially and emotionally domesticated second-generation psyche, but it is also an examination of how postmemorial structures functioned as catalysts for traumatic transference, as enclosed spaces that were and are conducive to the transmission of survivors’ senses of loss and absence. This conception of survivor-family homes as postmemorial structures enable us to better
understand how the “inter- and transgenerational return of traumatic knowledge” shaped and continues to shape the “embodied experience” of many in the second generation on a daily basis (Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory 6). Tracing Artie’s domestic experience from his childhood to his adulthood, Maus explores the ways by which his postmemorial structures, in Rego Park and in SoHo, both express and mold his relationship to his parents’ pasts. His childhood home becomes a creator, container, and invigorator of his postmemories as he lives in close proximity to his parents and imaginatively invests in their Holocaust experiences. So, too, does his adulthood home assume similar affective and psychosocial qualities that perpetuate and sustain his inherited traumas and embodied knowledge. Maus’s illustration of the intergenerational effects of mass trauma demonstrates the oftentimes perilous position of the second generation—which is applicable, to be sure, to the third generation in some instances (as can be seen in, for example, Amy Kurzweil’s graphic narrative Flying Couch). As survivors’ traumas were registered in the very space of their homes, their homes functioned as material archives of their Holocaust pasts, creating domestic environments that not uncommonly wounded their children. In addition to survivors’ unspoken traumas, their spoken narratives of the Holocaust were also imbued in the space of postmemorial structures to such an extent that these homes became the very “framework” or “architecture” of their psychosocial lives.
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NOTES
1. Before discussing the children of survivors who were traumatized by their parents’ Holocaust experiences, however, I ought to note at the outset of this study that not all children of survivors experienced such negative effects. Most scholars do not conceive of the entire second generation (or all survivors) as a group of traumatized victims who suffer from inherited pathologies (Fox 1; Bistritz 140; Shmotkin et al. 12-13; Klein 134; Bergmann and Jucovy 36). Some children of survivors rarely consciously thought about the Holocaust; some perceived the effects of their parents’ Holocaust experiences as neutral; and some even understood the effects as positive, which they believed to have contributed to their overall family life (Prince 49, 79; Lieberman 49; Hass 45, 46, 48, 129, 133; Berger 14; Egan and Helms 41; Bistritz 140; Epstein 219-20; Fischer 14). For example, Asher Z. Milbauer, a child of survivors, discusses at length how being raised by survivors was emphatically not traumatizing but was, rather, a time defined by laughter, care, and valuable life lessons (38-39). However, although many children of survivors were well-adjusted and unencumbered by their parents’ Holocaust pasts, many others were affected by their parents’ traumas, and it is in reference to those who were traumatized belatedly by their parents’ Holocaust experiences that I theorize how survivor-family homes oftentimes functioned as postmemorial structures.
2. I agree with Hamida Bosmajian’s understanding of the relationship between Artie Spiegelman qua narrator and Art Spiegelman qua author: “The narrator Artie Spiegelman in Maus is indeed different from Art Spiegelman. Nevertheless, autobiography, familial contexts, and the history of the Holocaust are interwoven so intimately with the fictionalizing structures that it is at times difficult to maintain the difference between Artie [the narrator] and Art [the author]” (27).
3. Of course, there are limitations to analyzing postmemorial structures in Maus, insofar as Spiegelman’s text is not necessarily representative of all second-generation experiences of domestic space. In truth, not every survivor family lived in such a large urban center; not every survivor-family home had two survivor-parents; some families had more than one child; many children of survivors did not move back with their parents as adults; and most survivor parents did not complete suicide. However, the ways by which the text depicts protagonist Artie’s childhood and adulthood homes as psycho- and emotio-spatial settings are comparable to a number of other second-generation texts like Anne Karpf’s The War After (1996), Sonia Pilcer’s The Holocaust Kid (2001), Elizabeth Rosner’s The Speed of Light (2001), and Bernice Eisenstein’s I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2006), to name only a few. In line with these other texts, Artie’s domestic spaces are imbued with the uninhabitable pasts of his parents that Artie nonetheless, paradoxically, comes to imaginatively “inhabit.”
4. Gaston Bachelard defines topoanalysis as “the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives” (8).
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5. For a longer discussion for the symbolism and role of clothing for the second generation, see my article, “Inherited Traumatic Threads: Postmemory and the Dis/function of Hand-Me-Downs in Bernice Eisenstein’s I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors.”
6. Of course, the opposite was also sometimes true: A number of children of survivors experienced the “Rapunzel” dynamic in which an overprotective parent or parents forced their child/ren to remain “innocent” and “protected” for as long as possible, since the world was perceived as terrible and dangerous, and the parent wanted the child to enjoy the innocence that was denied to them in their own experience. However, for the purposes of this study, I bracket off such individuals.
WORKS CITED
Aarons, Victoria. Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory. Rutgers UP, 2019.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas, Beacon Press, 1994.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, U of Texas P, 1981.
Baldwin, James. “Here Be Dragons.” The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction: 1948–1985, edited by Toni Morrison, St. Martin’s, 1985, pp. 677-90.
Berger, Alan L. Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust. SUNY P, 1997.
Bergmann, Martin S., and Milton E. Jucovy. Generations of the Holocaust. Columbia UP, 1982.
Berlatsky, Eric L. The Real, the True, and the Told: Postmodern Historical Narrative and the Ethics of Representation. The Ohio State UP, 2011.
Bistritz, Janice F. “Transgenerational Pathology in Families of Holocaust Survivors.” The Psychological Perspectives of the Holocaust and of Its Aftermath, edited by Randolph L. Braham, U of Michigan P, 1988, pp. 129-44.
Bosmajian, Hamida. “The Orphaned Voice in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.” Considering Maus: Approaches t o Art Spiegelman’s “Survivor’s Tale” of the Holocaust, edited by Deborah R. Geis, U of Alabama P, 2003, pp. 26-43.
Budick, E. Miller. The Subject of Holocaust Fiction. Indiana UP, 2015.
Chute, Hillary. “‘The Shadow of a Past Time’: History and Graphic Representation in ‘Maus.’” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 52, no. 2, 2006, pp. 199-230.
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Egan, Susanna, and Gabriele Helms. “Generations of the Holocaust in Canadian Auto/biography.”
Auto/biography in Canada: Critical Directions, edited by Julie Rak, WLU Press, 2005, pp. 31-52.
Elmwood, Victoria. “‘Happy, Happy, Ever After’: The Transformation of Trauma Between the Generations in Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus: A Survivor’s Tale.’” Biography, vol. 27, no. 4, 2004, pp. 691-720.
Epstein, Helen. Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors. Penguin, 1988.
Fischer, Nina. Memory Work: The Second Generation. Palgrave, 2015.
Fox, Tamar. Inherited Memories: Israeli Children of Holocaust Survivors. Cassell, 1999.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilizations and Its Discontents. Translated by James Strachey, W. W. Norton & Company, 1962.
Hass, Aaron. In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation. Cornell UP, 1990.
Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Harvard UP, 1997.
---. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. Columbia UP, 2012.
Hoffman, Eva. After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust. PublicAffairs, 2004.
Jacobowitz, Susan. The Holocaust at Home: Representations and Implications of Second Generation Experience. 2004. Brandeis University, PhD dissertation.
Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918. Harvard UP, 2003.
Klein, Hillel. Survival and Trials of Revival: Psychodynamic Studies of Holocaust Survivors and Their Families in Israel and the Diaspora. Academic Studies P, 2012.
LaCapra, Dominick. History and Memory After Auschwitz. Cornell UP, 1998.
Laga, Barry. “Maus, Holocaust, and History: Redrawing the Frame.” Arizona Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 1, 2001, pp. 61-90.
Levine, Michael. “Necessary Stains: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the Bleeding of History.” Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman’s “Survivor’s Tale” of the Holocaust, edited by Deborah R. Geis, U of Alabama P, 2003, pp. 63-104.
Lieberman, Hadassah. “Journey to the Planet of Death.” Daughters of Absence: Transforming a Legacy of Loss, edited by Mindy Wiesel, Dream of Things, 2012, pp. 46-70.
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Mann, Barbara E. Space and Place in Jewish Studies. Rutgers UP, 2012.
Mason, Edward A., and Eva Fogelman, directors. Breaking the Silence: The Generation After the Holocaust. National Center for Jewish Film, 1984.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. Harper Perennial, 1993.
McGlothlin, Erin. “No Time Like the Present: Narrative and Time in Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus.’” Narrative, vol. 11, no. 2, 2003, pp. 177-98.
Milbauer, Asher Z. “Teaching to Remember.” Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators, edited by Alan L. Berger and Naomi Berger, Syracuse UP, 2001, pp. 30-45.
Orvell, Miles. “Writing Posthistorically: Krazy Kat, Maus, and the Contemporary Fiction Cartoon.” American Literary History, vol. 4, no. 1, 1992, pp. 110-28.
Prince, Robert M. The Legacy of the Holocaust: Psychohistorical Themes in the Second Generation. UMI Research P, 1985.
Schwarz, Daniel R. Imagining the Holocaust. St. Martin’s P, 1999.
Shmotkin, Dov, et al. “Resilience and Vulnerability Among Aging Holocaust Survivors and Their Families: An Intergenerational Overview.” Journal of Intergenerational Relationships, vol. 9, 2011, pp. 7-21.
Spiegelman, Art. “Mad Youth.” Comix, Essays, Graphics and Scraps: From Maus to Now to MAUS to Now, by Spiegelman, Raw Books & Graphics, 1999, pp. 21-22.
---. Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History. Pantheon, 1986.
---. Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began. Pantheon, 1991.
---. MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus. Knopf Doubleday, 2011.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. U of Minnesota P, 1977.
Wilson, Lucas. “Inherited Traumatic Threads: Postmemory and the Dis/function of Hand-Me-Downs in Bernice Eisenstein’s I Was the Child of Holocaust Survivors.” Canadian Jewish Studies, vol. 32, 2021, pp. 86-98.
Yehuda, Rachel, et al. “Low Cortisol and Risk for PTSD in Adult Offspring of Holocaust Survivors.” American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 157, no. 8, 2000, pp. 1252-59.
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After the publication of Nightwood, a lover of Thelma Wood wrote to Djuna Barnes about the impact her novel had on Thelma: “Your book has ruined Thelma’s life, she is deadly ill & threatening suicide because of it” (qtd. in Stockton 104). Thelma immediately saw herself in the character of Robin, a woman who would become known as the center of one of the most bizarre modernist novels; as Jane Marcus famously writes, Nightwood is both “[s]trangely canonized and largely unread” (145).1 Robin has eluded readers since Nightwood ’s publication. Although commonly recognized as a literary interpretation of Thelma Wood, there is a rich academic history of interpreting Robin as ambiguous or indefinable, a characterization which can be elucidated through understanding Barnes’s unique relationship to romance.2 Her most significant romantic partnership began around 1921 to Thelma Wood, an artist who was ten years her junior, and would end around 1929 in an ugly
breakup over Thelma’s infidelities and presumed alcoholism (Fleischer 409; Stockton 104). Barnes then wrote Nightwood with Thelma operating as the center of the text through the character of Robin Vote, and the resulting novel was dense, labyrinthine, and, to many, unreadable. A similar ambiguity arises when interpreting André Breton’s surrealist text, Nadja, originally published in 1928. Famously based upon Breton’s brief relationship with Léona Delcourt, a young woman who would later be diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and interned in psychiatric wards for the rest of her life, the short text includes a number of photographs and Delcourt’s own drawings (Bogousslavsky 44). Yet, Nadja is known not for the depiction of a lover but for the feeling that arose from the work, a feeling that shares much in common with Thelma Wood’s despairing response to Barnes’s novel. These two works are characteristic of what scholars such as Mao and Walkowitz refer to as bad modernisms, or what Jonathan Flatley views to be the melancholic affect of the modernist period. In their hyper-specificity when describing a love-object, the object is lost, and the experience becomes universalized as one of a distinctly negative affect, one which I posit can be theorized as heartache.
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Focusing on the ethical dimension of romance and heartache in the novel helps, I believe, to understand how the characters of Robin Vote and Nadja remain curiously absent in hyperspecific descriptions while drawing attention to the negative affect inherent in each of the texts. I build this argument through a comparative study of Robin Vote and Nadja, identifying a number of common characteristics in the two subjects and their novels. First, although hyper-specific in their descriptions, Robin and Nadja’s real-world counterparts are curiously missing from the texts; second, as love-objects in the text, they both experience the confusion in subject-object orientation characteristic of negative affect, which I refer to as the subject-object oscillation; third, their general surroundings are deeply melancholic in the Freudian sense of the term. The goal of this study is then twofold. Firstly, in theorizing heartache as a negative affect, this article builds from the considerable scholarship on negative affect in the modernist period; secondly, this work contributes to developing discussions of affect theory, particularly as the discipline is working towards theorizing minor affects. Robin and Nadja’s ambiguous characterizations are then not representative of Thelma Wood or Léona Delcourt in specific, but instead become representative of the pain that results from the dissolution of romantic relationships in general.
Affect theory, melancholia, and heartache
Understanding how hyper-specific portraits of love-objects become universalized through their ironic ambiguity necessitates, I believe, a turn towards
affect theory. Interest in literary affect began to rise in the 1990s, primarily in response to poststructuralism. 3 Later, the theory moved away from post-structuralism, a deviation that Brian Massumi addresses well in his 2002 Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation : “While post-structuralist ‘discursive’ bodies might signify and make sense, they don’t sense,” he writes, later suggesting that sensation is either redundant or destructive to their descriptions, as “it appeals to an unmediated experience” (2). The focus in affect theory is less on a stable signified and more on sensation, and, as such, there is little consensus on a generalizable theory of affect. There are, however, broad trends in the theory; initially, affect theory was concerned with so-called major affects, or emotional responses such as jealousy, anger, shame, or fear; more recently, the turn has been towards minor affects, with Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings exemplary of this trend. In modernist studies, there have been a number of recent investigations into the negative affect surrounding modernist literature.4
Jonathan Flatley’s (2008) Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism theorizes the negative affect frequently depicted in modernist literature well. Working from Silvan Tomkins’ 1962 study into affective systems, Flatley suggests a number of axioms for understanding affect in modernist literature: “affects are irreducible, in the sense that they operate according to their own systemic logic; they involve a transformation of one’s way of being in the world, in a way that determines what matters to one; affects require objects, and, in the moment of attaching to an object or happening in the object, also take one’s being outside of one’s subjectivity” (19). Objects, here, become loosely defined; as Flatley later notes, an object could be a person, but “affects […] are always experienced in relation to an object
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or objects,” a relationship which develops “a kind of subject-object confusion,” or what Tomkins refers to as a “somewhat fluid relationship” (16, 17, qtd. in 17). This confusion, what I refer to as the subject-object oscillation, is a central tenet to understanding the negative affect of heartache.
Flatley’s study continues by addressing the history of melancholia, noting its historical roots before moving on to Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” the now-famous essay which Flatley refers to as “an allegory for the experience of modernity, an experience […] that is constitutively linked to loss” (2). In making these connections, Flatley addresses what is unique about modern as a signifier: “that modernity signals nothing more or less than the impulse to declare the difference of a present moment in respect to the moments that preceded it, to perceive the specificity and difference of one’s own historical moment” (29). It is in this articulation of modernity that the connection to loss—and, consequently, to melancholia— becomes apparent. By declaring the new period different and distinct from those that preceded it, an inherent sense of loss is developed. This loss appears in a very literal sense—Freud wrote “Mourning and Melancholia” during the end of World War I—but this loss is also figurative, a mourning for the simplicity of the period that came before. In articulating what is new and modern about the time period through its literature, that sense of loss prevails, and so it is fitting that there are so many studies considering aesthetic failure and loss in modernist literature. Such studies continue in investigations of Nightwood and Nadja, with a number of articles and book-length works considering the negative representation of the authors’ relationships with Thelma Wood and Léona Delcourt, respectively.5 What is remarkable about these two works is the alarming specificity that they take while describing the love-objects: both Robin
Vote and Nadja are developed in hyper-specific terms, and yet their characters become universalized through the reading experience of negative affect and its surrounding melancholia. It is nearly impossible to read either book without recognizing the suffering experienced by the characters contained within it. That suffering is well-theorized through Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” an essay which, as Flatley has noted, is useful in understanding the negative affect of the modernist period. Freud describes the breakdown of mourning and melancholia as the difference between a healthy reaction to loss and a sustained disattachment to a love-object resulting in a self-critical, self-deriding loss of ego, as the subject’s ego both consumes the love-object while attempting to distance itself from it. Heartache aligns with melancholia; the subject-object oscillation is one where the subject appears to consume the love-object. As such, I interpret Robin Vote and Nadja as personifications of heartache, in which heartache is defined as a negative affect in the tradition of bad modernisms inflected by melancholia. In developing this negative affect, I take as axiomatic the subject-object oscillation emblematic of affect theory; a degree of hyper-specificity in their descriptions, resulting in an ironically ambiguous characterization that distances each literary character from their respective real-world influences; and the consumption of the love-object into the ego of the subject associated with melancholic loss.
Modern love and ambiguity: André Breton’s Nadja
The subject-object oscillation is a central tenet of André Breton’s Nadja. Breton, a pioneer of surrealist writing, considered “the found object as the
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inextricable basis of Surrealis[m]” (qtd. in Ertuna 100). In noting an oscillation between subject and object as a foundation for heartache, this perhaps clarifies some elements of Breton’s enigmatic Nadja. What is interesting and unique about Nadja in this oscillation is that it is the subject of the narration who oscillates between subject and object, progressively losing subjectivity throughout the text; Nadja, as the ambiguous love-object, holds only a brief segment of the novel, but when she disappears, she retains her subjectivity. This, as will become evident upon analyzing the character of Robin Vote, differs in Nightwood The oscillation between subject and object is essential to the affective reading experience of lost romantic love, in that the subject discussing a love-object is one who both attempts to possess and is possessed by the love-object, resulting in the loss of control that occurs when left behind after romance.
Equally interesting for this analysis is the focus on hyper-credibility that appears as a trope of surrealist fiction, which makes for an interesting point of comparison with Nightwood. Nadja is accompanied by 44 images that begin appearing as early as page 20, although Nadja herself doesn’t enter the text as a subject until page 60. The details of the narrator’s encounters with Nadja are accompanied by photos of the cafés or sites they visit, along with images of Nadja’s drawings, and the narrator’s description of her is hyper-specific in a way that differs significantly from Nightwood: when he meets Nadja, he notes that she was “young, poorly dressed”; that “[s]he carried her head high”; that “she looked so delicate she scarcely seemed to touch the ground as she walked”; that she was “curiously made up,” among other details (64). Unlike Robin Vote, who was initially described as having perfume “of the quality of that earth-flesh, fungi” (34) before being
likened to a forest at night, the details of Nadja present a very clear portrait of a woman. Nadja, however, is known as an ambiguous love-object; the back-matter of the novel describes her as a “not so much a person as the way she makes people behave” before calling her “a state of mind, a feeling about reality, a kind of vision.” This ambiguity is maintained in a book that obsesses over credibility—the narrator notes in a number of surreal scenes that what he’s describing “may exceed the limits of credibility” (83) or may seem “almost unbelievable” (98)—by providing no photographs of Nadja, a notable absence in a book otherwise rife with photographic evidence. In this instance, André as narrator is denying an objectification of Nadja, refusing to present her, photographically, as one of the “found object[s]” of surrealist writing (qtd. in Ertuna 100). But while refusing to render Nadja as a surrealist object, Breton simultaneously decenters his own subjectivity as the very premise of the book; the opening lines suggest that knowing who he is amounts to “knowing whom [he] ‘haunt[s]’” (11). Nadja, as the love-object, retains her subjectivity only in comparison to other details or people in the text; when put into relation with André, her subjectivity is lost, and the many descriptions of her serve the purpose of defining himself as a subject. It is in this context that the subject-object oscillation of the negative affect of heartache becomes clear: the love-object is only recognized as a subject when separate from the lover; otherwise, the lover’s ego consumes the love-object as a display of subjectivity. This will become further evident when considering the role of Robin Vote in Nightwood. The decentering of André as narrator to instead replace his subjectivity with that of Nadja’s can be seen on the sentence level. In the preamble to his discussion of Nadja—the first 60 pages prior to her introduction in the text—he appears to be
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continuously displacing the love-object for a focus on form, when he develops a treatise for surrealist literature by discussing Huysmans and the necessity to render the real world in writing. Consider the following segment:
Between those of which I can be only the agonized witness and those others about which I flatter myself I possess the full details, there is perhaps the same distance as between one of those declarations or series of declarations which constitutes the sentence or the text known as “surrealist” and the declaration or series of declarations which, for the same observer, constitutes the sentence or the text whose every term he has fully weighed and measured. (20, emphasis my own)
Three elements stand out in the above sentence: firstly, the elision of the first-person singular subject to a third-person singular subject, presumably still referring to André Breton as narrator; secondly, the use of repetition, creating a sense of disorder in the meaning of the sentence through redundancy; and, thirdly, the focus on form that appears alongside the stylistic decisions that displace the subject in the text. The elision of the lyric “I” to the third-person “he” by the end of the sentence most clearly shows the displacement of the subject: by beginning with “I” as the subject, and moving towards a “he” that is described as “the same observer” as the initial “I,” Breton is presenting a depiction of André as narrator who is disassociated from his narrative with Nadja. Using a first-person singular subject implicates Breton into the story as narrator; switching to a third-person “he” by the end of the same sentence presents distance between himself and his time with Nadja. In this, much like elsewhere in the narrative,
Breton is distancing himself as the subject, complicating the reader’s experience of viewing André Breton the author and André the narrator as one. This distancing of André the author from André the narrator continues with the use of repetition to develop redundancy in the sentence. The sentence is lengthened through the repetition of “declaration or series of declarations,” a phrasing which, notably, already reads as redundant through the repetition of declaration, and the repetition of “the sentence or the text,” another phrase which reads as redundant prior to being repeated a second time in the same sentence. Together, the repetitive nature of the two phrases muddles the thought being communicated, lengthening the sentence and losing the idea in a deliberately redundant form. The content communicated through the sentence becomes jumbled, lost: a comparison is created, but it becomes unclear what is being compared and to what end. This, in conjunction with the distancing of André the narrator from André the author through the elision of first-person singular to third-person singular, serves to further distance André’s role in the story. By the end of the sentence, as readers, both subject and content of the sentence seem further away. But, at the very least, there is a focus on form: by diverting from explaining a series of events to instead consider a surrealist text, the reader is left with the impression that the stylistic form of surrealism plays a significant role in Breton’s novel, with every term “fully weighed and measured.” What this does is ensure that the passage operates as a microcosm for the introductory remarks as a whole: although the novel is meant to convey the relationship between André and Nadja, Nadja is unmentioned, André is distanced, the specific meanings are muddled, and what remains is a belief that form is what is most important for the text. That form is one of negative affect, made
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apparent through the use of subject-object oscillation, emphasized to divert the readers’ attention from the specific details of the novel.
The distancing of André as a subject, rendering him an object in his own story about Nadja, becomes more pronounced with the integration of the second-person address, operating as a
narrative framing for the novel. There are two distinctive uses of second-person address in Nadja: early in the preamble, after lengthy discussions on surrealist form and Huysmans, there is a startling personalization that appears: “you can be sure of meeting me in Paris, of not spending more than three days without seeing me pass, toward the end of the afternoon, along the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle between the Matin printing office and the Boulevard de Strasbourg” (32). Breton’s use of second-person, deliberately addressing the reader while situating himself as the subject narrating the novel, reminds the reader that this is, although distanced, a personalized tale: it is meant to convey the intimacy between two people in a relationship, however that relationship is formed. The second-person address then disappears, straying instead to the distancing between author and narrator and the oscillation
between subject and object that appears for the bulk of the novel. It reappears only briefly in the final few pages of the text, in a deeply intimate passage that reads as André addressing Nadja: “That is the story that I too yielded to the desire to tell you, when I scarcely knew you—you who can longer remember but who, as if by chance knowing of the beginning of this book, have intervened so opportunely, so violently, and so effectively doubtless to remind me that I wanted it to be ‘ajar like a door’ and that through this door I should probably never see anyone come in but you—come in and go out but you” (156-57). Providing only two segments of second-person address—one which gives a detailed explanation to the readers of where we can find the narrator, the second a deeply intimate account that presents the intended reader as Nadja—is jolting in comparison to the distancing that otherwise occurs in the rest of the novel. The use of second-person address in conjunction with the passage when Nadja tells André that he will write a book about her, begging him to choose her name wisely, while the reader already knows that the name Nadja was selected “because in Russian it’s the beginning of the word hope, and because it’s only the beginning,” ensures that the novel becomes full of contradictions, reading both as a eulogy for a lost love and for the hope she represented (66). The focus is then not on André and Nadja’s relationship in specific but is instead diverted to consider form, emphasizing in detail
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the linguistic signifiers which show the negative affect in the text. What is being mourned in Breton’s work is not the love-object but the hope that appears at the beginning of a new relationship. That hope, which comes before the loss and negativity so characteristic of heartache, is what Breton communicates in his strange, surrealist book about love. Hope, then, contextualizes the loss when considering the affective response of the relationship in decline, as the early hope of the new love disappears when the relationship begins to dissolve.
Nadja , in comparison to Nightwood , considers the loss inherent in the negative affect of a dissolved relationship, a loss tied directly to the hope in a new love. It presents a highly specific account of a lost love in Paris in the 1920s, contextualized with photographic evidence and the anxiety over credibility that accompanies many surrealist texts, but it is one that becomes quickly characterized by a distancing between the subject and the story, and an oscillation between subject and object. André as narrator distances himself from his story with Nadja, choosing to focus more on the form than on the content of his love-story for the first third of his account; in doing so, he treats himself as a passive object, observing the events around him without participating in said events. Nadja, in contrast, is treated as the definition of his subjectivity; who André is “amounts to knowing whom [he] haunt[s]” (11), as he tells us in the opening lines of the book, and so the love-object is consumed by the subject’s ego, much like with the Freudian melancholic. Together, the experience rendered by Nadja through the consumption of the love-object and the oscillation between subject and object is one that describes the negative
affect of heartache, where the negativity is due to losing the hope inherent in the beginning of a new love.
Heartache and Robin Vote
Much like with Nadja in Breton’s text, Robin Vote is both central to Nightwood while simultaneously appearing as a character in less than half of the novel. She remains central after she has disappeared as a subject in the novel through becoming an object of discussion. As Hubert notes, Robin “is portrayed mainly through the perspective of others,” as she is the primary focus of the lengthy monologues from Dr. Matthew O’Connor, particularly when in discussion with Nora (39). Her first appearance is not until the second chapter, “La Somnambule,” and she disappears from the action of the text three chapters later, reappearing only in the final scenes of the book. Robin’s introduction to the novel immediately develops the hyper-specific characterization that ironically results in an ambiguous or undefinable description, allowing for the universality of the experience of negative affect to occur. This becomes established in a scene during which Dr. Matthew O’Connor has been called to wake her from a deep sleep. Note the difficulty of determining what the similes in this passage convey:
The perfume that her body exhaled was of the quality of that earth-flesh, fungi, which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odour of oil of amber, which is an inner malady of the sea, making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire. Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleepworn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface. About her head there was
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an effulgence as of phosphorus glowing about the circumference of a body of water—as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous deteriorations—the troubling structure of the born somnambule, who lives in the two worlds—meet of child and desperado. (34-35, emphasis my own)
In three lines, Barnes uses four similes to describe Robin. Her use of simile in describing Robin is notable, as similes are intended to provide a comparison in order to render an initial object or subject more vivid; here, following each use of “as” with either “if” or “of” ensures that the phrasing that follows is either a conditional or prepositional phrase—of which none of the phrases following the repetition of “as” are perfect examples. Consider the first simile: “making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire” (34). The main clause is introduced with the present tense, and the conditional-if clause uses the past perfect to explain a conditional state that could not possibly be fulfilled, given that it needed to have occurred in the past. What this means is that Barnes, in describing Robin, is describing her in an unreal past state: “as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire.” And yet, the chapter title is “La Somnambule,” or the sleepwalker, and her introduction is as a woman who needed to be awoken by Dr. Matthew O’Connor. She is both in and not in a sleep incautious and entire, ensuring that there is no stability in her initial introduction. A similar interpretation can be applied for the second simile: “as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface” (34). Although this simile uses the past tense instead of the past perfect, deviating from the standard of the type-three conditional clause introduced earlier, the grammatical structure allows for a similar interpretation: sleep both is and is not a decay fishing her beneath the
visible surface. When considered in conjunction with the simile marker of “as,” implying that these descriptions are meant to illuminate or give further meaning to Robin, the interpretation that follows is simply that Robin is unstable in her meaning. What this means is that Robin, although described in hyper-specific terms, is rendered ambiguous through the syntactical structure; she is figuratively like both sides of an oppositional binary, but she is literally not either, and instead is merely illuminated or further explained by them.6 Her description is one which is intending, through an understanding of the content alongside the grammatical structure, to be both hyper-specific and yet indescribable in language.7 It is unsurprising that this is how Robin has been interpreted for decades.
After the initial descriptions of Robin in “La Somnambule,” Robin features more as an object in the lives of others than as a subject of the narrative, demonstrating the oscillation between subject and object inherent in negative affect. The most notable of these conversations occurs between Nora and Dr. Matthew O’Connor in “Watchman, What of the Night?” and “Go Down, Matthew.” To understand the worsening of Nora’s ego throughout the novel, it is useful to analyze the change in Nora’s dialogue with Dr. Matthew O’Connor between the two chapters. The following questioning from Nora in “Watchman, What of the Night?” presents a sharp contrast with the later chapter, particularly through the transition between referring to Robin as a subject and referring to Robin with possessive pronouns:
“Then,” Nora said, “it means—I’ll never understand her—I’ll always be miserable— just like this.” (85, emphasis my own)
“Nora said: “I can’t stand it, I don’t know how—I am frightened. What is it?
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What is it in her that is doing this?”
(86, emphasis my own)
“‘Matthew,’ Nora said, “‘what will become of her? That’s what I want to know.’”
(96, emphasis my own)
And later, in “Go Down, Matthew:”
Then I kissed her, holding her hands and feet, and I said: “Die now, so you will be quiet, so you will not be touched again by dirty hands, so you will not take my heart and your body and let them be nosed by dogs—die now, then you will be mine forever. (What right has anyone to that?)” She stopped. “She was mine only when she was drunk, Matthew, and had passed out. That’s the terrible thing, that finally she was mine only when she was dead drunk.” (145, emphasis my own)
Although the chapters function as mirrors in the sense that they are both dominated by conversations between Nora and Dr. Matthew O’Connor, there are notable differences in Nora’s dialogue between the two chapters. In “Watchman, What of the Night?” Nora goes to Dr. Matthew O’Connor to learn more about the nighttime that is so enthralling to Robin; in asking about the night, she implies a synonymy with asking about Robin, initially asking Dr. Matthew O’Connor to explain the night to her before descending into the questioning quoted above. The questions are a sample of her dialogue. She never speaks at length, and her questions are all structured around an increased comprehension of a person: she’ll never understand her, what is it in her that is doing this, what will become of her. In attempting to better understand Robin through learning about the night, Nora continues to treat Robin as a subject, or a
person to be understood. Robin has a degree of subjectivity that disappears in Nora’s dialogue in “Go Down, Matthew,” when Nora switches, no longer trying to understand another subject but rather trying to articulate Robin as her object: die now, and then Robin will be hers forever. This is a notable difference in the development of Nora’s persona; prior to “Go Down, Matthew,” Nora appears to be Robin’s sweet, kind victim, one who builds a home with Robin that Robin will eventually abandon. Here, Nora is lamenting that she was only able to possess Robin when she was intoxicated, showing a desire to possess an individual that is inconsistent with the equal subjectivity inherent in romantic relationships. And yet, it is interesting to note that Dr. Matthew O’Connor’s reply to Nora about her desire to possess Robin emphasizes Robin’s agency and ability to act as a subject:
Robin is not in your life, you are in her dream, you’ll never get out of it. And why does Robin feel innocent? Every bed she leaves, without caring, fills her heart with peace and happiness. She has made her “escape” again. That’s why she can’t “put herself in another’s place,” she herself is the only “position”; so she resents it when you reproach her with what she has done. She knows she is innocent because she can’t do anything in relation to anyone but herself.” (146, emphasis my own)
Dr. Matthew O’Connor explicitly rejects Nora’s language of possession when speaking of Robin, inversing the direction of possession: it is not that Robin is in Nora’s life, he asserts, but rather that Nora is in Robin’s dream. In developing Robin as egocentric and narcissistic, one who is unable to think of how Nora feels about Robin’s treatment of her, Dr. Matthew O’Connor gives a great insight into
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the psyche of Robin: “she herself is the only ‘position.’” She cannot be Nora’s love-object, because she herself can only be treated as a subject; in asserting that she is her only position, Dr. Matthew O’Connor rejects Nora’s treatment of Robin as an object, illustrating well the oscillation between subject and object inherent in Robin’s character. Nora’s switch, then, between a language of subjectivity and understanding to a language of objectivity and possession is consequently rejected by Dr. Matthew O’Connor in preference for a depiction of Robin as a subject, ensuring that Robin oscillates between being treated as a subject and an object in the text. It is this oscillation between subject and object that allows for an interpretation of Robin to be the personification of heartache.
During these speeches, Nora begins to experience the breakdown of her ego, an essential component of Freudian melancholia. In her despair at having lost Robin to Jenny, she begins to address the change between her love of people and her love of evil, emphasizing the degradation of her ego, noting that “[t]here’s something evil in me that loves evil and degradation—purity’s black backside! That loves honesty with a horrid love; or why have I always gone seeking it at the liar’s door?” (135). With this, the consumption of the love-object resulting in the degradation of the ego for the Freudian melancholic becomes fully developed. Freud articulates the difference between mourning and melancholia as the difference between loss through death and loss through the living, in which the melancholic, or the person experiencing the loss of someone still living, displays a trait “which is lacking in mourning—an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale” (246).
This is due to a facet of melancholia that is unique from mourning: while the patient may be “aware of the loss that has given rise to his melancholia,” he only “knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him” (245). Nora has gone from questioning what will happen to Robin to recognizing that she has lost something in herself by losing Robin. It is of note that Nora is described at the beginning of the novel as having a “face of all people who love the people—a face that would be evil when she found out that to love without criticism is to be betrayed” (51). Nora’s loss is not just of Robin but is also of her purity, evidenced by her uncritical love of Robin; by the end of the novel, through losing Robin and desperately wanting her back, Nora no longer loves people but rather loves evil and degradation, traits that she uses to characterize Robin. Through her articulation of her love of evil, her ego begins to unravel, and so she is no longer the timid, jilted lover approaching Dr. Matthew O’Connor for help in understanding Robin. Instead, she is the melancholic, desperate to turn Robin into an object that she can possess, experiencing a worsening of her ego in her loss of Robin as a partner. This, in conjunction with the hyper-specificity resulting in the ambiguity of Robin’s description, positions Robin Vote, as with Nadja, as the personification of the negative affect of heartache.
The interminable night begins: Conclusions
There is something enigmatic about the characters of Robin Vote and Nadja. Perhaps the best definition of Robin provided in the scholarly work was one of
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the first: Joseph Frank, in 1945, referred to her as a “creation,” because “it is impossible to call her a character, since character implies humanity and she has not yet attained the level of the human,” emphasizing that she “is one of the most remarkable figures in contemporary literature” (439). Frank, in referring to Robin as a creation, distances Robin from her real-world counterpart of Thelma Wood, much like Breton distanced Nadja from her real-world counterpart of Léona Delcourt. Such a distancing allows both characters to instead become representative of the negative affect of heartache. Building from studies such as Jonathan Flatley’s Affective Mapping, which considers the negative affect inherent in much of modernist literature through the lens of melancholia, I theorize heartache as an affective state in which the love-object is described in hyper-specific terms that ironically distance the love-object from their real-world inspirations, while the subject experiences the melancholic worsening of the ego resulting from the consumption of the lost love object. Central to this discussion is recognizing the role of the subject-object oscillation in articulating heartache: heartache becomes negative through oscillating in the treatment of Robin and Nadja as either subjects or objects. The worsening of Nora’s ego occurs as she begins to treat Robin as an object; in this oscillation, Robin loses her subjectivity and is instead repeatedly referred to with possessive pronouns. Similarly, Nadja is lost in Breton’s narrative through being treated, continually, not as a subject but as an object consumed by André’s ego; Breton’s distancing of himself as narrator can then be interpreted as a disavowal of responsibility for his treatment of Nadja. As the initial component in a chain of progressively deteriorating affective states, the importance of the
oscillation between subject and object is emphasized, and so the contribution of defining heartache as a form of negative affect becomes apparent. There is, of course, a difference in the heartache inherent in both Breton and Barnes’s narratives. Nadja is committed to a psychiatric ward; Robin chooses to leave Nora. The difference between a deterministic and individualistic cause of the loss of the love-object results in the differing degrees of negative affect in each of the texts; Nightwood is, arguably, a more despairing tale. Recognizing that the melancholic tone in Nightwood is the result of Robin’s agency allows for a curious insight to be uncovered. The love-object begins to be treated as an object only once she has demonstrated her agency and left her various lovers, ensuring that the agency inherent in her decision to leave her romantic relationships emphasizes the irony in her being treated as an object. Heartache does not occur at the suspension of agency, but rather at the assertion of agency; it is in the love-object’s decision to leave that results in the partner losing their beloved object and realizing that what they had attempted to possess was, in fact, a subject. Perhaps, then, heartache is not the pain of losing a beloved subject treated as an object; perhaps it is more accurately defined as the loss of the ability to possess, in recognizing finally that the love-object is indeed a subject and so is incapable of being truly possessed. Perhaps the heart of negative affect is not the ambivalence between the boundary of subject and object resulting in suspended agency, but is instead the disavowal and begrudging acceptance of the agency of another.
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NOTES
1. Jane Marcus was justified in coming to this conclusion: the contrasts in the immediate critical reaction to Barnes’s text emphasize this sentiment. Barnes’s editor at Boni and Liveright wrote to her about Nightwood: “It is obvious to me that you tried to do an honest study of perversion but I am afraid you got lost in your studies” (qtd. in Goodspeed-Chadwick 29); Ezra Pound famously critiqued Nightwood by stating that Barnes’s “[b]lubbery prose had no fingers or toes” (qtd. in Hubert 40). And yet, T. S. Eliot’s introduction to the book is lauding, resulting in its almost immediate canonization in modernist literature; to Eliot, Nightwood was “so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it” (xii), a sentiment he’d reiterate in his second introduction to the text written twelve years later: “As my admiration for the book has not diminished [...] I have thought best to leave unaltered [the original] preface [for Nightwood] (Eliot xvii). See Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick’s Modernist Women Writers and War: Trauma and the Female Body in Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Gertrude Stein and Susan J. Hubert’s (2004) “The word separated from the thing: Nightwood’s political aesthetic,” along with Eliot’s introduction to the novel.
2. Djuna Barnes had a complicated early life, including a relationship with her grandmother that has since been speculated to be incestuous, along with a short, presumably forced marriage to her father’s lover’s brother, both of which were the result of having grown up in an environment dominated by the philosophy of so-called “free love.” See Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century for a further analysis of Barnes’s early life.
3. Work from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank on Silvan Tomkins (1995) has since been viewed as one of the initial investigations into literary affect, with concurrent and later work from Brian Massumi (2002) becoming equally influential in developing affect theory.
4. See, for example, Jesse Matz’s (2001) Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics; Kevin Bell’s (2007) Ashes Taken for Fire: Aesthetic Modernism and the Critique of Identity; and Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s (2006) Bad Modernisms, among others.
5. Examples of past scholarship that considered Nightwood as a novel of melancholia include Katherine A. Fama’s (2014) “Melancholic Remedies: Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood as Narrative Theory” and Ery Shin’s (2018) “What Masochism Means to High-Risk Romantics: Reading Nightwood.” The renewed interest in Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” has, in fact, been attributed to the rise in affect theory, with Enderwitz arguing convincingly for the relationship between the two concepts. See Anne Enderwitz’s Modernist Melancholia: Freud, Conrad and Ford for a more in-depth discussion of the interrelation between “Mourning and Melancholia” and contemporary affect theory in analyzing modernist literature. Scholarship on Breton’s work has considered the depiction of schizophrenia and
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madness in considerably more detail, given that Nadja was based on a 10-day relationship with a woman who was then committed to an asylum for the rest of her life. See Bethany Ladimer’s (1980) “Madness and the Irrational in the Work of Andre Breton: A Feminist Perspective,” Harold Wylie’s (1970) “Breton, Schizophrenia and Nadja,” and J. Bogousslavsky’s (2013) “The Nadja Case” for further discussion.
6. Although I use the instability of oppositional binaries in Robin’s description as indicative of hyper-specificity ironically resulting in ambiguous universality, such analysis has a rich history in queer theory. See, for example, Julie Taylor’s essay “Making Contact: Affect, Queer Historiography, and ‘Our Djuna’” in Pender and Setz’s edited collection Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes’s Modernism
7. Other similarities beyond her ambiguous characterization have been oft noted in the scholarly literature. Specifically, Robin has frequently been addressed as the center of Nightwood, a sentiment which is justified by recognizing that, although Robin has a limited role in the action of the narrative, the other characters are obsessed with her, constantly speaking about her and considering her impact on their lives. For example, Smith writes that Robin is “the novel’s center, a metonym for history and memory—the woman over whom battles are fought,” later describing her as an “odd and paradoxical [...] empty center” to the novel (199). Discussions of Robin as an empty center are not unique to Smith, with the exact phrase having been echoed by de Lauretis (119) and Kaup (98); similar rhetoric appears in Marcus’s influential 1989 essay, “Laughing at Leviticus,” in which she refers to “Robin’s ‘soft usury’ of speech” as indicative of the “empty sign of her body” (171). Emptiness is characteristic of Robin, whether as a sign or as a center to the text; although she is the center around which the characters gravitate, she is a character fundamentally misunderstood, particularly as others try to possess her. Other iterations of this concept include Winkiel’s definition of Robin as “both an object of desire [...] and part of an alienated public searching for the spectacle’s promise of happiness, a promise that constantly evades them” (19) and Gallagher’s articulation that Robin “occupies the position of the woman-as-spectacle” (287). In the variations of these accounts, there is a consistent ambiguity, one which is reflective of the ambiguity inherent in Robin’s persona.
WORKS CITED
Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood. New Directions, 1936.
Bell, Kevin. Ashes Taken for Fire: Aesthetic Modernism and the Critique of Identity. U of Minnesota P, 2007.
Bogousslavsky, Julien. “The Nadja Case.” Literary Medicine: Brain Disease and Doctors in Novels, Theater, and Film, edited by Bogousslavsky and Sebastian Dieguez, vol. 31, Karger Publishers, 2013, pp. 44-51.
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Breton, André. Nadja. Grove Press, 1960.
de Lauretis, Teresa. “Nightwood and the ‘Terror of Uncertain Signs.’” Critical Inquiry, vol. 34, no. 5, 2008, pp. 117-29.
Enderwitz, Anne. Modernist Melancholia: Freud, Conrad and Ford. Springer, 2015.
Ertuna, Irmak. “The Mystery of the Object and Anthropological Materialism: Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence and André Breton’s Nadja.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 33, no. 3, 2010, pp. 99-111.
Fama, Katherine A. “Melancholic Remedies: Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood as Narrative Theory.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 37, no. 2, 2014, pp. 39-58.
Flatley, Jonathan. Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. Harvard UP, 2008.
Fleischer, Georgette. “Djuna Barnes and T.S. Eliot: The Politics and Poetics of Nightwood.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 30, no. 3, 1998, pp. 405-37.
Frank, Joseph. “Spatial Form in Modern Literature: An Essay in Three Parts.” The Sewanee Review, vol. 53, no. 3, 1945, pp. 433-56.
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, edited by J. Strachey, Hogarth Press, 1957, pp. 243-58.
Gallagher, Jean. “Vision and Inversion in Nightwood.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 47, no. 2, 2001, pp. 279-305.
Goodspeed-Chadwick, Julie. Modernist Women Writers and War: Trauma and the Female Body in Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Gertrude Stein. LSU Press, 2011.
Hubert, Susan J. “The word separated from the thing: Nightwood’s political aesthetic.” The Midwest Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 1, 2004, pp. 39-48.
Kaup, Monika. “The Neobaroque in Djuna Barnes.” Modernism/modernity, vol. 12, no. 1, 2005, pp. 85-110.
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Ladimer, Bethany. “Madness and the Irrational in the Work of Andre Breton: A Feminist Perspective.” Feminist Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 1980, pp. 175-95.
Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. “Introduction: Modernisms Bad and New.” Bad Modernisms, by Mao and Walkowitz, Duke UP, 2006, pp. 1-17.
Marcus, Jane. “Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as Woman’s Circus Epic.” Cultural Critique, no. 13, 1989, pp. 143-90.
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke UP, 2002.
Matz, Jesse. Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics. Cambridge UP, 2001.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard UP, 2005.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Adam Frank. “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins.” Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, edited by Sedgwick and Frank, Duke UP, 1995, pp. 1-28.
Shin, Ery. “What Masochism Means to High-Risk Romantics: Reading Nightwood.” Modern Language Studies, vol. 48, no. 1, 2018, pp. 85-103.
Smith, Victoria L. “A Story beside(s) Itself: The Language of Loss in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood.” PMLA, vol. 114, no. 2, 1999, pp. 194-206.
Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century Duke UP, 2009.
Taylor, Julie. “Making Contact: Affect, Queer Historiography, and ‘Our Djuna.’” Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes’s Modernism, edited by Elizabeth Pender and Cathryn Setz. Pennsylvania State UP, 2019, pp. [x-xx].
Winkiel, Laura. “Circuses and Spectacles: Public Culture in Nightwood.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 21, no. 1, 1997, pp. 7-28.
Wylie, Harold. “Breton, Schizophrenia and Nadja.” The French Review. Special Issue, vol. 43, no. 1, 1970, pp. 100-06.
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As I pick up my copy of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010), my first question is “What is it?”
Published by Visual Editions, a press that specializes in publishing books that use visual writing, Tree of Codes defies categorization. As I open the book, 128 die-cut pages surprise me. Each page is fragile, a latticework of holes and words and white space. The story begins with a page containing nothing more than five rectangular holes of various sizes. The next page presents 27 words, three punctuation marks, and five rectangular holes. At first blush, the words appear incoherent. But, in fact, the words on each page form viable sentences and present a story. The layers of text make me pause, forcing me to wonder if I should read each page as a solitary sheet or try to combine the words I see with the words that emerge from below. How many layers do I need to consider?
“What’s missing?” The easy answer is the words of the Jewish-Polish writer Bruno Schulz, for the story we read in Tree of Codes is what remains of Foer’s selective erasure of a recent edition of Schulz’s short story collection, The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories (2008). In fact, Foer creates his title
from one of Schulz’s chapter titles, “The Street of Crocodiles.” In 1934 Schulz published a collection of sensory-rich stories told in first-person that describe the lives of a boy and his extended family, including a strong-willed servant girl named Adela, a powerful mother, and an enigmatic father. Biographer Jerzy Ficowski describes the stories as a “personal and disquieting bible … in which the object of worship is the secret essence of things which transcend their own limitations—the magic of creation” (26), and he insists that the eponymous story “The Street of Crocodiles” is “the symbol of the bewitching and pathological beauty of imitation which conceals seeds of a magical metamorphosis” (95). Foer has created a new narrative— Tree of Codes —by incising swatches of passages from the original.
But how to make sense of this genre-blurring creation? Is the work a novel? Is it a short story collection? Is it conceptual art? Is it a performative? It is theater? Is it literary theory? Is it a Luddite’s response to the electronic book? Is it a representative example of what Marjorie Perloff calls “unoriginal genius” in which “[i]nventio is giving way to appropriation, elaborate constraint, visual and sound composition, and reliance on intertextuality” (11) or what Kenneth Goldsmith calls “uncreative writing”? Foer would no doubt bristle at such efforts to box him in, for he claims in an interview with Steven Heller that “[d]efinitions have never done anything
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“the real secret written in the hieroglyphics of cracks and scratched lines.”
—Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, 2008.
Barry Laga, Colorado Mesa University
but constrain.” So, perhaps Foer is merely heeding Jasper Johns’s advice to “take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it” (54).
Of course, the answer to “What is Tree of Codes?” may be “all of the above.” But Tree of Codes’ reworking of The Street of Crocodiles is far more ambitious. While the work meditates on loss, destruction, emptiness, and absence, Tree of Codes simultaneously invests in compensation, remediation, and redemption. The wispy pages and reconstructed narrative engage in a number of paradoxes and reversals, asking us to revel in expansion instead of closure, the inexhaustible in place of finitude, and wonder in lieu of certainty. The result is a rumination on language, literature, and the aestheticization of loss itself.
Layering Loss
Drawing attention to absence is the reigning trope of World War II and especially Holocaust monuments and memorials. For example, Horst Hoheisel’s “AschrottBrunnen” (1984) inverts a destroyed “Jewish” fountain, prompting visitors to stare at the water as it drains into subterranean depths. Christian Boltanski’s “The Missing House” (1990) foregrounds an absent rowhouse where Jewish families lived before WWII. Shimon Attie’s 1992 photography superimposes photographs of Jewish merchants and families from the 1930s onto their contemporary locations. The U.S. Holocaust Museum’s Hall of Remembrance (1993) is an undecorated, empty space that contrasts with the artifact-laden exhibit rooms. Micha Ullman’s The Empty Library (1995) invites us to look into a small room containing empty bookshelves beneath the cobbles near the facade of Humboldt University of Berlin. Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum Berlin (1999) contains an empty Holocaust Tower as well as “voids” created by the zig-zagging geometry of the exhibit halls. Peter
Eisenman’s “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” (2005) is a multi-acre site containing over 2,000 charcoal-gray concrete blocks, a kind of featureless, concrete cornfield. These sites and many more make a special effort to help us notice absence, drawing attention what is no longer present or what will never be present as a result of war and genocide. Foer works with the same trope. With its gaps, erasures, and holes, Tree of Codes embodies loss. Like these memorials and monuments that attempt to make the absent present or visible, the physical, tangible design of Tree of Codes draws more attention to absence than presence. As one moves from page to page, one cannot help but notice the gaping holes. We move slowly through the pages, fearing that we will damage the book. In this sense, the work is more akin to conceptual and performance art. Tree of Codes performs loss. Or as Gwen Le Cor asserts, “The gesture of effacement reenacts the loss” (312). We experience an actual absence. There is nothing allegorical or metaphorical about the missing text. The gaping holes are not only physical reminders of a missing past, but they literally eliminate Schulz’s (albeit translated) words. Without even knowing that Foer has excised the first page of “August,” the first story in Schulz’s collection, we experience absence because Tree of Codes presents a blank page with five irregularly shaped holes. The second page screened by the first page offers this vexing passage:
had their eyes half-closed. Everyone wore his children greeted each other with masks painted on their faces; they smiled at each other’s smiles. (7-8)
The fragments encourage us to ask, “Who had their eyes half-closed?” The awkward syntax of “Everyone wore his children greeted each other with masks painted on their faces” forces us to wonder what has been eliminated, what words would make the phrase
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“Everyone wore his children” a little less surreal? And even if we read Tree of Codes page by page, sans palimpsest, the holes in the pages confront us. The book leaves us with scraps, however coherent they may be. We return time and again to “What does the original say? What’s missing? Who’s missing?” Of course, absence works metaphorically. Echoing a common refrain among readers, Aaron Mauro notes, “The excised text in Tree of Codes is a physical representation of this loss and the loss of much of Schulz’s corpus during the war” (2). Foer reminds us in the “Author’s Afterward” of The Tree of Codes that “Schulz’s surviving work evokes all that was destroyed in the War: Schulz’s lost books, drawings and paintings; those that he would have made had he survived; the millions of other victims, and within them the infinite expressions of infinite thoughts and feelings taking infinite forms” (138). Foer describes as well the Nazis’ seizing of Drohobycz, in what is now western Ukraine, that threatened the Jewish Schulz. Anticipating his own demise, Schulz “distributed his artwork and papers… to gentile friends for safekeeping” (137). Sadly, all this work disappeared, as Schulz did when Gestapo officer Karl Günther shot him in the street in 1942 during a random “wild action” (137). Referring to the “important artists of the 20th century,” Foer reminds us that “Their long shadow—the work lost to history—is, in many ways, the story of the century” (137). More specifically, the loss of Schulz’s work becomes an allegory of lost potential as well as lost works. Think of the artists who prematurely died or whose future works never saw the light of day as a result of WWII. We cannot catalog the loss to the arts and intellect. In this sense, by evoking what is missing, synecdoche, not metaphor, becomes the governing trope in Tree of Codes. Its delicate pages testify of absence, not presence; of death, not survival. Loss extends to the medium itself. Foer fears the loss of the book, but he is not alone. Mauro notes
that “renewed interest in experimental print texts has come to express an anxiety about the proliferation of digital texts and digitized distribution models for literature” (2). Or, as Jonathan Freedman phrases it, “In age of Amazon and Kindle, the bookstore itself seems an anachronism; in the era of Twitter and IMing, so does the very notion of reading—or at least reading conceived of as a dense, hermeneutically rich, profoundly solitary activity. This tale is usually told as one of loss—the death of the book, the end of reading” (461). This “bookishness,” as Jessica Pressman describes the impulse, responds to “works that induce fear of the death of print in order to show that it is precisely the threat of the print body’s demise that prompts book-bound literature to respond with the necessary vigor to fight for its life” (469). Paper asserts itself, demanding to be recognized.
Foer certainly has his eyes on digital e-readers and their glossy screens, the virtual text that evaporates and reappears with a swipe of the finger, and their promise of limitless storage. An e-reader’s anonymity strikes us as well. One can’t tell what another is reading, for all those books are encased in the same metal, plastic, and glass. But what Tree of Codes provides us is not only an old-fashioned book, but a Kindle-proof book—no mean feat. An e-reader certainly cannot capture the complexity of Tree of Codes . The holes create a palimpsest whose complexity the reader generates by choosing the degree of depth. We can, for example, merely read the second page blocked by the screen of the first page:
had their eyes half-closed. Everyone wore his children greeted each other with masks painted on their faces; they smiled at each other’s smiles. (7-8)
Or we can read the second page without the first blank page that filters the second:
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The passersby had their eyes half-closed. Everyone wore his mask. Children greeted each other with masks painted on their faces; they smiled at each other’s smiles. (8)
Or we can read the second page with traces of the third page behind it:
growing in his emptiness, wanting to, the passersby the had their eyes half-closed. Everyone whole generations wore his mask. fallen asleep children greeted each other with masks painted on their faces; they smiled at each other’s smiles. (8-9)
Or, we can read the second page with traces of the third and fourth page behind it:
Apart from them, growing in this emptiness, mother and I wanting to The passersby over a keyboard the of paving stones had their eyes half closed. Everyone whole generations wore his mask. fallen asleep the children greeted each other with jar mask painted on their faces pain. we pass; they smiled at each other’s smiles. (8-9)
And so on.
The layers of pages do provide depth, an actual physical difference that literally conveys both time and space. As Olafur Eliasson observes in his promotional blurb that decorates the cover, the work provides “an extraordinary journey that activates the layers of time and space involved in the handling of a book and its heap of words.” An e-book cannot convey that tangible sense of space. The text lives on the surface with, at best, only an illusion of layers. The words that peek through the holes in Tree of Codes are, literally, millimeters deep. Time and space are literal, not virtual.
Foer’s bookishness certainly echoes Schulz’s own celebration of physicality. Ficowski reminds us
that “Schulz also was fascinated with the substance of things, with the texture of matter, and wrote: ‘This is… our love for matter as it is, for its emptiness and porosity, for its unique mystical consistency… we love its roughness, its resistance, its haglike awkwardness’” (64-65, ellipses in original). Foer’s attention to texture and weight is evident in the design of Tree of Codes, for the book forces us to notice its heft, its gaps, its body: “I was more interested in subtracting than adding, and also in creating a book with a three-dimensional life. On the brink of the end of paper, I was attracted to the idea of a book that can’t forget it has a body” (qtd. in Heller).
Texts that employ their bodies to create narrative complexity must be read not for their words alone but also for the physical involvements readers undertake to access their materialities— including smells, tactile sensations, muscular manipulations, kinesthetic perceptions, and proprioceptive feedback. That is what reading requires in the age of the aesthetic of bookishness. (231)
Foer resists the abstract, ethereal, soulless text. He wants to reunite the soul of the text with its body, and the flimsy pages allow us to do that. I have never turned a page so slowly. I pay attention to the separation of each page. To make it easier to focus on the story Foer carves out, I insert a colored piece of paper behind each page. I worry about tearing a page, and I caution friends who borrow my copy. I cannot escape the fact that the form of the book—wispy pages and binding—matters. The literal act of reading the book is laborious or, better put, Tree of Codes draws attention to the tactile process of reading.
Finally, Foer laments at times the loss of plenitude, however imaginary or aspirational that plenitude may be. We encounter limits in a variety
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N. Katherine Hayles foregrounds the body metaphor:
of ways. Paul Ardoin insists that Tree of Codes continues “the project of the impossible book,” “the impossibility of finished representation, as well as the failure of any inscription—particularly the printed book—to do anything more than represent itself” (1007). Ardoin points to Foer’s “hole boring” as “a Beckettian project” that foregrounds language’s failure “to do justice to a real state of being obscured by the material” (1007). This disappointment in our ability to touch the real manifests itself in the overwrought sensuous language that strains for meaning, but Schulz’s stories dwell on disenchantment as well, evident in, say, the dog Nimrod’s unrealized “attempt[s] to express the incredible wonder of that capital enterprise, life, so full of unexpected encounters, pleasures, and thrills” (Street 44) or the comet that promises “the end of the world, that splendid finale” (110). Instead, “[l]eft to itself, [the comet] quietly withered away amid universal indifference” (111). And Foer goes on to observe in his “Foreword” to Schulz’s story collection that:
Our lives, the big and magnificent lives we can just barely make out beneath the mere facts of our lifestyles, are always trying to occur. But save for a few rare occasions—falling in love, the birth of a child, the death of a parent, a revelatory moment in nature—they don’t occur; the big magnificence is withdrawn. (ix)
Channeling both Foer and Schulz, as we peek through the gaps in the pages, we see glimpses of the future trying to occur, but reality disappoints. Consider a random page in Tree of Codes . We can see few complete words and phrases as we peer many levels deep. One fragment catches our eye: “One could see gestures, raised eyebrows, watery” (87). With one turn of the page, we seem closer to the complete sentence and, presumably, coherent complete meaning. With another turn of the page, “One could see” disappears, and we now encounter “secret winks,
cynical gestures, raised eyebrows, watery.” And with another turn, we only have “a watery,” an adjective that now modifies the phrase “anonymous gray.” The “big magnificence” withdraws because the combination and context change. The future isn’t what we thought it would be. Meaningful combinations disappear instead of coalesce, in part because the future fails to produce what we yearn for.
We encounter another exemplary description when the boy-narrator of Tree of Codes uses his father’s city map to ruminate on the search for meaning. The map is incomplete, for “[o]nly a few streets were marked. The cartographer spared our city,” suggesting that areas of the city remain undefined and unnamed. The boy describes the:
colorless sky, an enormous geometry of emptiness, a watery anonymous gray which did not throw shadows and did not stress anything, a screen placed to hide the true meaning of things, a facade behind which there was an overintense coloring. (90-91)
The passage goes on to suggest a kind of urban drowsiness, an inability to locate a “sharpness of outline” (94). Our boy-narrator compares the city to a “tree of codes”: “The tree of codes suddenly appears: one can see the line transform the street. our city is reduced to the tree of codes” (94). He then ponders its significance: “And yet, and yet—the last secret of the tree of codes is that nothing can ever reach a definite conclusion. Nowhere as much as there do we feel possibilities shaken by the nearness of realization” (95).
The city then becomes a metaphor for our daily groping for meaning as well as a theory of reading: “[t]he atmosphere becomes possibilities and we shall wander and make a thousand mistakes. We shall wander along yet not be able to understand” (Tree 96). Our boy-narrator wants more than the gray ordinary life he experiences. The story ends with a
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description of an impending comet, and the boy looks to his father who simply ignores the comet: “Left to itself, it withered away amid indifference. richer by one more disappointment, life returned to its normal course. my father alone was awake, wandering silently through the rooms” (134). At its simplest level, the narrative portrays the boy’s unfulfilled desire, his fatigue of masks, empty gestures, the ordinary, and his disappointed quest for meaning and depth.
Tree of Codes meditates on various forms of loss. Foer draws attention to Schulz’s absence, the end of the book, the loss of physicality, the massive loss of lives, the loss of memory, the loss of plenitude, and—above all—the loss of a whole that can never really exist except in our aspirations and imagination. We lament that “nothing can ever reach a definite conclusion” (95). We grieve because we can never quite reach what we’re grasping for. Possibilities dangle in front of us, but they remain inaccessible.
Compensating for Loss
In light of this grim and disappointing conclusion, Tree of Codes compensates us by resisting totality, closure, unity, and completeness. Returning to a key passage offers a way to reread Foer’s seemingly nihilistic impulse:
The tree of codes suddenly appears: one can see the line transform the street. our city is reduced to the tree of codes. And yet, and yet—the last secret of the tree of codes is that nothing can ever reach a definite conclusion. Nowhere as much as there do we feel possibilities shaken by the nearness of realization. (94-95)
Failure to reach a definite conclusion is something to celebrate. How so? In Protocols of Reading, Robert
Scholes offers a reading metaphor that contrasts centripetal reading, which “conceives of a text in terms of an original intention located at the center of that text,” with centrifugal reading, which “sees the life of the text as occurring along its circumference, which is constantly expanding, encompassing new possibilities of meaning” (8). In other words, reading allows us to connect “one time to another, one place to another, one text to another through the figures of memory” (18). This process of association is the act of making meaning, for “[w]e read, as we talk, write, and think, by connecting signs and weaving texts, using the figures of resemblance, contiguity, and causality to accomplish this work” (18). Foer responds to epic loss as well as the quest for totality by celebrating the act of making meaning indefinitely. Tree of Codes revels in the condition that “nothing can ever reach a definite conclusion” (95). Failing to incorporate and integrate is a strength, not a liability; something to applaud, not lament. The centrifugal spin of Tree of Codes works in four ways: exhuming, conjuring, expanding, and deferring.
Exhuming, of course, invokes the raising of corpses, a fitting image given Foer’s subject matter, but Foer codes the word more positively, marking an unearthing, a revelation of what was once hidden. Foer offers us an anecdote in the “Foreword” to Schulz’s story collection that helps us understand this process. He describes how Felix Landau, a Gestapo officer, demanded that Schulz decorate the walls of his children’s playroom with murals. As the home passed from owner to owner, layers of paint covered the murals. Years later, with the help of Drohobycz locals, the filmmaker Benjamin Geissler rediscovered the home and hidden murals. Foer explains that “Geissler rubbed at one of the walls with the butt of his palm, and colors surfaced. He rubbed more, and forms were released. He rubbed more, like doing the rubbing of a grave, and could make out figures: fairies and nymphs, mushrooms,
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animals, and royalty” (“Foreword” viii). Chipping away, rubbing, exhuming—these processes imply hidden treasures beneath disruptive layers that cloud our vision.
Reading as exhuming as a way of locating “new possibilities of meaning” (Scholes 8) works in different ways. First, texts are multi-layered, inviting readers to rub and rub, unveiling meaning in the process. With each turn of the page, we remove a layer, and we encounter more signs to decipher. For Foer, however, this act of rubbing also describes the function of stories themselves. Stories, not readers, rub “at the facts of our lives,” and stories “give us access—if only for a few hours, if only in bed at the end of the day—to what’s beneath” (“Foreword,” ix). The reversal is clever. Instead of cocooned texts resisting our penetrating eyes, we readers are encased with layers of paint, hiding what’s inside us. Foer sympathetically cites Kafka, who insists that “[a] book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside of us” (ix-x). The act of reading bores into us as well, creating something new in the process by exhuming what lies beneath our surfaces.
Second, writing exhumes. The conventional view is that writers and artists plumb the depths of experience, locating hidden truths or barely visible realities. Tree of Codes is no different. As James Randall points out, exhuming a new story within Schulz’s story is a way of “reanimating the hidden forms of his work, treating them as fragments that may be brought to life” (77). Excising Schulz’s text “is a form of decryption that imagines and reveals latent figures and fragments within literature” (78). Tree of Codes exhumes a narrative hidden within The Street of Crocodiles. He is releasing a story that lies within in the same way that a sculptor reveals the figure within a block of marble. But does Foer destroy Schulz’s work? Foer defends his subtraction, offering sculpture as an analogy. To Heather Wagner of Vanity Fair, he explains that:
There are two kinds of sculptures. There’s the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on.
And then to Heller of the New York Times, Foer insists that:
one can carve any number of things from a block of marble, but one is still dependent on the marble. … Has a sculpture taken away from the block of marble? Not really. Has it added? Not really. “Tree of Codes” took “The Street of Crocodiles” as its starting point and made something new.
We cannot help but notice that the sculptor alters and transforms the block of marble. What might have conveyed strength and density may now suggest fragility and whimsy. We cannot deny a degree of loss as well. Shards of marble litter the floor. But for good or ill, Foer is right in that we don’t necessarily mourn for that complete block of marble, for the marble provides the source material. With a work of art before us, we celebrate what persists, especially in its new form. Based on the sculpture analogy, Foer reshapes The Street of Crocodiles to form Tree of Codes. Letters, words, and sentences litter the floor, but we celebrate what Foer presents us. Tree of Codes is a new work of art. Foer seems to follow the lead of the boy-narrator’s father in Schulz’s “Tailor’s Dummies” who proclaims that “all attempts at organizing matter are transient and temporary, easy to reverse and to dissolve. There is no evil in reducing life to other and newer forms” (Schulz 31). The father goes on: “There is no dead matter … Lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life” (31). And this impulse to recreate grows out of a desire to be a demiurge. An
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apt and appealing figure, a demiurge crafts and refashions the universe. In gnostic traditions, a demiurge transforms the ethereal and the conceptual into material reality. Tree of Codes literally embodies this desire, for it is a product of Foer’s own desire to reuse and remake. Importantly, this ability to create and recreate is part of the compensation Foer extends to us. As Zofia Grzesiak explains, “every man, and especially every writer-reader, should be a demiurge, transforming the ‘same’ into the ‘different’” (162). Recreate what is before us, reorganize matter, enliven the lifeless.
What significance do these changes produce?
In his “The Mythicisation of Reality,” a short work of literary theory, Schulz offers us a useful lens. For Schulz, as with so many modernists at the time, a poet’s task is to redeem the common, to help the word “regrow,” regenerate, and replenish “its full meaning.” The poet, for Schulz, “through new short-circuits which arise from fusions, restores conductivity to words” (3). Therefore, by incising Schulz’s stories, Foer is able to bring new life to Schulz’s work, for “the life of the word rests on its tensing and straining to produce a thousand associations, like the quartered body of the snake from legend whose separate pieces sought each other out in the darkness” (1). We discover meaning and animate what we thought was dead.
In this sense Tree of Codes redeems language and redeems Schulz’s stories. For example, at one point, the narrator offers this description: “reduced to the indispensable minimum, i drove small nails into the wall of existence. I have found at last moments” (Foer 128). The odd juxtapositions that create strange metaphors make the sentence tense and strained. The image of driving nails into the “wall of existence” is surreal and abstract, offering us a “thousand associations.” Does the image echo a Christian cross? Do the nails hold up or secure the wall? The “small nails” suggest a paltry effort or perhaps an inadequate attempt. The phrase “I have
found at last moments” is awkward and incomplete, yet the sentence shifts our focus to time itself. We could generate many more associations, but the point is that the act of incising Schulz’s work often creates the tensing and straining Schulz celebrates, and the result brings new meaning to Schulz’s stories. Building on Schulz’s severed snake metaphor, Foer decontextualizes Schulz’s words by his selective editing and scatters them across the page, and we must reattach them, “fuse” them, if we desire circuits that conduct meaning, just as Schulz attempts to do in his own work.
But the act of exhuming suggests a more meta-linguistic insight, for Foer “literalizes the concept that all writing is, on some level, an act of re-reading, a performative reworking of earlier works, a process of pulling words, images and idea from out of the lines one has read and loved and recasting them into something new” (Rager 2). In other words, writing itself is the act of mining words from pre-existing texts. And, as with mining, there is a destination, for Foer concludes in his “Afterword” that:
I could not help but feel that Schulz’s hand must have been forced, that there must have existed some yet larger book from which The Street of Crocodiles was taken. It is from this imagined larger book, this ultimate book, that every word ever written, spoken or thought is exhumed. The Book of Life is the Temple that our lives strive to enter, but instead only conjure. The Street of Crocodiles is not that book—not the Book—but it is one level of exhumation closer than any other book I know of. (139)
This passage deserves some unpacking. Foer encourages us to go beyond the literal world of Schulz’s works and imagine the infinite possible stories we can tell. Reading and writing become acts of creation, but Foer ruminates on the tension between finite and infinite linguistic possibilities. In this sense,
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Tree of Codes echoes Jorge Luis Borges’ short story
“The Library of Babel” (1962), which describes a vast library of interlocking hexagonal rooms. Borges’ narrator tells us that “the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols” (54). And given that the library contains all possible books, readers initially rejoice, for:
All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. (55)
However, readers soon realize that they cannot locate the most important texts or even the ur-text in what they believe was the “Crimson Hexagon,” which supposedly contains “books whose format is smaller than usual, all-powerful, illustrated and magical” (56). The readers find themselves incapable of sifting the useless from the worthwhile, despite the fact that the linguistic possibilities are ultimately limited. Foer’s Tree of Codes mirrors the same frustration and pleasure. Both texts revel in multiplicity. However, the multiple levels, the fragmentary language, and the letters that appear and flee vex a reader’s desire for coherency, and readers cannot readily separate the wheat from the chaff. What counts? What combinations matter?
The image of The Book of Life, the one Foer describes as the ultimate source of every word, recalls the biblical Book of Life that records our deeds and misdeeds in preparation for the final judgment. More relevant to Tree of Codes, however, is the notion that the Book of Life contains the plans of God for his people. The Book of Life contains “every word ever written, spoken or thought,” yet it also contains “every word that will ever be written, spoken or thought” (Foer, “Afterword”139). It’s a repository, a
collection, a grand library of sorts, an encyclopedia of words and thoughts. In other words, in this mode of reading, Foer reverses the traditional trajectory, for present and future creations are, in fact, excavations into a pre-existing set of codes. Importantly, this Book of Life contains not just what has happened, but what will happen, as many readers point to Psalms 139:16 ( RNSV ): “Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.” And here we have Foer as psalmist who appropriates biblical discourse to craft a theory of reading, for the Book of Life contains all stories. Writers exhume stories, and the writers who follow exhume from their stories, all through history until we arrive at Foer’s exhumation of Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles.
The Book of Life, then, becomes a metaphor for polysemy, and Tree of Codes draws our attention to stories as systems of symbols and signals that need deciphering. In Schulz’s story “Cinnamon Shops,” the narrator runs into the country and looks into the sky and exclaims, “The transformations of the sky, the metamorphoses of its multiple domes into more and more complicated configurations were endless” (62). This image offers a useful explanation of how a finite number of stars can multiply and transform into an infinite number of combinations, a principle Foer embraces in Tree of Codes and his own transformation of Jewish midrash and Borgesian postmodernism.
While Tree of Codes expands outward in the sense that reading and writing are acts of exhumation into an inexhaustible ur-text, the narrative—as with all narratives—generates “new possibilities of meaning” by conjuring imaginative and invented realities. This centrifugal spin of meaning offers us, perhaps, the promise of openness instead of closure, freedom instead of confinement, presence instead of absence, something instead of nothing. In a bit of folklore describing the destruction of the Second
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Temple in Jerusalem, Foer recounts how the Romans could not completely destroy the fourth and final temple wall: “It stood firm against hammers, and pick-axes, and clubs. The Romans had elephants push against the wall, they tried to set fire to it, they even invented the wrecking ball. But nothing, it seemed, would bring the wall to its knees” (“Afterword” 137). The tale recounts how a Roman soldier declared, “I am of the opinion that we should leave it, as a testament to our greatness. … If nothing remains, it will be as if nothing were ever there. But when people see the wall, they will be able to conjure the enormity of the Temple, and the foe we defeated” (137). This anecdote serves several purposes, and one function certainly echoes the idea of loss. The Romans destroyed all but one wall of the temple. The Nazis destroyed all but two collections of Schulz’s stories and a set of drawings. More importantly, perhaps, is the invitation to conjure what’s missing, or as Lai-Tze Fan explains, Tree of Codes is a testament in the sense that it is a “simultaneous response to the lost text and effort to participate in its continuation by remembering, reflecting upon, reclaiming, and rewriting textual absence” (48). As we examine Tree of Codes, we can extend the analogy of destruction and conjuring: by incising Schulz’s stories, Foer destroys most of the original text, yet a kind of “fourth wall” remains, testifying of Schulz’s greatness. For example, in Tree of Codes, Foer keeps the following words from the first page of the story “The Street of Crocodiles”:
My father kept in his desk a beautiful map of our city, an enormous panorama. the city rose toward the center of the map, honey-combed streets, half a street, a gap between houses. That tree of codes shown with the empty unexplored. (87-88)
And if that passage is an example of the “fourth wall,” all that remains of the first page of this story,
then consider what’s missing from Schulz’s text, the “other three walls.” In this sense, Tree of Codes invites us to not only conjure the missing passages in The Street of Crocodiles, but also all of Schulz’s missing work, art, letters, stories, and his missing novel Messiah. Admittedly, a desire to restore a prelapsarian past feels nostalgic and sentimental, but nowhere does Tree of Codes suggest that our conjuring is anything but a reconstruction, a creative and imaginative act. Perhaps more important than a successful restoration is the endless act of remembering and conjuring itself.
Second, Foer reminds us, “It’s been tradition, ever since, for Jews to leave small notes of prayer in the cracks of the wall. It could be said that these form a kind of magical, unbound book, conjuring the enormity of the desperation of the world, the needs we haven’t defeated” (“Afterword” 137). This anecdote encourages us to think of those orphaned words on the pages of Tree of Codes as prayerful scraps of paper that again function as synecdoches. Each word or phrase signals a larger prayer, an expression of desire, an ardent plea.
For example, on a single page we encounter the following fragments, and the words we encounter as we scan the page almost appear as an imagistic poem:
faces pressed against the pane , full of little, , content with sawdust tears
Read in context, text rewritten in paragraph form, with the text that precedes and follows, the fragment is quite comprehensible, albeit with a few surreal figures of speech:
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.
(46)
Mother could not finish her almost completed day. we used pieces of bread to wipe up the remains of nothing and it did not matter. now surrendered to her mercies, we became motionless. faces pressed against the pane, full of little, content with sawdust tears. During one of his wanderings my father stood in the dark, breathing on the waving window curtains, whispering softly: ‘I am not mistaken.’ (44-47)
However, read individually, each word or phrase can serve as isolated prayers that convey larger aspirations, yet they combine to form a coherent message and a “magical, unbound book.” Words and phrases become analogs of every book ever written, incomplete descriptions of humanity’s desperation and desires. This insight that language— sounds, words, texts—function synecdochally is not new, but what Tree of Codes provides is a visceral illustration of competing impulses: fragments invoke larger aspirations and desires even as they point to their impossible fulfillment.
Tree of Codes embodies the tension between loss and totality, fluidity and permanence, for Foer invites us to write these stories, fill in the gaps of textual history even as the text resists our efforts. The form of the book encourages this kind of conjuring, but what we will never be able to do is conjure the missing words and sentiment. The scaffolding provided by what remains is not enough to rebuild what is missing. On the other hand, we can fill in the gap with our own imaginary text. In this sense, Tree of Codes exemplifies Roland Barthes’ “writerly” text, making the reader “a producer of the text,” not a passive, “intransitive” consumer of the text (4).
Framed another way, Foer seems to follow JeanFrançois Lyotard’s suggestion that “[i]t is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented” (46). It’s easy enough to see how Foer’s incisions allude to the conceivable, and the reader’s task is to somehow
fill those gaps as we grieve for what we cannot reproduce and recover. It is a Sisyphean and contradictory task. We seek closure that can never arrive, while we simultaneously welcome the ever-expanding dissemination of meaning that frees us of constraint and totality.
We want to comprehend, enclose, and wrap our mind around what we encounter, and we do so by framing the experience in familiar terms and concepts. On the one hand, this desire is natural and normal, for making what is alien recognizable endows what we read, watch, and encounter with meaning. Or as Scholes explains, “We make sense of our lives as we make sense of any text, by accommodating new instances to old structures of meaning and experience” (10). On the other hand, Simon Critchley explains that:
The very activity of thinking, which lies at the basis of epistemological, ontological, and veridical comprehension, is the reduction of plurality to unity and alterity to sameness. The activity of philosophy, the very task of thinking, is the reduction of otherness. In seeking to think the other, its otherness is reduced or appropriated to our understanding. (29)
Tree of Codes resists our desire for totality and comprehension by not just endlessly exhuming and conjuring meaning, but also by multiplying and deferring meaning. Foer preserves alterity and in the process paradoxically compensates for loss.
In Schulz’s story “The Book,” from the second set of short stories entitled Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, the narrator, who in the act of describing a book he finds, clarifies this multiplicity: “And here we must stress a strange characteristic of the script, which by now no doubt has become clear to the reader: it unfolds while being read, its boundaries open to all currents and fluctuations” (127). He continues:
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And yet, in a certain sense, the fullness is contained wholly and integrally in each of its crippled and fragmentary incarnations. This is the phenomenon of imagination and vicarious being. An event may be small and insignificant in its origin, and yet, when drawn close to one’s eye, it may open in its center an infinite and radiant perspective because a higher order or being is trying to express itself in it and irradiates it violently. (128)
Reading is unfolding; boundaries open; fragments contain volumes; centers radiate infinitely. This process becomes tangible as we read Tree of Codes. If we don’t separate the page we are reading from the pages that lie beneath it, we encounter “crippled and fragmentary incarnations”:
ebrihoa ss back rising and fall the mother and I wanting to s . over a keyboardless day. the ormous f of gr paving stoned had their eyes half-closed. Everyone clumsy gestu. whole generations wore his fallen asleep child greeted each other with jar masks painted on their faces pain wit we pass; they smiled at each other’ secret of The sleeping smiles. (7-16)
These fragments invite us to imagine, bid us to look closely and search for a deeper significance. The process is less a matter of finding hidden truths and realities than recognizing that the seemingly insignificant contains “an infinite and radiant perspective.” For example, with each turn of the page, we unveil new information that simultaneously gives and takes away: the fragment “ebrihoa” transforms into:
spre screamed alf the bri hoarse Apart from them (8)
spre screamed alf the bri hoarse wi . (9) spreadi , the half the bri hoarse with shouting. he rising (13)
spreadi the silent the bright silence he rising (14) spreadi , the silent dow. her (16) spreading in the window, her (17) spreading in the window. (18)
Admittedly, Tree of Codes cannot quite reach Schulz’s goal of “radiant perspective,” but we recognize the aspirations embodied in the book. The reading process and the act of making sense of life events mirror each other. The seemingly small and fragmented allude to the transcendental, and the transcendental manifests itself in the “crippled and fragmentary incarnations,” and our task is to cross those boundaries.
But even as each page teases us with infinite meaning and fragments to decode, Tree of Codes also embodies infinite deferral. Each page, layered with possibilities, invites us to make meaning even as it defies our desire for complete understanding. This postponement is yet another way Foer preserves alterity. Hayles draws attention to creative desires that “[find] expression in the hole words. Lacking the stability of words on the page, they often appear half formed, as fragments peeking through the holes, contingently emerging through erasures created for other purposes and dissipating when the reader lifts the page” (230). This undermining of totality is echoed in Foer’s simpler story about slumbering pedestrians who wander in a detached world reminiscent of a James Ensor painting. Inchoate sounds, intimations of a mother and “I,” and the potential for ominous pain now haunt the story. As the narrator in Tree of Codes explains, “we find ourselves part of the tree of codes. Reality is as thin as paper. only the small section immediately before us is able to endure, behind us sawdust in an enormous empty theater” (92-93). But we can also say that ahead of us lies traces of what’s to come. We try to separate the present from the future, but the traces remain as we march forward. We gain clarity, perhaps, as we
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proceed, but not necessarily. As we peel off the present from the future, more traces reveal themselves, simplifying and complicating in the same gesture. A passage from Schulz’s story “The Book” clarifies this window to the future as well. The narrator observes that:
There are things that cannot ever occur with any precision. They are too big and too magnificent to be contained in mere facts. They are merely trying to occur, they are checking whether the ground of reality can carry them. And they quickly withdraw, fearing to lose their integrity in the frailty of realization. (127)
The concepts that govern Tree of Codes are all here: imprecise reality, the reluctance to appear or reveal oneself, limited access, integrity, and frailty. Read in light of pages that tease then disappoint, we see how Foer celebrates language’s ability to resist totality. We encounter infinite regress, but that feature is a strength, not a liability. Foer’s celebration of evanescence echoes the boy-narrator in Tree of Codes who, upon reflecting on the meaning of life, observes that “[s]omething stirred in me. The feeling of no permanence in life transformed into an attempt to express wonder” (67). Alterity and wonder connect, one a product of the other.
The title itself—Tree of Codes—suggests both a drive toward roots and sources, but a tree of codes spins outward as well, propagating and disseminating meaning. The future offers us many meaningful associations, but these possibilities flee as we approach them, for the tree continues to grow. Tree of Codes reminds us that the past, present, and the future demur: we only have traces of the past and the future, and the present apparently doesn’t exist, for what we experience now, on a single page, is a combination of the excised past and incoherent glimpses of the future. For Foer, limitless possibilities and unending movement are something to celebrate.
If closure, totality, and fixed meaning suggest a kind of loss and death, then openness, multiplicity, and infinite and deferred meaning promise life or at least endless renewal.
Aestheticizing Loss
Foer is fond of John Ashbery’s 1968 essay “The Invisible Avant-Garde” that proclaims, “Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibility that they are founded on nothing” (134). But I’m not sure if Tree of Codes is reckless. And explicit claims aside, Foer wants more than beauty; he wants delight and wonder. In the Vanity Fair interview with Wagner, Foer asks:
What if you pushed it to the extreme, and created something not old-fashioned or nostalgic but just beautiful? It helps you remember that life can surprise you. … People’s face when they see the physicality is pleasing and unexpected. They smile. It has a quality of extreme satisfaction. It’s not the way a book is supposed to be. Yet it is as it should be.
What’s telling is that the initial Visual Editions website that featured Tree of Codes displayed a one minute, eight-second video that showed nothing but people’s reactions as they opened the book. Marketing agents edited the video, to be sure, but in each case we see faces initially perplexed transforming to grins of delight and perhaps wonder and exclamations of “wow,” “amazing,” and “That’s just mad.” And perhaps these reactions are a key to Tree of Codes. Foer invokes the sublime in the VF interview in an uncanny way when he notes that:
We’ve gotten used to the notion that art, if it entertains or says something interesting
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about our time, that’s enough. But there’s something else it can do that nothing else can do. To be genuinely transported, to have your nerves touched, make your hair stand on end, that’s what I think art can do well—or only art can do.
What’s unsettling, however, about Foer’s celebration of wonder is that he rubs our nose in loss and deferral of meaning and understanding. What makes our nerves stand on end, perhaps, is that Foer aestheticizes loss itself. Tree of Codes reminds us to mourn for what we cannot access—the past, present, and future escape us—yet the form of this reminder delights us. As we discussed, our young narrator concludes that transience in every form has its charm: “The feeling of no permanence in life transformed into an attempt to express wonder” (Tree 67).
Liliane Weissberg encourages us to ask, “Can beauty exist when the relationships are broken, and no lifesaving reciprocity exists? Do we as artists or audience carry any ethical responsibility if we derive pleasure from ‘unfairness’?” (26). Or, what do we do, in the words of Brett Ashley Kaplan, with “unwanted beauty,” the aesthetic pleasure we
experience from representations of trauma and mayhem? I do not have the time and space to address those august questions. However, Kaplan offers us a useful insight and paves the way for a closer look. In her examination of Holocaust representations, Kaplan suggests that when representations of trauma are beautiful, “these works entice our reflection, our attention, and our questioning” (1). She clarifies, asserting that even if we derive pleasure from:
the unwanted beauty of some Holocaust works, that does not mean that we have emphatically refused understanding or that we have not attempted to glean meaningful lessons from the past. Rather… memory is transformed by beauty and that beauty—even though unwanted—allows us to approach diverse painful pasts in deeper ways. (167)
Tree of Codes is not a Holocaust work per se, but the work certainly trades in trauma, loss, mourning, and death. However, the work not only invites us to ponder lives lost, but the beauty of Tree of Codes entices us to reflect on the melancholy, elegiac, and delightful task of reading itself.
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WORKS CITED
Ardoin, Paul. “Jonathan Safran Foer and the Impossible Book.” PMLA, vol. 128, no. 4, 2013, pp. 1006-08.
Ashbery, John. “The Invisible Avant-Garde.” Art Theory and Criticism: An Anthology of Formalist, Avant-Garde, Contextualist and Post-Modernist Thought, edited by Sally Everett, McFarland, 1995, pp. 132-38.
Attie, Shimon. The Writing on the Wall: Projections in Berlin’s Jewish Quarter. Edition Braus, Heidelberg, Germany, 1993.
Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. Translated by Richard Miller. Hill and Wang, 1975.
Boltanski, Christian. The Missing House. 1990, Berlin, Germany.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Library of Babel.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings, edited by Donald A. Yates, New Directions, 2007, pp. 51-58.
Critchley, Simon. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. Purdue UP, 1992.
Eisenman, Peter. Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. 2005, Berlin, Germany.
Fan, Lai-Tze. “Material Matters in Digital Representation: Tree of Codes as a Literature of Disembodiment.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 51, no. 1, 2018, pp. 37-53.
Ficowski, Jerzy. Regions of the Great Heresy. Bruno Schulz, A Biographical Portrait. Translated and edited by Theodosia Robertson, W. W. Norton, 2003.
Freed, James Ingo. U.S. Holocaust Museum. 1993, Washington D. C.
Freedman, Jonathan. “BookishNess: A Brief Introduction.” Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 48, no. 4, 2009, pp. 461-64.
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Foer, Jonathan Safran. Tree of Codes. Belgium: Visual Editions, 2010.
---. Afterword. Tree of Codes, by Foer, Visual Editions, 2010, pp. 137-39.
---. Foreword. The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, by Bruno Schulz, Penguin, 2008, pp. vii-x.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. Columbia UP, 2011.
Grzesiak, Zofia. “Being Pierre Menard: Bruno Schulz in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes and Roberto Bolaño’s Distant Star. Comparative Studies, vol. 7, 2016, pp. 152-66.
Hayles, N. Katherine. “Combining Close and Distant Reading: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes and the Aesthetic of Bookishness.” PMLA, vol. 128, no. 1, 2013, pp. 226-31.
Heller, Steven. “Jonathan Safran Foer’s Book as Art Object.” The New York Times, 24 Nov. 2010, artsbeat. blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/24/jonathan-safran-foers-book-as-art-object/. Accessed 25 June 2012.
Holy Bible. New Revised Standard Version, Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989.
Hoheisel, Horst. AschrottBrunnen. 1984, Kassel, Germany.
Johns, Jasper. Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews. Edited by Kirk Varnedoe, Museum of Modern Arts, 1996.
Kaplan, Brett Ashley. Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representations. U of Illinois P, 2007.
Le Cor, Gwen. “From Erasure Poetry to e-mash-ups, ‘reel on/another! power!”: Repetition, Replication, and Resonance.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol. 24, no. 3, 2018, pp. 305-20.
Libeskind, Daniel. Jewish Museum Berlin. 1999, Berlin, Germany.
Lyotard, Jean-François. “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” Postmodernism: A Reader, edited by Thomas Docherty, Columbia UP, 1993, pp. 38-46.
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Mauro, Aaron. “Versioning Loss: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes and the Materiality of Digital Publishing.” DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 4, 2014.
Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. U of Chicago P, 2010.
Pressman, Jessica. “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 48, no. 4, 2009, pp. 465-82.
Rager, Matt. “[_]Tree[_] of C[___]od[__]es.” Post45. 24 May 2012, post45.org/2012/05/ _tree_-of-c___od__es/. Accessed 14 Feb. 2017.
Randall, James. “Sculpting in Lost Time: The Fragmentation of Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes.” Comparative Critical Studies, 2013, pp. 75-90.
Schulz, Bruno. 1936. “The Mythisation of Reality.” schulzian.net (no longer active; see https://org. coloradomesa.edu/~blaga/mythisation-of-reality-bruno-schulz.pdf ). Accessed 25 June 2012.
---. The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories. Translated by Celina Wieniewska, Penguin, 2008.
Scholes, Robert. Protocols of Reading. Yale UP, 1989.
Ullman, Micha. The Empty Library. 1995, Berlin, Germany.
Visual Editions. Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer: Public Reactions. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=neE3CeT0mFg
Wagner, Heather. “Jonathan Safran Foer Talks Tree of Codes and Conceptual Art.” Vanity Fair, 10 Nov. 2010, vanityfair.com/culture/2010/11/jonathan-safran-foer-talks-tree-of-codesand-paper-art. Accessed 25 June 2012.
Weissberg, Liliane. “In Plain Sight.” Visual Culture and the Holocaust, edited by Barbie Zelizer. Rutgers UP, 2001, pp. 13-27.
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52.2
DhammaTalks
BY LAUREN BARBATO
One morning in February, Lian tells me:
I’m calling this monk to ask him about death. Whose death?
My death. Lian hands me her iPhone, its protective seal still unbroken. Can you help me leave a voicemail?
Lian is thirty-five; I am thirty-two. She calls me The Baby; she’s The Old Lady.
We live together in a one-bedroom apartment, where Lian has spent the last ten months sleeping in the kitchen. We don’t find this odd; we don’t essentialize the kitchen. The kitchen is just a room with a sink, a black four-by-four Ikea table
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we found on Weibo, and Lian’s bed—a collapsible metal frame that runs from the stove to the fridge.
And on this portable bed this particular morning, fat wet snowflakes floating past our oblong windows, Lian awakes from her meditation worried about death.
What will you ask this monk? I want to know.
How to break samsara. Lian shrugs off the comforter she uses as a meditation shawl and rises to cook breakfast. Today, it’s potatoes and eggs with one giant pancake. She mixes flour and milk in a teal ceramic bowl with a matching rubber spatula. I need to get out of here. Lian raises the spatula straight in the air. Peacefully.
We’ve been worried about death for quite some time, even though we don’t go to many places. Lian walks to ShopRite each evening; three times a week, I work at the daycare facility on Ridge, where the kids still color from behind plexiglass barriers. Philadelphia is one of the last places in America to not plunge into arctic temperatures. Our lights and heat still work. We have running water, though our washing machine drains into the basement sink, which then drains back into the washing machine.
Lian isn’t afraid to stick her bare hands in weeks-old sink water and claw out the dirt and lint. She isn’t afraid to walk through Wissahickon alone at 10 p.m. without a flashlight. She is afraid of dying The Old Lady: no money or family. What will I do? Lian asks. Who will take care of me?
I lay flat on the living-room floor and rub the belly of my sleeping senior cat. We call him The Old Man: wiry white ear fur and all. Lian lingers in the doorway, blotting her eyes with her linen robe.
We all die alone, is all I can think to say.
Lian nods. You’re so mature. She returns to the kitchen with two damp, almondshaped spots in the center of her robe.
I am not that mature. I have six overdue parking tickets. A city bus recently swiped my parked Honda Civic and took out the driver’s side window, leaving red wires poking out from the dented plastic. It’s been two months and I still haven’t called, because it’s easier to drive like that than deal with the city.
I roll over onto my back, and The Old Man kneads my stomach. Do you think this monk will tell us how to break samsara?
Of course. Lian replies. At least, I hope so.
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Lian and I cannot handle this samsara any longer. No, Lian will claim she cannot handle samsara; I want to pass through this samara to the next. I’ve learned to live as just a speck in this universe, a speck that does not exist without its fellow specks. I am only here because once I was there and I will soon be there again.
I almost became a nun like Lian, after a breakup dragged my heart to the bottom of the Schuylkill and fed it to the rakshasas. Technically, rakshasas are maneaters, but they devoured me, too.
I spent a year traveling to convents and monasteries. I slept in a nun’s former painting space at an abandoned convent in New York City. I retreated to a convent on a cliff overlooking the Hudson, where wild turkeys outnumbered the sisters. Not long after, I met Lian; together, we drove to Kentucky and wandered in silence alongside Trappist monks. Lian is a Buddhist, not a Catholic, but she found many similarities between the bareheaded, brown-robed monks and herself, a diminutive, bareheaded woman in a lilac robe that she swears is gray. Finally, I flew alone to a Passionist center in Citrus Heights, just outside Sacramento, and prayed among oak trees. There, while resting my hand on the stone monument depicting the Fourteenth Station of the Cross, a presence rolled my long-shrugged shoulders back. Joints cracked and knots unwound. A breeze carried through the oak leaves. I waited several minutes before turning around, seeing nothing.
You don’t enter the monastery when everything is going perfectly. I forget who said this now. Maybe one of the nuns with whom I shared an afternoon along the Hudson.
But that’s the cliché, isn’t it? Those who can’t handle this world, leave.
It took a few days for the monk to return Lian’s call, and when he did, she was on one of her late-night walks and had left her phone charging on our kitchen counter. Did he leave a message? I ask.
Just to call him back.
Did you?
What time is it in California?
This monk lives somewhere among the Redwoods. Lian listens to his dhamma talks each morning and night, and whenever she feels anxious throughout the day. His voice is deep and smooth, his cadence, almost mechanical. I had to ask Lian if he was real or automated.
He’s brilliant, Lian says. And American.
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I began listening to this monk during my newfound morning ritual of scouring government websites and Twitter bots for vaccine appointments. I stumble out of bed at 5:30 a.m. and peruse a crowdsourced spreadsheet of every medical center and Shop Rite pharmacy in the state of New Jersey. As I click from one website to the next, caffeine and rage simultaneously strike my body. The monk reminds me to cultivate compassion, to imagine those who’ve harmed us—those we don’t like so much— happy. For a long time, I would imagine the man who fed my heart to the rakshasas. These days, I picture politicians in ill-fitting navy-blue suits with lopsided American-flag pins.
At 6:08 a.m., the vaccine bot sends an alert: seven appointments at Hackensack Medical in Bergen County, ten appointments at Rowan in Glassboro. Each website greets me: I’m sorry but there are no appointments available at this time. I’m sorry but these time slots are full. I’m sorry but
In the kitchen, Lian emerges from under her comforter as I replenish my coffee. Anything? She asks.
Nothing.
Lian slips back under the comforter, and then materializes on the other side of the bed, the comforter now wrapped around her head and shoulders. I’m going to call the monk again.
It’s still dark in California. He gets up early.
I return to my desk and scroll through Twitter. The monk advises me to extend my thoughts of happiness outward. I sip my coffee and imagine all those young Brooklyn people flashing their vaccination cards on my Twitter timeline, masks pulled down to their chins.
When I am ready—when I no longer want to subtweet those young Brooklyn people—I call the official vaccine line for the state of New Jersey. Stop right there. The state administrator interjects. Your father is more than eligible. My father is seventy-two with emphysema; it’s a miracle he’s survived this long. He recently had a heart attack, and survived that, too. This may be the one last nice thing I can do for him.
Don’t wait for an email, the state administrator continues. She claims a Shoprite pharmacy near my father’s house currently possesses a handful of doses. Don’t wait. She gives me another website address.
This website is generic, impersonal. Another alert, highlighted in red, flashes across the screen: There are no vaccine appointments available. Please check back at a later date.
Lian calls out from the kitchen: I left another voicemail.
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And I call back: I will, too.
A pharmacist answers after one ring, interrupting my spiel about my father: We’re waiting on a shipment from the fed. Check back in two weeks.
Okay, I’ll call back in two weeks.
No, don’t call. The pharmacist pleads. Go online.
But my father’s sick. I pause. And high risk.
There’s just nothing coming to us from the feds, the pharmacist sighs. But I was told—
Go online.
I imagine the pharmacist: plastic name tag clipped to her white coat; sleeves cuffed to accommodate her blue latex gloves. I imagine her wearing a bronze turtleneck, the color of the monk’s robes. Rakshasas can assume a female form, and when they do, they are called rakshasi Don’t be a rakshasi, the monk is telling me. Imagine the pharmacist happy.
So I breathe deeply: Thank you very much. I will check the website in two weeks.
Someone asked me to pray for Ronald, who is dying. Lian tells me as she unloads her yellow Shoprite bags.
That’s sad, I say. Who’s Ronald?
His friend, I think. People are always stopping Lian on her walks. They spot her long, linen robe beneath her Sherpa-lined brown cloak. They ask her about meditation and spirituality. They want guidance, dedications, and prayers. What they don’t know is that Lian calls me the Serious One. I’m the one who has taken the vow.
Lian reaches down to stroke The Old Man, who gazes at her shaved head as if Lian is the Buddha herself. I need to talk to the monk before he dies.
This monk became a monk in 1974. He’s not as old as the Fourteenth Dalai Lama or Thich Nhat Hanh but anyone can die at any time, Lian reminds me. The monk traveled to Thailand as a young man and returned fifteen years later to open a monastery in California, for his Thai master had received a vision. Thus begins every Buddhist origin story: A monk travels to foreign lands and there, atop a snow-capped mountain, or resting on buttress roots beneath a majestic tualang tree, he perceives what has never been perceived before. He gathers an assembly of attentive disciples: future arhats and later, bodhisattvas. One day, they will see it, too.
Part of the reason I came here was to find this monk, Lian tells me. We can no
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longer visit his monastery, the pandemic having shuttered it to outside visitors. Temporarily, which now means one year or longer.
We’ll see him soon, I assure her.
When we have vaccines, Lian adds. But first, I hope your dad gets one.
Are your parents okay? Lian’s parents cannot receive the vaccine; the government there declared that anyone older than fifty-five will have to wait until the younger generations are fully vaccinated.
Lian paces the perimeter of square kitchen, flexing her three-pound weights— magenta, with rubber grips—that someone donated via Weibo. They want me to come home, you know.
I know.
She pauses in front of the window and begins a rep of overhead presses. It’s good I stayed here. After ten presses, Lian gently drops both arms. My parents don’t go anywhere.
My dad doesn’t go anywhere either.
But at least—Lian returns to her remaining groceries—my father still has hobbies.
When Lian first met my father, at a socially distanced Thanksgiving dinner in New Jersey several weeks after his heart attack, she said he was a cool guy who needed more pleasure in life.
Each tweet from the vaccine bot these days has more than a dozen replies: Aw damn, those went quick! Wow, under a minute! Who gets these? Anyone?
Everyone I know who’s got one got it through a doctor friend, my dad tells me over the phone.
Don’t you have a doctor friend?
I have doctors, my dad replies. Not doctor friends.
I’ll keep trying, Dad.
I wonder if it’s like this in Colorado.
The man who delivered me to the rakshasas lives in Colorado. My father thought I would move out there and that he would come with me. A funny proposal, considering my father could barely breath at zero-feet-above sea level. But my father had liked the man who fed me to the rakshasas, though he did not like that this man was still married. Tell him he can’t be an Italian mist, my father had said then.
A what?
You know. My father adopted an exaggerated accent. A big-a-mist!
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Now, Lian’s voice floats from the kitchen to the living room. Those were such happy times, and not so long ago, she sings, I wondered where they'd gone. Her voice is soft and slightly off-pitch, but confident.
There’s nothing in Colorado, I tell my father before hanging up.
Every sha-la-la-la, every wo-o-wo-o. Lian is belting now. Every shing-a-ling-a-ling, they're starting to sing, so fine.
Lian had a talent for drumming; her master claimed that Lian was the best she’d ever heard. Lian has admitted that, if she wasn’t drumming, she would nap in the corner of the temple during morning services. Lian no longer drums but sings, usually in Mandarin, while she studies centuries-old Chan texts. This is the first time I’ve heard her sing in English.
I join The Old Man in the doorway, where he waits, ears forward. Just like before. Lian leans back in her desk chair, right hand twirling the air. It's yesterday once more.
That’s beautiful, I tell Lian.
Karen Carpenter.
Really?
Oh, yes. Lian smiles. I loved her as a teen. My cell phone dings: an alert from the vaccine bot. Lian and The Carpenters, I muse.
Those appointments are gone by the time I reach my desk. There’s only 39 appointments right now, the state administrator informs. For the entire state of New Jersey?
That’s right. The state administrator sounds afraid. Blame the fed. She’s nearly whispering now. They won’t give us any doses.
Earlier, the monk told me the Buddha was not the type of guy who picks fights. The present moment shapes your karma and pain and happiness of this very moment. I lay flat on the floor beside The Old Man and tweet at the vaccine bot: Thank you, bot, for all your help. I include a heart emoji to sound more sincere. The apartment is silent. Then, Lian whimpers. At first, I think her whimpers are hiccups, or maybe they are part of the song. A sort-of blues rendition of The Carpenters. When her whimpers break into a wail, The Old Man and I dart into the kitchen.
Lian curls over her computer keyboard, holding her elbows, chin pressed to her chest. I perch on the collapsible bed, curling Lian’s three-pound weights to my biceps, while The Old Man takes refuge under Lian’s chair. Snow has returned today, the flurry kind that sticks to windows but not the asphalt, and The Old Man and I wait until the kitchen window is obscured.
I never took my father on a plane. Lian whispers. He just wants to go on a trip
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before he dies.
Where does he want to go?
Lian lifts her face; when she cries, her face flushes from temples to chin. France. We’ll save our money and take him to France.
The travel bans.
More time to save up.
I was so stupid. Lian dabs her eyes with her robe. So selfish. Me too, I say, but there’s still time.
Not for me. Lian drops the hem of her robe. The Old Lady. She repositions her thin-framed glasses, peers at the computer screen, and sighs. So stupid.
Lian and I once woke up happy.
Before flying alone to America, Lian lived in a monastery on a willow-green mountain in southern China. This monastery, revered for its Chan Buddhist lineage, overlooked a grand teardrop lake, on which floated canopied sampans. Stone bridges connected the lake’s tiny islands. When Lian first showed me pictures, via Google Maps, I’d said: It’s more beautiful than the Schuylkill.
We lived at the top of a steep hill populated with rowhouses and cherry blossom trees, but we had no mountains; the Schuylkill was the closest Lian came to that lake. During the summer, we took daily walks to the river. We would cross Wissahickon Creek and go as far as the northern edge of Fairmount Park, where hundred-year-old algae-stained steps led directly to the river. Lian willingly skipped down to the bottom step, but I wouldn’t go. A person can drown in under four minutes, and I was never a strong swimmer. I could never return from the bottom.
It’d happened, once, with the man who later delivered me to the rakshasas. We were in a creek, and a current—swift and icy from late-spring snow melt—had swept me away. The man clung to a tree branch; I clung to his arm. He hoisted us onto the rough embankment, and I crawled all the way to his car, twigs and leaves stuck to my shins. Afterward, we stopped at a lodge for bourbon. I drank enough to forget to tell him about what I felt. My body suspended, lungs emptied. As if someone had tied my hands and feet and pulled from both directions.
Would you do that? Lian pointed to kayakers paddling downstream. No way. Would you?
I can’t wear a bathing suit.
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By can’t, Lian
meant
in public.
Lian couldn’t even shake a man’s hand. When we were a little more careless with our pandemic precautions, I took Lian to a party hosted by people I knew from A.A. We were the eldest people there, the only ones in our thirties. The twenty-somethings—largely men in neon tank tops, board shorts, and slip-on sneakers—draped their legs over secondhand papasan chairs and sucked on Juuls. Everyone brought their dogs, big brown mutts that slobbered on everything and everyone. Lian bowed to all the boys. She did not like the dogs.
The young men had wanted to discuss the plight of the Tibetans. They asked Lian about her preference between half-lotus versus full lotus. They kept trying to high five her and then promptly apologized. Lian watched me smoke mango-flavored hookah on a carpeted bedroom floor with a blue-eyed man seven years my junior who I’d almost slept with months earlier. The hookah was supplied by the DJ, a gangly man from the suburbs who talked at length to Lian about SLAA.
I didn’t know you could have a problem with—what’s it called? Lian asked me later, when I’d found her meditating on a folding chair before the dying bonfire.
Masturbation?
Yes, that.
Let’s call it: self-pleasure, I said, settling beside Lian’s feet. This party is fun. Lian smiled. My first American party.
Most of the twenty-somethings were loitering now on the third-floor deck, double fisting vapes and seltzer. They took turns throwing a tennis ball to the dogs barking below. This is a funny American party, I said.
Aren’t all American parties like this?
I snapped open my fourth seltzer. More beer.
Lian had been sober longer than everybody here. The last time she’d drank was college—a gathering in the boy’s dormitory. It was also the first and only time she’d kissed a boy; he rejected her several weeks later.
I don’t know how you stand it. Lian meant rejection from men, or maybe, its aftermath. I never knew how to explain it to her. How the man who sweeps you away like the creek could also be the same man who delivers you to the rakshasas
Sometimes, it’s not enough to imagine a person happy.
On our uphill trek home, I asked Lian: How do you know if you’ve reached Nirvana?
When you’re free of all desire.
I wondered, then, what this could mean. Sober, I no longer craved dry goods or alcohol. I’d surveyed the men at the party and felt nothing. Maybe I’ve reached Nirvana.
No. Lian stopped me. You have so much desire.
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The worst desire is the one you don’t quite understand—isn’t that yet another cliché? The Buddha taught that we needed to search for the origin before we could do anything else. If you could find it, identify it, then you could put the desire to rest.
I never did search for that presence that seared me in Citrus Heights. And I steer clear of the Schuylkill—and all bodies of water, for that matter—the rakshasas mocking my heart.
Yet we must drive across the Delaware to meet my father. An abandoned department store in Burlington County has been refurbished into this thing called a megasite That’s the word this month. The state administrator had said it over the phone with ease. We would have to take my father to a megasite and use a wheelchair, which the state administrator called a transport chair. To the state administrator, it makes my father sound less sick.
As we near the Ben Franklin Bridge, the steering wheel slides between my palms. Can you sing? I ask Lian.
Now?
My car drifts into the right lane, where an angry Suburban swerves. I hear a prolonged honk, and then another. Now!
Lian begins: When they get to the part, where he's breaking her heart, it can really make me cry.
From the crest of the steel suspension bridge, the Delaware extends in ten directions. This is how dharma spreads to all points north and south and east and west and those between. I can only think of the plunge into seamless waters, red-and-yellow port cranes that preen like plucked ostriches over the Camden waterfront laughing along with the rakshasas prowling below.
Just like before, Lian finishes as we descend into New Jersey, it’s yesterday once more. She focuses on the tumbledown brownstones flanking Route 76. How old is Karen Carpenter now?
She’s dead.
Lian’s body lurches forward—What?—the seat belt snapping her back against the seat. Like, thirty years. No one told you?
Lian speaks to the brownstones, sliding lower in her seat. Everyone dies. Have you tried the monk again?
He doesn’t want to talk to me.
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That’s not true.
How do you know?
All I know, in this moment, is that I want Lian to be happy—a selfish desire, but the monk advises that individual happiness is not selfish when it impacts others. I place my hand on her shoulder and, even though we rarely touch, she doesn’t immediately rebuff. He’s a busy monk, I say.
Okay. Lian dials the monk, her cell on speakerphone. When his automated voice message plays, she looks at me, wild-eyed, her face already beginning to flush.
Hi, this is Lian’s friend! I near-shout into the receiver. We would like to speak to you, because we are very big fans of your work! We need some guidance on how to get by in samsara. We are trying. Please give us a call back when you’re free!
That was perfect. Lian smiles, tucking the phone inside her cloak.
Too pushy?
No, I told you—he’s American.
We meet my father in a massive suburban parking lot emptied of its commercial trappings. Store marquees have been stripped and replaced with cheap vinyl banners: GET VAXXED. VACCINES HERE. ID NEEDED.
Lian bows to my father, palms pressed together. My father bows back, stiffly, his arms constricted from the two sweaters layered under his short winter coat. My father can drive, and he can walk on flat ground, but even on the flattest stretch of pavement he pauses to suck in cold air by the open-mouthed gasps.
We carefully remove the transport chair from my father’s sedan. Lian offers to push the chair, and I let her.
You’re a good daughter, my father tells Lian, and she smiles.
We roll my father across the megasite parking lot. Nearly two hundred people have already accumulated at the sliding glass doors, guarded with traffic cones and caution tape. My father waves his hands: Just wheel me past the door.
We take an elevator to a second elevator to a third elevator. All the clothes and shoes and perfumes have long been removed, replaced with makeshift nurses’ stations partitioned with blue tape. Some of the stations feature cheap gray curtains while others are open. Masked people sit there with their left sleeves rolled to their shoulders, scrolling on their phones with their free arms. National Guard members in desert cameo roam the aisles.
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Beneath a marquee promoting WOMEN’S INTIMATES AND SLEEPWEAR, a National Guard member scans my father’s ID. He clacks away on his laptop, secured to a portable standing desk. Second doses only today.
But the website said first dose.
The website was wrong.
I show the Guard member my iPhone. But you confirmed the appointment! Hey, the Guard member fires back, it wasn’t me.
I feel hot, even with my parka draped over my arm, my wool turtleneck bristling my chin. You don’t need to imagine him, the monk whispers to me, he’s standing right in front of you.
You’re right, I say, to both the monk and the Guard member. Do you know where they’re doing first doses?
The Guard member returns to his laptop. Try Cape May.
Cape May? I hear my father argue from his transport chair. I already drove here from Middlesex! I imagine we are wandering the Redwood Forest and the monk is leading us through the trees. We are careful not to step on any ferns, for we are considerate of all sentient beings. The monk knows the path. He is brilliant, even as an American.
I signal Lian to wheel my father around. Let’s go.
Once outside, my father removes his mask and yells to those still waiting in line: It’s a scam!
And the people yell back: Are you fucking kidding me? What the fuck is going on? We’re dying here!
I tap my father’s shoulder, as urgent yet gentle as I could be. You’re starting a riot, Dad.
They should know. My father throws up his hands, stained purple from bruises and blood clots. This state’s gone to shit.
Lian slows my father’s transport chair to a stop beside his sedan. What now?
My father is shivering; Lian’s shoulders are heavy. The man who delivered me to the rakshasas would be a more practical companion; he could lift my father, transport chair and all. But there’s only me, half-a-dozen bridges in our way. Cape May?
What’s that? Lian asks just as my father wheezes, Are you crazy?
Lian can teach you meditation on the ride. After my father’s heart attack, I’d attempted to teach him some meditation practices. He threw up his hands then, too, and shouted, I’m meditating! I’m meditating!
Now, I hold out my hand. After a moment, my father takes it, and I rub my thumb over the blood pooling beneath his freckled olive skin. Okay. My father glances at my driver’s side window as he steadies himself. The hell happened there?
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City bus, I say.
I’m driving, my father says.
It’s been thirty-five years since the monk’s master passed away. How did the monk survive this long? In his latest dhamma talk, the monk eulogized his master and provided this warning: You can’t just go into the forest to have a good time. The monk’s master never did.
Lian is enjoying the ride through the Pine Barrens a little too much. She slips through the seatbelt and breathes circles of condensation onto the glass, fixated on the miles of pines glazed with ice. Fallen branches protrude through the hard-packed snow, and it all shimmers, somehow, beneath this overcast sky.
My father never liked the radio, so the soundtrack for our journey is his fake molars clack-clacking Nicorette gum. You should put on your monk, I tell Lian.
Not my monk, Lian corrects. Everyone’s monk.
Whose monk? My father asks.
I poke Lian’s shoulder. Elaborate.
Lian faces my father. The monk was born in Long Island and lives in California.
You came all the way here to see a monk from Long Island?
He’s very inspirational, I explain. He wanted to succeed in meditation or die trying.
He succeeded, Lian adds. Now I want to succeed, too, because I don’t want to die.
You won’t die, my father says.
How do you know? Lian asks.
My father snaps his gum. You won’t die.
The Cape May site is not an abandoned department store, but a cozy colonial-era courthouse. Red-white-and-blue bows weave between white columns. A lone SMALL BUSINESSES MATTER sign stubbornly remains on the lawn, depicting the governor’s smiling face in bright red crosshairs. Only a dozen people loiter in the foyer; Lian and I are the youngest by decades. Are we too late? I ask the group at the end of the line.
If you’re too late, a gray-haired man replies, then I’m too late.
They’re checking their supplies, a woman in a fuzzy Patagonia vest tells us.
Another woman shakes her head, her permed bangs vibrating. I drove here from Freehold—there’s nothing all the way down Route 9.
The fleece-vest woman raises a hand. Ewing, for me.
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I thought I came far! The gray-haired man gestures toward himself. Lakehurst. We got all the counties here! My dad laughs.
Lian nudges my shoulder. I left my phone in the car. When I shrug, she lifts her mask: The monk. I give her the keys just as a civilian in dark-rinsed jeans and duck boots enters the foyer, clipboard in hand.
I’m sorry, folks, the civilian says, and that’s all we need to hear.
Well, that’s it for Route 9, the Freehold woman says. Time for Delaware.
I hear Maryland opened up to gen pop already, the gray-haired man adds. Six Flags.
My father slumps in his transport chair. I should just wait until the summer, he tells me. You know they’ll probably be everywhere by then.
I’ll keep searching, Dad. I know my father wants to tell me: Don’t bother. I know he wants to slap my hand away. But he allows me to squeeze his shoulder before rolling him down the accessibility ramp.
Lian circles my father’s sedan, performing a series of overhead presses—cellphone in one hand and the other, a clenched fist. She shakes her head. No monk. And so we link Lian’s phone to the car Bluetooth and welcome the monk’s backing track of birds and cicadas; it always sounds like the monk is relaxing on screened-in porch, post-rainfall. People come up to me all the time and ask: Are you happy? The monk laughs. Does the dhamma make you happy?
The gray-haired man raps our passenger-side window. I didn’t want to say this inside, he pants, saliva seeping through his mask, but I heard about some pop-up pharmacy down the road.
Is it safe? I ask.
But I would go now—the man nods, before jogging off—and don’t tell no one.
We idle in the center of the parking lot. The Freehold and Ewing women walk together now, their purses slung low against their thighs. I tell them: Yes, I am happy, the monk is saying.
Should I tell them? I ask my father.
He watches the women, too. Yeah. Go tell the others.
There’s a place at the edge of Delaware Bay that is no longer. An unpaved road bends along an uneven sandy coast. A stretch of bungalows, plated with salmon-hued aluminum siding, teeter on wooden stilts in empty yards. Garage doors swing from their hinges.
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The feds bought them out years ago, my father tells us.
A royal blue tarp stretches between a slanted chain-linked fence and two posts, evenly constructed from concrete blocks. A pastel-hued wooden signs, one of the ones you’d find on shore rentals, hangs from zip-ties: BAYSIDE PHARMACY.
You crazy? My father mutters, rolling down his window.
What you need? The pharmacist asks.
First dose! We shout.
Three? You’re in luck—we don’t have much left.
I point to the two sedans behind us. Two doses are for them. And then I look to Lian.
Lian nods. We are waiting.
We’re barely out of the car when Lian scales the stone barricade separating us from the storm-torn beach. She sprints across the sand, her brown cloak swelling outward. I chase after her.
Halfway between the pharmacy and abandoned homes, the beach curves like a horseshoe. Lian raises her arms toward the aging sky. The nuns on the Hudson would strike a similar pose each morning, returning grace to the land. I would love to show my father this place, she says.
France is a better choice, I say, even though I’ve never been there. I want the vaccine. Lian lowers her arms. But your father first.
You’re good, Lian.
No. I still just want to vanish. She shuts her eyes and breathes in. His voice—the monk’s.
I close my eyes, too. The monk’s voice is like the ocean. I think of the pharmacist, who is not what I imagined. A middle-aged woman in an oversized parka draped over an olive fisherman’s sweater. Hair clipped back and tucked under a beanie. A wedding ring bulging from inside her latex glove. What led the pharmacist to remain in this place? The monk has described breaking free of samsara as reaching a place where there is nowhere to stay—not even alone in a tarp on a late Wednesday afternoon.
When I open my eyes, Lian has already moved to where the waves rush over her loafers, heels sunken in the darkened sand. I don’t get too close to the shoreline. Even from afar, I can see what’s beneath and I’m afraid. A person can drown in under four minutes. Four minutes can feel like two years. That’s what it felt like. The man who delivered me watched as I clung onto the edge of those algae-stained steps, waiting until the last bit peeled from my fingertips before walking away. My heart is breaking for you, sweetie. I can still hear him from the bottom, ensnared in the nest the rakshasas created just for me. The rakshasas can survive down here; they have no fear.
But the monk might disagree. Don’t be a rakshasi, he tells me.
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ON SUMMER CAR RIDES FROM NEW YORK CITY TO LONG ISLAND, dread pooled at the pit of my stomach, knowing that I was going to vomit in my aunt’s car. It was the same apprehension as elementary and middle school field trips, where the teachers made the two kids in the class who were most prone to motion sickness sit at the front of the bus because the road felt less bumpy there. It was always me and Danielle.
We balled up plastic bags in our fists, and when mine filled up with Kool-Aid colored vomit and I stiffly held its weight in my hands, Danielle glanced over and her face crumbled and she immediately lurched forward into her own bag. But the feeling of dread driving to Long Island is a different kind; it is the kind that feels like you are suffering in the smell of hot leather seats for no reason because nothing exciting exists in Long Island, just picket fences, Applebee’s, and routine.
Then at the tender age of 19, long car rides became bearable, specifically four-hour drives to Binghamton, New York. That is not to say that Binghamton is a fascinating or exciting place, because it certainly is just as dreary, if not drearier, than Long Island, and its entire town feels gray. During my several visits there, I observed all the people I saw in the town—the students of Binghamton University and the locals of Binghamton—and was plainly shocked upon seeing the locals as my head wrapped around the fact that real, real, people chose to live in this random and unremarkable town of Binghamton that didn’t provide anything spectacular like high safety, vibrant culture, lively nightlife, or an abundance of anything, really. For me, I was only there to see my boyfriend, who was a student at the university. Maybe the car rides were better because Eric was in the driver’s seat, his presence a tranquilizer that calmed the hitches in the road and the smell of the car’s leather. Maybe it was being able to accept it for what it was, that my reality was inescapable in this moving vehicle with my head and body nodding as the wheels bounced on impact, and the familiarity of the vision in front of us, a perfect replica of the road movies we watched.
That is also not to say I was a fan of road movies, because I didn’t like watching movies at all, for that matter. Movies were not real, so I was not able to justify why I would invest a couple hours of my life fixated on a bright screen, and if they were real then they were documentaries, which meant they were boring. My attention span did not last me long enough to sit through a whole movie, or maybe it was that I didn’t care enough to. In my early teenage years, I tried—I really did. I tried watching Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel because of its raving reviews, because I heard others mentioning it and was intrigued, and because conversations floated around of Wes Anderson this and Wes Anderson that. I sat through the first twenty minutes of vibrant colors and soft sounds before my eyelids started to feel heavy and I dozed off. The first movie I watched from beginning to end, that wasn’t a Disney children movie, was at the age of fourteen. It was Jurassic World, and I only agreed to watch it because a girl I was becoming friends with at the time asked me to go see it with her, and of course in the beginning of any relationship, one would typically present themselves as an open-minded and enjoyable person who likes movies. When we became close, I admitted to her that I didn’t like movies.
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I began to watch movies with Eric only because his presence was there, and I was watching for him—it was the only thing he liked to do—and for us. In the beginning of any relationship, one would typically try to present themselves as an open-minded and enjoyable person, so of course I watched movies with him—movies that he raved about and wrote essays about and movies that I had heard of and was interested in seeing, but obviously not interested enough to watch them on my own. As Eric learned that I did not truly like movies, I learned that he didn’t just love movies, but that movies consumed him. Maybe that is the wrong word—not consumed, but there was an intangible relationship between himself and film, and it seeped into the crevices of his life.
After a date at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria on a tame January day, where we watched Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, I understood his unexpressed exposition that the relationships people have with their favorite films go beyond just the films. His relationship with 2001 was one that I couldn’t particularly deduce, but I knew existed—because he told me he had seen the film eleven times, and because I found it to be rather slow and meaningless, although I did not reveal that to him. I did enjoy it, though, just because he was there, but it was nothing remotely close to what it meant to him. To him, it was a portal inviting me into his psyche, and to me, it was a tacit confirmation that I meant something to him, or at least enough to let me play a character in this level of intimacy he held with the film.
He had so much to say about movies, but only after they were over. He ignored me when I asked him questions throughout a movie and I’d give up on asking after constant silence. Once in a while I’d cock my head to look at him in a very unavoidable way, and he would finally glance at me and dismissively say, “Just watch.” Frequently, at the end of a movie, I would be shocked or dumbfounded or touched in mystifying ways. I’d ask him things like, “Does that mean they’ll never see each other again?” and he would respond with something like, “That’s not the point of the movie.”
The only clear explanations he gave me were ones I didn’t ask for. “You notice how they are only shot from within the car? The camera always sits in either the backseat or the dashboard, framing them into this car and never leaving it.” I nod, sure. He continues. “So it reinforces the point that wherever they go, their directionless lives will remain the same and only the setting has changed.” After months of watching movies, along with learning how film directors utilize composition and colors to
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translate meanings, I also accepted the fact that I was not absorbing the correct point of them. Strange, because how can you say a romance movie wasn’t about the romance? Sometimes I disagreed with him, brushing off his remarks as thoughts of a pretentious film major, or perhaps that he was overanalyzing.
My fascination and intrigue that sometimes followed movie endings was something I was quietly proud of, because it meant I was an open-minded and enjoyable person, a person that found movies as entertainment. I thought it ended there. Unexpectedly, flashes of familiar scenes began to appear in my own reality and I felt peculiar sensations that were hard to pinpoint, that could maybe only be as closely described as remembering things that never happened, or perhaps as a fleeting memory of a past life (if past lives existed). There is something incredibly private about the relationships one has with films, and it was one that I could not explain or grasp where it came from.
Our drives to Binghamton instinctively possessed some element of Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo ‘66. Maybe it had something to do with both Binghamton and Buffalo being two of New York City kids’ most familiar state schools, or maybe it had to do with both of them being quite plain and ugly. We saw Buffalo ‘66 the first time we dated. Six months of long distance and still were relatively strangers. When he asked to get back together three months after our breakup, I sweetly went along with him, but the grudging whisper on my shoulder had entertained a plan to leave him this time around just so he could feel what I had felt the first time when he left. I realized my plan had to be discarded when it was undeniable that the surges in my chest lingered the way it does the night before you leave for the airport for a trip somewhere, and paced like drowsiness in a warm shower. When he asked me to stay with him at his apartment fifteen minutes off of his campus, I agreed and soon found myself sinking into the comfort of a pale yellow townhouse with loose shingles and uneven flooring on a desolate Walnut Street, shedding my hair over furniture as if I was marking it as mine, and living in his clothes and adopting his scent. We were quick to pretend that we knew each other deeply, that we were something true enough to play house, and we did it quietly, like an implication to not think too hard about it, and as if we signed an agreement to start over and to forget the brief affection we once had, the hesitancy of politeness of a budding relationship we once practiced, and the twin-size bed in his college dorm that I had once seen but never got to know.
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Like Layla in Buffalo ‘66, I quickly hopped in his car, conscious and indifferent that we were still somewhat strangers and escaped to the lonely gray suburbs of New York. Well, Layla didn’t really hop into Billy Brown’s car on her own. Sometimes I forget that Billy kidnapped her, because she falls for him so fast and begs him to stay. I asked Eric at least three times during that movie why Layla was in love with Billy. “I would hate Billy, seriously,” I’d say, furrowing my eyebrows at the sight of this cherubic girl in a powder blue babydoll dress being so tender and loving towards this angry and aggressive misogynist that she barely knew.
Movie reviews and synopses online say that Buffalo ‘66 is a road movie about a man, Billy Brown, who has just been released from jail and immediately kidnaps a tap dancing student, Layla, and forces her to pretend to be his wife when he goes to visit his neglectful apathetic parents. Yes, that is what happens, but that’s not what it’s really about. Despite Billy literally kidnapping her, Layla doesn’t try to escape and her primary concerns are how Billy wants her to present herself to his parents. Although the plot turns out to follow Billy’s contemplation upon revenge for what planted him in jail, I think it’s really about how these two strangers bizarrely fell in love along their journey, specifically how this innocent angel of a girl was able to make this hardshelled man feel love for the first time, and feel worthy of love, and to accept it.
I still have no explanation for why or how she fell in love with such a vile man, but regardless, it is not a story I can relate to. I think about the scene where Billy and Layla are in a photo booth, and as Layla radiates sunshine and bats her matching powder blue eyelids while smiling, Billy is a tight-lipped grim rock. It was not a reflection of my own relationship, and yet, something about Buffalo ‘66 felt like a nod towards myself and was deemed unforgettable. It certainly was an enjoyable movie— quirky and unconventional, raw and desperate, and upon Eric’s commentary fawning over the stylistic film direction, I understood that the crafted collages, jagged editing, and Lynch-like moments made it all even greater. Yet, those were not the reasons for the deep-seated feelings I had with the film. And it certainly was not because of an idealized setting. Buffalo is as homely as Binghamton, and Billy and Layla’s journey took place in a rundown car shuttling across its bleak doleful highways. I realized this feeling was specific, too, when I stumbled upon the fact that a decent amount of people did not like the movie. CNN called it “laughably repetitive and blatantly pretentious” and some others thought it was boring and meaningless. So what made me, who disliked movies and cars and roads, develop such an unshakable attachment to Buffalo ‘66? Was it my sympathy for the portrayal of a misunderstanding family that mirrored Eric’s parents? Was it the contrast of his coldness against my openness? Or
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was it that we were also a burgeoning pair that figured out who we were together on a journey to a humdrum New York?
A road movie does not necessarily have to be a movie revolving around a journey on a literal road, although the term did first circulate in the late 1960s and 1970s to describe New American films that were quite literally about traveling on the road. The setting had stereotypically once been the narrow confines of a car on roads and highways, stopping along motels and diners, the typical American scene. As an American film staple, road movies often have themes that range from or overlap as a combination of outlaw chases, love on the run, travelling from the East to the West, and a search of a quest. Think Thelma and Louise, a 1991 film of an unhappy wife and a witty waitress who leave for a vacation but end up running away on the road, fleeing to Mexico, and being chased by the police after a murder.
However, the term “road movie” has grown to expand beyond its original conception and has come to be a relatively ambiguous film genre, given that many films focus on journeys, and many films follow characters from one place to another, whether or not they take place in an actual vehicle on a road. A road movie then is never really about the road, and is often an analogy to something deeper, nor does it have to be very “American.”
Take Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también, a Mexican road comedy, but despite it being a comedy, I was left sorrowful, feeling more bittersweet than anything else, and perturbed. The surface of the film is a story of two horny best friends in Mexico City, Julio and Tenoch, who are absorbed in teenage lust and are left to their own devices after their girlfriends leave for a summer trip. At a wedding, they meet 28 year old Luisa, whom they immediately develop sexual fantasies for, and lie to her about traveling to an imaginary breathtaking beach called “Heaven’s Mouth.” Luisa surprises them when she agrees to go with them a few days later, when she decides to leave her cheating husband. On a whim, the three of them leave for this mythical “Heaven’s Mouth.” On the road, they tell jokes and talk about sex, gradually forming a sensual alliance, and eventually leading to Luisa having sex with Julio, then Tenoch, and then all of them together. After the shared sexual experience, their friendship seemed to vanish and each went their own way.
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As Eric and I watched Y tu mamá también, I asked him, “Do Julio and Tenoch have feelings for each other?” He shrugged. I asked him again. “Are they bisexual?” He shrugged again. “That’s not the point of the movie.” Although I knew the movie was about so much more—that it was about the coming of age, exploring sexuality and morality, about the purpose of life, and the socioeconomic divisions in Mexico —the simplest complete thought I was able to form was just: do Julio and Tenoch love each other? Everything else, I thought about, but could not tie them end to end. It is revealed that Luisa died of cancer a month after the trip and she knew it the whole time, suggesting that she went on this road trip with the teenage boys to fulfill a last moment of her life. “But why?” I ask Eric. He tells me she was trying to make the most of the rest of her life. Perhaps. I think about how, maybe, she did it as an attempt to figure out how to love herself. I think about how, maybe, she did it to find peace after heartbreak. Maybe she wanted to show Julio and Tenoch the truths of life, maybe call out their immaturity, maybe hint at their repressed sexuality or perhaps the shallowness of their friendship. But maybe it wasn’t that deep at all, that maybe everyone was on their own journey of self-discovery and exploration, that there was never a latent homosexuality, and the road trip simply marked the end of boyhood, and Luisa’s lesson was just the inevitability of change and loss.
Granted there was no overlap between my life and the road trip of Y tu mamá también, I became immersed in its magnetic connotations. Perhaps then, the pleasure of road movies is that it is reflective of moviegoing itself, that watching the movie becomes an equivalent of embarking on the journey that occurs on the screen. Identification with the image is necessary in a way, because wouldn’t the film be incomprehensible otherwise? And isn’t staring through the windscreen of a car when you’re on a car ride, parallel to the vision you are staring at on the screen? Does that mean that the act of perception itself leads to a level of identification with the fictional character the actor plays? Based on these assumptions, then, this also comes with the viewer identifying with either the camera or the protagonist, as when the camera moves from one scenery to another, the camera itself is synonymous to the eye of the viewer’s mind.
As Julio and Tenoch discover truths of themselves on the road, perhaps learning what it means to love someone else, and stumbling upon the surprise of how much intimacy can change bonds, I find myself following their journey, contemplating the same things, and hurting when the friendship between Julio and Tenoch unexpectedly halts. I realize that their friendship was one that I didn’t think could be broken, because sex was such an objective thing to them—after their filterless explicit conversations of sex, and after masturbating next to each other on diving boards hovering
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over a pool a few feet apart. Maybe that is why I am so troubled over their tension when they reunite at the end of the movie, when they are no longer friends, and the narrator states that this is the last time they see each other. I think about how altering intimacy is, how it is easier said than done to love someone, how there is something so fragile about relationships; I think about Eric’s bare chest pressed against my back, I think about his face buried in the crook of my neck as my fingertips draw circles down his spine, and I think about how this was a decision I made, because I could have just left, because it is overwhelming to love and conceivably even more overwhelming to let yourself be loved.
During the quiet pauses of car rides, in the comfortable silence that follows faded laughter, I listen to the wheels rush on the highway like warm jets. I look over at Eric and wonder if this is the moment where he calls it love. The patience and the tension lasted for months—even after living together in the solitude of Binghamton, drives back to New York City, trips to Ithaca, and odd ventures into Pennsylvania—because we both refused to call it what it was, maybe out of fear, maybe out of nervousness, or maybe because neither of us wanted to be the first one to claim it. I was able to stand it because I could sense the feeling when I laid in his lap on the bedroom floor, peering up at his crinkled eyes and cheekbones lifted in a smile, and when he bought hazelnut chocolates home from the deli for me, when he started writing about us in his film essays, and when we watched Wong Kar-wai’s In The Mood For Love at a drive-in theater one night in Queens.
We watched In The Mood For Love twice—once in our first relationship, and once in our second, mainly because the New York Film Festival had a twentieth anniversary restoration of the film and his adoration for Wong Kar-wai had rubbed off on me. There was the déjà vu of seeing the same shifting images with him once before, the same vividly pure red of the title screen, and the same contrasting eerie neons that Wong Kar-wai was so known for, just this time we saw it through the glass of his car in a parking lot and against the nightfall’s inky skies of Flushing Meadows. Yet, it was also a lucidly new feeling, an understanding that it was a fresh start for us, that this time we will work, that watching this movie was no longer really about watching the movie and rather about us, the fickleness of memory, and something else even less tangible that held an exponential dispersion of emotions.
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With my learned appreciation for Wong Kar-wai’s filmmaking and concurrence of his reputation in the film world as being the most romantic filmmaker, Eric and I watched every single one of his works together. I narrowed my favorite (a difficult decision) to Happy Together , a road movie that spends very little time on the road about an on-and-off-again couple, Po-wing and Fai. The opening lines narrated, by Fai, stick with me:
“Ho Po-Wing always says, ‘Let’s start over,’ and it gets to me every time. We’ve been together for a while and we break up often but whenever he says ‘Let’s start over,’ I find myself back with him. In order to start over, we left Hong Kong. We hit the road and ended up in Argentina.”
It’s the let’s start over that rings in the room, and it’s the in order to start over , we left that pulses like Eric and I—starting over from three months of deafness to a crescendo, to him suddenly cooking breakfast for me while I was cocooned in his sheets, to soft lips pressed against my forehead before he ran out for class, to me shoving my head under his shirt and hiding in his smell and darkness, to sleeping with his body sheltering mine and waking up with my frame cradled around his back. And as I watch Po-wing and Fai’s turbulent relationship slowly crumble apart, after mending itself, again and again, even after starting over in new places, I am perplexed over what exactly is going on, but somehow I understand and I feel it too. I could not articulate what the conflicts in their relationship were, so I resorted to the conclusion that I was just too dumb to absorb the film’s complexity. Yet, I could grasp that Po-wing and Fai were desperate for each other, that their urges to abandon the other were in vain, that they both knew they were hopeless, and that they were rootless. Like Y tu mamá también, it was impossible to watch the film without immersing myself into the relationship and the feverishness of the two men—feeling their intimacy and how intensely they knew each other, like old ghosts and old homes, but also plunging in their anger and jealousy. Like Buffalo ‘66, I instinctively saw flashes of my life in the film—and although Eric and I were not in the same destructive cycle that they shared, merely the familiarity of figuring out how to love and how to let go was enough. There was no point in asking Eric what the problem in their relationship was, because he would’ve said that wasn’t the point, and I knew he would’ve been right, because it was more so about letting go of something so private and close, so habitual and amorous, and that has been so acutely invested in repairing over and over again.
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There was something else, too, that tied my innate connection with Happy Together, something that rang true for a number of movies I had noticed an attachment to, and it was simply the seduction of the medium itself. After all, it utilizes elements of other art forms like painting and music to reach a phenomenological level in the audience. There is a certain utopian quality inherent to cinema, deriving from various possibilities, like its power to reveal aspects of the lived world that are unseen to us, or how it preserves reality through recording it into a physical matter, or its stand as a democratic art form with the ability to make the watcher think and feel things through the dialectics of images and creative modes of filmmaking.
Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” is an allegory of manifold meanings, and debatable ones—such as the story being a representation of philosophy itself—but it is widely agreed that there is a theme of reality versus knowledge. Eric tells me the allegory in an attempt to explain to me that it is similar to watching movies, that the prisoners in the cave are analogous to the modern cinemagoer surrendering themselves to fantasy rather than face real life. The fact that the modern film audience knows about the outside world, while Plato’s prisoners do not, adds on to the idea that the modern moviegoer chooses to indulge in the movie over reality, and are aware of it, and film ergo seemingly fulfils a certain satisfaction that also causes the watcher to question themselves and the world.
As much as I didn’t care about movies or techniques of filmmaking or different ways directors capture their art, I then understood their importance as I listened to Eric point out details and pause on specific shots and occasionally ramble on a mini history lesson during movie nights. In watching Happy Together, he points out the impact of the film being shot in both incandescent tinted monochrome and lurid saturated color. With the alternating colorless footage and heightened vibrancy that represent shifts in character development and shifts from the past to the present, there is also the manipulated slowed film speed, abrupt cuts, inverted frames, and disconnected voice overs that establish the turbulence and turmoil of the movie. The film reached my emotions before my mind was able to think, and so I begged for Fai and Po-wing to work out, like two misfit puzzle pieces that I insisted could still function.
In a somewhat twisted way, watching Happy Together brought a mesmerizing feeling of pain, because there was something so pure about trying, something so hauntingly romantic and exhilarating about pushing love at its extremes. It was the beauty of torture and masochism. The film romanticized heartbreak and toxicity
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through the same lens it romanticized the grittiness of the Buenos Aires setting and the squalid apartment they lived in, with the shower next to the dining table, its pathetic furniture, and the communal kitchen. The dingy walls of the home are portrayed through candy colored hues, and then there’s the buzzing illumination of Buenos Aires streets, the beautiful loneliness that persisted in the alleys, the Argentine tango that snakes through the bars, and the mix of Latin rhythms and staccatos and guitar licks. As Fai and Po-wing slow waltz in the ratty kitchen of rusted pipes and dirt-seeped tiles, surrounded by bareness but lit in a firefly glow centered in a bluetinted vignette, I am swaying in Eric’s arms in his aged Binghamton kitchen, my waist enveloped in his tattoos, in a world that is far less vibrant, especially because the kitchen lightbulb is so icy to the point that it seems gray and the view outside the window is of a frail deck with eroded wood and covered in burnt brittle leaves. But every lackluster moment becomes one that I embrace, and it warps to be nakedly enchanting. It replicates the same feeling I see on screen, of Fai taking care of Po-wing while he heals from his injury, the same feeling of finding safe haven in someone else; it is the same feeling of refusing to admit it, like rolling my eyes when Eric pulls me into his chest from behind, or like Fai’s curt rejections of Po-wing’s advances and yet secretly wishing for Po-wing to recover slower and hiding his passport, because he does not want him to leave.
When Eric was tasked with creating a short film for his final semester project, he decided to make a road movie of me. It only made sense to, after nearly a year of living together and shuttling between Binghamton and New York City, after melting our identities into the other, after embedding parts of myself into his home—dropping my tea on the stair carpeting and leaving the echo of my laugh in the rooms, after his shirt collecting my tears, and after knowing that we were the closest things we had ever known. When you first meet someone, you might think of them immediately as “cute” or “handsome,” but at one point you can know someone so deeply that they appear just as they are and you just see features on their face. He was no longer just a Brooklyn heartbeat, or a wine drunk silhouette under a tawny streetlight, and I was
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no longer running like water, rushing for him to stay, but staying for the rush. Ironically, we became the recreation and recollection of splinters and fragments of the road movies we watched, as if we had fallen into and been swallowed by the portal to his psyche that he had once invited me to visit. We stood on our tallest tiptoes to will the renewal of our relationship, and we were believers like the couple of Happy Together, finding revitalization of ourselves each time in a new place, carrying our fondness to new backdrops, and in the pursuit of belonging to someone. Perhaps my jaded temper for Long Island never surfaced for Binghamton despite its dullness, because Binghamton shapeshifted into bottled sentiments and an obscure shadow of Buffalo ‘66. Maybe it was also to be blamed on the seduction of movies. Maybe there was no correlation after all between throwing up in cars and Eric and road movies, because the road movies were never truly about being in the car on the road anyway. The overabundance of schools of thought concerning road movies and the essence of cinema seem to result in the recognition that there just is no fully succinct, all-encompassing answer. Maybe it wasn’t just the allurement of movies as an art form, or just that they were sources of identification, but maybe it was also that they were dawnings of idealism, escapism, and contemplation. Maybe I was lured by the idea of an escape to a languorous town, maybe I glamorized healing in a dilapidated home, and maybe I indulged in contrasting the past with the present and dreamed of what-ifs in other dimensions. Even then, I knew another reason latched onto Eric—because I would not have watched them on my own without him—and because much of the films we saw bled into the background of the memories of us. I cannot pinpoint then whether movies were infiltrated by memories, or if memories were infiltrated by movies.
A month later, Eric shows me the finished short film he made of me. He tells me it is a letter to me. And a year and a half after watching Buffalo ‘66, he hands me a postcard with the movie’s poster printed on one side, and the other side scribbled with a short sentence. It spoke enough.
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101 special cluster review
