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Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading

A book review written for my Masters in Arts (English Literature)

Whether it was coincidental or planned, A.S. Byatt’s The Matisse Stories (1993) and Mary Jacobson’s Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading have the same illustration of Henri Matisse’s painting Le Silence habite des Maisons (The Silence Living in Houses) gracing their front cover. While the former is a collection of fictional tales, the other is a collection of essays on the psychology of reading and the author. Both books share a similar thread of inter-correspondence and cross-linkage within each supposedly disparate essays or stories, with the familiar theme of the human psyche running through each. The argument shared by both is that of how the art of reading books and people is similar to the art of interpreting paintings, thus helping the observer unravel the subjective emotions of the piece, whether as painting, persons or text. However, it is Mary Jacobus’s very readable account on how psychoanalysis is used for literary criticism of texts, which incorporates elements of mental landscapes, trauma theory, imagination and philosophy into her readings of selected texts, that concerns me.

The choice of Matisse’s particular painting of two overlapping human figures looking at the open book, with a vase of flowers to one side, provided Jacobus with a vital introductory subject of the interior of the reader’s mind, that which is signified by “an abstract, minimally perspectival representation of domestic space opens via a window on to a fluid natural landscape of tree, sky and cloud,”(1). She went on to contrast the flatness of a dark interior with that of the airy vista outside, stressing the lines that divide the windows, that frame the windows with the curtain, rough scratchy lines that symbolised building blocks, and the human figures themselves. To Jacobus, the painting illustrates the interiority of our mental activity when indulging in the habit of reading, pointing to the “pictorial elements (volume, mass, perspective, depth, colour) to the mental repression that inhabits them,”(1). All these for what she terms as the “peculiar mental absorption involved in the activity called ‘reading’,”(2).

Jacobus highlights the ideas of D.W. Winnicott, a British psychoanalyst, taken from his The Location of Cultural Experiences (1967) to further delineate the importance of space and lines in relation to object and subject, in this case the object being the book and subject the reader and how these work to separate the world of boundless imagination to the more solid world of facts and reality, and more importantly that of human relations. Jacobus gives us Winnicott’s analysis of Matisse utilising the lexicon of Freud and Klein in his analysis. Using visuals and imagery, Jacobson drives home the point that the picture of the open book in Matisse’s painting provides the focal point to the idea of reading via the “inhabited solitude at the moment of continuity-contiguity,”(5); the ability to be alone in the presence of a trusted object.

To give an opposing view, Jacobus presents another view of reading through a pictorial image evoked by the Sven Birkerts in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an electronic age (1994), that of a Victorian image of a woman reading outdoors, undisturbed. This way, she hopes to draw attention to the phenomenological theory of reading by discussing the concept of the ‘nouemena’. She commented on what Birkert’s ideas on the perception of reading and signification of books to their readers through the subsuming the material objects into intellectual abstractions. This process reduces the experience of reading into an immanent activity, as opposed to Matisse’s and Winnicott’s idea of the mental mechanism as being introjected and projected to a psychic reality. Her use of such imageries, while confusing when read in isolation, became clearer as one progresses through the essays, for in the introduction she has outlined how she built on the ideas for the essay, giving them pertinence to each other, and the sources she draws on.

As a British object-relation psychoanalytic and feminist scholar with post-structuralism leanings, she utilises object relations associated with contemporary post-Kleinian thinking in all the chapters, some more than others, as she outlines in the introductory chapter. She injects Kleinian and post-Kleinian thinking, as well as that of Freud and Ferenczi into most of her essays. She also invites the reader to view the object, in this case the book) from different angles, and to follow a trajectory beginning from that of the interiority of the reader all the way to a reading that utilises all the theories built up in the earlier essays. In this sense, she has succeeded in moving from the consciousness of the reader to the realms of the unconscious.

In her first essay, Jacobus leads us down the path cleared by Georges Poulet by introducing his phenomenological account of reading, taken from his essay Criticism and Interiority that was published in the book The Structuralist Controversy: The languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (1970). Jacobus justifies her use of Poulet to open the chapter of “The Room in the Book” because it allows her to portray a recurrent figure in the scene of reading - that of the open book in an empty room that gives rise to a series of equivalence - the interiority of the book or the reader. From here, she explores how a reader may move from the outside to the inside of the book, seemingly creating boundaries yet abolishing them simultaneously. A good point of Jacobus’s essays is that she lays out her thesis in a very structural and easy manner, reiterating it whenever she has a statement to make, hence not allowing it to be mired in cross referencing and citations. Using the open book of Poulet’s text, Jacobus invites herself (and the reader) to look at how the book would ‘think’ of the person reading it, thus bringing us to the crux of her argument, which was the question Norman Holland asked of Poulet in the conference where his aforementioned paper was presented on the subject of psychoanalytic theory. Jacobus does not do much at this level other than to summarise all that has been said by both Poulet and Holland in this area, the idea of the consciousness, each with their dissenting viewpoints. By giving the reader an overview of the thoughts and theories of the early psychoanalysts and even a stream of consciousness author like Virginia Woolf, Jacobus allows the reader to visit the different layers in the topography of phenomenology that surrounds the activity of reading.

Jacobus moves away from the historical survey to a more probing look into Strachey’s and Derrida’s essays, comparing each to the other before proceeding to discuss Melanie Klein, a psychoanalyst that was to be featured prominently in her subsequent essays. Jacobus also uses Klein’s essay A Contribution to the Theory of Intellectual Inhibition (1931)to explain the subject of incorporation or ‘taking in’ of knowledge via the subjective phantasy of actual bodily intake, and then linking it to Strachey’s more materialist approach. Jacobus points out an interesting note made by Strachey, talking being “ ‘a process of expulsion, a method of extruding something inside oneself to the outer world’ (Strachey 326) ” (29) as opposed to “ ‘reading being a method of actually taking someone else’s thought into oneself. It is a way of eating another person’s words’ (Strachey 326)” (29). Jacobus goes on to talk about the obsessional habit of the reader, from defacing of a book to anguishing over missed meanings. She also expounds on the Strachey’s theory of sublimation in order to further the idea of object-incorporation. In her enthusiasm for the subject, she even started talking about coprophagy (eating of excretion), the reading of the excreted ideas of the author.

Moving on from the overview, Jacobus uses the work of Karl Abraham and Sigmund Freud to now analyse the writings of Virginia Woolf, by studying Woolf’s lecture on “How Should One Read a Book”, Woolf’s personal account from The Diary Of Virginia Woolf to read into the impressionistic effect of her writings in its use of ‘stream of consciousness’ technique. The reader is allowed a peek into Woolf’s orgiastic relationship with books. Jacobus draws a parallel between Woolf’s idea of ‘reading’ and the her essay on the childhood forays of herself and her siblings in the The Death of the Moth essay, which caricatures the children’s adventure in collecting moths. Jacobus links Woolf’s phantastic scene of reading, the mounting “intensity of our own libidinal investment” (44), as the children captured a specimen of the moth into a jar; the moth is viewed as the central exhibit of “Reading”. A rather phantastical analogy for it gives a rather dreamlike, hypnotical effect to the act of reading.

Jacobus could be “over-reading” by creating a link between authorial imagination and the moth-hunting activity, but the argument she makes of Woolf trying to achieve the same aesthethical climax in her writing as that wrought by the discovery of a splendid specimen is reasonable, especially in view of the concession she makes towards the end of the essay that Woolf would not have attempted to make an allegory of reading out of this essay of the moth-hunting party. The use of Steven Wallace’s poem The House was Quiet and the World was Calm to end was also appropriate to the thesis advanced.

Jacobus also discusses the book A.S. Byatt co-authored with Ignes Sodre, Imagining Characters (1995) which she mentions in the essay, “A Whole World in Your Head: Rereading the Landscape of Absence” .It could be said that Jacobus was inspired to write the essay with its focus on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park by a similar discussion on the book that Byatt and Sodre undertook in the first chapter of Imagining Characters . However, Jacobus operates from a different landscape, digging deep into the reading habit and interior mind of Fanny Price (the heroine of Mansfield Park) instead of merely discussing her thoughts in relation to the other characters. The reader is able to observe how Freudian analysis operates on the character of Fanny Price. There’s also a comparison drawn to that of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, in studying the landscape of absence and presence in the mind of the characters.

Jacobus also makes use of the work of Joan Riviere and J.B. Pontalis to study Rosseau’s work, an Enlightenment reworking of the story of the real life couple Abelard and Eloisa. The rich imagery produced by the forced exile of one of the main characters Saint-Preux (he symbolizes Abelard) was reproduced by Jacobus to show how La Nouvelle mirrored after Rosseau’s own life of traumatic separations, of frequently going from one place to another to find his identity. The absence of a ‘mother’ figures in La Nouvelle Héloïse and Mansfield Park for both Fanny and Julie ( the heroine of La Nouvelle) but the main point driven is that of the solitary figure – one that is disturbed by its difference from other people. Jacobus concentrates a lot more on Saint-Preux’s (the hero of La Nouvelle) solitary habits and psyche precisely because he is more of a solitary person than his lover Julie, who was married off during his exile. An interesting parallel that Jacobus draws between Saint-Preux and Fanny Price (Bertram) is how both the interiority of their minds are melded with the exteriority of the landscape which they inhabit. The melancholy of both has a lot to do with the limitations or boundaries of the area that confines them, and how this evokes the memories within them.

One suspects that Jacobus chose Fanny, after forming the phantasy of absence and landscape with Saint-Preux, to now make use of the devices hitherto developed, to study how “Fanny’s rhapsody on memory in Mansfield Park” (67) could now be used to study the reflections on reading, which is of main interest to Jacobus. In her study of Austen, one hears echoes from that of Byatt and Sodre, where Jacobus analyses all that has been discussed by the two. But Jacobus goes further by drawing out Derrida’s Archive Fever:A Freudian Impression, Arcadia Revisited: The Place of Landscape (1997) and even Repton’s Enquiry into the Changes of Taste in Landscape Gardening (1795) - drawing this last source that Austen might had used in talking about the avenue that is to figure largely in the discussion of Fanny and the incumbent Bertrams, forming a literary memory of sorts for Fanny in her mourning for the passing of the traditional landscape with the cutting down of the avenue. True to form, Jacobus ends this essay by referring back to Kleinian ideas of literary creation in emphasizing “the impulse to recover past times and lost objects, or to repair damaged ones” (83).

In the second part of her book, Jacobus utilises the idea of trauma theory in her reading of black Africans trapped in European settings that seek to exoticise and isolate them, of the trauma related to slavery and the “lactification” or the desire to be white (91). The title for this third essay; White Skin, Black Masks; is a reversal of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), draws a lot from Fanon’s book of the same title. It is ironic that Jacobus based her studies of a black character from the book of a French white woman, Ourika (1823) ,but it also goes to show that “the white reflects the black” in the internalisation of thoughts (90). Ourika is a tragic tale of a young black slave girl who was adopted by a cultivated French princess to be raised as her own. But as the story continues, we observe the slow dehumanising effect on a young girl not allowed to get married for fear of miscegenation, and hence is slowly pushed to the edge of the society which she now inhabits, all because she was black. This resulted in her tragic death in a nunnery at a young adulthood. The other book that is analysed by Jacobus is A Woman Named Solitude (La Mulâtresse Solitude) (1972) by Andre Schwarz-Bart. This is a story of a mulatto girl, a child beget through the rape of a black woman, Bayangumay, during the Middle Passage (the passage on the slave ship) and who was to be inflicted with melancholy due to the abandonment by her mother. The pariahness of the girl is further emphasized by the description of her one dark and one light-green eye. he first novel speaks of melancholia while the second of madness that shadows the black woman’s fight for freedom from slavery. Jacobus appropriates Fanon’s account of trauma to discuss further the idea of “ ‘projection’, both in its psychoanalytic sense of casting out unwanted parts of the self, and with the connotation of projection on to a surface such as skin”(91). Jacobus argues that both the novels engage psychoanalytic or proto-psychoanalytic discourses in trying to understand the psychic effects of slavery, both focusing on the immediate or long-lasting effects of the French Revolution on the French colonial subjects. It must be said that the author of A Woman Named Solitude, though white, is married to a black Guadeloupean writer, Simone Schwarz-Bart Thus he writes about something rather close to his heart, that of the Guadeloupe’s fight for freedom from the French annexation. Both different treatment of characters, written in the aftermath of the French revolution, a hundred and fifty years apart, portrays the victimisation of the blacks in an alien environment acutely, whether as slaves or ‘free women’. By looking into the psyche of these young black (or mullato) women, Jacobus argues for the dehumanisation of these women under slavery, and how the psychological sufferings of these women relate to the suffering of their race. It is interesting to note that both of these women were severed from their biological mother from childhood, hence fulfilling Lacan’s idea of the search for a substitute. Unfortunately for them, they were not able to recover pure self-identity and self-completion as neither found satisfactory substitution. Both Ourika and Solitude get lost during the stage of “identification” (91), at the age when they were undergoing the transformation of selfhood, when the symbolic matrix of the ‘I’ is at the stage of objectification. Jacobus argues that “the paradoxical attachment of traumatized or alienated memory both to the specific topoi or sites and to an excess of signification; an excess, however, that may makes it possible ‘to resurrect old meanings and generate new ones along with new and unforeseeable connections’ ” (121) taken from Pierre Nora’s two volumes work, General Introduction: Between Memory and History from Realms of Memory.

Jacobus now moves her idea of traumatic reading from the displaced Black to the displaced Jew. Traumatic reading is now utilised to examine the war, seen through the Holocaust memories of an infantile Jewish child. She quotes from Geoffrey Hartman’s paper On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies, published in volume 26 of New Literary History, on the binary process that takes place between the object-like texts and the subject-like readers, that of the dead book, waiting to be resurrected by the living reader. Jacobus argues that the trauma theory of Hartman defines the trauma knowledge as a missed meeting where as “as a theory of knowledge, derives from psychoanalysis its scepticism about whether the past can ever be fully experienced or known – let alone completely retrieved or communicated; hence its insistence on the limits of understanding, representation, memory and transmission” (126). She also quotes Laplanche’s theory of “afterwardness” (126) - revisiting the landscape of personal devastation.

With an overview of the trauma theories of Hartman, Laplanche, Green and the source of all, Freud, Jacobus provides the reader with textual and contextual information for understanding Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memories of the Wartime Childhood. When using Freud, Jacobus never fails to include the contrasting and opposing view of Melanie Klein. As opposed to Freudian fear of object loss, Klein highlights the issue of the fear of losing the internal object, having argued vigorously that very young children also succumbed to the fear of annihilation. This argument is very well foregrounded by Wilkomirski’s memoir. The fact that Wilkormirski himself wrote this memoir from fragmented, unverified childhood memories renders Jacobus enthusiasm over its use to substantiate the holocaust traumatic neurosis somewhat suspicious, as it could be read as an over-zealousness to reproduce the theories earlier reviewed in a supposedly realistic situation, which she later acquiesced to be a questionable account. Jacobus also conceded to her own indecision in not including the fact that Wilkormirski’s memoir “recapitulates one of the familiar topoi of trauma theory”(161). She argues unconvincingly that “no survivor’s memoir could avoid reproducing the conventions of Holocaust writing”(161) and the fact that it is thoroughly mapped into contemporary consciousness, “along with psychoanalytic models for trauma which have gained wide currency today” (161) makes it all the more debatable, for I wonder if it is part of some sort of wish-fulfilment. But Jacobus is honest in her stand that “The temptation exists to say that in so far the text of Fragments is a work of imagination, its value as testimony remains unchanged” (160). She justifies her point by exerting that “however alert a reader may be to the inevitably constructed nature of any autobiographical memoir, readings involves an element of witnessing. Whether one witnesses to fact of fiction may amount to the same end. But in practice, the reader is likely to recoil from the idea that memories have been fabricated, emotions manipulated, sensibilities violated. If Binjamin is a fictional character, his trauma imagined or appropriated, what does that say about the reader’s response? But perhaps, as Wilkormirski himself is quoted as saying in an interview, it is up to the reader to decide whether his book is fiction or memoir. After all, how could one ever represent the truth of a trauma that lies beyond the scope of memory, imagination, and (for most readers) experience?”(160).

The final part of the book, contains the last two essays on Jacobus’s favourite subject of women authors and characters. This part puts into practise the theories surrounding the idea of reading, authorial imagination, psyche and trauma. This part deals thoroughly with the subject of women, both the fiction and the authors who penned them, less from the point of view of feminism (apparent though threads) as Jacobus herself has made clear in her introduction, but dealing more with the object-relation between that of the author and the character.

The first essay (chapter five) “Guilt that Wants a Name: Mary Shelley’s Unreadability” deals with a posthumously published incest-novel of Mary Shelly, Matilda. But this essay and the novel itself deal less with the actually physical act of incest but more with the psychological lust-theory (anticipating Nabakov’s Lolita). Jacobus opens by quoting Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s joint account of the enigma surrounding the act of mourning brings psychoanalysis and poetry into the same room with the phantom of analytic failure via the mutilation of the memory of the patient or poem (165). Jacobus reveals her own interest in studying the relation between trauma and literary transmission by using Shelley’s novel as the object of her analysis. Jacobus relegates Matilda to the “psycho-biographical circuit structuring literary transmission between the daughter of a famous, dead feminist mother (Mary Wollstonecraft) and her chronically debt-ridden philosopher father (William Godwin)”(167). But Jacobus is more interested in the poetics of “unreadability” than in the biographical concerns of the novel, by quoting Tilottama Rajan’s Kristevan account of Matilda, from “Mary Shelley’s Mathilda: Melancholy and the Political Economy of Romanticism ”, volume 26 of Studies in the Novel as “ ‘a textual abject’, that is, neither narrative nor lyric but a mix of both”(167). Shelley and Jacobus both agree that the narrative of the novella is not beautiful, but Jacobus tries to explore the negativity permeating the novella by looking at “the complicated relations between trauma and forgetting, trauma and attempted reparation, and trauma as the misreading, misapplication, misremembering, or dismembering of prior literary texts”(168-69). Jacobus argues Mary Shelley’s literary past as being linked to her heritage and generational transmission of the writings of her parents, citing “that this form of trauma is endemic in any attempt to grapple with the literary impingements of the past; incestuous repetition and radial discontinuity continually threaten both generational difference and the line of literary descent”(169).

The Oedipus-reversal theme of Matilda deals with a father falling in love with his daughter after having been absent from her life for sixteen years following the death of his wife at childbirth (note Jacobus astute selection of texts dealing with the idea of absence-from the landscape of reading to that of trauma, the absence of a parental figure). When he finally meets her again, he views her not as a long-lost daughter by as the incarnation of his dead wife (who is also the nymph-fantasy of his childhood). The death of Matilda’s mother at her birth in a way echoes the deaths of Mary Shelley’s three children, and the death of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, putting to view Jacobus’s idea that the novel also deals with the theme of the loss of child to mother and vice-versa (re-echoing the sentiments of her earlier essay on the detachment of the young black infants from their mothers). Jacobus states how the “submerged relations between Matilda’s unreadable melancholia and identification with a lost object-as well as the relation between trauma and death drive (manifested as the separation of representation from effect) can be read in this single, telling repression”(172).

Matilda’s extortion of her father’s secret love becomes a polluting factor to their relationship, which she had phantastically viewed as amatory without putting it to words, and it is only death that could finally sanctify them of this ‘sin’.

In her final essay, “Traces of An Accusing Spirit: Mary Hays and the Vehicular State”, Jacobus makes use of techniques from the previous study of Mary Shelley, but now in a different form of self-absorption, self-analysis and egocentricism. William Godwin once again figures in this essay, to an even greater extent for it is his philosophy of rational enlightenment “based on the production of shared subjectivity and conceived as a community of critical reflection”(205). This time Jacobus dwells into the psyche of a young woman, torn asunder by her passionate obsession for a man who refuses to acknowledge or return her love. The young woman is Mary Hays, a minor novelist, contemporary and friend of Mary Wollstonecraft. Her epistolary novel Memoirs of Emma Courtney proves her ongoing correspondence with Godwin, which started initially to discuss his philosophy but steadily descended into a monologue of her passionate feelings for an aloof William Frend, the Cambridge radical, activist, and Unitarian. Jacobus argues, using Jurgen Habermas’s point that “The eighteenth century became the century of letter”(205), and that “through letter writing the individual unfolded himself in his subjectivity” (205). Habermas proposes a public sphere predicated on the peculiar forms of intimacy “ ‘whose vehicle was the written word’ ”(205). Jacobus goes on to quote at length the psychological interest derived from the increase in the dual relation to both one self and the other, a diary becoming the letter addressed to the sender, first person narrative becoming a conversation with oneself addressed to the other party. In this final essay, Jacobus integrates all the elements previously discussed in the other essays to provide a cohesive theory applied in practise to the Memoirs of Emma Courtney. The feminist in Jacobus echoes the sentiment of the isolation of the Romantic woman from the public sphere, hence reducing her to the confinement of solitary madness, being refused the “ordinary outlets of political action of public discourse” (218).

The footnotes of almost all the pages illustrate the extensive research done by Jacobus for her essays. Despite its rather deep and heavy focus of study, I found this book very useful as a graduate student who is beginning to look into the different ways that psychoanalysis and object-relations are used in the study of literary criticism, and gynocriticism. I would recommend this book to all graduate students with an interest in this field of research.

Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading
Author: Mary Jacobus
ISBN: 0198184344
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1999
Pages: 234 pp