Reconstruction 11.1 (2011)

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The Spectropoetics of Trauma: Ghosts, Language, and the Wound in Nightwood / Brad Baumgartner

The future can only be for ghosts. And the past.
—Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx

Abstract:

Engaging the language of psychoanalysis through a “spectropoetics” while attempting to interpret the ghosts operating both inside and outside characters in Djuna Barnes’ novel Nightwood, this essay addresses issues of modernity, queerness, and autobiography which act in a sort of spectral dialogism between text and reader, author and autobiographical impetus, trauma and well being. The influence of ghosts residing both within and without these characters evokes an ontological inquiry into the alternating dialectic of psychic and bodily haunting, and thereby sheds new light on Barnes’ marginal modernism. The novel suggests that rather than merely acting as agents of trauma, specters as conceived by theorists like Derrida as well as Abraham and Torok may create a “hauntological” place necessary to address the wounded subject. As opposed to the talking cure, which seeks psychic coherence, Barnes’ novel suggests a model of subjectivity existing in conversation with specters.

Keywords: Literature, psychoanalysis, modernism, poststructuralism, translation studies

<1> Many notable writers throughout world history—from Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, to modernity—have shared a keen interest in the “spectral.” In Ancient Greece, Plato understood Socrates to be frequented by a daemon (or seductive spirit) telling him what to do; modern interpretation sees in this daemon intuition, or likewise, the third eye. Analogously, literary modernism has produced many reflections concerning the unseen world. In her groundbreaking Ghostwriting Modernism, Helen Sword accounts “for the striking persistence of popular spiritualism in the age of literary modernism” (161), as she focuses her study on “the subtle ways in which mediums and communicating spirits unsettle seemingly stable ontological—or, as Jacques Derrida would have it, ’hauntological’—boundaries between self and other, absence and presence, materiality and spirituality, life and death” in the work of twentieth-century writers such as W. B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot (xi). The twentieth-century fascination with psychical disjunction in the spectral sphere also finds evocative expression in the modernist project of Djuna Barnes. Contemporary critics tend to read the works of American modernist women like Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein as projects that lift the curtain on lesbian and gay subcultures. But Scott Herring argues that Barnes was complicit in an even larger project: her project undermines the knowable discourses of lesbian and gay subcultures to present an indecipherable one “removed from a sensationally real gay or lesbian historical body” (Herring 20). And in The Apparitional Lesbian Terry Castle quotes Barnes as suggesting that “Robin Vote and Nora Flood, the novel’s central pair of lovers, are ‘so ‘haunted’ of each other…that separation was impossible’” (54). This modernist novel is fundamentally a book about love and loss, and in the twilight world of Nightwood, each character’s relationship to this twilight world is, for one, inherently queer [1].

<2> In a sense, Nightwood works by turning legibility into something completely foreign. Physical and mental space becomes isolated, enclosed, or alienating. Characters often come in contact with reanimated dolls or the returning dead. Its plot is grotesque, the stuff of nightmare and its corollary response—fear and trembling. Its “aura of oblivion” (Glavey 749) stems from the desire to resist the demands and influence of the past, yet it is the oblivion characteristic of psychoanalytic haunting, where the past becomes unhinged by specters who are out of joint with time. These specters can often be seen, are often the characters themselves. As such, Barnes’ modernism is one obsessed with “marginality” as both a psychic and social effect. As a progenitor of what has come to be loosely called “marginal” modernism, Nightwood is composed in such a way as to lead one to believe that Barnes “felt a kinship with the outcast and at times would have taken the world’s wounded to her breast [even as] she could also be wickedly satirical” (84). Her own relationship to the world of the novel could thus be characterized as haunted.

<3> Her major literary work has its origins in the 1920s life-world of its creator; consequently, many of the characters in Nightwood are charged with the energy of real life experience: Thelma Wood, for instance, is transposed as Robin Vote, and Guido Bruno as Felix. Barnes’ elliptical meanderings are, it becomes clear, coupled with the musings of a traumatic past. The funereal story of Robin Vote and Nora Flood, two American women on the Left Bank in the spectacular Paris of the 1920s, is autobiographically modeled after the “great love” story (although marked by a deep devotion between the lovers, it is also typified by excessive drinking, infidelities, and fits of violence) and the destructive break-up of Djuna Barnes and her lesbian partner, Thelma Wood, which resulted in cyclical patterns of emotional wellness alternating with personal crisis, that affected Barnes throughout the rest of her life. Barnes’ text, a classic in American modernism, is packed full of spectral memories of queer sexuality, profound language, and other past traumas. “Betrayal,” for instance, “is replayed over and over again, like a kind of nightmarish marionette show, in the fateful affair of Nora Flood and Robin Vote” (Castle 180-1). Robin is, as John Jervis notes, “the infected carrier of the past” (21). This provocative phrase opens up a multitude of questions: What is Robin infected with? Is the past still present in her due to a traumatic experience? Is she being haunted by the past—by what I call the ghosts of trauma? [2]

<4> The rise of modern journalism in the 1920s enabled much more personal, deliberatively subjective, writing styles. In America, fascinated with sensational moments (take, for instance, Barnes’ interest in Guido Bruno, who single-handedly turned Greenwich Village into a spectacle), Barnes soon became one of the major lesbian writers of her time. In 1921 she moved from Greenwich Village to Paris where she helped turn portions of Paris into booming lesbian and gay subcultures. While in Paris, Barnes fell in love with an artist named Thelma Wood, a young woman who looked strikingly similar to Barnes’ grandmother. This relationship, as we will soon take note, whose characteristics from the beginning were perhaps, as Freud might say, overdetermined, caused Barnes to go insane shortly after it ended. Large portions of Nightwood stem from her relationship with Thelma; and she employed a variety of literary strategies during the work’s composition. Indeed, Nightwood is the veiled narrative of a botched romance and its resulting emotional repercussions, trauma and grief. These emotional repercussions are also emblematized discerningly in a new classification of the twentieth century offered by Mark Seltzer, who asserts that “Modernity has come to be understood under the sign of the wound…the modern subject has become inseparable from the categories of shock and trauma” (qtd. in Luckhurst 132). This new semiotic classification of comparison linking the sign of the wound and its traumatic signification legitimates a new model of the modern subject as prepossessed-by-the-wound. And modern subjects who are held captive by the wound correspondingly are held captive in the past.

<5> Michel Foucualt maintains that “Penitence of sin marks a breaking away of self…represents a break with one’s past identity” (43). And, as Calvin O. Schrag points out bleakly, “The self that has nothing to remember stands in peril” (37). Some of my interest in this text, therefore, comes from the contradiction in modernity relating to subjectivity [3], one that never seems to resolve itself into a dialectical form—modernism's aesthetic impetus-to-fragment and its psychoanalytic implications versus the seemingly reasonable counter-desire imagined in Freud's talking cure—to achieve some kind of psychic wholeness. The latter desire would take the form of a Lacanian impossibility, to achieve a unified Imaginary by speaking to ghosts that haunt one's mirror images. As Jacques Derrida puts it in his “hauntology” of the specter, its resistance to traditional discourse would seem to defy any psychoanalytic model based on discourse: “What seems almost impossible is to speak always of the specter, to speak to the specter, to speak with it, therefore especially to make or to let a spirit speak” (11). Nevertheless, in Nightwood, Barnes is, impossibly, trying to communicate an experience of the self that tends to be incommunicable. She seems to believe that if she acknowledges certain features in the psychic production of specters, evoking the ghosts of the traumatized self, she will be able to give a voice to traumatic experience.

Ghosts of Failed Mourning

<6> The language of mourning is the language of affect, of feelings. With this said, I begin under the assumption that affects are feelings, not emotions. Here I borrow from Sianne Ngai’s notion that as readers we can only perceive characters’ affects from a third person omniscient point-of-view. In Ngai’s words, “an ‘affect’ designat[es] feeling described from the observer’s (analyst’s) perspective [third person], and ‘emotion’ designat[es] feeling that ‘belongs’ to the speaker or the analysand’s ‘I’ [first person]” (25). Imagining the idiomatic realm of affect, born of a belief in the value of approaching characters’ states of being in a psychoanalytic fashion, engenders a certain self-reflexive state in the reader. Furthermore, Ngai, deploying a Lacanian deconstructive reading, insists that emotions are “unusually knotted or condensed ‘interpretations of predicaments’—that is signs that not only render visible different registers of problem (formal, ideological, sociohistorical) but conjoin these problems in a distinctive manner” (3). In the context of Nightwood, Robin’s emotions are, in other words, entangled within these problems while her affects are the effects of these problems.

<7> This nexus of feelings, focusing itself upon the walking wounded of Nightwood, can be analyzed, I contend, by gesturing towards a hauntology of ghosts purported by Jacques Derrida. Derrida, in the experimental independent film Ghost Dance (1983), becomes, as he puts it, intrigued by a particular theory of ghosts…based on a theory of mourning. In normal mourning, Freud says, one internalizes the dead, one takes the dead into oneself and assimilates them. This internalization is an idealization. Whereas in mourning which doesn’t develop naturally…that is to say, in mourning that goes wrong, there is no true internalization. There is what Abraham and Torok call “incorporation.” That is to say, the dead are taken into us but don’t become a part of us. They just occupy a particular place in our bodies. They can speak for themselves. They can haunt our body and ventriloquize our speech. So the ghost is enclosed in a crypt which is our body. We become a sort of graveyard for ghosts. A ghost can be not only our unconscious but more precisely, someone else’s unconscious. The other’s unconscious speaks in our place. It is not our unconscious, it is the unconscious of the other which plays tricks on us. In Barnes’ text, the ghosts of trauma penetrate the fractured selves of her characters through their idiomatic characterizations—these characters are developmentally stunted, not altogether psychologically developed, not altogether fractured, but amorphous, penetrable; not on guard; open to penetration by foreign entities. Cathy Caruth also implies the possessive nature of the ghosts of trauma: “the pathology of trauma consists ‘solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it’” (qtd. in Brewster 115). Robin, victimized by her traumatic relationship with Nora, becomes the site of Barnes’ woundology. The work of mourning “consists always in attempting to ontologize remains, to make them present, in the first place by identifying the bodily remains and by localizing the dead” (Derrida 9). Robin’s ghosts, the personifications of the animated psychic atmosphere, embody, in other words, the part of Robin’s autonomous unconscious which seeks to localize Barnes’ (and Robin’s) displaced self.

Nightwood’s Language of Trauma

<8> Of the various literary strategies employed by Barnes, from Sapphic modernist tendencies to glimmers of sensational realism, one thing is certain: these characters speak almost Shakespearean prose. Indeed the jump-off point here begins with language: how Barnes’ use of language signifies the differences between alternating psychical and bodily states of consciousness. Within this kind of poetic prose, as Julia Kristeva describes it, “we have the ‘ego,’ situated within the space of language, crown, system: no longer rhythm, but sign, word, structure, contract, constraint; an ‘ego’ declaring itself poetry’s sole interest” (29). Teetering on the thin line between stereotypical aristocrats and brilliant provocateurs, Nightwood’s characters share one thing in common: they’re fake. In fact, no one is what they appear to be. And as she replaces sensational realism with banality, Barnes deploys a strategy of resistance—she confuses us; she resists the automatization of modernity through the vehicle of poetic language [4]. As readers, we are getting lost in language.

<9> Take, for instance, the transvestite doctor, Matthew O’Connor. One of the strangest characters in all of American literature, an ill-formed man thought to be neurasthenic and charlatan, the doctor appears to be nothing but a trickster figure. But like all great characters in literature, Dr. O’Connor is more than meets a first reading. As T.S. Eliot reminds us in the book’s Introduction, “At first we only hear the doctor talking; we do not understand why he talks. Gradually one comes to see that together with his egotism and swagger—Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O’Connor—he has also a desperate disinterestedness and a deep humility” (xiii). Analogously, the language of Barnes’ characterization of Robin in the Chapter entitled “La Somnambule” bespeaks a certain profundity—both bodily and spatially. Barnes states: “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” (34). Robin, heavily metaphorized, lying in bed “heavy and disheveled,” is nature, but a nature that is everywhere and nowhere at once [5]. Like Robin, these abstract places are hard to identify. As Glavey adds, Nightwood anticipates “the anti-identitarian refusals of contemporary queer theory…stymies any attempt to categorize or label” (749).

<10> Similarly, Barnes’ metaphorized language may be contrasted by way of simile: What is Robin like? She’s hardly human at this point; she speaks in a monosyllabic droll; she’s not fully fleshed out (her psyche is wounded). Robin cannot be properly identified within the life-world of the city. Nature, we find, is Robin’s somnambulic haven. Barnes continues: Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface. About her head there was an effulgence of phosphorous glowing about the circumference of a body of water—as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous exteriorizations—the troubling structure of the born somnambule, who lives in two worlds—meet of child and desperado [6]. (34-5) Barnes’ poetic language refuses to show us what Robin looks like—rather, we read of her bodily make-up, a convoluted structure of sentience; her lesbian identity as well as her sexual identity are lost within the night’s soliloquy. Nature, the great redeemer, mediator of the uncanny, holds her in-between night and day, psychic and bodily. Robin, both natural and naturalized, dwells in-between two worlds.

Uncanny Hauntology

“The only thing that is universally familiar to us today is unfamiliarity itself, momentarily illuminated by an ephemeral glimmer of meaning. But how can we express that in human form?”
-Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful

<11> Barnes’ description of Robin suggests the uncanny nature of “being-in-the-world” that emerged during the early twentieth-century. The city, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century, a melting pot of eerie activity and experience, became a great feature of iconography; cities in France and England, as well as cities like New York and Chicago started to emerge as high modernist societies. From what is Robin suffering? Her experiences are uncanny—the disorienting experience of something disturbing which makes the familiar seem unfamiliar and vice versa. In examining what produces the uncanny (1919), Sigmund Freud uses the public space of the city street to differentiate between what seems familiar and unfamiliar. As he walks through the city he becomes extremely disoriented and unfamiliar with his surroundings as he returns to the same street time after time. Freud argues that the unfamiliarity of the city’s streets parallels his uncanny sensations and that the people living in the city feel this same feeling. The city itself causes a sensation of anxiety in him. Freud states: “The German word ‘unheimlich’ is obviously the opposite of ‘heimlich‘ [‘homely’], ‘heimisch’ [‘native’] the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude that what is 'uncanny' is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar” (122). Furthermore, as Collins and Jervis point out, “the uncanny has become a widely used figure for the simultaneous homelessness of the present, and haunting by the past, that has been associated with modernity since at least the time of Baudelaire” (2). Nightwood is symptomatic of modernity itself: the uncanny manifests itself in this twilight world just as anxiety manifests itself as a psychosomatic ailment in Robin. It is this overwhelming sense of homelessness, of anxiety, that affects the characters in the text.

<12> The uncanny exists insofar as it makes the familiar unfamiliar. Its sensations are feelings of awkwardness or anxiety which uproot the individual’s sense of self by flooding the self with competing factors. It could be construed that the ghosts of trauma reside within the uncanny. Here, “there is no division between worlds, but rather a hesitation: a hesitation within which the whole world of the uncanny, the world as uncanny, resides” (Barr 28). And in between perception and consciousness, “it is only [our] representation that we recover possession of” (Lacan 56). Barnes writes: “Have you,” said the doctor, “ever thought of the peculiar polarity of times and times; and of sleep? Sleep the slain white bull? Well, I…will tell you how the day and night are related by their division. The very constitution of twilight is a fabulous reconstruction of fear, fear bottom-out and wrong side up. Every day is thought upon and calculated, but the night is not premeditated…The night, ‘Beware of that dark door!’” (80) Therefore, as Lacan maintains, it is this division, “[this] gap itself that constitutes awakening” (56). The realm of the uncanny constitutes ghosts of the unconscious; ghosts are perceptible in our psychic manifestations (i.e. Jungian constructs) brought about by the unconscious.

<13> In this sense, Robin is characterized by a negative affect: depression. She repents as to compensate for this new feeling. Robin may be experiencing this negative affect because it reads the predicament posed by a general state of obstructed agency (Ngai 3), with respect to Dr. O’Connor’s shrewd insight into her sense of self. Rather than with “post-traumatic stress disorder,” Barnes and other modernists would have been familiar with the term neurasthenia. As Tom Lutz points out, “At the turn of the century, nervous excitement was considered the first symptom of a progressive disease of the nerves, neurasthenia, which could end in nervous prostration, brain-collapse, insanity, or death. According to medical wisdom, this disease attacked only those with the most refined sensibility” (2). Furthermore, “nervousness in literary, academic, and journalistic discourses was [then] most often used in explaining gender roles….change in financial circumstances, change in cultural values [and] social status” (Lutz 19). It was thought that women were susceptible to this disease because of their natural fragility and hypersensitivity. Diagnoses and cures were based on these assumed weaknesses. In short, women’s healthy state differed only in degree from their diseased state. Neurasthenia was not so much a social rite of passage as a liminal discourse available only to people with the capacity—dependent upon class role and social mobility—for change; seemingly, the disease may have also been used as a counter-narrative by marginalized cultures and peripheral regions during the onslaught of twentieth-century modernity.

<14> Nightwood is an underworld, a subcultural world that exists outside the hegemonic norms of middle-class white society of the 1930s. Victoria L. Smith reminds us that “The narrative shapes itself around a blank space, an absence, that outlines a loss of access to history, to language, and to representation in general for those consigned to the margins of culture because of their gender [or] sexuality” (194-5). This novel demonstrates how the complex relationship between this underworld and its historical referent plays a vital role in structuring early twentieth-century thinking in terms of its fiction, discourses, politics and aesthetics revolving around queerness and absence. This underworld functions dialectically as a cultural artifact and producer of history, but it also has mythical connotations in the spirit-world. The “Town of Darkness” (81), the submerged world of Nightwood, is at once like and unlike our own cities, and within this twilight world these five tragically wounded characters are wrought with anxiety, haunted by the ghosts of trauma. “Fear is stimulated by something in the environment; anxiety is stimulated within the self” (Rothschild 61). Thus, it is Robin’s anxiety towards death arising from within that separates and distinguishes her from the other characters. Heidegger seeks to define anxiety’s effects as a form of isolation, stating, “Anxiety (Angst) pulls Dasein back from its falling-away emergence in the ‘world’. Everyday familiarity collapses. Dasein is isolated, but isolated as Being-in-the-world. Being-in enters into the existential ‘mode’ of the ‘not-at-home’. Nothing else is meant by our talk of ‘uncanniness’” (Donald 92). Anxiety, in an existential sense of the word, meaning to fear everything and nothing in one’s environment, renders Robin dissonant from fear.

<15> Roger Luckhurst explains that “Trauma psychology frequently resorts to loosely gothic or supernatural tropes to articulate post-traumatic effects” (130). In a move from the metaphysical to the historical, modernism allows the ghost back into the archetypal memory of humanity—what Jung terms the “collective unconscious.” Although many denotations of the word “haunt” ascribe meanings dealing with apparitions, the etymology of “haunt” has connotations of home, “to bring home” or “to give a home to.” As the Oxford English Dictionary indicates, the word does not have only the verbal meaning of “to practice habitually, but also a figural meaning of “immaterial visiting.” Another meaning of the word haunt—“of diseases (obs.), memories, cares, feelings, thoughts: To visit frequently, habitually” (OED 11)—theoretically conceived, as Sianne Ngai would have it, presents ghosts as recurrent problems. It is the “recurrent influence” (OED 11) usage of haunting as an active process of distracting through memories, cares, or feelings that intrigues me the most.

<16> Reframed from its historical role of perpetuating apparitional configurations, the word may be better used in exploring the affects (or feelings) of twentieth century literature and trauma therapy. Here, the now precedent body that has been traumatized becomes a dwelling place for the ghosts (haunting feelings) of the initial traumatic experience. Robin, for example, a shadowy figure—some, like Felix, never have a clear “idea of her at any time”—is being haunted, incorporating, in a Derridian sense, her ghosts, rather than assimilating them. “This logic of haunting,” remarks Derrida, “[is] larger and more powerful than an ontology or a thinking of Being…It harbor[s] within itself, but like circumscribed places or particular effects, eschatology and teleology themselves. It would comprehend them, but incomprehensibly” (10).

<17> “In Spectres of Marx,” writes Christopher Prendergast, indeterminacy rests “in the more strictly ontological register of occupying a place/non-place between presence and absence, appearance and disappearance. The spectre is a ‘Thing’ (Shakespeare’s term) and yet not a thing, not a substance. It hovers uncertainly between material embodiment and disembodiment. It inhabits a space of pure virtuality, and what in that space is swallowed up is the ontological ground of Being itself” (45). Each ghost is a ghost of itself; each ghost competes with itself for the present moment. The past does haunt us [7], since, as Derrida notes in Ghost Dance, “Ghosts don’t just appear, they come back. In French we talk of them ‘returning.’ Now that presupposes a memory of the past that has never taken place in the present.” The ghosts of trauma are unable to be seen when they were originally here—Robin, for instance, cannot see her ghosts with the physical eye. In this way they are not angry or evil; rather, they’re curious; they desire to know why they are given the cold shoulder; they want to know why they are not acknowledged. There is no closure for ghosts. Each ghost is an alienated other. Each ghost is a stranger, carrying a history that no trauma victim ever knows (or can know). Robin, like the trauma victim, “should learn,” as Derrida entreats us, “to live by learning not how to make conversation with the ghost, but how to talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself: they are always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet” (221).

The Language of the Wound

<18> The link between Shakespeare’s ghost and Barnes’ spectropoetics might seem initially strained. However, there is more to this link than meets the eye. Like in Hamlet, so too in trauma: “The time is out of joint.” Ghosts are trapped within the disjointure. It is the “link between the spectral and the disjointed that furnishes the crux of Derrida’s argument; it is this paradoxical hinge, introduced at the very moment of speaking of the unhinged, that explains why it is that Hamlet is so important to him” (Prendergast 46). Barnes’ Robin is at once tragic and post-traumatic; her suffering is twofold. Her wound, tragic, is irreparable in the narrative of the novel. And her wounds, post-traumatic, render her prophecy self-fulfilling. Ghosts aren’t essentialist beings made to scare because they cannot do otherwise; rather, like the guardian of the threshold, expressing a metaphysical malady inherent to the unconscious, they take on the representational forms we give to them. Gilles Deleuze, echoing Lucretius, writes: The second genre of phantasms is constituted by simulacra which are particularly subtle and agile...capable of supplying the animus with visions...all of the images which correspond to desire or, again and especially, dream images. Not that desire is creative here; rather, it renders the mind attentive and makes it choose the most suitable phantasm from among all the subtle phantasms in which we are immersed. The mind, moreover, isolated from the external world and collected or repressed when the body lies dormant, is open to these phantasms.” (276) Ghosts, then, take on grotesque representational forms not to frighten, but to awaken the haunted to their own shortcomings and epistemological misapprehensions.

<19> Nightwood suggests the experimental female psyche as a haunted house of creativity, in part by caving in the early twentieth-century cultural binaries of sexuality and psychology, mind and body, dream and wake. Thus Barnes gives us the phenomenological phantasm, the phantasm-as-it-is-experienced. Robin, losing touch with other human beings, gropes for a fantasy reality which actively exploits the social constructions of hetero/homosexuality via her queer meanderings. Only in a modernist world freed of the cultural clichés of Victorian romance and sexological dichotomies can Robin’s psycho-sexual peripheries be altered. It is through phantasmal pleasure that she is led to a place in which she can find union with her lesbian lover, if only briefly. But is this a mere aesthetic fantasy or does this version of Barnes’ spectropoetics imply a suitable paradigm for modernity itself?

<20> We find Robin is isolated from her external world, and her repressed, dormant body becomes a housing place for ghosts (Deleuze 276). And if the unconscious, as Lacan maintains, is structured like a language, their wretchedness is a gift to her, a mirror stage of the inner world, a world with no intelligible identity, but a structured discourse, a language. Ghosts are not essences, made to be what they are—ghosts and nothing else. Rather, Robin’s ghosts seek identity; they seek the futurity of a presence that has passed away. Stuck in a purgatorial identity crisis, ghosts morph (like the inherent changes that characterize trauma) and are constituted by simulacrum-like forms that shift due to the inseparable and interwoven parameters of her personal identity. And if specters are a projection of the inner self, then it is the trauma victim’s identity, not the ghost’s identity that is in flux. To be haunted then is a good thing; it is a benevolent act because these ghosts are the ghosts of future wholeness, the ghosts of second chances. Once chosen, one must go back and stare at the ghost or, as Derrida puts it, “speak to the specter” (11). Ghosts need the trauma victim as their mirror; ghosts are the mirror of the other; the trauma victim is the mirror of the ghost.

<21> Ghosts also enter through the value-laden language of others. As Roger Luckhurst describes it, “Freud’s close colleague Sandor Ferenczi believed in ‘the sudden, surprising rise of new faculties after a trauma’. Trauma ‘makes the person in question…more or less clairvoyant’…because the passage through the trauma was a little death, and thus related to ‘the supposition that the instant of dying…is associated with that timeless and spaceless omniscience’” (130). Analogously, T. S. Eliot, in the book’s Introduction states, “[the doctor’s] monologues, brilliant and witty in themselves as they are, are not dictated by an indifference to other human beings, but on the contrary a hyper-sensitive awareness of them” (xii). The doctor’s desire (to bear witness) is the desire of the Other. The doctor is the mirror of the other. The problem of alienation, the problem of desire, is relinquished in language. As Cathy Caruth explains, “For the witness, ‘to listen to the crisis of a trauma … is not only to listen for the event, but to hear in the testimony the survivor’s departure from it” (Brewster 125-6). Relinquishing the desire of the Other then leads Dr. O’Connor to a more inclusive self which enables him to assimilate his own ghosts.

<22> As Roger Luckhurst observes, “We could say that the wound acts uncannily, breaching boundaries, opening inside to outside, life to death, that the wound is a site of haunting” (132). Barnes’ ghosts are like little deaths—as each present moment passes away, each carries along with it a ghost. What is the present moment? Is there a present moment? Like a kaleidoscope, ghosts fill our worlds. There is not one single ghost; rather there is a plethora of them. They don’t come back for one specific moment....each one of them comes back for each specific moment.

<23> As Nightwood plays itself out in the realm of the walking wounded, perhaps the monologues of the doctor, as critic Merrill Cole puts it, “recast early twentieth-century homophobia in all of its obscenity and meanness. [While] the novel's fantastic twist is to compel this discourse to shriek and wail with homoerotic affect” (391). Clearly, Doctor O’Connor’s voice cuts; it opens wounds. He is transparent—he says everything and yet says nothing; he is the sickest person in the room and yet his shrewd insight pierces through to the nothingness. (Developmentally speaking, he has not moved beyond the age of three or four—peer development skills have not been developed.) But Dr. O’Connor’s most endearing or perhaps his most “human” moment comes in the form of recapitulating a memory, a paradigm shift so dear to him that he cannot picture his life without it: the church scene in “Go down, Matthew.”

<24> Ironically, his initiation into psycho-social magic/manipulation was induced by a Catholic priest. O’Connor recounts his memory of being in a small church where he cries—empathizing with a helpless child named Tiny O’Toole—and realizes himself as a simple, emotional human being for the first (and arguably last) time in his life. Listening to him tell his story, Nora smiles and says, “Sometimes I don’t know why I talk to you. You’re so like a child; then again I know well enough” (Barnes 133). But the one-upmanship of witty interjection proves short lived: “Speaking of children—and thanks for the compliment—take for instance, the case of Don Anticolo,” responds the Doctor. Although O’Connor is manipulating her, Nora sees him to be emptily self-serving and escapist, developmentally functioning at the level of a child and employing a despairing means of avoiding commitment and personal responsibility. Truly, he may be failing to acknowledge his personal debt to her and the communal/existential interplay of the characters in the novel. She wants to assert herself; but he keeps her there. In this speech act, Dr. O’Connor holds Nora to her past, not allowing her to move forward into the present moment, but rather keeping her stagnant in the past. Ultimately, this passage is about the Doctor, not Nora. Nora has been hurt by him and she wants him to feel her pain—a child psychologist might say that she’s “punishing” him—but the Doctor’s genius proves too much for her.

<25> But, this example is somewhat misleading, for his humility while in the church is short-lived. It was of course just a memory recapitulated via one of his monologues; hence a linguistic act of questionable ilk. For Dr. O’Conner is truly less-than-human for the duration of the novel and it is “his revulsion against the strain of squeezing himself dry for other people and getting no sustenance in return, that sends him raving at the end” (Eliot xiii). And of course his experience in the church took place during his youth. He is, to a certain degree, an id-obsessed linguist, and a social magician at that—but he is an adult in the bodily sense; he knows what he’s doing, which makes what he’s doing (wounding through language) much more benevolent than initially meets the eye. Mesmerizing them with the content of his monologues, he will keep each character within his bubble of manipulation for as long as they choose to converse with him.

<26> Not only then does the Doctor’s characterization foreshadow future advancements made in developmental psychology, such as the stage theories of Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson, but it harkens a new paradigm for psychoanalysis itself. Dr. O’Connor is a psychoanalyst of sorts who, by the nature of his language, creates the wound whose corollary would be psychoanalyst-cum-specter. Indeed Dr. O’Connor, as he eschews the continuity of conventional storytelling through his monologues, also becomes a model of the psychoanalyst as specter. Innovatively, Barnes introduces a new model for psychoanalysis which is a counter narrative to the traditional Freudian model, based on Judeo-Christian tradition and mythology. Rather than the psychoanalyst exorcising specters using a classical technique of empathic attunement, interpreting the patients’ unconscious processes that inhibit their daily life, the psychoanalyst is the specter (corporealizing the unconscious processes) whose spirit supersedes their senses.

The Autobiographical Impetus

<27> In the historical Indo-Aryan language of Sanskrit, there is no word for memory. Consequently, in a proto-existential movement towards ontological comprehension, who we are is what we do—herein there is no past and future, only the present partitioned by socially-constructed time-breaks. Moreover, as twentieth century American philosopher John MacMurray once put it, all personality is essentially inter-personality. Who we are, the tenets of our personality, tends towards the culmination of our experiences with the Other as mirrored back upon ourselves. Perhaps then this is where the soul dwells—within this interpersonal matrix, within the alternating exchanges between self and other, which may be consciously integrated into one’s personality through reflection and praxis. As part of a process-oriented framing, these opening remarks might lead us into deeper insight into Barnes’ compositional “self and other self.” Barnes’ bardologist Phillip Herring notes: “Djuna Barnes called her famous novel, Nightwood, the soliloquy of a ‘soul talking to itself in the heart of the night,’ but it, too, is a kind of ravishing, which takes as its subject Djuna Barnes’ eight-year lesbian relationship with a Saint Louis artist named Thelma Wood” (xvii). Her grief (although the process had not been completed) over the loss of, and betrayal by, Thelma, became what Phillip Herring calls “the autobiographical impetus to Nightwood” (157). “In Nightwood, Nora describes her intense love for Robin… [telling] Chester Page that she had fallen in love with Thelma Wood (the novel’s Robin) because she resembled her grandmother” (Herring 59). Robin is Thelma’s autobiographical stand-in. Robin’s traumatic experience in the novel is twofold; it is bound within a layering effect: the traumatic experience, the simultaneous outcome of the incestuous experience Djuna has with her grandmother, Zadel, resurfaces when she begins her relationship with Thelma. Thelma resembles Djuna’s grandmother, which triggers a series of systemic psychological responses. The trauma then reinvents itself as Djuna displaces this initial trauma onto her lover, Thelma Wood.

<28> The traumatic break-up, then, contingent upon its predecessor, is now two degrees away from the initial experience and yet twice as powerful. Herring maintains, “Djuna often said that she came to love Thelma because she looked like Zadel, a very odd perception for one who specialized in portraits, for they looked nothing alike. In Nightwood, Nora repeats a similar observation: ‘For Robin is incest too; that is one of her powers’ (N 156). Thelma Wood was family to Barnes, and the kinship was somewhere between metaphor and psychology” (157). When Thelma rejects Djuna, the traumatic cycle of incest and abuse is reopened and completes itself once again—now, however, it is multi-layered and thus catastrophic to Djuna’s already fragile psyche; it results in the onslaught of ghosts. Robin states: Perhaps, Matthew, there are devils? Who knows if there are devils? Perhaps they have stepped foot in the uninhabited. Was I her devil trying to bring her comfort? I enter my dead and bring no comfort, not even in my dreams. There in my sleep was my grandmother, whom I loved more than anyone, tangled within the grave grass, and flowers blowing about and between her. (148-9) One does not resent (or re-feel) [8] the initial traumatic event and its corollary emotional response, profound grief; it is not an open wound that ceases to heal itself. Rather, the closed wound becomes reopened time after time, and each subsequent negative event triggers the initial trauma and each subsequent trauma. The present trauma is non-exclusive; it is the haven of resented specters, of a hierarchy of trauma, dialectical in its systemic configuration. (The trauma--on the left side of the binary—and its recasting—on the right side of the binary—turned ninety degrees is hierarchical.) The initial trauma will always take precedence; it is the impetus from which all other traumas flow. It is Robin, we are reminded, “the woman who presents herself as a ‘picture’ forever arranged [who] is for the contemplative mind, the chiefest danger. Sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human. Such a person’s every moment will reduce to an image of a forgotten experience… stepping in the trepidation of the flesh” (37). One trauma, therefore, is needed to begin the system, but each subsequent trauma may have innumerable counterparts, each layering upon itself, day after day, year after year, ad infinitum.

<29> Barnes’ autobiographical impetus with its authorial ideology is already looming like a shadow behind the text. Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text contends that “The text needs its shadow: this shadow is a bit of ideology, a bit of representation, a bit of subject: ghosts, pockets, traces, necessary clouds” (32). Robin’s trauma, the dialectical counterpart of Djuna’s trauma, reveals the growing tendency towards modern experimentation with the work of art; the novel, increasingly engaging the writer’s wounded self with relation to others in her contemporary culture, produces a philosophical-epistemological enquiry into the dimensions of her being-in-the-world. As Martin Heidegger [9] states: “Preserving the work does not reduce people to their private experiences, but brings them into affiliation with the truth happening in the work. Thus it grounds being for and with one another as the historical standing-out of human existence in reference to unconcealed ness” (66). Preserving the work, like preserving the trauma, enables Barnes to subject the unknowable discourse of trauma—i.e., her present self in relation to her own unstable identity—to scrutiny, which becomes increasingly therapeutic. This novel, examining the marginal lives of five tragically wounded characters, confirms that a self-reflexive approach to fiction can both shed light on processes of therapeutic appropriation and adaptation of the modern self, and also uncover empathic models of self-discovery between the work of art, its author, and the work’s corresponding readers.

<30> The ghosts of trauma are the ghosts of affect, the ghosts of a failed mourning. “Such a woman [as Robin] is the infected carrier of the past,” writes Barnes, “before her the structure of our head and jaws ache—we feel that we could eat her, she who is eaten death returning, for only then do we put our face close to blood on the lips of our forefathers” (37). Therapists often say that the hardest part of therapy with post-traumatic patients is the process of literally giving trauma a voice. What, then, is the mediating factor between body and language? The language of trauma is the language of the body, of gesticulations. The voice of trauma (manifested as the ghosts of trauma) is an interlocutionary illogic wherein an ontological stuntedness dwells--or rather, a developmental stuntedness. Ghosts of trauma enter the body but they do not bodily possess; they stagnate, anchor down. They enter and stay, but do not initially “possess”—rather they take up space in psychic crevices, germinating, under the guise of failed mourning, to be recalled by memory. And if the copula gives us a world of space, then ghosts are capable of dwelling within the copula—within the ontological realm itself. They proceed in a movement from the past, an illiterate, oral, traumatic time/place—for trauma has no home—to a world of space, within the very crevices of being: always stunted (not stuck, not fixed, but stunted), moving forward—teleologically suspended between the past and the thousands of ever-passing-away present moments. The question of ghosts is the question of Being. The ghosts of trauma arise, like a “third thing” (as D. H. Lawrence might call it). Privative, deprived, arising out of consciousness, trying to overcome, as Paul Ricouer might put it, “the dialectic of their alternating presence and absence by transforming its intention into language” (Simms 52). Ghosts (like a dream) precede being-in-the-world.

<31> And Dr. O’Connor, the psychoanalyst-cum-specter, functions within the spectral sphere as he transforms his spectral intentions into language. Dreaming through others, “burying them with the earth of [his] lost sleep” (Barnes 149), O’Connor’s hermeneutic circle of narcissism completes itself as he reveals himself to us during one of his last sonorous monologues: “This I have done to my father’s mother, dreaming through my father, and have tormented them with my tears and with my dreams, for all of us die over again in somebody’s sleep…. this, I have done to Robin: it is only through me that she will die over and over” (Barnes 149). Like a third thing speaking through/for others, Dr. O’Connor hereditarily precedes others’ being-in-the-world; he is the ghost of the collective unconscious which precedes conscious expression; he is at once the haunted-haunter and the wounded-healer. His spectral intentions as psychoanalyst-cum-specter, arising out of the alternating worlds of dreaming and waking, overcome Robin and propel her to flee to her inner world of her psychological discontents once and for all: an encounter with her shadow self, animalistic and ghostly.

“Sensuous communion with unclean spirits”: Robin’s Encounter with the Specter Self “To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event.”

-Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory

“Whoever said that one was born just once?”

-Jacques Derrida, Points

<32> But does she in fact flee or has she been led to this ghostly encounter by something other than herself? Nightwood’s final chapter “Possessed” is an enquiry into Robin’s conflicted experience of being-in-the-world as it plays itself out in the spirit world (or, namely, the unconscious) to which her psyche has given rise and by which, in turn, she must confront and redeem. As such, this chapter naturally concerns itself with the unnatural, the symbolic order of the unconscious. But rather than merely endeavoring to illustrate the interrelatedness and cyclical contents of an area of the psyche which tends to be incommunicable, “Possessed” seeks to uncover Robin’s concurrent perspective and the particular transformations which, amalgamating into this quite ambiguous developmental tier of her-self, inform and circumvent (Barnes’ representational choices of) Robin’s affect-less state-of-being. As readers, we must ask: Is there any course to redemption, any remedy, for Robin, a woman so wounded and overdetermined that she finds, in the polymorphously perverse configuration of a dog as a sex partner, a variegated self-image?

<33> Robin’s atavistic perversions render her inseparable from the unconscious and symbolic orders, which (like Barnes’ own insanity) had hitherto only affected her during isolated periods of psychic illumination or dream-like states of consciousness. Hence, one component of the originality of the novel’s final chapter lies in its exploration of a logical fallacy: that one may inhabit the conscious and unconscious worlds simultaneously. Here again, we find another early revision of classical Freudian theory. Although psychoanalysis was criticized for its sensuousness and uncleanness, the ending of the novel is a transgression of traditional theories of psychoanalysis and mourning. Barnes’ reading of Freud, then, is an inversion of his psychoanalytic theory. Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), for instance, posits that an undeveloped sexuality fails to commit to the genital norm. The failure to commit to a normalized form of genital sexuality is unconventional; it functions in retaliation against the prevailing heteronormative sex acts of the 1920s. Indeed Barnes’ impenetrable writing style mimics the difficulty of imagining a world beyond the sexual and psychical restlessness of her contemporary culture, but it also allows her to bridge the gap between Robin’s wounded psyche and sexual disjunction: in “Possessed” she creates a fragmented sexuality in opposition to a society which employs normative sexuality as a means to uphold itself.

<34> The symbolic order of Robin’s unconscious bespeaks an inversion of the natural order. And Robin’s lover Jenny, the heiress, for example, like a child not yet initiated by pain, knows all about Robin’s trauma even if she cannot articulate it. Barnes writes: “Because Robin’s engagements were with something unseen, because in her speech and in her gestures there was a desperate anonymity, Jenny became hysterical. She accused Robin of a ‘sensuous communion with unclean spirits.’ And in putting her wickedness into words she struck herself down. She did not understand anything Robin felt or did, which was more unendurable than her absence” (168). Presented with the unconscious, Robin’s (and thus Barnes’) tragedy is that she has been illogically chosen to bear out the disjointed world of post-trauma. The unverifiability of these unclean spirits, which alludes to a “savage” or “primitive” way of thought, is Freudian in so far as it opposes “scientific” thought, but it also calls into being the hauntological realm itself—that realm which hovers between past and present, death and life—because it encompasses all forms of ontological inflection, shifting away from issues of past, present, and future because their language-based prescriptions betray themselves. She is cursed by the ghosts of the past, but also stands at their gate, perhaps hoping to redeem the tragic-traumatic life that has been dealt her, but more carefully to confront her animalistic shadow-self in the hauntological sphere itself—what was once called She’ol in Judaism or Hades when translated into Greek.

<35> The narrative, ending on a harrowing note, does not initially authenticate or validate Robin’s traumatic past, but Robin, “on a contrived altar, before a Madonna” (Barnes 169), does symbolize a sympathetic counterpart to other walking wounded. The sexual encounter between Nora’s dog and Robin—bodies in union, barking and crying together for their loss of Nora—remains her haunting obsession. Such a vexing description refuses to give readers any closure. Robin has become even more animalistic in her characterization, more primitive, more symbolic. Her ghosts have become the outward manifestation of inner turmoil. Her post-trauma is at once self-diagnosis and perversion; she is uncivilized, non-normative, and aberrant. Obsessed with time and yet, ahistorical, remaining out-of-time, “out of joint,” with no sense of herself as a historical being, (dressed anachronistically) Robin, the sleepwalker, remains somewhere in an uncanny dream-state. Within this dreamwork, however, we find Robin’s shadow self. Barnes writes, “A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow as well as himself” (119). This shadow self, dwelling within an uncanny place neither reified nor transcended, alchemizes a way out of the twilight world of trauma: As C. G. Jung reminds us, “the ultimate aim of alchemy” really was “trying to produce a corpus subtile, a transfigured and resurrected body, i.e., a body that was at the same time spirit” (427-8). Robin’s main concern after she has given herself completely over to the spirit world is the attainment of psycho-somatic redemption through alchemical transformation of her body. Her wound, therefore, must be transfixed upon God, the Redeemer [10]. Christ-like, Robin, forming one part of the traumatic Elohim (Robin, God, and the Wound), extending her spirit to all humanity for the sins of all the walking wounded [11], martyrs herself to get to Self.

<36> Robin, like Richard Rorty’s ironist, discovers that she’s been operating within the spectral realm’s final vocabulary all along; that her world has not been self-created. Throughout the entire novel, Robin’s ghosts were effectively present, manipulating the entirety of her being, co-opting her to achieve psychic wholeness. In this way, the ghosts of trauma are benevolent ghosts. Although the dog scene is markedly degenerative and sad, we must leave her battered body, mind, and soul a hope for redemption—laying on the dog, giving herself over to the final wound, Robin accepts her specters. For “the demolishing of a great ruin is always a fine and terrifying spectacle” (Barnes 142). Hence, her transgressions do not leave her dwelling in the realm of uncanny, but rather on the cusp of validating her body’s place in the mourning process through the assimilation of her ghosts of trauma. For in mourning “one has to know. One has to know it. One has to have knowledge [Il faut le savoir]. Now, to know is to know who and where, to know whose body it really is and what place it occupies—for it must stay in its place. In a safe place” (Derrida 9). Assimilating the ghosts of her traumatic past in an ecstatic movement from the psychic to the bodily and back again, Robin, aghast, embracing the animistic phallus, embraces the hauntological world. Robin’s alchemical process engenders the beginnings of personal transformation for Barnes the writer and the creation of a new, dynamic means to individuation, living with a sense of community with other trauma victims [12]. Given inner illumination, Barnes may transmute the pain of the wound into a transformative agent via the penning of the novel. But for Barnes, encountering the specter self is something like squaring the circle. Abandonment to the wounded self happens only on behalf of the discourse of the inner world--a dialectical world which exists outside-of-time before humanity’s spirituality was sublimated to the realm of the intellect—as it expresses the desire not to be beholden to the past, validating its specters, but alchemizing the trauma victim herself into its other-worldly counterpart: the specter Self [13], the corpus subtile.

Works Cited

Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood. 1937. New York: New Directions, 1961. Print.

Brewster, Scott. "Access Denied: Memory and Resistance in the Contemporary Ghost Film." Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties. New York: Palgrave, 2008. Print.

Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Print.

Cole, Merrill. “Backwards Ventriloquy: The Historical Uncanny in Barnes’ Nightwood.” Twentieth Century Literature 52.4 (2006): 391-412.

Deleuze, Gilles. “Lucretius and the Simulacrum.” The Logic of Sense. 1969. Trans. Mark Lester. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.

Donald, James. “The Uncanny and the Cosmopolitan.” Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties. New York: Palgrave, 2008. Print.

Foucault, Michel. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1988. Print.

Ghost Dance. Dir. Ken McMullen. Perf. Pascale Ogier, Leonie Mellinger, Jacques Derrida. Columbia, 1983. Film.

Glavey, Brian. “Dazzling Estrangement: Modernism, Queer Ekphrasis, and the Spatial Form of Nightwood.” PMLA 124.3 (2009): 727-43. Print.

Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Perennial, 1971. Print.

Herring, Phillip. Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes. New York: Penguin, 1995. Print.

Herring, Scott. Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007. Print.

Jervis, John. “Uncanny Presences.” Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties. New York: Palgrave, 2008. Print.

Jung, C. G. Psychology and Alchemy. 1953. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton UP. 1968. Print.

Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. Print.

Lacan, Jacques. Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. 1973. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981. Print.

Luckhurst, Roger. “The Uncanny After Freud: The Contemporary Trauma Subject and the Fiction of Stephen King.” Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties. New York: Palgrave, 2008. Print.

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Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005. Print.

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Rothschild, Babette. The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000. Print.

Schrag, Calvin O. The Self After Postmodernity. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999. Print.

Simms, Karl. Routledge Critical Thinkers: Paul Ricouer. London: Routledge, 2003. Print.

Smith, Victoria L. “A Story beside(s) Itself: The Language of Loss in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood.” PMLA 114.2 (1999): 194-206 Sword, Helen. Ghostwriting Modernism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002. Print.

Notes

[1] Nora, for instance, is a promoter of freaks; she does advanced publicity for the circus; Dr. O’Connor may or may not be a sexual invert; he is, however, a sexologist and holds vast amounts of knowledge about homosexual subculture.

[2] To say or write the word here implies that one has or can perceive a ghost. The nature (although a problematic term in postmodern theory) of ghosts, their essence, that they were born to be what they are—ghosts and nothing else—is not being considered here. Rather, I am beginning under the assumption that ghosts already indeed inhabit the perceptible world.

[3] As C.G. Jung purports, “The self is not only the centre, but also the whole circumference of which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of consciousness” (41).

[4] Furthermore, as Roman Jacobson once put it, “Poetry protects us from this automatization, from the rust that threatens our formulation of love, hate, revolt and reconciliation, faith and love” (Kristeva 32).

[5] Metaphorization here is highly pertinent. For Jacques Derrida in “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” in Margins of Philosophy, the use of “metaphor seems to involve the usage of philosophical language in its entirety… It is above all to take an interest in the non-syntactic, non-systematic pole of language, that is, to take an interest in semantic ‘depth,’ in the magnetic attraction to the similar” (209, 215).

[6] Emphasis in italics added are mine.

[7] Note, for instance, Dr. O’Connor’s assertion to the Baron in “Where the Tree Falls”: “‘Your devotion to the past,’ observed the doctor, looking at the cab metre with apprehension, ‘is perhaps like a child’s drawing’” (112).

[8] In another article, I stress a meaning of “resentment” that traces back to its Latin etymology. “Resent” stems from the thirteenth century Latin sentire which literally means “to feel.” The Oxford English Dictionary cites several etymologies of “resent.” The OED cites “resent” in 1667 in Paradise Lost as a transitive verbthat frustrates our popular definitions. When deployed as a universal (as it often was in the seventeenth century), it can mean “to feel oneself injured or insultedby (some act or conduct on the part of another); to show that one is displeased or angry at” or “to take or receive as or for something.” Delving a bit deeper into its etymology, we know that it can mean “to feel or experience (joy, sorrow, pain, etc.),” and even more acutely as used in 1620 it can mean “to feel (something) as a cause of depression or sorrow; to feel deeply or sharply.” See: “resent, v.” The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford UP, 1989), 696.

[9] Interestingly enough, Heidegger’s specter will forever haunt Western culture, reminding us of his own political past, Nazi sympathies, the propaganda, and the politics of his historical moment. For Heidegger’s response regarding these issues see his interview in Der Spiegel magazine.

[10] Although I use here a Christian conception of God, God may refer to any sense of a higher power. This conception includes but is not limited to monotheistic strands which arise throughout history in various parts of the world such as “Tao,” which embraces the intelligence of all pattern in nature, or other monotheistic currents such as the Atman, Shiva, or Vishnu. I wish only to stress the importance of a higher power that may be found at once within and without oneself.

[11] As C. G. Jung posits, “Isolation by a secret [ghost] results as a rule in an animation of the psychic atmosphere, as a substitute for loss of contact with other people. It causes an activation of the unconscious, and this produces something similar to the illusions and hallucinations that beset lonely wanderers in the desert, seafarers, and saints” (49). As Robin’s dialectical struggle unfolds, we see that it is within this now larger conceptualized community that she is finally able to differentiate herself from others, substituting her fellow walking wounded for ghosts.

[12] D. H. Lawrence speaks of a similar phenomenon, metaphorizing the body, when he states in “On Being a Man”: “Real thought [like personal transformation] is an experience. It begins as a change in the blood, a slow convulsion and revolution in the body itself. It ends as a new piece of awareness, a new reality in mental consciousness … thought is an adventure, not a practice. In order to think, man must risk himself doubly. First he must go forth and meet life in the body. Then he must face the result in his mind” (213). From Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.

[13] I capitalize Self in this instance not to imply its universality, but rather to make it look less natural.

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