I

Brookner's Melancholic Maternal Web

[W]e are confronted with an enigmatic paradox that will not cease questioning us: if loss, bereavement, and absence trigger the work of the imagination and nourish it permanently as much as they threaten it and spoil it, it is also noteworthy that the work of art as fetish emerges when the activating sorrow has been repudiated.

--Black Sun, Julia Kristeva

Called "a latter-day Jane Austen," Anita Brookner has produced several novels about women's depression and the power of writing to contain it. Look at Me (1983), Hotel du Lac (1984), The Misalliance (1986), and A Closed Eye (1992) narrate variations on a struggle with melancholia--whose etiology is maternal abandonment and/or neglect. ("The trouble was obviously psychic; the nurse . . . seemed to think the fault lay in a lack of mothering.") 2 Brookner's heroines are graceless losers who agonize over ways of compensating for their loss, which threatens to entail "the loss of [their] being--and of Being itself" (Kristeva 1989, 5). They are submerged in gloom, forever subject to "an implosive mood that walls itself in and kills [them] secretly, very slowly, through permanent bitterness, bouts of sadness . . ." (29). Brookner's depressives refuse to negotiate, to say, "I consent to lose her" (43). Unwilling to [End Page 357] negate their loss, they suspend that negation "and nostalgically fall back on the real object (the Thing) of their loss, which is just what they do not manage to lose, to which they remain painfully riveted" (44).

Brookner's heroines (like Austen's Emma) consequently latch onto male disciplinarians as if that were a mode of remaining in bondage to the wounding mother; hence this potential bridge to worldly power, and thus to liberation from maternal suffocation, turns out to be sadomasochistic. Brookner's novels reinforce the idea that a woman abandoned by her mother, especially if that mother neglected or subjected her (making her subjectivity a function of her attachment to the mother), may be vulnerable to cathecting her libido onto an abusive erotic object choice: having encrypted her mother, the daughter in this way plays out the usual matricide against herself. One theorist who issues a similar warning is Maria Torok, although Kristeva (1989) herself notes that her patient Anne showed manic excitement over "torture that took hold of her in her relationship with her mother and sometimes with her partner in between her depressions" (57). In The Shell and the Kernel, Torok (1994) considers the little girl's difficulty in divesting the mother of her prerogatives, in evicting the mother, as she identifies with both parents. Torok speaks of this difficulty in conjunction with "a special imagoic configuration: a demanding, castrated, and jealous Mother; a Father who is envied, depreciated, and magnified at the same time." When a woman burdened by such imagos approaches married life, explains Torok, her "affective life remains immature"; she is apt to replay the anal relationship to the mother with her spouse: the "benefit derived from this position is not having to come face to face with the maternal imago and thus being able to avoid the deep-seated anguish at tearing oneself free from her dominion." Women, as a result, accept relationships of dependency on men, "on the imagoic heirs of the anal mother" (70-71). 3

Brookner's Look at Me opens self-sabotagingly with a piece of wisdom that the sheer existence of the novel contradicts--"It is wiser, in every circumstance, to forget, to cultivate the art of forgetting. To remember is to face the enemy" (5). 4 The [End Page 358] heroine's dejection and consequent craving for invulnerability--good luck, good health, good looks, no terror, and therefore cancellation of the past--result from her inability to complete mourning for (to "forget") her "enemy": her now literally dead but psychically encrypted mother. Frances comments matter of factly that after her mother's death she was "dry-eyed and stony-faced, glad that the ordeal was over" (26). Her housekeeper, Nancy (a mother surrogate, inherited from her mother), thought that Frances's behavior after the death was "ruthless": she moved about stiffly and practically, stripping her mother's bed, cleaning up, etc., as if nothing had occurred. Yet Frances reflects back on her "terror" over her ailing mother's spasms--and her dread of her ailing mother's wish to kiss her goodnight. Her fear of her mother's death was so enormous that her death had to be denied, as it was at the time and still is: Frances has "changed nothing in the flat"; the nights are "just the same," as is the food. She "fingers the gold brocade curtains, with their tasselled gold tie-backs, and . . . think[s] how [her] mother used to stand at the window, waiting for [her] father to come home. And then [she] knows that [she] will stay" (27). "Like a commemorative monument," as Maria Torok (1994) writes in "The Illness of Mourning," "the incorporated object betokens the place, the date, and the circumstances in which desires were banished . . . ; they stand like tombs in the life of the ego" (114).

The end of Look at Me is as frozen as its beginning. After a terrifying walk back through an "endless tunnel" clearly symbolic of a birth canal (it is as if Frances is wading through "viscous substance" [170]), melancholic Frances collapses into a "state of total regression" (177), "a mood of lethargy that was almost one of mourning" (180). But not exactly: having consumed the love-object she misses, Frances engages in incomplete mourning or, we might say, "refuse[s] to mourn," shunning "the consequences of mourning even though [her] psyche is fully bereaved. Incorporation is the refusal to acknowledge the full import of the loss, a loss that, if recognized as such, would effectively transform [her]" (Torok 1994, 127). Instead of a transformative recognition of loss, Frances inhabits her dead mother's flat so fully that she dons her mother's [End Page 359] white nightgown and sleeps in her bed: "It felt quite natural for [her] to be there" (Brookner 1985, 190). Mrs. Hinton died at home, no doubt in the very bed in which Frances now sleeps. Like Kristeva's patient Helen, Frances has "assimilated her [mother] into [herself]," possessed her, held "her within . . . so as never to be separated from her" (Kristeva 1989, 75). Her mother is enwombed/entombed in Frances; and at the end Frances reenwombs/reentombs herself (traveling back through the "endless tunnel") in her mother, a double psychic invagination. Torok's insights into the subject of entombment fit Frances perfectly. Words of grief cannot be uttered, scenes of grief recalled, or tears shed--"everything will be swallowed along with the trauma that led to the loss. Swallowed and preserved. Inexpressible mourning erects a secret tomb inside the subject" (130).

Kristeva's Helen is a similar case of "cannibalistic solitude," of "the body as tomb," of "omnipotent devouring" (Kristeva 1989, 71). Helen consequently undergoes a period of frigidity, which Kristeva (1989) explains as "an imaginary capture by the frigid woman of a maternal figure anally imprisoned and transferred to the cloaca-vagina" that bars anyone else from entering (77). Frances Hinton, like most of Brookner's heroines, also seems impregnably virginal. Although she is romantically inclined toward Dr. James Anstey, she holds his hand "as confidently as a child holds the hand of its parent" (Brookner 1985, 95). She is in no hurry for sex, although she expects eventually to do "whatever was demanded" (98). That Frances resists the idea of sex at the Maida Vale flat--suffused with her dead mother's presence--is a glaring confirmation that her blockage is the result of an incorporated mother. Given what dwells within her, weighing her down and filling her up, the act can occur only on demand; any bliss it might bring is not a consideration, for it would be instead a potentially traumatic ripping out of a deeply embedded "maternal Thing."

Kristeva (1989) writes that the partner capable of dissolving the mother imprisoned in the melancholic woman acts "neither the father's part, ideally rewarding his daughter, nor the symbolic stallion's." Yet it is "by means of a phallic [End Page 360] violence" (79) that Kristeva imagines him outwardly displacing the mother; and it makes sense that conquering the all-consuming death-bearing mother would entail a blow of some sort. Perhaps the purgative effect of phallic violence helps explain why so many women abandoned by mothers (in literature at least) seek, or at least accept, abusive lovers. But the membrane between phallic violence that "destroys the bad but also bestows and honors" (79) and purely destructive phallic violence--that sustains, or even deepens, the wound--is permeable. Frances Hinton seems to have trouble with this distinction twice. In her first romantic relationship, she was debased, "enjoyed precisely because she was humiliated" (Brookner 1985, 122), caught in a cycle of desire and contempt, and rose to the cruelty of it all. Although she claims not to love her new beau James "in the fatal sense"--"he was not a drug, an obsession, like that time of which [she] never speak[s]" (121)--her attraction to him too is linked to his harsh treatment of her. James strikes her as a cruel man: "His general bearing was that of an army officer" (73). His hands look angry; his tie is severe. Frances sits "on the ground at his feet[,] . . . and his large authoritative hand would stroke [her] face and hair" (90). "James, in his long, severe overcoat, [thrills] her with delight" (93).

Yet for all James's "phallic violence" (after he attempts to make love to Frances, her dress is creased, her "collar slightly torn," her "mouth swollen and open, the unaccustomed lipstick smeared all over it" [127]), he fails to possess her. Prior to his attempt, instead of sitting on a stool that Frances pulls up in front of the fire for him, James occupies her mother's chair, as if he senses what is at stake. Moments later, James recognizes a prohibitive obstacle: "Not with you, Frances. Not with you" (127). No explanation--such as this one: "Depressive persons cannot endure Eros, they prefer to be with the Thing up to the limit of negative narcissism leading them to Thanatos" (Kristeva 1989, 20)--is proferred. The presexual, lightly sadomasochistic relationship that Frances and James maintain facilitates Frances's self-punishment according to the depressive's paradoxical logic: I love the lost object, "but even more so I hate it; because I love it, and in order not to lose it, I imbed it in [End Page 361] myself; but because I hate it, that other within myself is a bad self, I am bad" (Kristeva 1989, 11). James keeps Frances's wound blissfully festering. (It is, in fact, Freud's "recurrent image of an open wound that is said to attract the whole of a counter-cathecting libido . . . the wound the melancholic attempts to hide, wall in, and encrypt" that to Abraham and Torok [1994] epitomizes melancholia [135].) Yet once sexual advances are made, Look at Me implies, the sadistic partner and incorporated mother no longer cooperate but compete for the body of the melancholic woman.

The alternative indication, as physicians put it, is always art. Kristeva (1989) proposes that the "artist consumed by melancholia," fighting to overcome the death-bearing mother, mounts a relentless campaign against the "symbolic abdication" blanketing him/her (9). She points in particular to "poetic form"--melody, rhythm, semantic polyvalency, the decomposing and recomposing of signs--as a possible "'container' . . . able to secure an uncertain but adequate hold over the Thing" (14). Insofar as literary creation "bears witness to the affect," through the transposition of "affect into rhythms, signs, forms" (22), it may help control sadness. To write, to name suffering, exalt it, dissect it "into its smallest components--that is doubtless a way to curb mourning" (97). Beauty, like "feminine finery concealing stubborn depressions," serves as "the admirable face of loss, transforming it to make it live" (99). Frances Hinton herself suggests that full-fledged female melancholics are gripped by an affliction beyond words, so that her own creative writing along with the amorously poetic Look at Me itself testify that the worst stages of the syndrome have been surpassed. Indeed, Frances uses her writing "to be hard": "to recompose events, to make them sharper, funnier, than they really were" (Brookner 1985, 44). She spares no feelings but her own, writing to enhance her lot. By the end she works, with pen and notebook, at recovery in the form of revenge: she wants to return to the group that ostracized her only to "make notes for a satirical novel" (184). The words pour out; she jazzes things up, plays for laughs, seeking fortitude that compensates for humiliation. No apparent crisis of the signifier here.

Frances's writing--like the ponderously delayed narrative [End Page 362] of Austen's Emma--is nevertheless as much an act of allegiance to the mother as it is a means of detachment from her. Theorizing melancholia (in fact), Look at Me makes writing-as-homeopathic-antidote one of its subjects. Now representing "the burden of [her] solitude" (53) and in this way keeping her mother close, Frances's writing had once been a pleasure for her mother to hear read aloud. Her mother's bedroom--where Frances and her mother coalesce at the end--provides the context in which she converts her lost hopes into language. The last voice of the text, uttering the words "My darling Fan" that inspire Frances to pick up her pen and start writing (presumably the novel we have at this instant finished reading), is that of her mother who, wide-eyed, used to say, "'My darling Fan' . . . 'I think you have a gift.' . . . [and who] encouraged [Frances] to write it all down" (16). Frances laments that, since her mother died, she has no one with whom to converse about her writing process. To conquer her need to write--Frances's "penance for not being lucky" (84)--then, appears to be a way of divorcing herself from what she has lost. Writing, the "enemy of forgetfulness," as the text in a depressive refrain keeps reminding us, is (not always undesirable) punishment. 5

Look at Me seems balanced precariously on the border between negation (of loss) that pries open sign systems (the novel as therapeutic entry into the symbolic) and a refusal to mourn that disavows negation by overloading signs with affects--"ambiguous, repetitive or simply alliterative, musical or sometimes nonsensical"--to the point that language devotes itself to "capturing the unnameable" (the novel as poetry of penance on the verge of collapse). It contains, in this respect, a fort/da motion that, as Madelon Sprengnether (1990) describes little Ernst's fort/da game, "institutionalizes both the act of renunciation and the impulse toward regression that inheres in it" (135). 6 Frances writes to murder time, locked--like the text--in an eternal cycle effected by the almost inconceivable mise en abyme ending that points to its beginning and epiphanizes the entire book: "A voice says, 'My darling Fan.' I pick up my pen. I start writing" (Brookner 1985, 192). She memorializes literarily a regression, verging on asymbolia. Still, the fact that intricate writing is being spun out, by Frances [End Page 363] and especially by Brookner, is crucial, given that, as Sokolsky (1994) elaborates: "Melancholy seems to harbor a revulsion against narrative: there is nothing to say, or no point in trying to say it. The great loss or grief the melancholic has suffered cannot be eased by rehearsing it. All efforts to persuade one that anything but an irredeemably lost past matters are regarded with wonder or disdain. The only audience who counts--the one whose loss has precipitated the melancholy--cannot or will not hear the protest that without it is not worth mounting. . . . to recount one's loss would be to vitiate or disperse it" (129-30). Avoiding such vitiation or dispersion while simultaneously "protesting" (i.e., announcing her pain), Frances/Brookner has devised a way of writing publically for the only audience who counts.

Brookner depicts melancholia as self-perpetuating, as turning "cures" back into nutrition for the disease, as an endless maternal web: the more furiously her heroines spin, the more entangled they seem to get. Yet, regardless of this apparent futility, both as an outgrowth, and an expression, of melancholia's interminable quality, elegant writing gets woven, female melancholia engrossingly articulated. Writing, given its own interminability, turns out to be well suited to reproduce and embody the illness, as a way of grappling with loss. If the cause is, in Schiesari's words, "to give the depression of women the value and dignity traditionally bestowed on the melancholia of men," Brookner furthers it (93). Her writing, moreover, compensates for the lack that plagues her heroine(s), offering an artistic form of plenitude that protects against advantages that might be taken of the female melancholic's vulnerability. Brookner recuperates loss aesthetically, achieving as a female artist the very fetishistic triumph that Kristeva attributes to her (genderless) melancholic artist, and that Schiesari's male melancholic artist achieves--through an oscillation that both posits and conquers maternal loss. Perhaps, as Kristeva (1989) suggests (in the epigraph of this section), "the work of art as fetish emerges when the activating sorrow has been repudiated" (9) because "repudiation" entails immersion to effect emergence. Like Freud's fort/da game (understood as an unending progressive/regressive movement, rather than as [End Page 364] pure mastery), writing enables the requisite preservation of loss as a means of achieving liberation from it: "To remember is to face the enemy" (Brookner 1985, 5).

This idea is in fact analogous to the conclusion that Freud (1923) comes to in his late meditations on melancholia in The Ego and the Id, where he proposes that, instead of surpassing or disposing of loss, the ego reconfigures itself in relation to its losses. Freud writes paradoxically that through melancholic introjection--the "setting up of the object inside the ego"--"the ego makes it easier for the object to be given up or renders that process possible. It may be that this identification is the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects." Hence the ego is "a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes," containing their history (24). We are left to wonder to what degree transformation of an erotic object choice into an ego alteration allows for cure. Freud's idea that to give up the lost object the ego must take it in leads one to question whether mourning is ever completed. The contrasting virtue of writing's preservation of loss as a means of getting a grip on it is that the lost object may be embraced without directly bogging down the ego--incorporated at one remove. Melancholic writing serves as surrogate ego.