Donna Haraway & Ridley Scott’s “Alien”

“Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret.”     ―Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Much has been written already about Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner (my original choice) in relation to Donna Haraway’s landmark essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” but less about the essay’s relation to Scott’s first great film, Alien (1979). For this short essay I’d like to avoid the feminist jungle that Alien offers for analysis and instead focus on the characters of Ash and Kane.

 

Original movie poster from 1979

Ash is an android whose simulated nature is revealed halfway through the film. It seems a deliberate move to surprise us in this way, leaving the audience fooled on a deep and disturbing level, by a character whom we came to know as human and realized is only a system of wires that oozes blood the color of Cream of Wheat (not unlike the alien’s “acid” blood). The scene is a violent one, with a disagreement between Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and Ash turning physical. Ash unsuccessfully attempts to suffocate Ripley by stuffing a rolled up (phallic) magazine into her mouth, and it marks the only time in the film when a female is threatened in an overtly sexual way. The suggestion is that Ash is compensating for his lack of sexuality as an android, and although he is ostensibly “male” he more closely resembles what Haraway calls the “post-gender” world of the cyborg. But our heroine prevails, and quickly: Ripley decapitates Ash (who is literally reduced to a talking head, a system of code and information, without a body) and annihilates him in a bath of flame with a blowtorch.

Once this revelation about Ash happens, the “nature” of everyone else on the ship becomes suspect, and, further, we as viewers begin to question our own nature. How different are we from Ash’s robotic body with wires for guts? If androids are machines that can be terminated, what does that make us? Don’t we have the ability to end their “life” as God ends ours? The result of this scene is a blurring of the boundary between man (organism) and machine, and it anticipates Haraway’s essay, published six years later.

Donna Haraway in 1988

Yet Haraway’s is an argument “for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries,” and Alien represents the antithesis of this. In a film whose monster is heavily imbued with both phallic and vaginal imagery, a scene of “oral rape” in which a male character (Kane) is impregnated orally by an alien species, and another scene where the planted egg erupts violently from Kane’s chest, the deconstruction (and fusion) of gender and sexual boundaries is deliberately horrifying, not pleasurable.

I would argue that upon viewing the film a second time, one of the most subtly disorienting scenes is the moment just before the alien erupts from the character Kane’s chest, when the crew is casually sitting around eating breakfast, and we realize that Kane is pregnant. Though the pregnancy is short-lived, he is ultra-feminized in a sense, and the result is a viciously violent one that kills him. The suggestion, then, is that the attempt to transgress gender by fusing its boundaries, especially in a sexual way, is highly volatile. As Haraway says, “To be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable…exploited as a reserve labor force.” Kane is raped and exploited by being used as a vessel out of which the alien egg can hatch. He is not emasculated so much as violently feminized, and I would argue that the result of this is a radical re-feminization of the film’s hero, Ripley.

The film consciously raises our anxieties and fears surrounding the issue of playing God, and losing our assumed boundaries of male and female, but also of the Self and the Other. The characters of Kane and Ash question our historical idea of the body and its permeable nature, and remind us that “man is matter,” capable of being mutated, exploited, simulated, and impregnated. Haraway’s dominant-submissive dualism speaks to women primarily, and Alien represents a reversal of that domination, not without its casualties.

Shoveling (by Ann Harrington)

I woke to the sound of shovels scraping the sidewalk:
More snow.
Son of a snowplow driver,
shoveling was one of your specialties,
like rising at five to feed the cats,
filling the bird feeder,
making the coffee,
charging my phone—
a catalog of kindnesses
I mostly slept through.
You were the constant one, the unapologetic booster, the besotted.
I was the strategist, the asker of difficult questions, the beloved.

We chose the old house on the corner
not knowing what we were in for. (Whoever does?)
We battled, together,
but cancer made you old too soon
and left me, the independent one, suddenly alone.
Now the years stretch ahead of me
like an endless sidewalk, filled with snow.
I shuffle into your old jacket, hat,
and too-big boots,
grab a shovel and get to work,
hoping some of you
will rub off on me.

–2014

Andrew Wyeth. First Snow (Groundhog Day). 1959.

Ann Harrington is an editor and writer, single mother, and die-hard Twins fan. She lives with her two kittens in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Food for Thought: How do the sounds of the opening line reflect the action? How does the act of shoveling change dimensions by the end of the poem?

Marx & Baudelaire’s “Let’s Beat Up the Poor”

In his Communist Manifesto, Marx carefully constructs the following sentence to demonstrate the importance of his ideas coming into fruition at the exact time he is writing these very words: “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” Though he is speaking of the history of class struggle and using the past tense, the phrase “now hidden, now open” evokes the call to revolution with brilliant subtlety. It is this phrase that I’d like to focus on as concretized in Baudelaire’s poem “Let’s Beat Up the Poor.”

The prose poem describes a brief anecdote in the first person involving the narrator, after two weeks of self-induced isolation in his room, breaking out of the eggshell of his home and into the streets, with “the idea of an idea” in his mind and “feeling very thirsty.” He then comes across a beggar holding out his cap with a pathetic look, and throws himself on him, beating him nearly senseless. It is here that the poem takes root and stares the reader in the face: the “antique carcass” of the beggar fights back, bruising and bloodying the narrator, reclaiming a long-lost dignity and reason to live. The narrator’s “theory” as whispered to him earlier in the poem by “a Demon of action, a Demon of combat” is that “only he is the equal of another who proves it, and only he is worthy of liberty who can conquer it.” A pact is made by the two men and the beggar’s promise to carry out the “theory” is what makes it social, forward-thinking, and represents Baudelaire’s challenge to the reader. That virtually no one who reads the poem is bold enough to actually carry out his “theory” in practice seems to be exactly what Baudelaire is after. Its egalitarian standpoint reveals the irony that true equality is impossible not because it is denied us by society, but because we deny it ourselves.

This provocative poem attempts, in a single stroke, to materialize the idea of Marxist class struggle in a definitive and self-willed way. It is a demonstration of the carrying out of the revolutionary ideas Marx formulated, yet it does so in a reverse order. Not only does Baudelaire make manifest the otherwise concealed, ignored, and silently tolerated class struggle between the poor and the bourgeois, but he does so by going down the ladder, not up it. And in doing so he reveals the energy and fire that exists in the lowest class, i.e. the poor, the destitute, the homeless. Whereas Marx calls upon the proletariat to unite, invigorating the strength of the huge middle class (whose key advantage lies in their weight), Baudelaire shows that this strength also exists in the lowest dregs of society. And his poem is as much a call to action as Marx’s Manifesto. The title, after all, is not “An Encounter” or “Walking Down the Rue Saint-Honoré” or something vague like that, but rather a declarative, almost adolescent-toned invitation that is playful and exciting.

Baudelaire’s poem answers the question, what does class struggle actually look like? What material form is shaped by the tension of invisible antagonistic forces? The abstract becomes suddenly and uncomfortably tangible. Yet it does so in such an unusual and provocative way: instead of the slave revolt against his master, or the bored and privileged Alec D’urberville exploiting the naive and underprivileged Tess, Baudelaire’s hero is consciously provoking a revolt against himself. Rather than merely ignite the fuse of revolution by throwing a snowball at a policeman (i.e. the Boston Massacre) or organizing a committee of intellectuals or anarchists to overthrow the ones with power, he invigorates a member of a lower class to realize in a necessarily barbaric way that, at the bottom of his spirit, he is equal to anyone else alive. The beggar cannot fight back to defend himself unless there is something to defend. In this way the hero of the poem exposes the ability of humans to expose themselves.

Charles Baudelaire

 

Marx, at heart, was a humanist. It is precisely this notion of self-exposing that is most revolutionary about Baudelaire’s poem, and it is a humanistic and spiritual inertia he triggers more than a social one. The social inertia triggered is contained in the following lines, spoken by the narrator: “Sir, you are my equal, be kind enough to do me the honor of sharing my purse with me; and remember that if you are truly philanthropic, you must apply to all your colleagues, when they ask you for alms, the theory which I have had the anguish of trying out on your back.”

Yet it is not just a social shadow that is brought into the light. The truly revolutionary element of Baudelaire’s poem is illustrating that the necessary ingredient for revolution (now hidden, now open) lies within the beggar himself. Thus, in the same way that Tolstoy’s story “Master and Man” personalizes the idea of sacrificing one’s life for another (as demonstrated by the Christ-figure Brekhunov), Baudelaire personalizes the Marxist idea of class struggle leading to revolution with a “miracle” as the beggar rises from a heap on the ground and straightens himself “with an energy that I should never have suspected in a machine so singularly disordered.” (Note the deliberate use of the word “machine.”) Just as Tolstoy’s story takes the grand event of Christ sacrificing himself for all of mankind and scales it down to two individual people, so does Baudelaire’s poem bring Marx’s international call for revolution within the anecdotal sphere of two ordinary men: moving from the macro to the micro.

The brilliance of this poem is its understanding that before revolution can be directed outward, it must be manifested inward. This is why the truly radical revolutionaries in history — Jesus, Joan of Arc, Gandhi — were largely alone in their accomplishments. Their following, if any, were often made up of a group who fed off the revolutionary’s energy, convincing themselves they were the same, and willing to sacrifice the material in exchange for spiritual or social reform. But for any of this to happen a dramatic internal change must happen first, otherwise one is left with an empty shell of a person shouting from the rooftops but filled with doubt inside his heart.

Eating & Drinking in Madame Bovary

“There is a hunger that all the treasures of the world cannot satisfy . . . There is a thirst that all the streams of overabundance cannot quench.”     –Kierkegaard

I discovered so many patterns, themes, and techniques while reading Madame Bovary, that it was difficult to focus on just one. What kept coming back to me, however, was the theme of eating and drinking. There is so much focus by Flaubert on Emma’s lips, mouth, tongue, and teeth. When we first meet Emma she is sucking the blood out of her own fingertips, which she has pricked with a sewing needle (just as the wedding bouquet will later prick her, and the cactus Leon buys for her pricks him). Flaubert writes: “Charles noticed that her lips were full, and that she had the habit of biting them in moments of silence.” (19) Later, when Charles returns to the house to check on Emma’s father’s progress (whom he has operated on) Flaubert uses dazzling imagery in the depiction of Emma sitting in a sunlight-slatted kitchen, sewing “between the window and the hearth” (26) She offers Charles a drink of liqueur, and interestingly pours a full glass for him and “a few drops” in her own:

Because it was almost empty she had to bend backwards to be able to drink; and with her head tilted back, her neck and her lips outstretched, she began to laugh at tasting nothing; and then the tip of her tongue came out from between her small teeth and began daintily to lick the bottom of the glass. (26)

Emma pours herself so little liqueur out of obedience to the customary conventions of her society. Flaubert uses this image as a precursor to what will follow throughout the rest of the novel: Emma’s spiritual thirst and ultimate starvation. Food and drink then, as I see it, represent the unattainable, unreachable, spirituality that all of the characters are oblivious to except Emma. It is her heroic effort to quench this profound thirst that makes her character ultimately redeemable. The real tragedy of the novel is not Emma’s death but rather the inability for her or anyone else to fulfill her spiritual need.

The Bantam Classic paperback from 1982, translated by Lowell Bair

 

Everyone in the novel eats. Decadence does not escape the bourgeoisie. Even the horses are “stuffed with oats to the bursting point.” (34) Emma feeds the flames of her image of Leon, and eventually they die down, “whether exhausted from lack of supplies or choked by excessive feeding.” (146) Her attempt to feed her spiritual hunger through an affair with Leon will prove unsuccessful. During an early period when Emma is still happy, Flaubert writes: “Emma had her dinner brought to her in her bedroom on a tray, and ate it beside the fire. She lingered over her food: everything tasted good.” (124) In one of the book’s great passages, the doctor Homais and the priest Bournisien have fallen asleep in the room with Emma’s corpse, whom they both have failed: “They sat opposite one another, stomachs out, faces swollen, both of them scowling–united, after so much dissension, in the same human weakness…” (392). Later the two have a meal together and are temporarily friends, not enemies, while satiating themselves of their hunger. Homais says he’d “gladly partake of some nourishment” and a brief unity is formed:

The priest didn’t have to be asked twice. He went out, said his Mass, came back; and they proceeded to eat and clink their glasses, chuckling a little without knowing why, prey to that indefinable gaiety that often succeeds periods of gloom. With the last drink of brandy the priest slapped the pharmacist on the back: “We’ll be good friends yet!” he said. (393)

Emma has a deeper and more profound spiritual hunger than anyone else in the novel. Even on her deathbed, after all the affairs that she hoped would fulfill her childhood fantasies, she cries, “I’m thirsty! I’m so thirsty!” (372) It is Emma’s deep spiritual hunger that leads her to, in a sense, consume herself. Consistent with this idea is the way in which Emma kills herself: by eating aresenic “greedily” out of the can that Justin has so tragically and ignorantly procured for her. Hunger is an appropriate metaphor for human spiritual need for several reasons, the most significant being that it is unconscious and it is constant. Hunger happens to us regardless of our situations, our feelings, our social status, or our beliefs. All men are subject to hunger; sooner or later it comes calling from his belly, and he is driven to do something about it. Flaubert’s suggestion, then, is that Emma’s need for spiritual fulfillment, though distinct in its profundity, is a reflection of all humanity.

What distinguishes Emma from all the other characters in the novel (and in her society) is that she is not afraid to sin in order to attain the spiritual nourishment that her soul thirsts for. Nor is she afraid to die. In fact, Flaubert offers a stark contrast between the way Emma faces her own death, laughing at the song of the blind beggar, and the pathetic way that Homais cuts off a lock of her hair to give to Charles as a keepsake: “He trembled so violently that he nicked the skin on the temples in several places. Finally, steeling himself, Homais slashed blindly two or three times, leaving white marks in the beautiful black tresses.” (393)

When she is driven to use her sexuality as a bargaining chip to attain the 3,000 francs she needs to pull herself out of debt and avoid being completely exposed, Flaubert states that she is “unaware that now she was eager to yield to the very thing that had made her so indignant only a short while ago, and totally unconscious that she was prostituting herself.” (363) The question, then, is this: is Emma’s corrupt morality the result of conscious choice or a byproduct of her spiritual instinct? The words “unaware” and “totally unconscious” lead one to believe that it is the latter.

Sophie Barthes’ 2014 film, starring Mia Wasikowska

 

Madame Bovary is a story about society’s inability to fulfill a spiritual need that it has itself created. The battle between medicine (science) and religion ends in the utter failure of both to relieve the suffering that the characters experience, most notably Emma. The failure, we begin to see, is the result of trying to solve something that is not meant to be solved. Emma’s desperate attempts to escape her own human condition lead to the resolution that there is no escaping the human condition. Hippolyte’s leg is ultimately a symbol for that thing in nature that is only adulterated by our attempt to destroy it.

Finally, Flaubert puts language (himself an artist of words) in the same category as religion and science. He recognizes that all of them are inventions of man and therefore utterly limited as a rule in their capacity to transcend what is human. There are two scenes where Emma tries to communicate with authorities in each class, first with the priest, and later with Homais. Emma is at a loss as far as how to express her spiritual need to the priest. She can only say what it is not: “It isn’t earthly remedies that I need.” (132) Religion has been put into the same category as medicine: both are used merely to relieve suffering. As the priest puts it, referring to Charles: “‘He and I are certainly the two busiest people in the parish. He takes care of the bodies,’ he added, with a heavy laugh, ‘and I look after the souls.’” (133) Religion is a complete failure, then, for not only does it provide a practical channel for the individual to connect with God, but it cannot even relieve the suffering of the soul, which it proclaims to do.

Religion does no better with individuals than medicine did with Hippolyte’s leg: both fail utterly, and yet language is at the root of both. It is language that is the great poison, the arsenic of the world, and this is Flaubert’s ultimate irony. Language has created a God that man cannot reach (just like Kafka’s castle) and romantic fantasy ideals that will never be attained. As Flaubert himself says, on page 224: “None of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”

Central America (by Derek Walcott)

Helicopters are cutlassing the wild bananas.

Between a nicotine thumb and forefinger

brittle faces crumble like tobacco leaves.

Children waddle in vests, their legs bowed,

little shrimps curled under their navels.

The old men’s teeth are stumps in a charred forest.

Their skins grate like the iguana’s.

Their gaze like slate stones.

Women squat by the river’s consolations

where children wade up to their knees,

and a stick stirs up a twinkling of butterflies.

Up there, in the blue acres

of forest, flies circle their fathers.

In spring, in the upper provinces

of the Empire, yellow tanagers

float up through the bare branches.

There is no distinction in these distances.

 

–1987

Anselm Keifer, Palette. 1981.

 

 

Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia, a Caribbean island, in 1930. Growing up he was trained as a painter but turned to writing instead. At age 14 he published his first poem in a local newspaper. Five years later, he borrowed $200 to print his first collection, which he distributed on street corners. His work celebrates the Caribbean and its history, and investigates the scars of colonialism. His poetry books include In a Green Night (1962), The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), and White Egrets (2010). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. In his acceptance speech he said, “It is the fate of poetry to fall in love with the world, in spite of history.” He lives in St. Lucia and New York City.

 

 

Food for Thought: How does the poet contrast images of ugliness with those of beauty? Is there any distinction between them?

Visiting Paris (by Vijay Seshadri)

They were in the scullery talking.
The meadow had to be sold to pay their riotous expenses;
then the woods by the river,
with its tangled banks and snags elbowing out of the water,
had to go; and then the summer house where they talked—
all that was left of an estate once so big
a man riding fast on a fast horse
couldn’t cross it in a day. Genevieve. Hortense. Meme.
The family’s last born, whose pale name is inscribed on the rolls
of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. As in the fresco of the Virgin,
where the copper in the pigment oxidizes to trace a thin green cicatrix
along a seam of Her red tunic,
a suspicion of one another furrowed their
consanguine, averted faces.
Why go anywhere at all when it rains like this,
when the trees are sloppy and hooded
and the foot sinks to the ankle in the muddy lane?
I didn’t stay for the end of the conversation.
I was wanted in Paris. Paris, astounded by my splendor
and charmed by my excitable manner,
waited to open its arms to me.

—2010

Andrea del Sarto, Madonna del Sacco, 1525 (restored 2010)

Poet, essayist, and critic Vijay Seshadri was born in India in 1954 and came to the U.S. at the age of five. He worked as a commercial fisherman in Oregon for several years, and eventually earned a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA from Columbia University. Seshadri is the author of Wild Kingdom (1996), The Long Meadow (2003), and 3 Sections (2013), which won the Pulitzer Prize. In his early days, his poetry began with an image, but later transitioned to beginning with a musical phrase. Of his nationality, Seshadri says, “I always say that whether I’m an American or not is something others might feel they have a right to decide, but I know I’m an American poet.” He has worked as an editor at the New Yorker and currently directs the graduate non-fiction writing program at Sarah Lawrence College. He lives in Brooklyn.

Food for Thought: Why does the poet choose the subtle yet exact image in lines 10-12? How does the syntax of the words “consanguine, averted” contribute to the poem’s depth?

The Cord (by Leanne O’Sullivan)

I used to lie on the floor for hours after
school with the phone cradled between
my shoulder and my ear, a plate of cold
rice to my left, my school books to my right.
Twirling the cord between my fingers
I spoke to friends who recognized the
language of our realm. Throats and lungs
swollen, we talked into the heart of the night,
toying with the idea of hair dye and suicide,
about the boys who didn’t love us,
who we loved too much, the pang
of the nights. Each sentence was
new territory, like a door someone was
rushing into, the glass shattering
with delirium, with knowledge and fear.
My Mother never complained about the phone bill,
what it cost for her daughter to disappear
behind a door, watching the cord
stretching its muscle away from her.
Perhaps she thought it was the only way
she could reach me, sending me away
to speak in the underworld.
As long as I was speaking
she could put my ear to the tenuous earth
and allow me to listen, to decipher.
And these were the elements of my Mother,
the earthed wire, the burning cable,
as if she flowed into the room with
me to somehow say, Stay where I can reach you,
the dim room, the dark earth. Speak of this
and when you feel removed from it
I will pull the cord and take you
back towards me.

                                                                                      –2004

Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of the Womb. 1513.

Leanne O’Sullivan was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1983. Her first collection, Waiting for my Clothes, was published when she was 21. By that time she had already won many of Ireland’s prestigious poetry prizes. She received an MA in English from University College, Cork in 2006. Her other collections include Cailleach: The Hag of Beara (2009), The Mining Road (2013), and A Quarter of an Hour (2018).

Food for Thought: How does the image of the cord change with the phrase, “stretching its muscle away from her”? What might the cord represent by the end of the poem?

Faulkner & Dickens: The Witness as Cinematic Technique

While reading Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, I came across a passage about a boy named Jerry (named after his father, also Jerry) in the chapter titled “The Honest Tradesman” (Volume II, Chapter 14). Young Jerry wakes in the middle of the night to follow his father, who has told the family that he is going fishing in the night. Thus young Jerry in his curiosity follows his father’s excursion like a shadow:

“Young Jerry, who had only made a feint of undressing when he went to bed, was not long after his father. Under cover of the darkness he followed out of the room, followed down the stairs, followed down the court, followed out into the streets.”

See now the careful description by Dickens in how young Jerry observes his father: from a distance yet unobstructed. We as readers are brought into the act of seeing along with the character. We want to see what he sees. And Dickens wants us to see what young Jerry sees:

“Impelled by a laudable ambition to study the art and mystery of his father’s honest calling, Young Jerry, keeping as close to house fronts, walls, and doorways, as his eyes were close to one another, held his honored parent in view.”

Dickens then describes how two other men join Jerry the father on his “fishing” expedition, and Young Jerry watches them scale a wall and drop into the grass of a graveyard. Young Jerry is scared off by the “awful striking of the church clock” but is lured back by his “long-cherished desire to know more about these matters.” What Jerry’s father has termed “fishing” is actually grave-digging. The following lines instantly reminded me of a scene from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying:

“They were still fishing perseveringly, when he peeped in at the gate for the second time; but, now they seemed to have got a bite. There was a screwing and complaining sound down below, and their bent figures were strained, as if by a weight. By slow degrees the weight broke away the earth upon it, and came to the surface. Young Jerry very well knew what it would be; but, when he saw it, and saw his honoured parent about to wrench it open, he was so frightened, being new to the sight, that he made off again, and never stopped until he had run a mile or more.”

When I read these last few lines I put down my book and saw, in my mind, the following scene from Faulkner’s novel, in which the youngest, Vardaman, sees his brother Darl ostensibly crying over their mother’s coffin: “He is out there under the apple tree with her, lying on her” and then, “The moonlight dappled on him too. On her it was still, but on Darl it dappled up and down.”

On the surface the parallels between the two episodes are obvious: both involve young boys of an impressionable age; both involve moonlight and coffins; both involve strikingly powerful images that make a profound impression on the observers; and both involve vertical movement. Are these parallels what made the synapses in my brain fire together? What really interests me is that my mind may have made the connection in a purely visual sense: the way my imagination “saw” the Faulkner episode was similar to how it “saw” the Dickens episode. After some research I was surprised to discovered that, unbeknownst to me, Dickens was a major influence on Faulkner.

The connection between both writers is explored superbly by Joseph Gold in his essay “Dickens & Faulkner: The Uses of Influence.” Gold elucidates the moral use of children as characters by both authors in the following way: “For children illustrate the freedom and flexibility that are so often lost with custom and with social role, and also the susceptibility to the past. They are dependent on adults whose attitudes, in the long run, they are helpless to resist, so that in a way they are used in the fiction as an act of wish-fulfilment as they are made to resist the pressures of their environment. They serve especially well, therefore, as points of moral conflict (i.e., to please an adult world they must deny their own innocence or freedom) and they are useful for illustrating the consequences of evil, the way in which evil is literally regenerated.”

Under the surface of both of these scenes, there is a strikingly similar use of the child as witness to something he does not understand, yet which will have a profound impact on his psyche as he matures into adulthood. Both authors use the child’s malleable moral and psychological structure to see images that cleave to the mind. Vardaman simply says, “You needn’t to cry,” to his brother Darl, but the image, as written by Faulkner, was powerful enough that it stayed in my mind. Faulkner subtly uses the “up and down” motion to suggest crying, however there is also the suggestion of something sexual, and with Faulkner this is not impossible, especially when we consider the nature of his characters, as in the story “A Rose for Emily,” about a woman who is discovered to have been sleeping with her dead boyfriend for years. In that story, Emily’s father dies and she refuses to let him, or his body, go, until the townspeople insist on taking the body and giving it a proper burial:

The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid, as is our custom Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly.

Because she must give the body away, she finds a replacement in Homer Barron, a suitor-turned-victim, whom Emily poisons and sleeps with his body. In a way, “A Rose for Emily” (his first to be published) is the quintessential Faulkner story because it illustrates his own fixation with the past: necrophilia, then, becomes the central theme for Faulkner as a writer, for it exposes not only his attachment, but his awareness of that attachment’s secret derangement, to the past. Necrophilia is a person’s way of insisting that something dead is still alive, and the sexual act confirms this belief more powerfully than any other because it is a creative and life-promoting act. We cannot assume that Emily is fucking the corpse of Homer Barron, only that the “strand of iron-gray hair” suggests that she has been sleeping in the same bed as the corpse. But our imagination completes the image. Faulkner opens the door and allows us to step through it, thus making us complicit in the same pathology he is trapped by. Note the brilliant use of “iron-gray” as an indication of just how strong and enduring the past (which Emily is now a part of herself) becomes in Faulkner’s world. He just as easily could have described it as a “wisp” of gray hair.

Applying this same thought process to As I Lay Dying paints an image that becomes all the more evocative. We have a corpse in a coffin, a Biblical apple tree, and the juxtaposition of stillness and movement. Note also the phrase “lying on her” and its dual suggestion of a body supine on another as well as how the images we see can deceive us.  Many critics have written about the mother’s body becoming fetishised throughout the novel, and in this brief yet powerful image Faulkner merges light and shadow, truth and deception, sorrow and sexuality.

In Dickens’s image (one that, given Faulkner’s propensity for “raising the dead” through his fixation with the past), young Jerry watches his father and three others unearth a coffin from the ground, in order to sell the body for money. Young Jerry, who has “peeped in at the gate for the second time,” has unknowingly become a voyeur in this episode, and there are elements of the erotic in the image he witnesses. There are “screwing and complaining” sounds as the coffin is lifted, and he watches in horror as his father is about to “wrench it open,” a violent treatment of a body that, because it is a corpse, has no way of defending itself from being violated. He takes off running.

Thus Jerry represents the innocence of childhood that Faulkner could not get back to. He rejects the corpse, the past, the dead, and does not subject himself to even look at it. The response is a healthy and appropriate one. Faulkner mourns for his days as the young Jerry, and in doing so his characters not only look at the corpse but carry it with them, lie on it, sleep with it. He is enslaved by it. His own past becomes his coffin.

Psychologists in a Nutshell

The TOC from The Psychology Book by Joannah Ginsburg gives a wonderful overview of the history of psychology and its major contributors, with each of their major breakthroughs. From philosophy’s early questions of Who are we? comes Why are we so? Particularly interesting to me are the new names of Charcot and the universal laws of hysteria, Joseph Wolpe’s instruction to surrender the imagination, Donald Winnicott’s assertion of the all-important mother-infant bond, Roger Brown’s term “flashbulb memories,” which reminds me of the films of Jean-Marc Vallee, and Harry Harlow’s provoking yet seemingly obvious statement about contact comfort being “overwhelmingly important.”

Which ones stand out to you?

 

Pierre Janet

PHILOSOPHICAL ROOTS

Galen – The four temperaments of personality

Descartes – There is a reasoning soul in this machine

Abbe Faria – Dormez!

Johann Friedrich Herbart – Concepts become forces when they resist one another

Soren Kierkegaard – Be that self which one truly is

Francis Galton – Personality is composed of nature and nurture

Jean-Martin Charcot – The laws of hysteria are universal

Emil Kraepelin – A peculiar destruction of the internal connections of the psyche

Wilhelm Wundt – The beginnings of the mental life date from the beginnings of the life

William James – We know the meaning of “consciousness” so long as no one asks us to define it

G. Stanley Hall – Adolescence is a new birth

Hermann Ebbinghaus – 24 hours after learning something, we forget two-thirds of it

Alfred Binet – The intelligence of an individual is not a fixed quantity

Pierre Janet – The unconscious sees the men behind the curtains

 

Ivan Pavlov

BEHAVIORISM

Ivan Pavlov – The sight of tasty food makes a hungry man’s mouth water

Edward Thorndike – Profitless acts are stamped out

John B. Watson – Anyone, regardless of their nature, can be trained to be anything

Edward Tolman – That great God-given maze which is our human world

Edwin Guthrie – Once a rat has visited our grain sack we can plan on its return

Zing-Yang Kuo – Nothing is more natural than for the cat to “love” the rat

Karl Lashley – Learning is just not possible

Konrad Lorenz – Imprinting cannot be forgotten!

B.F. Skinner – Behavior is shaped by positive and negative reinforcement

Joseph Wolpe – Stop imagining the scene and relax

 

Sigmund Freud

PSYCHOTHERAPY

Sigmund Freud – The unconscious is the true psychical reality

Alfred Adler – The neurotic carries a feeling of inferiority with him constantly

Carl Jung – The collective unconscious is made up of archetypes

Melanie Klein – The struggle between the life and death instincts persists throughout life

Karen Horney – The tyranny of the “shoulds”

Anna Freud – The superego becomes clear only when it confronts the ego with hostility

Fritz Perls – Truth can be tolerated only if you discover it for yourself

Donald Winnicott – It is notoriously inadequate to take an adopted child into one’s home and love him

Jacques Lacan – The unconscious is the discourse of the Other

Erich Fromm – Man’s main task is to give birth to himself

Carl Rogers – The good life is a process, not a state of being

Abraham Maslow – What a man can be, he must be

Viktor Frankl – Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning

Rollo May – One does not become fully human painlessly

Albert Ellis – Rational beliefs create healthy emotional consequences

Virginia Satir – The family is the “factory” where people are made

Timothy Leary – Turn on, tune in, drop out

Paul Watzlawick – Insight may cause blindness

R.D. Laing – Madness need not be all breakdown; it may also be break-through 

Boris Cyrulnik – Our history does not determine our destiny

Dorothy Rowe – Only good people get depressed

Guy Corneau – Fathers are subject to a rule of silence

 

Steven Pinker

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Wolfgang Kohler – Instinct is a dynamic pattern

Bluma Zeigarnik – Interruption of a task greatly increases its chances of being remembered

Donald Hebb – When a baby hears footsteps, an assembly is excited

Jerome Bruner – Knowing is a process, not a product

Leon Festinger – A man with conviction is a hard man to change

George Armitage Miller – The magical number 7, plus or minus 2

Aaron Beck – There’s more to the surface than meets the eye

Donald Broadbent – We can listen to only one voice at once

Endel Tulving – Time’s arrow is bent into a loop

Roger N. Shepard – Perception is externally guided hallucination

Daniel Kahneman – We are constantly on the lookout for causal connections

Gordon H. Bower – Events and emotion are stored in memory together

Paul Ekman – Emotions are a runaway train

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – Ecstasy is a step into an alternative reality

Martin Seligman – Happy people are extremely social

Elizabeth Loftus – What we believe with all our hearts is not necessarily the truth

Daniel Schacter – The seven sins of memory

Jon Kabat-Zinn – One is not one’s thoughts

Steven Pinker – The fear is that biology will debunk all that we hold sacred

Paul Salkovskis – Compulsive behavior rituals are attempts to control intrusive thoughts

 

Ignacio Martin-Baro

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

Kurt Lewin – You cannot understand a system until you try to change it

Solomon Asch – How strong is the urge toward social conformity?

Erving Goffman – Life is a dramatically enacted thing

Robert Zajonc – The more you see it, the more you like it

Janet Taylor Spence – Who likes competent women?

Roger Brown – Flashbulb memories are fired by events of high emotionality

Serge Moscovici – The goal is not to advance knowledge but to be in the know

William Glasser – We are, by nature, social beings

Melvin Lerner – We believe people get what they deserve

Elliot Aronson – People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy

Stanley Milgram – People do what they are told to do

Philip Zimbardo – What happens when you put good people in an evil place?

Ignacio Martin-Baro – Trauma must be understood in terms of the relationship between the individual and society

 

Jean Piaget

DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

Jean Piaget – The goal of education is to create men and women who are capable of doing new things

Lev Vygotsky – We become ourselves through others

Bruno Bettelheim – A child is not beholden to any particular parent

Erik Erikson – Anything that grows has a ground plan

John Bowlby – Early emotional bonds are an integral part of human nature

Harry Harlow – Contact comfort is overwhelmingly important

Francoise Dalto – We prepare children for a life about whose course we know nothing

Mary Ainsworth – A sensitive mother creates a secure attachment

Kenneth Clark – Who teaches a child to hate and fear a member of another race?

Eleanor E. Maccoby – Girls get better grades than boys

Albert Bandura – Most human behavior is learned through modeling

Lawrence Kohlberg – Morality develops in six stages

Noam Chomsky – The language organ grows like any other body organ

Simon Baron-Cohen – Autism is an extreme form of the male brain

 

Nico Frijda

PSYCHOLOGY OF DIFFERENCE

J.P. Guilford – Name as many uses as you can think of for a toothpick

Gordon Allport – Did Robinson Crusoe lack personality traits before the advent of Friday?

Raymond Cattell – General intelligence consists of both fluid and crystallized intelligence

Hans J. Eysenck – There is an association between insanity and genius

David C. McClelland – Three key motivations drive performance

Nico Frijda – Emotion is an essentially unconscious process

Walter Mischel – Behavior without environmental cues would be absurdly chaotic

David Rosenhan – We cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals

Thigpen & Cleckley – The three faces of Eve

“In a cheap hotel . . .” (by Elizabeth Bishop)

In a cheap hotel

in a cheap city

Love held his prisoners               or my love

brought the pitcher of ice—

dropped the quarter in the spidery old electric-fan—

Love the Night Clerk, the Negro bell-boy

I remember the horrible carpet

& its smell, & the dog-eared telephone book

with its ominous look,

full full of the names

          of strangers close to my head,

my head with our name on it

                              or nameless embarrassment—

the bed, the motor-court below us

Six

Five yrs. ago             still

Almost every night     —frequently

                       he drags me

back to that bed.

The ice clinks, the fan whirs.

He chains me & berates me—

He chains me to that bed & he berates me.

 

Elizabeth Bishop was born in Massachusetts in 1911. Her father died eight months after she was born, and when she was four her mother was institutionalized for mental illness. She saw her mother for the last time at age 5, after which she lived with her grandparents in Nova Scotia. Bishop attended Vassar College, where she established a life-long friendship with the poet Marianne Moore. She lived in Brazil for 15 years with her lover, the architect Lota de Macedo Soares, and eventually settled in New England and taught at Harvard for many years. She became known as one of the major “confessional” poets. Her collections include North & South (1946), Questions of Travel (1965), and Geography III (1977). After her death, her reputation grew until she became recognized as one of the most important poets of the 20th century. Bishop said, “All my life I have lived and behaved very much like the sandpiper, just running down the edges of different countries and continents, looking for something.” She died in 1979.

 

 

Food for Thought: How does the poet make use of punctuation in this poem? How does the repetition of certain words/phrases reflect its content?