Last night I had a refreshing conversation with someone I know currently doing a PhD in literature at University of Toronto who was wanting to write a prospectus on dream poetics within Renaissance literature. This friend of mine is taking this particular course with Elizabeth Harvey:

Freud’s frequent, often pivotal references to Shakespeare signal both deep cultural influence and a complex intertwining of shared attention to the nature and structure of the human psyche. The dominance of historicist approaches to early modern studies over the past three decades has tended to marginalize psychoanalysis as a discourse; this seminar will explore the resources of psychoanalytic theory for understanding the early modern “emergence” of subjectivity. We will consider historicism’s skepticism about and exclusion of psychoanalysis, what was at stake in these debates, the role of historical phenomenology and cognitive approaches, and the current reemergence of psychoanalytic theory. 

During this conversation my friend revealed his renewed interest in thinking about dreams, or what I understand as the psycho-affective aspects of a literary period that this course argues has largely been dominated by “historicist approaches.” I shared that I had, myself, gone through some form of psychoanalysis recently and described its effectiveness for me and others (this was psycho-dynamic therapy in a group setting). My friend was interested in how my therapy enacted a form of theatre that can be found in the early modern period, how even where each client sat was important and symbolic to how our psyches emerged and related to our past.

I didn’t mention this to my friend but I couldn’t help but think about how throughout my therapy I was insistent that I ought to be allowed to define my narratives the way I wanted to. One of those narratives had to do with how I related to my parents; any alternative story of a different way of looking at that relationality was unacceptable to me, and felt disruptive to my sense of self. I saw the inarticulated traumas my parents and grandparents had as a betrayal that I must continuously rail against.

As one example how the therapy broke me out of this cycle, I had once had a dream about three dangerous, violent men I knew who are in their 30s, and the dream consisted of trying to escape via stairs when I found myself on the same floor as them, trapped in a small room. The doctor, surprisingly, suggested that my uneasiness with older men had to do with my uneasiness with my father. I found this approach, at first, creepy, repetitive, and sometimes nonsensical. When I shared this feeling, the doctor probed me, however, to remember how my parents affected me in uncanny ways – ways that I could not remember and prefer not to think about. As uncomfortable as this framing was for me, I think it’s useful to keep in mind Young’s conception of “received history,” an idea he adapts from Hirsch’s “aesthetics of postmemory,” when thinking about how autobiographies are produced. I had, after a while, a rehearsed story that I refused to deviate from that constituted some kind of oral narrative of my life.

Of course, my relationship with my parents is informed by larger historical forces (WWII, the Cultural Revolution, June 4th), so I can’t relate to them without having a way to account for received history: the “narrative hybrid that interweaves both events [that occurred in my parents’ life] and the ways they are passed down to me” (Young 669). In Young, of course, he speaks in particular of the events of the Holocaust and how Vladek, Art Spiegelman’s father, tells them to him.

Reading Maus I was struck by the way Vladek the character cohered for me as a father, husband, and Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. One of the most powerful ways that Spiegelman tells this “story of a story” is by paralleling Vladek’s current “manifest behaviours” – that is, through drawing (via comics) his current behaviours around objects, money, and familial relationships – with his telling of his Holocaust experiences.

Throughout Maus Vladek is obsessively spendthrift, resourceful, and skilled at fixing things, but to an extent that makes his son, Art, feel incredibly inadequate and frustrated.

I would argue that, however, writing the comic and having his father receive them constitute a creative, relationally transformative act. As addressable other for Vladek, Art takes up the responsibility of researching and understanding the Holocaust in his own way. By acknowledging Art’s role as documenter, Vladek also suggests that his stories are worth telling, that his version of survival of the Holocaust enables him to be a father to Art, even if, somehow, he still harbours inarticulable trauma around Richieu.

In this way I can see how in telling my own story the same way over and over, I fail to engage in the very relationality I speak of. I fail to unearth and receive history that is relevant to me when I assume that there is a tenable, stable story of this life. Uncanny stories lie embedded in untold trauma within my family, informing the depth of trauma.

In some way, Art’s defensive reaction to finding out that his father destroyed his mother’s journal is like my disappointment that I cannot ask my grandmother about the Cultural Revolution. While she is still alive, that channel in our relationship may as well be dead. That history is lost, because of how strong the cultural silence around that time period is for those in my grandmother’s generation (and her in particular). I am, like Art, never allowed to witness this side of his family story, and all he can do is represent that disappointment, that absence, that sense of incompleteness.

In these ways I think the psycho-affective aspects of narratives and historical narratives at large are crucial, if not indispensable for understanding a life and how it can be represented. They show how authors of life narratives always belong to a larger historical framework where history is “received,” that these stories are always mediated by relationships that affect them psychically.