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This is to certify that the
thesis entitled

NARRATIVES OF THE UNCANNY: A STUDY OF
ASIAN/AMERICAN FICTION

presented by

PUSPA LAL DAMAI

has been accepted towards fulfillment
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NARRATIVES OF THE UNCANNY:
A STUDY OF ASIAN/AMERICAN FICTION

By

Puspa Lal Damai

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS
American Studies Program

2004

ABSTRACT

NARRATIVES OF THE UNCANNY:
A STUDY OF ASIAN/AMERICAN FICTION

By

Puspa Lal Damai

This thesis attempts to read the uncanny contemporary world inundated
with flight, terror and catastrophe and haunted by the return of the “animal.” It is
also an exploration of the uncanny figures “abandoned” to the third place of
disjuncture, diaspora, homelessness and exile, and their gradual passage into the
“beast” or the Sandman. It meditates on the political and the existential sense of the
unheimliche that renders home unhomely and the nation ghostly. It attempts to think
nation fi'om the negative space inhabited by the unhomely “immigrants,” at home
neither at the place of their “origin” nor at the location they adopt as home. After

reviewing theories of the uncanny, the thesis discusses the issues of violence of

 

remaking oneself in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine the issues of history, incarceration
and rightlessness in John Okada’s No-No Boy, the figures of haunting, translators
and ghosts in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Mfladies, and the questions of dictation

memory, trauma and textuality in Cha’s DICTEE .

To my Father Gopal Ram and my Mother Deva Devi
with love and gratitude

iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I feel immensely indebted to my supervisor Professor Scott Michaelsen for
guiding me through this project with his uncommon critical sensibility and genuine
human sensitivity. It’s a sheer matter of luck that one gets the opportunity to work
with a teacher like him. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to my
advisor Professor David Stowe for his invaluable comments, corrections and
suggestions. I should also thank Professor Shreedhar Lohani of Tribhuvan
University, Nepal, who first suggested this topic and encouraged me to work on it.

This research would have been impossible without the generous grant
from Fulbright. Thanks are due therefore to the Fulbright Commission in Nepal,
especially the Director, Mr. Michael Gill, not only for providing this prestigious
grant, but also for his good will, encouragement and friendship.

I am also thankful to my friend Julia Susanne Veltum for clarifying
various nuances and shades of meaning of various German concepts and terms I have
used in the thesis. Along with acknowledging the debts of an army of research
interlocutors, from whose works I have heavily drawn, I would like to express my
gratitude to my parents, who I dedicate this research to, for their constant support,

sacrifice and love.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION:

UNCANNY OR THE WORLD AROUND NINE ELEVEN 1

CHAPTER 1

THEORIZIN G THE UNCANNY OR “THE SANDMAN EFFECT” -------------- 16
The Call of the Uncanny l6
Feminism and the Uncanny: Gendering of the Concept 22
Neil Hertz and his Triangles: Emplotting Freudian Uncanny ---------- 27
Deconstruction and the Uncanny 32
Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny 35
The Cultural Uncanny 41
Freud’s Essay on the Uncanny and the “Sandman Effect” 47

CHAPTER 2

THE VIOLENCE OF BEING IN JASMINE 55
Imaginary v. Imagining Homelands 55
The Enigma of Arrival in Jasmine 58
Fighting F atalistic Exile 66

CHAPTER 3

THE BARE HUMANS IN A NATIONSCAPE: OKADA’S NO-NO BOY------73

73

 

Foucault and the Space of Power
Feminist Critique of No-No Boy

76

 

The Condition of 3 Bare Human

79

 

CHAPTER 4
HAUNTING AND GHOSTING IN
LAHIRI’S INTERPRETER OF MALADIES

86

 

 

The Watch of the Sandman
The Uncanny Hymen

86
89

 

The Race of Interpreters

101

 

CHAPTER 5
DICTATION, DISPLACEMENT AND DISMISSAL IN DICTEE

 

107
107

 

Worlding in DICTEE

 

The Problem of the Genre
Turning of the Tables or the Figure of the Diseuse

112
116

 

CHAPTER 6
CONCLUSION: THE RESISTANCES OF THE UNCANNY

 

126

 

WORKS CITED

131

INTORDUCTION:
UNCANNY OR THE WORLD AROUND NINE ELEVEN

. . .her name Mother of Exiles.
From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; . . .
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

- Emma Lazarus

In his monograph on the “Uncanny” Nicholas Royle characterizes the
modern world as an uncanny place. He recalls his own experience in the twin towers
and the tragedy of September 11: his visit to the top of the towers, the vertiginous
sensation, the deafening wind, illusion of the towers being weirdly close to each
other, yet far apart and swaying in the wind. For him the twin towers were “already
rather uncanny” (vii). Then he enumerates the uncanny associations of the events of
September 11, and especially its resemblance with US system of putting date and the
emergency services; the enormity of the death drive in the hijackers, which Royle
calls the “double death drive;” the “appalling apparent accident of a plane flying into
a skyscraper” which is followed “minutes later by its uncanny repetition;” the live
TV coverage of the whole incident and its repetition for days giving the impression
of unreality and filmic artificiality. He casts this tragedy further into uncanny plot by
referring to other patterns of the uncanny that the events of September 11 reveal, like
thousands of people buried alive in the debris of the towers, the “terrible
prosopopoeia of the voice of someone about to die on one of the hijacked aircrafts,

the voice-mail left by the victims, the mobile technology, the effacing and deranging

the distinctions between private and public, the living and the ghostly” (viii), and the
familiar and the domestic security of the US turning illusory, continues Royle, as the
First World War of the twenty first century, a la US president, was declared against
an unknown enemy:

Here very legibly, was the logic of the double and the diabolical. It quickly

emerged that the prime suspect responsible for orchestrating the atrocities

in the US had, in the past, himself received military training and support
from the US . . . For the uncanniness of September 11 has to do with what
was already happening as well with the fear or dread of what may be to

come. (viii)

Michael Arnzen introduces the special edition of Paradoxa devoted to the
uncanny together with the claim that the 20lh century is not only the “century of the
uncanny,” but also a century of uncanny scholarship steeped in a heightened self-
awareness and self-criticism responding to the sublime horror of our cultural past,
and the strangely familiar spectrum of time streaming toward the grand end of the
second millennium.

Royle and Amzen are not the only theorists to “historicize” the uncanny. .
Locating the uncanny spatio-temporally and relating it to human experiences, often
of a catastrophic magnitude, are recurrent tendencies among its readers. In her
provocative excursion of the eighteenth century culture[s], The Female
Thermometer: Eighteenth Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, Terry
Castle claims that the uncanny is the invention of the eighteenth century (8). She

claims that the new human experience of strangeness, anxiety, and intellectual

impasse is the “toxic side effect” of the cultural and psychic transformations, the

rationalist drive and the glorification of scientific means and methods by the epoch
called the age of reason or enlightenment. She links the uncanny sense of
estrangement and uncertainty with what she calls “the enlightened bewilderment,” or
a state of confusion due to too much knowledge (1 9).

At the helm of her discussion is the 18'h century reception of the newly
introduced thermometer, especially the satirist Bonnell Thomton’s gendering of this
invention as “Female Thermometer” for measuring the exact temperature of a lady’s
passion. Castle goes on to explore the themes of passions, emotions, and psychic
states in relation to machines and the resultant feeling of the uncanniness. The
weatherglass is the reflection of human temperament, especially the fickle, fishy, and
“fity” nature ascribed to females, - in other words weatherglass as the femme
machine (31), - and becomes for her a symbol to understand the narratives of
uncanniness in the West since the 18th century. According to her, the concept of the
mercurial hysteric female associated with the weatherglass however was soon
generalized into the vagaries of human mind.

When Castle comes to Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” the major point of
reference in Freud’s essay on the uncanny, she reminds that Coppola, an important
figure in the tale, is the repulsive vendor of the weatherglasses, and she finds it
interesting that the instrument now is associated more with male neurasthenia than
female hysteria. For Castle Freud’s topology of human psyche thus is “a universal
weatherglass” (40), continually in flux and unpredictably polymorphous,

mechanically controlled by the external forces to which it cannot not respond. Her

3

study focuses then on this intimate machine that she finds in the narratives

throughout the centuries ranging from Defoe’s Roxana, Richardson’s Clarissa to

 

Woolt’s To the Lighthouse. She perceives the phenomenon of the uncanny as the

 

merger of the external and the internal, weather and the human moods, and
eventually as the conflation of the gender differences in the wake of the femme
machine.

In Uncanny American Fiction: Medusa’s Face Allan Gardner Lloyd-Smith
on the other hand argues that Freud’s essay unmistakably betrays the association with
the Victorian ideology of the “angel in the house,” or the heimlich aspect of home
that can turn unnervingly unheimlich insofar as the woman is both the bringer of life
as well as death (5). Lloyd-Smith not only grasps the janus-faced nature of the
uncanny both as confined creature of the house and as the fatal intruder into the
intimate confines of life, he also mythicizes the uncanny by arguing that Medusa’s
face, which has an apostrophic quality of self-defense, best represents the experience
of the uncanny.

If Lloyd-Smith’s uncanny is divided among this temporal triplet of the
present, the Victorian angels, and mythic-cultural fantasies about Medusa, Vidler’s
The Architectural Uncanny locates the uncanny in the nineteenth century, especially
in its archaeological interests. For Vidler the uncanny is the shared trope of the time
in literature and arts, which explains the nineteenth century “rediscoveries,” and
excavations of antique sites especially Egypt, Pompeii and Troy. He traces Freud’s

use of the analogy of uncovering and excavating the buried in describing

4

psychoanalysis and the unconscious to this archaeological interests of the nineteenth
century. Vidler discusses the rediscovery of Pompeii at length and argues that the
site became a locus of the “dramatic confrontation of the homely and the unhomely,”
or a space of literary and artistic uncanny interspersed in the mystical writings of
Nerval, the popular melodramas of Bulwer Lytton, the romanticism of Theophile
Gautier and the dream narratives of Wilhelm Jensen (47).

What is interesting about Vidler’s discussion is his spatialization of the
uncanny. He reads the unheimlich as a site, but his imagery of excavation and his
attempts to collate the unconscious with the archaeological bring him close to the
thinkers who rarefy the “experience” of the uncanny as something uncommon, thus
making it a privileged or an accidental moment.

Martin Jay in his essay “The Uncanny Nineties” calls uncanny the “master
trope” of the nineties. Detailing the history of the critical neglect of the term, Jay
argues that until recently the term was not in currency in the theoretical idioms of the
academy. Freudian scholars like Philip Rieff, Richard Wollheim, the radical
Freudians of the sixties like Norman 0 Brown and Herbert Marcuse, and more recent
works by Peter Gay and Frank Sulloway paid no heed to this term. According to Jay,
Lacan once discussed uncanny in the 1962-63 seminars on L ’angoisse, which
however remained unpublished. Only in the seventies the concept gets belated
recognition by critics like Cixous and Derrida.

Jay is right in observing that uncanny, as a concept, now has become

migratory and homeless as it has “migrated from the ghetto of poststructuralist

5

literary criticism, first to the visual arts, now to the cultural studies in general” (159).
Vidler’s use of the uncanny in the field of architecture and urban spaces, Hal Foster
and Margaret Cohen’s engagement with the term in their works on Surrealism
(Compulsive Beauty and Profane Illumination respectively) and especially their
consideration of the surrealist object as the lost object beyond recovery are some of
the examples Jay cites as the nineties’ appropriation of the term in a variety of fields.

The increasing use of the uncanny in film studies and cultural studies
corroborates Jay’s thesis, but when he places Walter Benjamin’s “ruminations” on
the modern city at the center of these writers’ obsession with the uncanny, or in other
words, their conceptualization of the uncanny as the reflection of the demonic city, at
once unreal but restless, concrete but always changing, he turns the uncanny into an
urban, metropolitan and mutatis mutandis a western phenomenon at the cost of the
global tangents of these metropolises. Jay’s delimitating the uncanny first as an
experience and then as a rare urban phenomenon is as fractional as temporalizing it
in a point of time in history. The hypothesis here in this research is that without
bringing the dimension of the uncanny as an ongoing process touching several
“worlds” of the globe, including the modern distinction between the global South
and the North, we cannot bring all the implications of the term into firll play and
exploit it to analyze the socio-economic and cultural aspects of global movements
like colonialism, imperialism, migration, translation, homelessness and
displacement.

In Jay however we not only come across the theme of “loss” in the

6

uncanny, but we also encounter the notion of migration, even though only in the
metaphorical sense, namely the migration of the term from literary studies to cultural
studies. This thesis concentrates on the idea of migration and movement between
home and location and the production of the uncanny lives in the process of
translation and transition. It was Heidegger who first discussed in his book on
Holderlin’s Ister the relation between the uncanny and translation. He relates the
uncanny to Sophocles’ use of the term Setvév in his Antigone and Holderlin’s
translation of the term as extraordinary and fearful and his own correction as
unheimlich (159). In other words, the unheimlich seems to evoke the body of lives
that are caught in the process of movement, migration and translation across cultures,
languages and nations and any attempt to fix the uncanny in a particular space and
time is anything but an exploration into it.

And by extension, it also requires a movement across disciplines, which is
reflected in the way uncanny is understandably divided into various theoretical
schools. Conceptualization of the uncanny as a critical approach across disciplinary
boundaries is not only a correction of Freud’s individual appropriation of the term in
psychoanalysis, but it is also a way of demystifying the otherwise arguably
untheorizable and aconceptual terms like the uncanny by categorizing them into
schools, methods of analyses and interpretations.

There are several schools, as it were, of the uncanny, at times related to the
names of what Foucault would call the founders of discursivity or the trans-

discursive writers of the West, most notable of whom are Kant, Marx, Heidegger,

7

Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, and Derrida.

The Kantian notion of the Sublime is sometimes conflated with that of the
uncanny. To this school belong essays like “Freud and the Sublime: A Catastrophe
Theory of Creativity” by Harold Bloom (compiled in his book Agg), where he calls
Freud’s essay on the uncanny “the only major contribution that the twentieth century
has made to the aesthetics of the Sublime” (101). Interestingly enough Derrida
sounds like a member-defector of this school, when in his essay on Nietzsche, lh_e
Ear of the Other, he says that Unheimliche is an absolute risk, an absolute madness
in which he doesn’t believe (156). In the course of this study we will have plenty of
occasions to dwell on and suspend our disbelieve about this absolute risk and
madness: the madness with which uncanny beings find themselves abandoned.

The school of uncanny literature exposes Freud for his misreading of
Hoffmann’s “The Sandman.” This school basically concentrates on the troubled
relationship of psychoanalysis and literature and tries to subsume Freud’s insight on
the uncanny entirely inside fiction and its phantoms.

The strongest revision of Freudian theory of the uncanny comes from what
can be called the feminist school of the uncanny. Almost all feminist theorists
including Cixous, Kristeva, Spivak, and Chow have written on and mostly decried
Freud’s position and arguments on the uncanny.

“Technology as uncanny” dates back early as to Sybil Wuletich-Brinberg’s
reading of Poe’s stories, which according to her, speak of Poe’s fascination with

machines, for his characters are, like Freud’s Olympia, “living machines or dead

8

machines, or machines that are half dead-half alive” (3 7). Gia Pascarelli argues that
technology is a pervasive presence and a decisive factor in Hoffmann’s story and
Freud’s reading of the story and his theory of the uncanny is his response to the mass
technology of the time. Freud’s theoretical efforts of the early twentieth century,
argues Pascarelli, suggest that he was, even though unbeknownst to himself, engaged
in the analysis of the “particular socio-cultural moment in time: a moment when
human psyche was being radically conditioned and constituted by . . .industrial
technology” (1 11). Donna Haraway situates her cyborgs and simians where humans
and machines merge and anthropology and technology intersect.

There are critics, like Homi Bhabha, Rey Chow and Spivak, who use
uncanny to engage the issues of gender and sexuality, agency and empowerment and
to wage a critique of capitalism and transnational division of labor that convert
workers into dolls often monitored, manufactured and manipulated by computers.

In White Skins/Black Masks: Representation and Colonialism, Gail
Ching-Liang Low, for instance, uses the uncanny to elucidate colonial presence in
the grotesque and the unhomely colonies. In this interesting application of the
uncanny, Low intends to explore colonial narratives by Kipling for configurations of
colonial identity reflected back by its inversion of the normal structure. In his own
words, colonial identity in the Anglo-Indian setting of Chittor (India) or other
colonial locations, with their dark palaces full of eyes and haunting, undergoes an
eerie experience of “home that turns out not to be a home and a self that turns out to

be some other being” (114).

The reverse of this idea of the cultural uncanny shows how the “homeless”
move away from their “native” settings only to discover that neither the place they
left nor the one they adopt as home is adequate to their feelings of “home.” In
“Reflections on Exile,” Edward Said muses over the curious fate of the exiles that
live, according to him, a death in life, without of course “death’s ultimate mercy”
(174). Said defines exile as “an unhealable rifi forced between a human being and a
native place,” an essential sadness that can never be surmounted, “a condition of the
terminal loss.” He also has his round of locating exile both spatially and temporally,
and he claims - as does Arendt in her essay on the refugees (Arendt 110) - that
modern Western culture, especially the academic, intellectual and aesthetic thought
in the U. S. is the work of the exiles, émigrés, and refugees from fascism,
communism and other forms of socio-political dictatorship around the globe (173).
He cites George Steiner, who posited the thesis of “extraterritorial” literature of the
West to differentiate the Romantic exile from the exile of “our age” - with its
modern warfare, imperialism, and the quasi theological ambition of totalitarian rulers
- the age, in his own words, that belongs to “the refugee, the displaced person, [and]
mass immigration” (174).

But he complicates this definition of exile based on belonging first by
relating it to nationalism, which stands to exile, according to him, as do master-slave
to each other in Hegelian dialectics. If nationalism is an “assertion of belonging in or
to a place, a people and a heritage” (176), with its founding fathers, quasi-religious

texts replete with the rhetoric of who belongs and who does not, its heroes and

10

official enemies and its historical landmarks, exile is a discontinuous state of being,
“beyond the frontier between “us” and the “outsider” or the perilous territory of not-
belonging: this is to where in a primitive time people were banished” (177).

On the one hand exile “belongs” to or constitutes what fares as the modern
Western culture, its aesthetics and intellectual capital, on the other hand exile on the
twentieth century scale is “neither aesthetically nor humanistically comprehensible”
(174). Even though Said overlooks the fact that his own reflections on exile are
heavily dependent on literary figures ranging form Faiz, who fled Zia’s military
dictatorship in Pakistan, to his favorite Conrad, Auerbach and Mahmoud Darwish,
whom he repeatedly and symptomatically cites throughout his writing, along with
other great figures of European literary tradition, like Dante, Hugo, Joyce, Nabokov,
Adomo etc., he makes an important observation about the relationship of literature,
music [his description of exile as contrapuntal also evokes Schoenberg], aesthetics
and exile. In other words, by ruling out the possibility of comprehending exile
humanistically and aesthetically Said raises the question of the authenticity of
aesthetic representation, the ahumanity of the concept of exile, or exile as an
aconcept, the negative space, which defies all spatio-temporalization that Said
started his reflection with. Exile is not simply the dialectic of the self and the other, it
is beyond both the “us” and the “outsider,” a non-locus where home is not only
provisional but also experienced as ineluctable loss. The borders that separate the
outsiders and us do not encompass the exiles; in this sense the exiles, refugees,

immigrants are not in-betweens, at the borders:

Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar
territory, can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason
or necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and
experience. (185)
But Said goes a step further to detect among the exiles the same leap beyond the
reason and the urgency with which they too defend the borders between the “us” and
the “outsiders.” He finds the borders of nationalisms and exiles undergoing
continuous erosion and conversion, which lead him to hold suspect the difference
between the loss and painful solitude of exile and the jingoism of the nationalists. He
wonders:

What is there worth saving and holding on to between the extremes of

exile [or exile as an extreme, beyond borders, thoughts, aesthetics,

humanity, etc.] on the one hand, and the often bloody-minded affirmations
of nationalism on the other? Do nationalism and exile have any intrinsic

attributes? Are they simply two conflicting varieties of paranoia? (177)

In other words, the idea of “nation,” “home,” “culture,” and “belonging”
are intricately related to the notions of “exile” and “non-belonging.” Said, like
Derrida, not only points out the dangers of these two forms of paranoia: the
nationalist’s championing of home against the “alien” and the exile’s sense of home
in her homelessness itself, he also traces the non-locus of non-belonging to the

ancient space allocated to the condemned. Curiously enough Agamben in his fie

Man Without Content theorizes this duplex of artistic production and banishment of

 

the artist and calls art “the most uncanny thing,” that purges itself not only of
spectators, but eventually of the artist as well (50). It is precisely this in-human locus

of the condemned that they hardly elaborate. Once we realize that the uncanny beings

belong nowhere but to the “site” of non-belonging itself, they also exceed the
economy of the self and the other, the same and the different and assume the features
of the ghostly sandman that Freud would talk in his essay on the uncanny.

At the heart of the present study is the exploration of this space of the
condemned and the uncanny beings that inhabit this non-locus, which can be
explained with the rhetoric neither of the nation nor of exile. This research pursues
such places and beings not only in the narratives of the diasporic dispersions of the
mass from the so-called third world into the First, but also the other way round as
well, that is, the diasporic’s disillusionment at her return to her own “native” place.
That is the reason why uncanny beings can never be reached even with the rhetoric
of the difference or the other.

Afler revisiting several theorists of the uncanny in chapter two, the reading
will elaborate the ways in which narratives like No-No Boy, Jasmine, Interpreter of
Maladies and DICTEE attempt to give expression to the dynamics of the production
of the uncanny creatures, who live in a state of non-relation both to home and to
location.

To clarify by way of a disclaimer, this study is not just about
“homelessness” or about “strangers,” and human oddities. The last term, oddity,
reminds of an early study by a “psychical researcher” named Eric John Dingwall,
whose book Some Human Oddities: Studies in the Queer, the Uncannyand the
Fanatical, published in 1962, narrates the unbelievable stories of flying friars, dead

but active deacons, etc. He calls his book a “medical and psychological monograph”

l3

that relates nothing but the case histories of the concerned people (5).

There are readings that try to incorporate homelessness in the US into the
national myth of the pioneers, that is to say pioneers themselves as the homeless
exiles, or even before that in the middle ages, or as John Allen opines in his study of
homelessness in American Literature, back in the Golden Age of Adam and Eve (4).
Kingsley Widmer in his The Literary Rebel locates homelessness at the heart of the
Western literary traditions with their “wandering blind Homers, peripatetic Cynics,
homeless rhapsodists, drifting jongleurs, mendicant goliards, rhyming beggars . . .”
and calls the literature of the West a production of the “muse on the road” (77).
Allen explains:

In the United States, homelessness has played an important role in

defining national character and establishing American identity. Early

colonists were “homeless” when they arrived in America and successive
waves of immigrants and adventurers sought to establish homes in cities

and the unsettled rural areas of the west. (5)

Almost similar approach can be found in Peter Karsten’s essay on the
historical typology of American exile, where he talks about “the British Diaspora”
during the renaissance, but unlike the curious phrasing of Allen’s about the homeless
adventurers to settle in the unsettled rural areas, Karsten refers to the production of
the exiles by the exiles themselves, namely, as he explains, the encroachment into
the Cherokee, Creek and Chickasaw lands that continued down to the eighteenth
century by California officials who justified the act by calling the natives the wild

people of desperate fortune who would not be subject to the officials’ laws (149).

Amy Kaplan, in her presidential address to the American Studies

14

Association 2003, evokes the recent shift, and by ironic reversal, a revival of the
myth of the “American Exile.” By exposing the uncanny bond between empire that
insists on a borderless world and the homeland that tries to shore up the boundaries
again, she tries to unpack the contradictory implications of this move based on the
“violence of belonging.” On the one hand for her the US. national identity has
always been linked to geography, and US is said to be the nation of immigrants, a
melting pot, the western frontier, manifest destiny, a classless society—all involving

metaphors of spatial mobility rather than the spatial fixedness and rootedness that

homeland implies, but on the other hand the term “homeland” brings in contradictory ,

connotations, such as a sense of native origins, of birthplace and birthright, or even
common bloodlines, ancient loyalties, and racial and ethnic homogeneity. She fears
the revival of the Old World mythologies, a Freudian encounter with the long
surpassed nativism and unitarism:

Homeland also conveys a different relation to history, not a nation of
futurity, but a reliance on a shared mythic past engrained in the land itself.
It resonates with the notion of the heartland. . . [and] underwrites the
resurgent nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment and policy. Where is
there room for immigrants in this fusion of nation and nativity? How many
immigrants and their descendants may identify with America as their
country or home but locate their homelands elsewhere, as a spiritual,
ethnic, or historical point of origin? How many US. citizens see
themselves as members of a diasporic community with a homeland in
Ireland, Africa, Israel, or Palestine—a place to which they feel spiritual or
political affiliation and belonging, whether literally a place of birth or not?
Does the idea of America as the homeland make such dual identifications
suspect and threatening, something akin to terrorism? Are you either a
member of the homeland or with the terrorists, to paraphrase Bush? And
what of the terrible irony of the United States as a homeland to Native
Americans? (8-9)

15

If the mythic revival of the “native” past is eliminating a succession of
diasporas, and if consolidating the borders is at once an imperial move outside the
borders, the whole process takes up features of the production of the uncanny beings
at once enclosed into a highly strengthened frontiers of loyalty and exposed to the
very often predatory and persecutory legal and political authority. Who are called the
uncanny lives here are somewhat the beings Kaplan and Pease put together, or the
creatures that are both enclosed and exposed in a “biolpolitical territory” as big as the

globe itself:

. . . the Homeland enacted into law by the Homeland Security Act did not
have reference to an enclosed territory. And it was not exactly a political
order. The Homeland Security Act was the political instrument on whose
authority the state transformed a temporary suspension of order erected on
the basis of factual danger into a quasi-permanent biopolitical arrangement
that as such remained outside the normal order . . .. This juridical-political
apparatus thereafter authorized a biopolitical settlement that inscribed the
body of the people into an order of state power that endowed the state with
power over the life and death of the population. This biopolitical sphere
emerged with the state's decision to construe the populations it governed
as indistinguishable from unprotected biological life. Insofar as the
Homeland State's biopolitical imperative to regulate the life and death of
the population that it governed was irreducible to the denizens of the
nation-state, the Homeland State's biopolitical regime became potentially
global in its extensibility. (Pease 11-12)

Uncanny in terms of mythico-political geography therefore is exile and
homeland put together and if it has been the defining feature of the Western literary
culture in general and “American national character,” in particular, it is more so in

the world awakening to and taking shape around the events of 9/11.

16

l. THEORIZING THE UNCANNY OR “THE SANDMAN EFFECT”

“Home,” he mocked gently.

“Yes, what else but home?
It all depends on what you mean by home.
Of course he’s nothing to us, any more
Than was the hound that came a stranger to us
Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail.”
- Robert Frost.

The Call of the Uncanny:

After a long prolusion on the topic, it is time now to look more closely at
Freud’s essay on the uncanny with some of its readers and critics. This chapter shall
review literatures written on and about the uncanny in general and about Freud’s
essay in particular to attempt a reading by way of an intervention into the debate.
The reading is mindful of the resistances to psychoanalysis and Freud, especially
with regard to the limited possibility of application they offer to texts in which the
cultural contexts predominate the psychological atmosphere; but the present
exploration also shies not from taking Freudian propositions on the uncanny to their
limits so as to outline insightful inconsistencies and revealing contradictions in his
essay. The reading also makes use of arguments from other writers of the uncanny,
especially Heidegger, whose works on the subject are very crucial to the
understanding of this term.

When Freud brought out his essay on the uncanny in 1919 amidst
considerable personal and professional pressures, which we will return to with Neil
Hertz, he was aware of the fact that he was venturing into the virtually untrodden

territories only with one study as precedent: J entsch’s medico-psychological

l7

literature of 1906. That was also the decade during which Heidegger was invoking

the term in his unfinished masterpiece Being and Time. In that work he relates the

 

uncanny with anxiety that brings Dasein (Heidegger’s term for the Being-in the-
world) back from its absorption into the world (233) and the call that recollects or
the alien voice that pursues Dasein and threatens its lost-ness (322). Later when
Heidegger was to dwell exclusively on the uncanny in his treatise on Holderlin’s
Ister, he traced the term back to Sophocles’s Antigone, without however referring
either to Freud or to J entsch.

Daniel Chapelle in his book Nietzsche and Psychoanalysis links the demon
of The Gay Science with the uncanny. The experience of the uncanniness, like that of
the demon of the eternal return, he argues, strikes a chord in man’s soul that allows
him to experience what is taken as nonsensical by reason (199). Thus the uncanny
experience that results from the haunting of the demon is at once autonomous
spontaneity and ahistoricity, or it is at least a critique of a linear progress of history
(201). Chapelle therefore conceives of the uncanny experience as a ghosted moment
at which humanity encounters the eternal return of the self. For Chapelle “the
psychology of uncanniness constitutes the stuff of which tragic art is made.” At the
same time, he notes that tragic art is “an aesthetic affirmation of life’s uncanniness”
(203).

To put it differently, uncanny experience is the eternal return of life’s
affirmation in the face of human tendency to deny and negate. So like Freudian

uncanny as something brought to light, Zarathustra’s vision at the mid-day is the

18

voice of the demon, the diabolic double, which the exorcists try to exorcise on the
pretext that Nietzschean notion of the eternal return is not scientifically verifiable.
Chapelle responds to Nietzsche’s critics who question the objective truth of the
eternal return by positing the immediacy as opposed to the verifiability of the
encounter with the demon. He argues in the manner of Derrida’s arguments in TE
Pgsjgard, and later in the Specters of Ma_rx_, that to refute the veracity of the eternal
return is an attempt of “exorcism of the demon from aphorism 341 [from T_h_e_G_ay
WI” (34)-

If Freud’s theory of the uncanny flounders about the beginnings,
Heidegger has the middle omitted from his musings on the uncanny, and Chappelle’s
Nietzschean demon of uncanniness is fixated upon the immediacy of the
“ahistorical” moment brought back by history’s eternal return, Mehlman, in his essay
on Marx, Hugo and Balzac, locates the early usage, if not the origin, of the uncanny
in Marx’s Class Struggles in France, in which Marx was to critically attend a kind of
“recall,” this time the statutory regulation that every newspaper article bear the name
of its author, which, according to Mehlman, Marx criticizes for its inability to
tolerate “the sinister anonymity [unheimliche Anonymitat]” of any press (5).

In spite of these uncertainties about the beginning of the term, or because
of its chance repetition in Freud later on, Mehlman argues that one thing is pretty
sure about the uncanny: “what is unheimlich about the unheimlich is that absolutely
anything can be unheimlich” (6). Mehlman’s position on the uncanny, however,

sounds somewhat like that of Anneleen Masschelein, who in her article on the

19

uncanny as a concept notes that uncanny belongs to those critical concepts that have
lost their working force.

Citing Mieke Bal’s ideas about the misuse of concepts, Masschelein
argues that the historicin of all concepts entails a period of development, new
accretion of meaning with every new user of the concepts and her intentions, as a
result of which the concepts, instead of being descriptive, become more and more
normative and programmatic. This “misuse” of concepts, writes Masschelein, causes
them to degenerate into labels. Once “the framework to which a concept belongs is
no longer visible,” she continues, the “concepts lose their working force: they are
subject to fashion and ultimately become meaningless” (54).l And that is iwhat she
thinks has happened to concepts like trauma, cultural memory and the uncanny.

It is precisely this rendering invisible the “original framewor ” of the
concept is the aim of this reading, which in a way helps us move beyond any
“programs” Freud and Heidegger or Nietzsche had in mind - which could be likely,
for a highly normative reading is possible with all of them - while they proposed

their readings of the uncanny. If Freud remains all immersed in his theory of the

 

' In her introductory essay to the special edition of “Image [&] Narrative” on the uncanny,
Masschelein argues that uncanny thematises the impossibility of conceptualization in the traditional
sense of a self-contained entity, for it, like the concept of the unconscious, is a negative concept and
hence internally contradictory. For her uncanny for by virtue of its negativity indicates something
which cannot be rationally and consciously thought. And like the sublime, it denotes not an entity but
a quality, which in return makes it an aesthetic concept. It expresses a subjective sentiment, she
continues “which cannot be captured in words, for the generality of language always in a way betrays
the individuality of experience” (Massachelein).

20

castration complex and the place of the eye both in the complex and in the story by
Hoffmann, on which he hinges much of his theory of the uncanny, Heidegger on the
other hand makes explicit references to National Socialism in his treatise on the

unheimlich: Holderlin’s Hymn “The Ister.”

 

It is always fascinating to see where and how Freudian emphasis on vision
goes blind and Heidegger’s meditation on polis converges on the ideological. It is
also productive to explore implications and nuances in their writings overlooked by
the critics of these thinkers. Therefore instead of complaining about the fading
signification of the term, it is always more intriguing to observe how, if not why, a
particular shade of meaning is upheld or downplayed by a particular reader of the
uncanny.

Or one might argue that the aconceptualization to which Masschelein
refers might be the ghostly effect of the uncanny visitations, which are always
fraught with force but they come in/as flinders. Unlike her empiricization and
aestheticization of the term, reading uncanny might be nothing else but an illative
act, which only tries to grasp this spectral perambulation. It only assumes some
discernible, if not individually identificatory features with what Freud calls terror
(Schreckhaften), symbolized by the Sandman or with the Heideggerian threat of
Being, with Nietzschean diabolism or with Marxian “anonymity,” that “speaks,”
unlike Gayatri Spivak’s muted “subaltemism” visible as the aborigine and locatable
as the global south.

The aphorism in The Joyful Wisdom that Chapelle referred to, follows

 

21

Nietzsche’s critique of Socrates’ babbling even in the last moments of his life:

I would that he had also been silent in the last moment of his life — perhaps

he might then have belonged to a still higher order of intellects. Whether it

was death, or the poison, or piety or wickedness — something or other
loosened his tongue at that moment, and he said: “O Crito, I owe a cock to

Asclepious.” (270)

In other words, the uncanny that ambulates or that “arrives” as argues Adam
Bresnick, in a moment of singular strangeness to perplex the subject and that returns
as a revenant to occupy “a kind of interior no-man's land” (117) has to be received in
flight, in diasporic movements, and exilic wanderings. Grasped as a force in flight, it
at times might not speak to us, and even if it does, it might not be consistent with our
tongues, with our laws and our norms; and it might not benefit from the demands on
its behalf of recognizable face and an intelligible language.

F eminis_m and the Uncanny: The Gendering of the Concept:

Cixous in her essay “Fiction and its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das
Unheimliche (The “uncanny”)” warns the readers of the uncanny that one invites the
inevitable undoing by courting the uncanny as Freud did by using Hoffmann’s tale to
elucidate the uncanny. Cixous starts the equivalence between Freud and the
protagonist of the story by stressing the points at which the story and the theory
intersect. She believes that there is a transfer and a transmission of roles between the
story and the theory. The spy-glasses taken by Nathaniel from Coppola are snatched
by Freud; what he comes to see through the spy-glass is the inverted version of the

doll; Freud in turn transfers, argues Cixous, that dangerous eye-glass snatched from

the protagonist of the story, who had in turn snatched it from Coppola, who might

22

have snatched it either from Coppelius or from Spalanzani, or even from Nathaniel
himself - hence the rounds of snatching, transferring and doubling that eventually
leap upon the eyes of the reader to expose him to the “horrible peculiarity of the
world of doubles” (527). So Nathaniel reading Olympia across the houses reflects
Freud reading Hoffrnann across the disciplines.

Cixous reminds as soon as she opens her reading: “These [Freud’s] pages
are meant as a reading divided between literature and psychoanalysis . . .” (525),
with his side-long glances both at Jentsch and several dictionaries, while remaining
quite aware of the questions of priorities. Cixous’s reading of Freud’s reading or
skipping explains her emphasis on reading as the locus of the uncanny and its
embeddedness into the literary text. In other words, the circularity of reading (as
resistance, or as the fear of castration) is not as much the return of the repressed as it
is yet another round of displacement and repression. Cixous does not reflect (as she
does on the disciplinary boundaries of the texts, or on Freud’s distinction between
psychology and psychoanalysis, which Cixous calls Jentsch-Freud split, or the
difference between psychoanalysis and aesthetics, on which she has her eyes set) on
the homogenizing ring of general readership she resorts to. When she blames Freud
for pulling a thread and obviously leaving the whole tapestry untouched, for shifting
the zoom of the spy-glass (snatched from the same story he set out to analyze) from
Olympia to Nathaniel, her own attempts to insert differentiality and displacement and
to expose the inherent act of repression into the ring of reading ultimately reinstates

the circularity by bringing her back to what she is criticizing. Indeed all conclusions

23

cut both ways:

(1) The expulsion of “intellectual uncertainty” allows the prescription of

an analytical interpretation, [beginning of Cixous’s attempt at distinction

between reading and (psycho)analyzing] and the minimizing of Olympia
leads to the focus on Nathaniel. (2) In this narrative of the Sand-Man,

Freud plays up the fear of becoming blind and its substitute so that the

Sand-Man is cutoff from view by the reducing equation: Sand-Man = loss

of eyes (yet it is not as simple as this). Thus in one stroke, the two grand

and extraordinary figures are supplanted and with them, Hoffmann’s
theatre: one half of the text is eliminated. Only the eyes remain . . .(535)

Supplanting of these two “great and extraordinary figures” equals Freud’s
reversion of the unheimliche into the heimlich or Freud’s lexical analysis of the
transfer of the heimlich into the unheimliche. Cixous criticizes it as Freud’s gesture
of androgenyzing (530) the process at the cost of [sexual] difference:

At the end of this strange crossing of languages, Unheimliche can consider

itself a part of this myth: from Heimlich to Unheimliche. In this crossing,

the meaning reproduces itself or it becomes extinguished or it is stirred up.

Opposition has been blunted; the divergence opened just enough space for

it to be reclosed. The phoenix reproduces itself. (531)

Cixous’s critique therefore introduces an equation: the uncanny equals to the Other,
the different; and by attempting to domesticate the unheimlich into a prescribed
heimlich, Freud, for Cixous, neutralizes the autonomy of the other.

If the analysis of the figures in the narrative supplants the difference, and
the analysis of the lexicon androgynies it, the analysis of the story itself linearizes
Hoffmann’s narrative into the “logical account of Nathaniel and [re]articulate[s it] as
a kind of “case history” going from childhood remembrances to the deliritun and the

ultimate tragic end” (533). More than infantalizing, what is more problematic for

Cixous in Freudian “dictionnaire-enfant” is the relegation of Jentsch’s position of

24

critical intellectual uncertainty (regarding the doll’s state of being animate or
inanimate) into a childish belief, or a superstition that it is alive.

Freud’s linearizing of Hoffmann’s tale, his obsession with the child and
childish beliefs as the point of departure exorcize the ghostly uncertainty inherent in
fiction. The road of (psycho)analysis, which is always the road of return to the child,
heimlichizes, as it were, the uncanny world of the fictional doubles. So Cixous’s
project of rescuing is not limited to the doll, she is not satisfied with making Freud’s
androgenized reading aware of the difference, or of the doll’s potential for being
inanimate or dead, so utterly other, its corporeal hybridity “composed of language
and silence (that in the movement which turns it and which it turns, invents doubles,
and death (548));” she also tries to instigate a difference between reading and
analyzing. In other words, Cixous attempts to rescue the doll of fiction and its
reading from the domesticating forces of analysis.

On the one hand therefore the ghostliness and horror of the uncanny is due
to its generic association with death; on the other hand Cixous introduces the
dimension of doubt about the doll’s life by asking: “what if the doll were alive” (
538), which together render the doll wholly other, therefore uncanny.

In her book Sgaking the Unspeakable, Diana Jonte-Pace argues that
Freud’s texts, including his essay on the uncanny, exhibit an “uncanny association of
Judaism, circumcision, death, mother, and immortality” (87); and she also cautions
that we do not afford to dismiss Freud for his “womanless psychoanalytical theory,”

for throughout his writing the figure of the mother, which is interestingly absent from

25

Cixous’s reading of the essay, is both the source of fear as well as fascination. 2
The deadly mother, present in the other texts we have examined, is
obscured in this text [“The Uncanny”] - yet her spectral presence has not
been erased entirely. The Sand-man has deadly maternal qualities: he tears
out children’s eyes as food for his own little children, a hint that the story
itself can be read as a fantasy concealing the fear of death at the hands of
the dangerous mother. (65)

Laurens de Voce in “To See or Not See: The Ambiguity of Medusa in
relation to Mulisch’s The Procedure” argues that Medusa, like the ontological
uncertainty of being and not being of the J entschian doll, represents the uncanny
terror, at once extremely ugly and shining with absolute purity and beauty. De Voce
points out the simultaneously venomous and curative properties of Medusa’s blood,
and cites Bataille on the ambiguity of a headless and cruel society based on the
expression of tremendum and fascinans:

A society that succeeds, says Bataille, in catching the ambiguity of the

cruel which consists of ‘tremendum’ and ‘fascinans,’ has attained the ideal
model. Such society he calls “acephale,” or headless (de Voce).

 

2 In his Dissertation on Freud and Derrida Eric W. Anders argues that "The “Uncanny” is a
“position(ing) paper" based on phallocentrism. It is a text of, to use Anders use ofthe Derridian term,
self-posting. The secret of"The ‘llncanny.’" is for Anders the secret ofnon-binary difference and
chance. ()n the one hand. argues Anders. Freud seems to stress the importance ofthe mother‘s role to
establishing identity. the importance ofthe primary identification with the mother for any individual,
and the intensity ofthis bedrock of identity. On the other he is acting out the male infant‘s anxiety
with respect to the secret 0fthe power and significance ofthe mother and his primary identification
with her. the latter being theoretically repressed with the assumption of"primary masculinity." Anders
cautions that he is not arguing for primary femininity as a gap-filling measure for Freudian theory; nor
is he advocating for the acceptance of primary femininity for identification. Ile clarifies that his
intention is to draw attention to a lacuna in Freud‘s theorization that also constitute the primary secrets
ofpsychoanalysis, “secrets that establish its home: the significance ofthe mother, male identification
with the mother. the obvious necessity of male bisexuality. . ., its mode of reducing the Other to more
ofthe Same. . .a move to theorize woman once and for all. a mastery of the other (Anders).

26

Neil Hertz and his Triangles: Emplotting Freudian Uncanny:

If J onte-Pace stresses the tension of what is said and what is left unsaid 3 in
the text as the matrix of the uncanny, Hertz’s discussion leads us to the dynamics of
theory and its context. In his essay “Freud and the Sandman,” Neil Hertz insightfully
contributes to the diagnosis of the troubled relationship between literature and
psychoanalysis started by Derrida, Cixous and others. Besides focusing on Freud’s
artful evasion of some important aspects of Hoffinann’s story, “The Sandman,” he
engages several issues entailing Freud’s interpretation of the story. He seems to be
moving beyond the “doubles” that Freud and his critics depend for their analysis and
tries to restore the force field of the triangles. His essay, like Freud’s own, employs
not only the dictionaries - chief source of entries is Laplanche and Pontalis’s DE.

Luggage of Psychoar_1_alysis - it also sets up an analytical session, as Freud tried to

 

do in his essay, but the subjects involved and the terms of the session are reversed.
Now in Hertz, it is not literature or its characters, but what is being analyzed or
reconstructed is psychoanalysis with its characters caught up in their tales and
triangles.

The doubles of the fiction and phantoms (Cixous), signs/symbols and

signification (Derrida), animate and inanimate doll (J entsch), Coppola — Coppelius

 

3 In a reading of Certeau’s works in the light of the unheimlich, Alex Demeulenaere, argues that if for
Freud the unheimliche symbolizes the shattering of the autonomous subject, the uncanny with regard
to historiography marks how a triumphant manner of writing history is excavated by what it does not
write, by what it cannot think. What results is a mystique or a spectral discourse moving in an atopic
space that consciously multiplies the places of writing, which can only point in the direction of the
Other without ever grasping it (Demeulenaere).

27

(Hoffrnann), pleasure—death instincts, heimlich-unheirnliche (Freud) are replaced by
the triangles of popular narratives, thus reading psychoanalysis through literature and
not vice versa. At the outset of his reading he makes his intentions clear:

My hope is to quilt together these scraps of verbal material [his reading of

the glossaries as well as the recent publication of biographical material in

Freud] each with a somewhat different feel to it - a work of fiction [which

he will triple in the course of his analysis of Roazen’s story of Tausk and

Freud’s Wolf Man case], a psychoanalytical accent of its structure, the

formulation of a metapsychological theory, some biographical anecdotes . .

. (98)

So the new element inserted into the double of fiction and phantoms is the
biographical account, which stresses Freud’s involvement in the triangles of the
transferences with his “disciples” undergoing analysis with him or under his
supervision, its effect on the tangled history of the writing or rewriting of his papers,
especially, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” and “The ‘Uncanny.’”

While emphasizing Freud’s drive to repeat, Hertz points out, as did Cixous
and Rand and Torok in their own way, that in citing the story of The Sandman, Freud
quoted only the dialogue between the characters and erased the narrator of the story
in order to appropriate this position and re-narrate the story on his own. This theme -
compulsion to narrate - leads Hertz towards an important observation about the
relationship between literature and psychoanalysis:

It may seem like a quibble to dwell on this difference [the difference

between the repetition compulsion and what gets repeated thereby]: surely

the awareness of the process of repetition is inseparable from the
awareness of something being repeated, for there can be no such thing as

sheer repetition. (102)

From this double bind that Hertz detects at the heart of repetition compulsion, he

28

figures out Freud’s unease about broaching into the field of aesthetics - out of
compulsion, but not without it’s surplus - because every compulsion to repeat is an
impossibility in itself, literally unspeakable (102), unless yoked to some figure, some
figurative language and coloring. On the one hand the recognition of the compulsion
to repeat is the source of the uncanny, on the other the figurative surplus, “brought
home in connection with the repetition” (102), is the source of Freud’s experience of
the uncanny in the process of reading Hoffmann’s story.

For Hertz the appearance of the unsettling surplus along with the
figurativeness of its account is not the only uncanny experience in Freud. He brings
Roazen’s “tale” into play, according to which Lou Andreas-Salome, a friend of
Nietzsche and Rilke’s, comes to Freud to learn about psychoanalysis only to become
an active figure in the periodic discussions within the circle. But she also runs into
Tausk, whom she thinks to be the most loyal of Freud’s disciples. Thereupon begins
Freud and Tausk’s unconscious rivalry for Lou. Tausk returns fi'om war in 1918-19
to join the circle, but Freud refuses to take him into analysis; instead he puts him
under Helen Deutsch, which in turn repeats the triangle of rivalry, now Deutsch at
the center. Freud in March of 1919 feels compelled to ask Helen, who was
undergoing analysis with Freud, to choose between the master and the disciple, as a
result of which Tausk commits suicide on the eve of his marriage leaving a note
relating his gratitude for Freud.

What fascinate Hertz are the coincidence between the repetitive triangles

(F reud-Tausk-Salome, Freud-Tausk-Deutsch) and Tausk’s forceful removing of

29

himself from it that eventually resulted in death, the part Freud played in it, the
theory of death instinct and the uncanny, with its own triangles (Coppelius-
Nathaniel-Klara, Coppola-Nathaniel-Olympia, etc.) obviously re/written during this
period. Hertz wonders whether one can spin stories out of this interface of theory,
biography and the reading of literature.

Hertz feels caught somewhere between seriousness and what he calls the
literary fore-pleasure, a conscious vacillation between literary and non-fiction and
the sense of repetition in it and he concludes that the intertwining of fiction and non-
fiction and the repetition of these moments make one say that “we are experiencing
the uncanny” (110).

A similar approach is taken by David Ellison in his book Ethics and
Aesthetics in European Modernist Literatge: From the Sublime to the Uncamay, in
which he theorizes uncanny as a transition from the romantic sublime (ix). Ellison
employs uncanny to read the transition of romanticism into modernism. In a highly
textual reading of Freud’s essay, Ellison focuses on the German text and works out
different layers of meaning and association impossible to gather merely from the
translation, which can be taken as a continuation of Freud’s suspicion regarding the
constraints of the foreign languages.

Ellison beautifully deploys the German term ein Fall - meaning fall,
example and trap - to suggest that one cannot do otherwise than fall into the uncanny
as did both Hoffmann and Freud; and the fall as such is nothing less than exemplary

since uncanny can be apprehended only through (fall) examples. Therefore Ellison

3O

takes Freud’s reading of “The Sandman” as his fall into fiction, Freud’s fiction
envy. According to him, uncanny cannot merely be an example (ein Fall), it is also a
fall (ein Fall) into literariness - and a trap (eine Falle) for the analytical thinker (58).
It is a trap because the story, argues Ellison, says far more about Freud than Freud
says about the story.

He thinks that Freud recognizes himself in the story and he encounters
Oedipus - not the theorized “Oedipus Complex,” but “Oedipus before theorization, a
most dangerous and diabolical antagonist who comes back to haunt his interpreter
and rock the foundation of the psychoanalytic edifice itself” (63). Like Hoffmann,
Freud is also dictated by the unconscious motivation “to enclose the uncanny within
a logical structure” (65). Ellison also traces moments of identification with the story,
which he calls Freud’s fiction envy, Hoffinann as Freud’s double. In addition to
these moments of identification, Ellison argues that Freud’s Antrieb to enter the
foreign land of aesthetics concurs with Nathaniel’s drive towards spying on his father
and Coppelius. Ellison then brings in other strands of his arguments in play here to
project Freud’s reading of the story into Kierkegaardian theoretical model of the
stages and the question of choice.

According to Ellison, the same “primitive material” (71) of the Sandman
is presented in the mother’s “rationalized” tale, which takes Sandman as children’s
state of being overtaken by slumber, without being capable of closing their eyes as if
someone had sprinkled sand into them. For him the servant woman’s version of the

Sandman is fraught with “more folk wisdom” (71 ), according to which the Sandman

31

is an ogre that takes children’s eyes to feed his own children, who a la Royle, is the
cannibal of The Heart of Darkness, more primitive, hence more enticing to civilizing
and evangelizing missions. The horror of the heart of darkness anticipated in
Hoffman’s tale is carried further, again in anticipation by Ellison, as a moment of
undecidability. He argues that in The Heart of Darkness Kurtz is the idol of the West
to evangelize the natives; on the other hand Marlow is the Buddha without the lotus
flower, the idol of the East, both of whom turn the situation into an unheimlich
cohabitation, transected, theatrical, undecidable (174). The uncanny situation also
erodes the distinction between the moral and the immoral in the text.

Thus for Ellison order and morality in the face of the uncanny are
intertwined with violence. The fragmentary nature of the uncanny reflected by
Freud’s text itself can be totalized only through violence (62), which leads Ellison to
privileging Kierkegaardian irony as he points out “the central dramatic conflict” of
“Der Sandmann” in the choice Nathaniel has to make between Clara and Olympia,
between the ethically constructed world of finite and restricted place and the universe
of Romantic irony, in which, says Ellison, “the unbounded power of the
imagination’s projective capacities causes the young man to find beauty and even life
where there is, or has been, only a ghostly resemblance of life (70).

Deconstruction and the Uncan_ay:

It is Nicholas Royle again, who, dubbing Derrida’s rather playful aphorism

in Memoirs that deconstruction is America and America is deconstruction, first

suggested a similar equation between deconstruction and the uncanny. But there is

32

another way to evoke the sense of kinship, which emerges somehow, with Samuel
Weber’s reading of Freud’s essay on the uncanny in “The Sideshow, or: Remarks on
a Canny Moment,” in which Weber is not only conflating deconstruction with the
uncanny, but also conflating castration with the uncanny, as Freud is often criticized
for doing, but in a different or more precisely deconstructive way.

Weber criticizes Freud’s thematic definition of castration complex and
proposes an interpretative, differential, or as he says, for the want of a better term,
structural definition. He blames Freud for reducing castration complex, along with
all of its complexity, to a simple “thematic material event, as if it were essentially a
perceived reality, the content of a representation” (1119), which eventually succumbs
to repression and then returns in identical form. He also charges Freud, to the
consternation of the critics who claim that castration is at the helm of Freudian
oeuvre, of taking castration as “one phenomenon among others” (1119), or of
hypostatizing castration and making it substantial and a visible theme. He decries
Freud’s naive hope of fixing, representing, and rendering visible what is given only
as the effect of the differential in repetition. His binding of the uncanny directly to
the figure of the Sandman, argues Weber, to the effect of reducing all other
repetitions, doublings, splitting, to the identical meaning of this single figure in order
to derive the conclusion, to quote Weber quoting Freud with emphasis, that
“Coppola the Optician really is the lawyer, Coppelius, and thus also the Sandman”
(1120), is Freudian simplification of a “complexity of castration complex,” which is

neither completely genetic or biological nor entirely personal. Resorting to Lacan’s

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revision of the moment, as “almost nothing but not quite,” Weber argues that this
complex moment of castration, which structures experience, “dominates both
everyday life and the tradition of the western thought as a whole” (1112). In his own
words again, it is “neither nothing nor simply something . . .what is discovered is the
absence of the maternal phallus, a kind of negative perception, whose object of
referent-perceptum-is ultimately nothing but a difference . . .” (1112).

Thus by bringing in the dimension of difference, Weber sets Freudian
thematic ide'e fixe right, but his own structural reading also veers towards a fixation,
namely the Urszene, “the primal scene,” the role of the parents, says Weber, “the
spectacle of the father, lying dead with contorted features, the mother unconscious
next to him” (1119), which is repeated in the tower scene in which Freud as fixated
as usual brings the Sandman to the fore denying even a sidelong glances to Clara,
but, argues Weber, Nathaniel is not blind not to notice the figure of the poison and
antidote - Clara, and tries, as he reaches his side-pocket for the spyglass, to hurl her
down the tower. Weber thinks that the uncanny moment is not the result of the
visible figure of the castrating father, but the “glimpse of that almost-but-not-quite-
nothing, a glance which therefore itself blind, but not quite, for it sees the difference
that reveals and conceals itself in the same movement” (1121).

Nathaniel’s mechanical thrust into the side pocket, which for Weber is the
traumatic repetition of the Urszene, when parents were lying dead due to the
Sandman, necessitates an oblique direction or sideways. For what is designated by

the term “castration,” argues Weber, “is the impossibility of seeing directly, right on

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or straight ahead. Castration can never be looked at, en face, for it is always off the
side, off-side, like the uncanny itself” (1122).
Psychoanalysis and the Uncarmy:

If the uncanny is the wholly other in Cixous or the difference that borders
on death, it is the heart of darkness, for Royle and Ellison, with its Kurtz and all the
missions to bring the cannibals to civilization. For Ellison, it is also a leap of
madness in which a person chooses ghostly simulacra over the world of the artifact.
And in Weber it is a space lying offside, which can never be viewed directly. So we
move from the figure of frightening other as uncanny to the time of the uncanny
madness to the uncanny as a savage geography at the margins (off-sides) of Western
civilization.

In their Questions for Freud, especially “The Sandman looks at “The

 

uncanny”: The return of the repressed or of the secret; Hoffmann’s question to
Freud,” Nicholas Rand and Maria Torok bring in another dimension of the uncanny,
namely family and its secrets. They critique what they believe to be the “central idea”
of the otherwise “unsystematic” text by Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” namely “the
disquieting return of the long-ago repressed” and they try not only to correct Freud’s
misreading of Hoffmann’s tale, for the story and the “independent” theory of the
uncanny are hardly consistent, but they also want to replace Freud’s incoherent
theory of repressed infantile [castration] complex with “the return of the family

secret.” This attempt to disburden Freud’s text of its verbal jugglery, “lexical

details,” its network of ages, stages, doubles, instincts, myths, stories, folklores,

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(foreign) languages and other texts by curtailing the unnecessary impediments on the
path of divulging the (family) secret is praiseworthy, so long as it is itself canny,
coherent and cohesive.

Their “new psychoanalytical definition of the uncanny” entails much more
than just an unease with Freud’s rather unjustifiable “wish” to “defend the symbolic
equivalence between the eyes” (emphasis added) and the male genital (198); it is a
discomfort with Freudian notoriety for making associations and equivalences, his
uncanny desire (often at the cost of critical astuteness, or of the “text” at hand, as
Rand and Torok argue) to take the risk of keeping the text open, without a permanent
closure, his courting of the very unheimlich secret, instead of releasing it, and thus
inviting the stranger called the castration into the otherwise nicely “uncanny” [or
cryptic as Rand and Torok would prefer, for they believe, uncanny goes well with the
atmosphere of Hoffmann’s awful story] text based upon the little family secret.

Rand and Torok in their critique of Freud’s “The ‘Uncanny’” are obsessed
with keeping the unheimlich that pervades Freud’s essay inside the purview/crypt of
the family secret, the familiar circle that gets disturbed by the withdrawal of
knowledge by the family members themselves. So on the one hand they think Freud
is right in claiming that heimlich is what is unheimlich; on the other they fail to
imagine the radical otherness of the unheimlich and its complicitous interface with
any text. The obsession to keep the uncanny within the family, within the literalness
of the text, within its individuality, within the presence and reach of the concerned

individual, in this case Nathaniel, is obvious from the very beginning of their text.

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They criticize Freud for making a wrong choice of Hoffmann’s story to
illustrate his theory: “How important is it to note,” they ask, “that Freud chose to
exemplify his theory of the uncanny with a literary (emphasis added) text that
arguably does not corroborate it?” (186). Doesn’t he cite almost all dictionaries
available to him, along with popular sayings, several other literary texts including a
novel by Hoffmann himself, which he deals with in a certain detail? The argument
here is that neither Freud solely devotes his “theory” of the uncanny to [Freud talks
about Sandman in nine paragraphs of a fairly long essay, which is not to suggest that
it has relatively less importance] a “literary” text, [which Rand and Torok seem to
confuse with the fictional as they call Freud’s text a fiction], nor is the literary
exclusive in its illustration of the uncanny. In fact Freud’s text includes references to
lexicons, myths, psychoanalytic theories [at least of Rank and J entsch], religions,
personal anecdotes, philosophy, history, etc. In their correction of Freud’s essay,
Rand and Torok, therefore replay Freudian ‘Wsh” of symbolic equivalence with
these four types of “inexorable destinies” (198): familial, textual, temporal and literal
- the secrets of the family, the family of languages, of texts and their literalness into
which “symbolic” equivalences are the real invasion. Temporal destiny in the sense
that they replace Freud’s seemingly out-of-reach infantile complex with a date, as if
Freud’s “fiction” of childhood is null and void, as they say: “The woes of the
university student [no mention of the childhood, the nurses and the mother who
“mystify” a child’s “earnest” search for truth] Nathaniel begin on the day, 30 October

at noon to be exact, when a barometer dealer, Coppola-Coppelius, enters his room . .

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.” (190). Literal destiny in the sense that the eyes that are invariably related to
castration for Freud, are now nothing else than literal blindness, inability to see [a
doll and a human being apart].

All these instances of delirium [of seeing nothing but illusions, Olympia in

a doll, Coppelius first in his father then in Coppola, and the bloody eyes of

the doll thrown at his chest in Spalanzani’s place] on the eyes. But what

kind of eyes [meaning certainly not that have symbolic value]? These are
eyes ripped out of their sockets, dazzling and dazzled, mystified, inert and
lifeless; in short these eyes are deprived of the power of sight, they are

denied insight and the capacity to discriminate. (196)

What else would be wrong with eyes if anything ever goes wrong with
them? In short - literal uncanny devoid of figurality. They continue this literal
foreclosure: “Injured, blinded or lifeless eyes are omnipresent in The Sandman and
they symbolize the sheer inability to see - nothing else” (200). So much so that the
secret of the family that rendered the protagonist blind, is the focal point in their
inexorable reading of both the tale and its mis/reading by Freud: “Inexorably,
Hoffmann’s tale stages the misadventure of the eyes, the plight of blocked
understanding. No more is needed to grasp fully the hero’s suffering” (200).

Maria Tartar’s and Allan Lloyd-Smith’s essays on the uncanny are
continuation of Rand and Torok’s line of argument. In her article on Hoffmann’s
story Tartar argues that uncanny is not about making the unfamiliar familiar, as is
usually believed to be the case, it is accepting what one already knows or to come to
terms with the truth that one tries to evade for various reasons. Even though she has

Freud only as a “brief detour” (169), yet her mode of analysis with t/his concept is

close to the theme of enlightenment, literally throwing light, as Terry Castle would

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say in The Female Thermometer, into the ancestral secrets and crimes.
For Tartar uncanny is about knowing and acknowledging the criminal and
secret past of the family. She exemplifies her argument with narratives like I_h_e

Castle of Otranto, where Manfred’s confession of his parents’ and his own criminal

 

past exorcises the seat of his power. The restoration of the “original” identity in
Oliver Twist is another example she chooses to instantiate her analysis of the
uncanny (182).

Keeping with Abraham and Torok’s reinterpretation of the notion, Allan
Lloyd- Smith, in his essay “The Phantoms of Drood and Rebecca,” links uncanny
with their idea of the phantom and cryptonymy. In the opening sentence itself, Lloyd-
Smith keeps the “untheorizable” uncanny at par with the periodic moments in
criticism “as a reading effect” (285) or the semantic slippage in the text. His
argument, as he summarizes, is that “the unresolved contradictions, unedited fears
and desires, and incompatible assertions of the culture produce these areas of
slippage (285). He works through Abraham and Torok’s idea to argue that the
experience of the uncanny can be conflated with the moments of reading rather than
the complete revelation of the secret of the past. For him uncanny is the moment of
unsettling elusiveness rather than the settling of secrets.

A strange critical twist has been given here to the discussion of the
uncanny insofar as the uncanny is associated here with the themes of Enlightenment
in general, rather than seeing it in association with Romantic Irony, immorality of the

heart of darkness and death. Kristeva in her Strangers to Ourselves continues this

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subversion of the uncanny from a dismal heart of darkness to the economy of
Enlightenment by converting the story of the uncanny Sandman into the story of the
foreigner, thereby also radicalizing the familial circle of interpretation drawn by
critics from Torok to Tartar. She concludes her reading of the history of the
foreigner, as if such a history is possible, with Freud’s notion of the uncanny.

During her survey of the figure of the foreigner from the Greek suppliant,
the Pauline discourse of the exiles and conversion, the Renaissance utopias and
wanderings to the Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and rights of citizen and men, she
traces the history of the Western management of the Other. She locates Freud’s
discourse of the uncanny in the continuum of the humanistic and romantic discourse
of the 19th and 20th century, especially Kant’s notion of what she calls the universal
pacifism and Herder’s vollcsgeist and German Nationalism.

Kristeva’s history of the foreigner is confined to the “others” from Europe
and eventually her contribution to the discourse of the uncanny is her postulation of
the internalized or integrated otherness or strangeness in human beings. Her
salvaging the foreign otherness - which is for her both biological and symbolic - is
restoring it as the integral part of the same. She argues in her characteristic logic that
the foreigner in Freud “is neither glorified as a secret Volkgeist nor banished as
disruptive of rationalist urbanity.” Instead, she continues, “foreignness is within us,
we are our own foreigners, we are divided (181). In both of these views about the
uncanny, the figure of the other or of the foreigner is either homogenized as the

familial other, thereby betraying genealogical line of thinking or as the introjected or

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internalized other at the cost of the empirical other that shares the world out there
with all of us.
The Cultural Uncanny:

In contrast to the psychoanalytical neutralization of the other, the
theoretical trend that could be termed the cultural uncanny, seems to argue for the
difference, otherness, and the question of agency to point out the hazards of
incorporating gestures towards rendering the uncanny just canny. With these writers
the unhomely gets applied almost for the first time to themes other than European
Enlightenment and to worlds other than just the Western.

Among the post-colonial cultural critics, Homi Bhabha has written at
length on home, locations and the uncanny. Low’s work on the colonial uncanny
White Skins/Black Masks, is partly an exploration of the colonial unheimliche along
the lines Bhabha suggested in The Location of Culture. In the introduction of this
work Bhabha enunciates the importance of the concept of the unhomely in terms of
his notions of the border lives that represent “the conditions of the extra-territorial
and cross-cultural initiations” (9). The border for Bhabha is a site of inscriptions that
confuses the boundaries of home and the world through terror. He argues that to be
unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can we accommodate the unhomely in the
familiar division between the private and the public spheres. Rather the unhomely is
a moment unavoidable as our own shadow that creeps stealthily on us out of blue and
stages history’s intricate onslaught into personal life to the effect of rendering the

moment exclusively creative, for it forces upon us “a vision that is as divided as it is

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disorienting” (9).

In the section entitled “Articulating the Archaic,” he revisits Freud’s
uncanny to present a colonial situation in which a missionary in Calcutta (India) is
patrolling a street, where he runs into the image makers of the Goddess Durga,
working almost automatically on thousands of images of the Goddess for the festival
dedicated to her - Durgapuja. Bhabha quotes the onlooker, missionary Rev. A. Duff
(Duff‘s India and Indian Mission), who looks aghast at the image makers working at
Durga’s images, which are at various stages of their manufacture, arms, legs, heads,
eyes, half painted, unpainted, to be assembled images. Duff finds himself at his wits
end at this “industrious folly;” his past values, “the settled convictions of home
experience. . .counterpoised by the previously urrimagined scene,” lead him to
wonder whether these irnage-makers are men (136).

Bhabha critiques Duff’s homogenizing definition of “men,” and tries to
relate this situation with Freud’s interpretation of the Hoffmann’s “The Sandman.”
He paves his way in-between intellectual uncertainty and castration, repression and
surrnounting, and Durga and Olympia, through whom he says, the ghostly magical
spirit of the double embraces his “entire colonial concert party: Marlow, Kurtz,
Adela, Aziz, Nostromo, Duff, Maine, the owl, the Marabar caves, Derrida, Foucault,
Freud, master and slave alike” (136). These comedians or the teachers of the
culture’s double lesson, the enunciators of the problem of the intellectual uncertainty
are euphorically put together, assembled like the multiple hands of the Goddess in

the making, for, Bhabha argues, the uncanny lessons of colonization are inscribed in

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the double.

In her essay “Postmodern Automatons,” Rey Chow reads Freud’s
‘Uncanny’ in relation to broader theoretical frameworks of modernism, its polemical
displacement by postmodernism and feminism’s uneasy relationship with both of
them. Amid these theoretical “implosions,” what keeps Chow interested is the
possible emergence, the actual term she uses is “burst[ing] open,” of the social. The
explosion of the social against the Baudrillardian “implosion” of the simulacra has as
significant a place in Chow as can be guessed from her essays like “Where have all
the Natives Gone?” The latter stages the disappearance of the “native” between the
colonizer’s defiled image and his indifferent gaze. Essays like “Media, Matter,
Migrants,” explore the disappearance of another nature: disappearance of human
(resources) into the speed culture of the first world, where migrants are either
deposited like un-recyclable waste, the [abject] destitute bodies constituting what
Chow calls “the ecology of human waste” or they disappear as the laborer bodies
into the (long distance) electro-cybemetically extracted labor devoid of any
responsibility in return from the employers. The rhetoric of the distance and closing
in, the gaze of the camera and visuality returns when she analyses Nathaniel spying
Olympia first from the distance and then from close quarters, every time, alienating
or othering the object of the gaze.

Chow’s contribution to the discourse of the uncanny lies in the way with
which she relates the mechanical doll of “The Sandman” with mass culture as “the

automatised site of others, the site of the automatized others, the site of automatons

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(63), in which the other is produced as an object of ridicule as in Chaplin’s “Modern
Times,” a silent film on an assembly line worker for whom the line between his body
and the machine are blurred. In Olympia’s case too, her mesmerizing beauty owes
much to the distance from which she is viewed, and to her mechanical assent, ah, ah
to everything said to her.

Thus Chow claims that she is moving beyond the usual equation of women
as visual objects of male gaze and modernity as visuality as she relates Freudian
specularity to broader drama of producing otherness. That is the reason why she
criticizes He'léne Cixous’s gendering of the doll, which she calls first world
feminism’s pretension to give life to the mechanical doll with a second look, while
accepting all the attributes of automatism attached to it (66).

The modernist interest in the third world “natives” or “indigenous
cultures” accepts only the kind of discourse that conforms to its own views, as if it
were like, in Chow’s words, “so many Olympias saying “Ah, Ah!” to a Western
subject demanding repeated uniform message” (67). The oppressive discursive
prowess of the first world is repeated in the feminist critique as it upholds the
dehumanizing automatism even after animating it with the second look. The
repetition compulsion is, as Chow argues, rooted deep within West’s individualistic,
ahurnan speed culture, that erases human “matter” on the ground as did the bombers
in the Gulf War[s] (178).

If Chow relates the dehumanizing circumstances that the uncanny lives

inhabit in modem spaces, Rushdie records their journey back “home,” and the

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subsequent experience of disillusionment. There is a moment in Rushdie’s Imagina_ry
Homelands, especially in the essay of the same title, which can be called an uncanny
moment. The essay starts with Rushdie looking at a picture of his old house hanging
on the wall of his room. He describes the house as “peculiar - a three storied gabbled
affair,” (after all the picture was of the time at which Rushdie had not been yet born),
which reminds him of L. P. Hartley’s opening sentence in his novel Lhafig
Between: “The past is a foreign country.” But, says Rushdie, “the photograph tells
me to invert the idea; it reminds me,” he continues, “that it’s my present that is
foreign, and that the past is home in a lost city in the mists of lost time” (9).

His return to the house, both in the picture and in reality after some time,
can be seen in the light of what Freud calls the “compulsion to repeat” or what he
calls, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “return to the inanimate state” (46). On his
return to the same house in reality, Rushdie makes an “eerie discovery” that the city
telephone directory still had his father’s name, their old address, and the telephone
number, as if they had never gone away, and nothing had happened in-between.
Following the address discovered so eerily in the telephone book he goes to the old
house only to get overwhelmed, with the feeling, as Freud would say - so it really
exists - without however either being repressed or surmounted. But the memory
gathered from the monochromatic pictures of his childhood house is not synchronous
with the reality present in front of him. He finds that the colors of history “had
seeped out of [his] mind’s eyes,” and he feels assaulted by colors. The assault of

color that drained the monochromatic history confuses Rushdie as to the truth of

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memory and the reality of the present, he encounters similar doubts as to his claims
and capacity to reclaim history and the past.

Bhabha’s descriptions of the inroads of history into the personal “homes”
and Rushdie’s wounds from the assaults of the colors of reality shed more light on
the kind of trauma an uncanny experience could be. Yolanda Gampel, a former
president of Israel Psychoanalytical Association and a training analyst argues in her
essay on uncanny that the term uncanny is helpful and more exact than others to
describe the traumatic experiences of the victims, survivors or their relatives. She
casts the dialectic of heimlich-unheimliche into the interdependence of ego and the
external world to explore the relationship between trauma and the uncanny. She
explains:

An object becomes Unheimlich when it contains some characteristics of

the familiar object, but with a twist that is threatening. Feeling of uncanny

is a special form of anxiety, a warning sent by the ego facing the ego that
threatens it. When this combination of the familiar (soothing) and the
unfamiliar (dangerous) confronts the ego with a paradox that it cannot
solve, the experience becomes traumatic, obstructing ego’s ability to
function. (5 l )

Yolanda cites one of the cases under her analysis in example to explain the
relationship of the familiar that turns threatening. T, a child survivor of Shoah, one
day leaves Yolanda’s clinic and finds unexpectedly that her father’s car is behind
hers. As always she avoids him by turning her car away. Yolanda relates her patient’s
panic at the unexpected encounter with the parents to their early experience of

Shoah, when the parents were forced to leave their child at a very early age to a non-

Jew family, who took care of her until the parents returned after the war to take her

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home, at which she cried a lot. The accusatory avoidance is a symptom with which
the patient revolts against the circumstances of her separation as well as the parents
who could not only take care of her, but also took her away from the ones who did.
Yolanda argues that the “strange faces that arrived to take her away” (52) were the
familiar turned uncanny. But it also shows the shifting relationship of what she calls
the background of safety and the background of the uncanny with which turn the ring
of filiations into uncanny affiliation with the other.

Freud’s Essay on the Uncanny and the “Sandman Effect”:

It is precisely due to the double critique of filiations and affiliations, nature
and culture, myth and civilization that the uncanny becomes a useful theoretical tool.
It lends invaluable insights to read literatures written by, for instance, Americans
who are not quite/only Americans. The combination of African, Asian, Chicano,
Native and American literally instantiates the uncarmy bond between the heimlich
(familial/familiar/native) and the unheimlich (unhomely/unfamiliar/foreigner).

For Freud uncanny is a negative feeling rather than a positive one like
beauty and sublime, both, according to him, chief staples of aesthetics, hence the
marginalization of the unheimlich in aesthetics. Freud also aspires to displace
J entsch’s notion of intellectual uncertainty with that of certainty about the feelings of
the uncanny and he attempts to move beyond J entsch’s combination of
new/unfamiliar and the uncanny, the inanimate and the animate. He calls this
equation the limitation of Jentsch’s theory of the uncanny against which he proposes

the new definition of the uncanny as “that class of the frightening which leads back

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to what is known of the old and the long familiar” (220).

Freud’s advancement on Jentsch’s theory therefore is based on the
principle of the return of the repressed and her recognition. But Freudian recognition
results into the familiarization or even the domestication of the other as he
neutralizes at the level of semantics the dynamics of difference between the
unheimlich and the heimlich. For him heimlich is a word that “finally coincides with
its opposite, unheimlich [and] Unheimlich is in some way or other a subspecies of
heimlich (226).

The problematic distinction of the species and the subspecies therefore is
more important and dangerous in Freud than the accusation like Cixous’s that he
emphasized the Sandman and the eyes at the cost of being blind to the equally
uncanny figure of the doll, Olympia. In the first place Freud is hardly interested in
the “figure” of the uncanny. For him uncanny is a feeling rather than a being, for
which later in his meditation on Ister Heidegger will critique him without ever
invoking his name by arguing that uncanny is never a matter of impression and
feeling, rather it is the fundamental trait of human beings (90-91).

After the linguistic excursion on the subject, which Lyndenberg calls the
“linguistic shifter” from the realization that one is foreign to oneself (1076), Freud
reaches that conclusive moment when he says that the heimlich is a subspecies (Art)
of the unheimlich. Art is a curious German term, which was later capitalized by the
national socialists in coining quite interesting combinations with the term. As Ea

New Cassell’s German Dictiong explains, in the national socialist usage Art is a

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comfortable term between more politically troublesome Rasse and Volk and it
implies a spiritual adjustment of the Volk to the race idea (33).

On the one hand therefore Freud, as many readers of his essay on the
uncanny have already noticed, conflates the dichotomy of the heimlich and the
unheimlich into a unity; on the other hand however he tacitly introduces a dimension
of ethnic and racial othering into the overlapping domains of the terms. Besides
Lyndenberg’s argument that Freud’s reference to Italy, local women, and foreign
languages, including his pun on “gen Italian,” reflect his “complex relation to the
foreign,” what is equally fascinating is Freud’s exoticization of the Roman women in
the Italian Piazza he happens to return repeatedly.

Freud's wanderings “through the red light district of a small Italian
village,” as Susan Bernstein reminds (1119), not only expose him to his own deep
seated desires and his wish to flee from the unpremeditated encounter, but the
painted faces of the women, as Freud himself describes them in the essay also
become the inscription of the primitivism (237), which brings back “animism, magic
and sorcery” (243).

Freud begins his double moves, contrary to what Sarah Kofman calls his
“desire for unity which drives the investigation” (123), towards the analysis of the
uncanny from the moment he makes a theoretical choice, whose significance most of
the readings we reviewed overlook:

Two courses are open to us at the outset. Either we can find out what

meaning has come to be attached to the word ‘uncanny’ in the course of its
history; or we can collect all those properties of persons, things, sense-

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impressions, experiences and situations, which arouse in us the feeling of

uncanniness, and then infer the unknown nature of the uncanny from what

these examples have in common. (220)

Then he follows both the choices by turns. He begins the investigation by
surveying dictionaries for various usages of [the term, for which he starts with the
German language and finds that in German unheimlich is obviously the opposite of
heimlich and heirnisch. He continues the survey with the Latin, Greek, English,
French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese languages where he finds his convictions
confirmed that uncanny is a “locus suspectus,” a “haunted house” perhaps populated
with “xenos, the foreigners” (221).

By his methodological choice, he seems to suggest that moving towards
the foreign is indispensable to the understanding of uncanny. But he also realizes two
things: one that the dictionaries he consulted tell him nothing new, second “perhaps
only because we ourselves speak a language that is foreign” (221). Freud’s logical
moves are as always intriguing. He goes to consult foreign dictionaries only to find,
like his definition of the uncanny, that the unfamiliar is nothing new. In other words,
the intimacy and similarity of the unfamiliar is what is unheimlich. That is the case
not because the foreigner is within us, as Kristeva might hurry to argue, nor because
Freud is playing a kid’s game with his dictionnaire enfants, as Cixous would
“parentalize” Freud’s arguments, but because in relation to those foreign languages,
we too speak a foreign language.

On the other hand however his obsession wit the eye, the attendant‘fear of

the sandman and his encroachment upon the cozy circles of the family, mostly

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couples, turn the sandman (who we all are for each other, with our own haunted
houses of languages and their huge walls that, to appropriate Heidegger’s
terminology, put communication between the houses entirely out of question) into a
terrifying, violent, intruding foreigner.

Freud notices that in Hoffmann the sandman hardly takes up recognizable
features; on the contrary it is an ambulatory “spirit” passing as the folk wisdom of
the nurse, or as the rationalized explanations of the mother. This spirit arrives but
only through rnisrecognition and displacement, as Coppola, Coppelius, etc. Freud not
only tries to give a shape, but also a recognizable identity to the sandman so as to
create a killjoy from him so that eventually the ghost of the sandman can be
connected to the terror of the castration complex.

If the unheimlich sandman is being imposed on every intruding figure into
the familial, which in turn helps Freud subrogate history, as Volosinov would say in
his book on Freudianism, with the annals of human emotions (10)," on the other hand
this very refraction of history with its sandman effects - the ghosting of the

encroacher with the terrifying sandman, constitutes a form of resistance to the

 

’ In a characteristic passage Volosinov terms Freud’s emphasis on the biological being a “fear of
history.” And he opines that the state of European philosophy itself speaks to this uncanny fear of
history:
Thus, we see the basic ideological motif of Freudianism is by no means its motif alone. The motif
chimes in unison with all the basic motifs of contemporary bourgeois philosophy. A sui generis
fear of history, an ambition to locate a world beyond the social and the historical, a search for
this world, precisely in the depths of the organic - these are the features that pervade all systems
of contemporary philosophy and constitute the symptom of the disintegration and decline of the
bourgeois world. (14)
F anon reaches a similar conclusion about Freud, but he puts it somewhat differently, as he says, in
Black Skin: Whit Masks, that Freud substituted for a phylogenetic theory the ontogenetic perspective

(13).
51

regimes of official history external to the familial. This explains why Freud, despite
his references to the native (heimisch) and the foreigner dichotomy in the fluid
juxtaposition of the uncanny, never mentions the mid-nineteenth century Pfalzers,
nor the legal reforms and popular literary inventions of the Biedemeier period,
which, argues Applegate, were essential in German history for the development of
the concept of Heimat that later evolved first as provincial culture and German
nationhood and then, gathering more political, racial and emotional significance
during the war, as the ideology of extreme nationalism (4-5).

In a historico-theoretical survey of the German idea of Heimat in relation
to identity and modernity Peter Blickle weaves some of the trends together, for
instance Haberrnas’s project of modernity - which Blickle calls “a clear picture of
what Heimat denies and how it effects this denial” (139) - his reinstatement of the
proud culture of reflection against the postmodern reenchantrnent of the world in the
name of Heimat, in short his proposition of the public sphere as the uncanny;
Friedrich Schlegel’s 1797 banner phrase for the theory of irony: “Philosophy is the
true Heimat of irony;” and the German Heimatkehr literature from Holderlin to
Handke “that describes coming home as self-healing” (41).

1f repressing the official versions of history based on the notion of Heimat
and replacing it with the familial and emotional histories are Freudian modes of
resistance, by the same token Freud also tries to play down certain historical areas
related to the usage of the term. Except for a line from Shelling on which he tries to

hang almost all of his essay, for instance, Freud never bothers to cite Fichte’s idea of

52

the absolute I, the curious turn in Nietzsche’s thinking between his The Birth of
Iggegy and the reconciliation of the Dionysian and Apollonian as Heimat, and the
anti-Heimat aphorisms of the Thus Spake Zarathustra, the inhabitants of the
mountains and The Joyfirl Wisdom, where Nietzsche openly expresses his distrust
for home. In the aphorism 240 of The Joyful Wisdom for instance, Nietzsche asserts
that he will have no truck with the idea of home:

I would not build myself a house (it is an element of my happiness not to

be a house owner!). If I had to do so, however, I should build it, like many

of the Romans, right into the sea, - I should like to have in common with

that beautiful monster. (203-4)

Between the Nietzschean monster of the unhomely sea and the Freudian
Sandman or the wicked man, who comes, as Freud have the nurse describe the
monster, when children won’t go to bed, and throws handful of sand in their eyes so
that they jump out of their heads all bleeding, and then he puts the eyes in a sack and
carries them off to the half-moon to feed his children (228), opens a space for a
critical discourse that threatens all forms of closure in the name of the family,
nations, languages and cultures, and also “brings into light” every form of
persecution of the sandman in the name of civilizing the savage or exorcizing the
ghost.

That is the reason why the discourse of the uncanny is at once
psychoanalysis dealing with the “spirit” of the sandman, and how people get the

wicked and violent sandman imposed on them in the name of home, nation and

through all existing and imaginable hegemonic formations, including colonization,

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imperialism, sexism, fundamentalism, or racism, not only in the “material” or
biological form, but also in all the subtle psychological forms as well. But it is also a
cultural discourse of the return of the repressed, the discourse of resistance that
brings in theoretical unease by exploding all disciplinary homes into the unhomely

site of contestation and confrontation.

54

II. THE VIOLENCE OF BEING IN JASMINE

Grant me an old man's frenzy,
Myself must I remake
Till I am Timon and Lear
Or that William Blake
Who beat upon the wall
Till Truth obeyed his call.
- W. B. Yeats

Imaginary v. Imagining Homelands:

Bharati Mukherj ee instantiates a sustained engagement yet a fierce
struggle against exile. In spite of espousing the idea of fluid identity, multiple selves,
immigration, dislocation and diaspora, her novels as well as her interviews and
conversations, which are no less novelistic, exemplify a hidden discomfort against
certain versions of march and movement. This Heideggerian contradiction of not
moving in moving, concealing in unconcealing and the confusion of the personal and
the political not only intrigues Mukherjee’s readers, it also complicates further,
instead of easing, the critical debates about assimilation and wholehearted surrender
to the mainstream, and the questions of betrayal that have always surrounded her and
her works.

Criticized from all sides, by the fellow immigrant writers and scholars for
her championing the mainstream ideology of American rugged individualism,’ and
for dehistoricizing and romantically conniving at the uneven immigrant experiences

and the blatant ethnico-political discriminations in the New World (one of many

 

5 In her interview with Bill Moyers, Mukherjee, almost in a settler’s tone, said: “I want to conquer. I
want to love and possess the country. . .” (Moyers 8).

55

examples is Jamil Y. Khader’s reference to la_s_mi_na as “popular multiculturalist
literature (9) as opposed to his theoretical project of migrancy and multiple diasporic
conditions); and by the so-called mainstream which she loves to identify with for
being the mean mouthed retrograde antifeminist. Even the innovative readings of the
novel like Hoppe’s, which argue that the New World equals to Technology and the
novel capitalizes this equation by way of its fascination with both, hardly escape the
traps of tokenization, which in turn carry the rings of Freudian mis/reading of the
doll.

The mechanization of Jasmine becomes clear when Hoppe catches her
saying that since she has neither accents nor does she sound Iowan, her voice is like
those on the telephones (146). The protean “subject” in the novel, who for Hoppe
resembles highly mutable character of technology and the fluid and multicultural
image of America, leads him to believe that Jasmine is one with the mercurial
America. Mukherj ee’s experience of constantly being tokenized - in spite of her
repetitive attempts at reminder that she is an American, rather than an Asian-
American writer - and her Canadian experience of being spat at, render her a
painfully homeless storyteller of the agonistic dislocation and dispossession and the
traumatic venture for transformation and reclamation.

In her essay “Imagining Homelands,” which seems to be a powerful
rejoinder to Rushdie’s “Imaginary Homelands,” she critiques the exilic sojourning
and the “expatriateist” aloofness as opposed to her notion of mongrelization and the

acceptance of the entire history of the US as a whole including the historical guilt of

56

slavery, segregation, extermination of Native Americans, “the CIA, Vietnam . . .the
hypocrisy of supporting both freedom and dictatorships and . . .[the] generally vulgar
“Coca-Cola” and “McDonald’s” culture” (79). While she sounds all the way towards
the end like a mongrelizing immigrant integrationist, she suddenly unsettles the
categories by this exuberant expression:
Did we come seeking religious freedom? I didn’t. Did we come to escape
oppression, the shackles of dictatorship? I didn’t. Did we rejoin the
remnants of our shattered family? I didn’t. Have we come seeking
happiness and fortune? - For both, I should have stayed where I was. We
are expatriates, exiles, slaves and dispossessed, we are conquerors,
plunderers, refugees, and amnesty-seekers, we are temporary workers,
undocumented workers, visitors, students, tourists, we are joy seekers,
claim-jumpers, parole-violators. (85)
Mukherjee emphasizes the travails of transit and the violence inherent in
“crossing the black waters” to exile, to use Nilufer Bharucha’s terms that define
typical “Indian” reaction to diaspora, which involves the loss both of home and caste
and a perpetual banishment without return, which Bharucha thinks to be the dividing
line between Indian and other diasporic experiences, for the former “lacks the
searing desire to return to the Homeland” (53).
Radhakrishnan in his book Diasporic Meditation: Between Home aad
Location locates diaspora as an in-betweenness or a state of being always between
what is left behind as home and the present place of residence as location, hence its
foreign environ; and he wonders whether naturalization empowers us or marginalizes

us (205). On the contrary Mukherjee champions affirmation without return, hence

the apparent tone of anti-exile in her. Her novel Jasmine documents this ambiguity of

57

exile and affirmation, repression and return.
The Enigma of Arrival 6 in Jasmine:

Jasmine lands, or to be more precise, is stranded in Florida by proxy and
prosthesis, thereby interrogating all past and firture arrivals. Her documents were all
forged up; her passport teemed with false information. She had a false name (a name
which she no longer identified herself with, the name of the girl from Hasnapur,
whom she and her husband so successfully dispatched off long ago) and also a false
date of birth. Along with assuming the name of the long dead girl, she used the dead
husband’s money, visa, and other papers, which all made the trip more eerie and
ghostly.

The motif of fake identity continues even in New York, when she
suddenly discovers that the “Professorji” that Prakash had always looked up to,
admired and thought of emulating is in reality a retailer in human hair. The picture of
the professor that she had first from his inspiring long letters to Prakash, urging the
latter to come to the States and then from his talks of lab work and assistants during
her stay with his family in New York, and the reality taught Jasmine that masks and
the troubling identity of the heimlich and the unheimlich are part of American

identity.

 

6 Referring to the so-called discovery of America, the “first of all arrivals” of the “immigrants,”
Prashad in his book The Karma Of Brown Folk writes about the pioneering prosthetizing of Indian’s
arrival in America. He writes: “India came to America by mistake. A Genoese navigator landed in the
Bahamas in search of India. He saw and slaughtered the Bahamians (and rescued for world history one
Bahamian word, “hammock”). Those whom he found he named “Indians,” and the land he called
“India” (1).

 

58

In other words it is Prakash, who is coming by proxy, it is his ideal, his
dream of establishing a firm, “Vijh and Wife” that brings Jasmine here as Jyoti Vijh.
That is not to say, as does Dayal, when he calls Prakash “the prime mover” (Dayal
67), or as does Kristin Carter-Sanbom in her essay “We Murder Who We Were:
Jasmine and the Violence of Identity,” that here the man transforms and the woman
is transformed, and as positive as her transformation might be, it fails not to oppose
violence to agency, active force to passive object. “The male postcolonial nurtures
his American dream,” continues Carter-Sanborn, “with that dream he wields the
power that will violently “rebirth” the wife” (580).

Jasmine decides upon this transfer of life, of documents and dreams, when
she finds it impossible to go back to Hasnapur, Jyoti’s place of birth. For Jasmine,
the feudal Jyoti is dead. Jasmine’s reduction to widowhood, as the astrologer
predicted, was not simply a state of not being with one’s husband; it was not simply
the fact of having lost one’s husband, it’s being abandoned, forgotten, and even
psychologically killed by friends, relatives, religion and caste. At Prakash’s death,
Jasmine was this despair of dereliction and deceit. Recalling Prakash’s admonition -
“Don’t crawl back to Hasnapur and feudalism. That Jyoti is dead.” Jasmine
continues to reflect:

My sisters all were living in cities, with jealous, drunken men who would

not part with a few rupees of bus or train fair. They were gone from my

life. Except for the visits from my brothers on the weekends, Mata and I

were alone in the widow’s dark hut, little better than the Muzbis and the

Untouchables. My young fiiends, like Virnla, never visited. (96)

This “widow of the war of feudalisms,” as she calls herself is left as an outcaste

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amidst her family and friends, or as an alien or exile in her own birthplace. The war
of feudalism killed Prakash, but the consequence was the systematic smothering of
Jasmine too, who as a woman was nothing there without a husband. It is this state of
cultural non-being and not-belonging that Jasmine wants to flee. It is this sense of
exile in the so-called native place she wants to overcome. Thus starts Ms.
Supplementarity’s prosthetic journey into the New World with fake documents and
proxy dreams that eventually displace, substitute (Derrida) and appropriate - in the
sense of owning or Ereignis (Heidegger) the original dream.

After defining the human essence as the uncanniest of all, Heidegger in his
meditation on Ister elaborates his propositions by arguing that if becoming homely is
the care of literature (poetry), encounter between the foreign and one’s own is also
the fundamental truth of history:

This coming to be at home in one’s own in itself entails that human beings

are initially, and for a long time, and sometimes forever, not at home. And

this in turn entails that human beings fail to recognize, that they deny, and
perhaps even have to deny and flee what belongs to the home. Coming to
be at home is thus a passage through the foreign. And if the becoming
homely of a particular humankind sustains the historicality of its history,
then the law of the encounter [A useinanderstzung] between the foreign
and one’s own is the fundamental truth of history, a truth from out of

which the essence of history must unveil itself. (49)

In this way her arrival is not only double but agonistic; she not only carries
the duplex of the dreams, but she also appropriates that dream, and she displaces that
dream into her own duty and honor, (what dream is not a displacement, or what is a

dream if it is not a displacement itself? In that sense she is dreaming her husband’s

dream as displacement, as departure from the place of her seclusion and exile). So

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Jasmine plans to set out in a journey beyond these two deaths - death to/from the
relatives and to/from herself.

If the reader encounters her as a fated exile from the very first page of the
novel, therefore never at home at all, as Heidegger would say, the journey beyond
these deaths is also toward it. Jasmine herself is going to become at many points in
the novel the reeking dead animal she despised and thought she escaped from as
soon as the story unrolls. That is to say, the protean permutations of the selves, the
dreams of a young girl full of wanderlust, the audacious acts of self-defense by this
seemingly innocent and vulnerable stranger into the New World neither speak of her
agency, nor of her being at home. Coming to oneself or creating oneself is for both
Mukherjee and Heidegger not only a loss of “intellectual mastery” that disturbs us
from our beliefs and ontologies, as Curtis Bowman argues in his Heideggerian
reading of Jacques Tourneur’s horror films (73), but it is the most difficult of all
tasks, for it involves catastrophe.

To eulogize J asmine’s journey across the world as globalization (as does
Anthony C. Alessandrini in his essay “Reading Bharati Mukherjee, Reading
Globalization”) is as naive as to patronize her as a survivor from the brutalities of a
primitivism.7 The readings that equate Mukherjee’s sense of journey in this novel as

well as elsewhere with adventure or wandering also miss the specific sense of voyage

 

7 Chua in “Passages from India,” makes an interesting remark with regard to survivorship in the novel.
For Chua Jasmine is a double survivor. She survives the death into a short story, for she was tenuous
enough to make the author let her survive beyond the short story into a full-fledged life of the novel,
and she also survived, which is rather a problematic survivorship, the fatalistic determinations of life
in Hasnapur “to the freedom” of American life (57).

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Mukherjee evokes in the story. Journey here in the novel and in Heidegger is not
simply a wandering and an indulgence in being unhomely forever.

Elucidating the distinction between these two “passages” Heidgger says in
the same book that:

. . .this is no more homeless wandering around that merely seeks a location

in order then to abandon it and take its pleasure and satisfaction in a mere

traveling around. The human being here is not the adventurer who remains
homeless on account of his lack of rootedness. Rather the sea and the land
and the wilderness are those realms that human beings transform with their
skillfulness, use and make their own, so that they may find their own
vicinity through such realms. The homely is sought after and striven for in
the violent activity of passing through that which is inhabitual with respect
to the sea and earth, and yet in such passage the homely is precisely not

attained. (73)

An adventurer can be an interesting figure but s/he cannot be an uncanny
being, to whose essence, argues Heidegger, belongs what he calls “counterturning.”
The adventurer is also not unhomely, but the Setvérortoq, the uncanniest is
unhomely precisely because “it” remains excluded from its own essence, or it finds
no entry in the essence. Heidegger explains his arguments and maintains that the
uncanniest goes everywhere, but it comes to nothing and attains no home. In his
algebra, Heidegger calls it: navronopoq omopog (pantoporos aporos) - a being that
experiences everything, yet remains without experience.

This Heideggerian meditation gets more resonant when one reads how
Jasmine escapes the metropolitan life of New York city to fill the pots with water in

Iowa, which reminds her of her days in rural India, and how Bud’s ex-wife bugs her

in the beginning thinking her to be a money-grubber, but soon realizes her mistake

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when she finds that J asrnine is not after Bud’s money at all. Therefore to interpret

J asmine’s westward movements as Mukherjee’s longing to identify with the pioneers
is to miss the uncanny move towards everything without reaching anything. “Poros”
in Greek, explains Heidegger, is opposed to “penia” or poverty, so it also means
“earning a living,” or wealth. But in spite of and because of this accumulated
“porosity” in every sense of the term, the uncanny gets to “nothing.” To let
Heidegger explain this unique situation in which the uncanny find themselves
caught:

Driven to busy themselves with all beings in every way, human beings are

simultaneously (as though) driven out from being, however much effect

beings may have . . . For the powers and forces of nature too can indeed be
fearful in their effect; other things in their sublimity can indeed demand

awe; . . .[But] Human beings alone stand in the midst of beings in such a

way as to comport themselves toward being as such . . . Human beings

simultaneously stand in the midst of being in such a way that in relation to
those beings they are omopoq. Yet only as navrortopog are they ourOpog
and vice versa. In those beings they come to, and in which they think
themselves at home, they come to nothing. Thinking they are homely,

human beings are those who are unhomely. (76)

In other words, the more homely one feels with'beings, the more radically
unhomely one becomes. For Heidegger this singular fate humans are consigned to is
more catastrophic than all catastrophes of nature and cosmos put together. For him
human essence is the sole catastrophe, not only because home turns him forever

away from what is homely, but also because one needs to fight against one’s own

coziness and comfort, one’s rootedness and rigidity.8

 

8 In her essay “Reading and Writing the South Asian Diaspora,” Inderpal Grewal not only blames

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It is precisely in the light of this necessity to explode out of one’s coziness
(both material and metaphysical) Mukherjee detects and decries the classy gesture of
the purity of pain and moral superiority maintained by the émigrés and exiles - the
“haughty cousins,” as she calls them - against the déclasse' immigrant. She in her
essay “Irnmi grant Writing: Give Us Your Maximalist,” directs her critique especially
towards exiles like Rushdie, with their “nostalgic glee” and “bitter world weariness”
and the post-colonials, “who earn the right to be permanent scolds, soaking up
comfort and privilege and nursing real grievances until privileges and grievances
become habits of mind (28). Mukherjee tries to demythologize the aura of exile by
replacing it with what she in “Imagining Homelands” calls “the scraped-knuckled,

bruised-elbow immigration” (70).

 

Mukherjee for stereotyping the Sikh minority of India, who also form the first wave of Indian
immigrants to the United States, she also interrogates the portrayal of Jasmine, the Third World
woman as an anomaly, or a representation of “specialness,” rather than “difference.” Grewal quotes
Minh-ha to support her argument that “this kind of formation creates a division “between I-who-have-
made-it and You-cannot—make-it” and it has unfortunate consequences in the preservation of one’s
identity as special at the cost of other women, it leads to a “double game: on the one hand (I shall)
loudly assert my right, as a woman, as an exemplary one, to have access to equal opportunity; on the
other hand, (I shall) quietly maintain my privileges by helping the master perpetuate his cycle of
oppression”” (233). When we look at Jasmine as a pantoporos uncanny being, we immediately see
where Grewal’s arguments lose their relevance.

64

For Mukherjee, if diaspora is a search for the homeland, that is why
suspect, exile is also a painful preservation of the wound, which the exile retains
against relating to the host country. The difference between Mukherjee’s déclassé
mongrelizing - debasing and profane - and the purist stand of the exile, expatriate
and the postcolonial deepens when she in “Imagining Homelands” suggests that the
latter bear some resemblance with the “current crop of French and Austrian race-
baiters who even propose cleansing the various motherlands of Turks, Gypsies,
Africans, Kurds, and Bosnians/Kosovo refugees (77).

Her critique of hyphenization is taken as an alibi for assimilation and her
declaration that she is an American writer rather than an Asian-American is read as
betrayal. Contrary to this Mukherj ee argues that the elitism of exile silences, instead
of enunciating, the pain of migration. In her essay, “Immigrant Writing,” she
articulates the gap between the new comer “with too much story to tell” (28) and too
few people to speak for them (1). She feels constrained in the deeply rootedness of
the exile and the expatriates, who, says she, end up all their genius talking only to
themselves and their biographers (29). As opposed to this the immigrant is the
double, the flexible ubiquity that finds ease in fictionally entering lives and
characters other than him/herself.

With the “immigrant” that inhabits this jointure or rupture of too much
story to tell and too little possibility of actually doing so, Mukherjee might have been
expressing the divide of the houses and the “near” impossibility of the dialogue

between them that Heidegger referred to in his On the Way to Language (5). The

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compulsion to speak beyond one’s own house entails a journey away from one’s own
house, which in turn renders both the houses quite unhomely.
Fighting Fatalistic Exile:

Even though there are attempts (Alam 1996) at periodizing Mukherjee’s
literary output, the so-called phase of exile and nostalgia for home in her early
writings that include The Tiger’s Daughter, 1972, and her nonfiction collaboration
with her husband Clark Blaise Days and Nights in Calcutta, I977, mostly based on
her Canadian experience; the second phase of expatriate’s aloofness with which she
moves to New York and publishes Wife and Darkness; the third phase of the

exuberance of immigration that includes Jasmine The Middleman and Other Stories,

 

etc.; yet the sense of passage to hold dialogue between different houses and the
resultant homelessness and dislocation are present in different guise throughout her
writing.

Her encounter with and her entrenched opposition to fatalistic exile are
obvious in the first sentence of Jasm_in_§: “Lifetimes ago, under a banyan tree, in the
village of Hasnapur, an astrologer cupped his ears - his satellite dish to the stars - and
foretold my widowhood and exile” (3). This sentence in the beginning of the novel,
about the beginning of Jasmine’s life (though even at that point Jyoti had a past, the
past perfect before the partition, the stories of affluent, comfortable, elegant,
prepolitical, and spectacular past, favorite site of her father’s nostalgic musings of
which she was an instinctive participant), unfolds, intensifies and thickens the plot of

the text, as if Jasmine were sentenced into/by it, its ominous articulation and its

66

subsequent misinterpretation. This articulation of destiny belongs to the symbolic
order that tries to impose coherence into the chaotic past and the fleeting firture of
the place, culture, civilization and peoples (Jyoti in particular). It is this sentencing
against which the author pits her protagonist and postulates, as does Heidegger with
the figure of Antigone, her own politics/poetics of self-remaking and birthing. This is
what leads the readers to giving a generic reading to Mukherjee’s passionate

narratives in general and Jasmine in particular and to saying, as does Dlaska, that

 

women are unhousement and exile (45).

One needs to be more careful, more attentive to the cultural complexity
involved either in Mukherjee’s case or in Jyoti’s. If we call Jyoti a survivor, a victim
of extreme disadvantage and injustice, as Dlaska seems to claim her to be (129), we
need to remember that she became Jasmine not in the first world, but already in the
third one with Prakash. The rebellion against any sentencing started even as early as
her encounter with the astrologer, the violence of whose chucking resulted into the
revelation of third eye. And on the other hand if we use the short-shrifi paradigm of
first and the third world in order to put the savior sentencing into circulation and call
the author a survivor from the submissiveness demanded of Indian women (Bloom
68), that would jeopardize the privileges enjoyed by her, her sense of being in control
of her destiny, as she puts in Days and Nights in Calcutta, better in India than in
Canada (168).

What suggests itself here is not that unhousement is not women’s general

condition in Hasnapur, nor that there is persecution of the survivor here in the West.

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More interesting is fatalistic exile, the inescapability of being nothing else than what
the astrologers and the Half-Faces want one to be - the double-bind of widowhood
and survivorship, which Mukherjee herself at times promotes and indulges in. On the
one hand there is a cultural submission, on the other there is patemalized
survivorship, beyond which one cannot simply grow in these respective ideologies.
Mukherjee is opposed to both modes of exiles and exclusions, so she takes recourse
to what in an interview her husband Clark Blaise said, is a move from unhousement
to rehousement, a painful “breaking away from the culture into which one is born. .
.[to] reroot. . .oneself in a new culture (Hancock 39).

“Rerooting” in m is neither getting assimilated, nor forgetting the
past. Forgetting and being engrossed into thrownness occur only when the being
feels homely in the paths he lays for himself and gets stuck with them. In
Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger clarifies:

The violence-doing, which originally creates the routes, begets in itself its

own unessence, the versatility of many twists and turns, which in itself is

the lack of ways out, so much so that it shuts itself out from the way of

meditation on the seeming within which it drifis around. (168)

If the uprooted Jasmine travels, as Mukherjee would say in “Immigrant
Writing,” “half the world in every direction to come here and begin again” (28), the
rerooting is never simply a rehousement for her. Dwelling, as Heidegger
characterizes it in his “Building Dwelling Thinking,” is building (148), but such a

building also accompanies violence that surmounts the violence-doing in building. In

this way the issue of techne', or technology in Heidegger’s sense of the term and not

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the way Hoppe reads technology in the novel, is relevant in relation to Jasmine’s
move beyond simple rehousement. T echne', as Heidegger uses the term in
Introduction to Metaphysics, is knowing , it is “initially and constantly looking out
beyond what in each case, is directly present at hand” (169).

There is a monstrous leakage therefore between technology and Jasmine
not because her voice resembles the ones in the telephones, nor because, like
Olympia, she is a mechanical doll receiving directives from the authorities starting
from the patriarchs and the purists in Hasnapur to the mythrnakers of the nation-
building here in the New World, but because in her is set to work “being-out-
beyond” that irnpels her to move beyond all beings. In this way techné suggests the
deinon, the violence-doing against the overwhelming character of what Heidegger
calls Fug after the Greek dike’, both of which constitute the essence of the uncanny
being. Jasmine embodies this agonistic confrontation of dike and techné, or a violent
move away from all the structures of power and authority, which brings a sense of
justice (diké') too to the journey full of adventure and violence.

The first words of Jas_rr_n'_n§, Lifetimes ago - thus speak of Jasmine’s life in
the joints (Fug), the ruptures between the selves and her constant fall and escape
from those ruptures and traps. Jyoti of Hasnapur village gives way to Jasmine after
marrying Prakash, a man from the city with new ideas and values. She in turn
becomes Jazzy after she escapes from the motel where she killed the man she was
raped by. The process continues into a succession of avatars that Jasmine takes as

Jase in New York, and as Jane in Baden, Iowa.

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Each displacement exposes her to greater violence and greater loss. This
being situated at the ruptures without the benefit of a niche, this pantoporos wanderer
across the world is aware of being hemmed in, of having no way-out than going
towards beings, but experiencing nothing. This aporosity of being-in-the-world,
laying out paths, without ever reaching anywhere explains the way Jasmine describes
her transition and translation in the New World: “Let go just one thing, like not
wearing our normal clothes, or a turban or not wearing a tika on the forehead - the
rest goes on its own down a sinkhole” (29). This is also how Du’s language, his
shrines, pictures, candles and dried fragrances disappeared; the same happened to
J asmine’s Ganapati - the elephant god that landed with her on this side of the shore,
but could not make with her more than a few lodgings; and same fate befalls on
Prakash’s suit, his mission and his memories too. This is the reason why Heidgger in
his meditation on Ister calls uncanny beings the ones who are anoint;- apolis -, the
ones who are “forfeiting the site” (86).

To put it differently, the uncanny wanderers like Jasmine are at once inside
the polis, and among the beings, but also above it or without it, since they violently
overcome what is present at hand. As a result of which they forfeit the site or the
polis and become unheimliche. “There are” argues Jasmine, “no harmless,
compassionate ways to remake ourselves. We murder who we were so we can rebirth
ourselves in the image of dreams” (29).

The existence of an uncanny wanderer is calibrated upon the loss of the

constructed selves and the political sites. Their essential homelessness, however,

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puts them above the site and the polis too, as a result of which their very
unhomeliness acquires the form of the Third Eye. If Freudian uncanny is the fear of
losing one’s eyes, Mukherj ee portrays an uncanny character, who acquires the
mythical third eye associated with the Hindu hermaphrodite god of death and
destruction.

In acquiring the Third Eye she becomes Shiva, the hermaphrodite lord of
dance as well as destruction, the homeless fakir, who is at once the care giver and the
lord of death. And his dancing consort in the ambivalent dance of death is Kali, the
black goddess, the only force of justice through violence. Jasmine, who is at once
Shiva and Kali (hence the ambiguity of gender in her), who tells Duff the stories of
Nachiketa - the boy sent towards Death by his own father, becomes the historical
humanity itself. “I feel old,” she exclaims, “very old, millennia old, a bug eyed
viewer of beginnings and ends. In the old Hindu books they say that in the eye of the
Creator, mountains rise and fall like waves and the ocean” (35). One can read in her
what Heidegger in Basic Questions of Philosophy terms the historical humanity, in
contrast to the cult of individualism:

The historical man is not a separate “individual,” dragging his past behind

himself. Nor does it mean several individuals, belonging together in a

form of a society. . .Historical man: that shall mean for us the unexhausted

unique fullness of essential human possibilities and necessities. . .ones

arising from man’s relation to the truth of Being itself. (181)

What frightens Bud about Jasmine is her uncanniness, for him she

symbolizes an apolis, a world “that he will never see” (109). It does not mean that

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Jasmine withdraws into the old world, let alone the mythical world of the gods and
the goddesses. Like her author, for her too India is a place for relaxed vacationing,
not more than that. And withdrawing from the new world also does not mean that
Jasmine does not belong. Even though she leaves Lilian, she leaves Taylor and New
York, she abandons Bud to join Duff and Taylor to go to California, like a
pantaporos aporos, she remains one of the Americans, and in spite of the fact that

J asmine’s papers are not straight even at the end of the novel, her undocumented
unhomeliness lends strength to the vision she has of America. J_asnrine_ is about

dreaming nation and history from this negative space of uncanniness.

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HI. THE BARE HUMANS IN A NATIONSCAPE: OKADA’S NO-NO BOY

Consider if this is a man

Who works in the mud

Who does not know peace

Who fights for a scrap of bread

Who dies because of a yes or no
- Primo Levi

Founault and the Space of Power:

In his interview “Space, Power and Knowledge” Foucault relates within
parenthesis an anecdote about his encounter with a Sartrean psychologist in a
discussion organized by a group of architects gathered to study space. The Sartrean
psychologist, says Foucault, announced that “space is reactionary and capitalist, but
history and becoming are revolutionary” (140). Foucault calls it an absurd discourse
at which one would be convulsed with laughter these days. For him space can neither
be reactionary nor capitalist because, he continues, even within the concentration
camps, there is resistance.

A couple of questions before in the interview he says, “ There are certain
number of things that one can say with some certainty about a concentration camp to
the effect that it is not an instrument of liberation, but one should still take into
account” - and this is what he claims to be his contribution to the discussion of this
issue - “that in spite of torture and execution, no matter how terrifying a given
system may be, there are always possibilities of resistance, disobedience and
oppositional groupings” (135). In other words, for him neither is the space
completely liberating nor entirely repressive. Even though he allows that space is

fundamental in the exercise of power, but the walls of repressive architecture, certain

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allocation of people in space “is a plunge into a field of social relations” (140) rather
than a separation, seclusion, exclusion and confinement, let alone repression.

Foucaultian space and its analytics steeped in the discourse of power,
discipline and punishment are also sites of resistance, revolt and negation, which
necessarily entail freedom. What if the space in which freedom and resistance is
“exercised” to a certain “effect,” brings more seclusion thereby turning the resistance
null and void? 80 the reference to power is not enough to analyze space that stages
social relations or their absence.

Foucault’s playing of space against history, the latter is the old man’s
wistful “that good old time” for him, is subjected in turn to the service of the critique
of the present as against the myth of the return of the past. The presentism ossified
into the correlations of power and resistance smoothes over total rationalization of
power relations that ultimately ends up with the severing of ties from the subject.
Foucault’s eye or the architecture of power, with its autonomous mechanism, as in
Panopticon, his advancement on Bentharn’s regulatory mechanism, resulting in
mutual control, glosses over certain historical facts. The concentration on space and
the neglect of history to the extent of reducing it to the history of the present is
politically more comfortable, but historically irresponsible, because it limits point of
views to the local in such a debilitating way that it denies the global fact of people’s
marches and movements, their migration and displacement. To concentrate just on
the plunge of social relations is to deny diaspora just as to stress the subjects of

freedom and resistance is to overlook the beings for whom freedom is more like

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abandonment and resistance without effect.

Foucault’s topos devoid of chronos reappears in modern manifestation in
the critics like Arif Dirlik, who in his essay “Asian on the Rim: Transnational
Capital and Local Community in the Making of Contemporary Asian America”
argues against diasporic nostalgia for the past, which for him undesirably
foregrounds ethnicity, which it should suppress in favor of what Dirlik calls the
“place based politics.” The diasporic recourse to the historical point of common
origin is less “effective” (48) towards coping with society. He offers an example of a
Chinese in Los Angeles, who has more of a stake with his or her Afiican American
or Hispanic American neighbor than with some distant cousin in Hong Kong.
Dirlik’s politics based on space can be taken as a spatial presentism that not only
discards genealogy, ethnicity, race and history as undesirable for racial bridging and
dereification of identities, in short, assimilation, even though Dirlik posits ethnic
assirrrilation against spatial rootedness, unwittingly in the service of the nation, thus
supporting the myth of “home wherever one lands.” His historical trajectory through
places involves “forgetting and new acquisition” (47). But both of these panaceas of
forgetting and new accretion are difficult if the “enrooted” people happen to be the
Japanese Americans like Ichiro’s family, for whom forgetting is as difficult as
acquisition and the place is as uneven as history is zigzag.

Dirlik’s juxtaposition of the genealogical and the geographical belonging,
his dream of “enabling people to feel at home where they live” (46) instead of

whimpering with the so-called location of origin, is only ironically applicable to the

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uncanny groups thrown into internment, exile, displacement and diaspora.
Feminist Critique of No-No Boy:

One might wonder if Lowe’s reading of No-No Boy as an anti-
developmental novel with an almost static plot (58) hints towards this ossification
that we just discussed in the light of Foucault and Dirlik’s critical stance. Only the
dyads of the origin and place, or the two points of the spatial contiguity are replaced
with another dyad of nativism and assimilationism that Lowe presents as problematic
in Asian American writing. In the same way as Shirley Lim and Amy Ling critique
what they consider to be the mere rearticulation of masculinist version of anti-racist
and anti-mainstrearn reading of Asian American writers by critics like Frank Chin,
Lowe points out the danger of such static narratives that tend to silence internal
heterogeneity in the name of fighting for it externally.

If Frank Chin accuses writers like Kingston for unduly ferninizing Chinese
culture, Shirley Lim in her article, “Japanese American Women’s Life Stories:

Matemality in Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter and Joy Kagawa’s Obasan ” accuses

 

 

the editors of Aiiieeeee anthology for “setting up an alternate critical hegemony . .
.based on masculinist and sociological evaluation” (90). She continues:
The Aiiieeeee critics offer an ideal of male Asian American writing
defined as social history, possessing an original force beyond the reach of
any tradition. John Okada’s No-No Boy is their idealized textual type, a
text they insist on receiving as “arrogantly self-begotten.” (90)

The feminist response to Chin’s apotheosis of the novel undoubtedly complicates a

simple place based politics by foregrounding the double space and double

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temporalities that Asian-Americans inhabit, but unfortunately her “feminist reading”
that “values instead of disparages ambiguities and fluid boundaries in writing” (91)
gets too elusive to account for the discontinuities inherent in being or not being an
American of Japanese descent, and for the difference it makes to be a no-no boy.

In a reading of this novel in the light of Freud’s uncanny, Bryn Gribben
argues that Ichiro’s identity formation follows the Western path often fortified by the
disciplines of sociology and psychoanalysis. At the outset of the essay Gribben
writes:

Both the emergence of sociology as a discipline in the 19403 and the

specifically Western emphasis on psychoanalytic models of identity

formation pervade Ichiro's attempts to define a self apart from his family. .

. . Many of the tropes of No—No Boy are familiar to students of

psychoanalysis: the controlling mother, her refusal to look into a mirror

with her son and face their separateness, and her death by water all signify,
in traditional Western psychoanalysis, a psychosexually-rooted crisis in
masculine identity formation, based on separation and differentiation from
the mother. The home which is now “umheirnlich” and the dismembered
leg of the character Kenji (a Japanese American peer of Ichiro’s who
fought in the war) also foreground the dis-ease Ichiro faces upon his return
from prison, a return met continually with other “present” absences.

(Gribben)

J inqui Ling in his Narrating Nationalism: Ideolcgyand Form in Asian
American Literature on the contrary reads No-No Boy as a narrative intervention and
a rhetorical decision in the broader context of the US. history, namely the mass
consumerism, corporatism, and technological fetishism of the fifties and the growing

sense of resistance and alienation among the American intellectuals (52). Ling

recontextualizes the novel in the critique of corporatism and the search for

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alternatives to individualism. But his narration of nationalism is more than a
conflation of exile and nation. For him the novel is a rhetorical decision by the
author. Okada’s choice of the fictional mode in order to express his discontent,
argues Ling, is an attempt to “speak [the] ideologically unspeakable,” which Ling
finds ambiguously built in the No-No Boy. a strategy on the part of the author to
utilize the form and structure of the novel ideologically in order to balance the
demands of resolution from the readers and the demand of conformity to assimilation
from the publishers (49).

What is left unelaborated in Ling is the state of dual citizenship, hence the
dichotomous pressure of belonging on the issei and the nisei. Ling mentions but does
not carry to more serious implications the duality of legal status of Japanese
Americans in the U. S.:

Historically, the conflict between the issei and nisei had been largely

shaped by a phenomenon of dual citizenship, which repeatedly called into

question the nisei American identity, because the Japanese law designates

the offspring of a Japanese father, regardless of the place of birth, as a

natural Japanese citizen, while American law recognizes anyone born on

American soil, regardless of the parents’ ethnicity or nationality, as a U. S.

citizen. (41)

The dichotomy of the place-based US. politics and the patriarchal, nativist, ethnic,
genealogical Japanese ideology beset the soul of Ichiro by a Du Boisian double-bind,
or in Du Bois’s famous words, by the “twoness, an American, a Negro; two souls,
two unreconciled strivings (5); but instead of staying with the duality of souls inside

the racial veils Okada characterizes Ichiro’s situation as more precarious, so that the

“split-man” of the novel looks more like what Hannah Arendt would call a bare

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human: without a state and without rights.
The Condition of a Bare Human:

Lowe’s interpretation of Ichiro’s condition as “a deeply divided subject”
(50), Ling’s reading of Ichiro’s “failed identity quest” (51), McDonald’s desire for
Ichiro’s successful redemption from the guilt of not choosing (McDonald 12)
unwittingly rehash the myth of the individual heroism free of history. Arendt’s ideas
about modern conditions that reduce people to bare humans address these
complexities by realigning the readings based on individual’s quest to broader
concept of belonging, rightlessness and dislocation.

As Arendt clarifies in The Origin of Totalitarianism, the term
“displacement” is the invention of the postwar era in order to attenuate a person’s
reduction into the mere existence and to snatch even the title of the “stateless,”
which at least suggests the person’s belonging to a state in the past (Arendt 279),
which in turn completes the circle of belonging to nothing, or being just the
mysterious given of being human.

On the one hand Ichiro’s survivorship - from the war, which he “fought”
inwardly for deciding to not fight it, from the internment, and from the violence that
ultimately devoured Freddie, another no-no boy, separates him from what
Arendt/Heidegger, following the Greeks, call polis - he in the Aristotelian sense
remains no longer a political animal, he is animal itself, a savage inside civilization,
and a beast amidst humanity. But on the other hand, argues Arendt, like all survivors

his abstract nakedness of being nothing but human is his greatest danger.

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He failed the test of claiming the rights by saying no to the article 27-28 of
the “Statement of United States Citizenship of Japanese Ancestry,” particularly 28‘“,
which reads: “Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America
and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic
forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, to
any foreign government, power, or organization?” (Weglyn 136). As a result of
which he continues saying no to every offer and opportunity for job, love, business
and relationship. He declines Mr. Carrick’s generous offer for a job in Portland. He
cannot find himself to be the right person to accept Emi’s proposal for love or Mr.
Maeno’s offer of a job. He goes to the Christian Rehabilitation Center, but fails to
accept Morrison’s job in the center.

Once he falls out of the polis, the political, the public realm of rights and
the pale of law, he also loses his ties and rights to belong to the body politic. Arendt
explains:

The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty

and the pursuit of happiness or of equality before the law and fieedom of

opinion - formulas, which are designed to solve problems within a given
communities - but that they no longer belong to any community
whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before law, but that
no law exists for them, not that they are oppressed, but that no body wants

even to oppress them. (296)

Ichiro’s desperate attempt to enter back into the polis gets rebuffed from
the very beginning. Eto, the friend turned stranger or a Japanese who plays “more
American than most Americans” (73) spits on him, Mr. Brown says - you just pick
up where you left off, and you won’t have any trouble - as if nothing has happened at

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all. But Ichiro knows that Brown and he are creatures of two different worlds. He
describes his meeting with Brown as meeting someone in a revolving door, same as
well as different, it was like, says be, seeing without meeting, talking without
hearing, smiling without feeling. Ichiro takes this fissure as the terminal loss of the
polis:

No, Brown is still Brown. It is I who reduces conversation to the

inconsequential because Brown is of that life, which I have forfeited, and

forgetting it, have lost the right to see and hear and become excited over

things, which are of that wonderful past. (57)

It becomes clear that merely ethnic analysis of Ichiro’s problem is
inadequate to fully grasp the situation, when his own father fails to understand what
he is undergoing and snaps that Ichiro’s problem is over once he came home from
prison, which, thinks his father, is not the case with Mama. Ichiro hardly believes his
ears when his father calls his “homecoming” the termination of his problems, and he
retorts:

“You are a Jap. How can you understand? No. I’m wrong. You are

nothing. You don’t understand a damn thing. You don’t understand about

me and about Ma and you will never know why it is that Taro had to go
in the army. Goddamn fool, that is what you are, Pa, a goddamn fool.”

(115)

His attempts to reconnect to the polis, to the public life and to resume in
that world of the wonderful past by visiting the Club Oriental bar, for instance, are
frustrated by his own brother and his hoodlums. He wants to change place with Kenji

just in order to stay connected like Kenji to the polity, to history, even after knowing

that Kenji has only eleven inches to death. The immense uprootedness that he feels is

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aggravated by the realization that even though by language, by culture, by education
and upbringing he belongs to the polis, to the logos of the polis, yet he as an
American of Japanese descent has to prove that he belongs, not the German, the
Italian or Russian (31), for his rightlessness is built into his body itself.

This dark background of mere givenness, as Arendt would call it, is a
permanent threat to the public sphere, which is built on the principle of equality. And
the people who want to stay within the public sphere of equality, who want the
sphere safe from these abject creatures that are threat to the atmosphere of equality,
the humane domain of justice and freedom, feel self-hatred, for having a creature
inside, which is nothing but a human being. Hannah Arendt continues to argue that
the higher the development of a civilization, the more accomplished the world of
human artifice it has produced. Therefore:

The more at home men feel with human artifice, the more they will resent

everything they have not produced, everything that is merely given to

them. The human being who has lost his place in a community, his
political status in the struggle of his time, and the legal personality, which
makes his action and part of his destiny a consistent whole, is left with
those qualities, which usually can become articulate only in the sphere of
private life and must remain unqualified, mere existence in all matters of

public concern. (301)

But Ichiro’s “rightlessness, hence his uncanniness, are not allowed even
this Arendtian niche of the private sphere. The guilt of having failed to connect
himself with the polis - the “site” of history and destiny, freedom and equality,

justice and judgment, bounces back to consume him. The war to which he said no

and for which he was incarcerated seems to invert into or encroach upon his private

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sphere, his family and friends. Just like the self-accusing body politic projecting self-
hatred into the body of the abject, Ichiro, as the ghost of the public sphere, who
haunts the polis to be reconnected, displaces self-hatred into the inmates of the
private sphere - especially his own mother.

His life turns uncanny from the moment he realizes that he is no longer a
plain “J ap,” which his father is, or the moment at which it dawns upon him that the
uncanny combination of the Asian and the American would never allow him to
plainly identify with the story of the mythical hero Momotaro. In his monologic
address to his mother, Ichiro muses on this condition of uncanny double that depletes
rather than duplicates identity:

There was a time when I was your son. There was a time I no longer

remember when you used to smile a mother’s smile and tell me stories

about gallant and fierce warriors who protected their lords with blades of
shining steel and about the old woman who found a peach in the stream
and took it home and, when her husband split it in half, a husky little boy
tumbled out to fill their hearts with boundless joy. I was that boy in the
peach and you were the old woman . . .it was all right then to be Japanese
and feel and think all the things that Japanese do even if we lived in

America. (15)

And there comes a time as an emergency during which Ichiro is asked to
make a choice, which he fails to do. He fought the hollow idea of being an
American, as he fights the idea of being a Japanese now. His identity in this sense is
neither divided nor double, let alone hybrid; rather that he is left with none, with an
emptiness, due to the ghostly appearance of that part of his identity, as Freud would

have it, which has to remain suppressed:

I wish with all my heart that I were Japanese or that I were American. I am

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neither and I blame you and I blame myself and I blame the world, which

is made of many countries, which fight with each other and kill and hate

and destroy again and again and again. (16)

The severance is at once spatial as well as ontological. To be more precise,
the plane of blame is equally divided between the world, which is not a globe but
countries, and himself, who is not a being, but a spectral double of being and non-
being, both warring against each other, a perpetual killing and destruction.

Arendt’s elucidation of “mere existence” in the political sphere is not
elaborated enough to encompass this violence against oneself that Ichiro’s uncanny
existence instantiates, nor can her notion of the polis adequately describe the merger
of the hearth and the polis that we encounter here in the novel as we do in Heidegger
too. The polis is like a pole, argues Heidegger, towards and around which turns
everyone. He seems to wonder whether there is any “out” to the polis. He suggests
on his book on Holderlin’s Ister that we avoid this unavoidable confusion of
explanation of the logical, the aesthetic, technical, metaphysical and biological.

The essence of the polis he says, “always comes to light, in accordance
with the way in which beings as such in general enter the realm of the unconcealed”
(82). Arendt’s discussion of the rightless is political inasmuch as it is invariably
characterized in relation to treaties, laws, Iegislations and rights, rather than beings
and their relationship to themselves. Whereas in the novel, as well as in Heidegger at
this point, the polis is pre-political so far as what is excluded as non-relational is
included in the polis as prepolitical.

In the novel the lines between the home, the shop, kitchen and the

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bedroom are blurred. The bells at the entrance ring throughout the house. He finds
his home already political, he belongs or does not, for Ma he does, since he is her
true son, who never betrayed her, the true strength of Japan. For the same reason,
however, Taro finds himself an outsider.

. . .even Mr. Carrick, why isn’t he in? Why is he on the outside
squandering his goodness on outcasts like me? May be the answer is that
there is no in. May be the whole damned country is pushing and shoving
and screaming to get into some place that doesn’t exist (159—60).

Ichiro’s realization of this emptiness at the heart of the nation is also the realization
of his own uncanniness, his realization that he inhabits a place that Heidegger calls
the apolis. He is that unheimlich being who is at once everywhere without ever being

anywhere.

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IV. HAUNTING AND GHOSTING IN LAHIRI’S INTERPRETER OF
MALADIES

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
0f dead and living.

- TS Eliot

J humpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer prize winning debut, Intemreter of Maladies,
deals with the problems of belonging, home, exile and immigration. Lahiri’s tales are
deceptively simple but they present subtle pictures of the immigrants’ life portrayed
with uncommon beauty and elaborateness. As Lahiri seems to be an artist that
believes in art as concealment, beneath the light surface of her short stories lie a
poignant world of painful diaspora, a distant but powerfully present ghostly world of
the past, and an eerie socio-political reality in which nations and relations are broken
as quickly and easily as they are built.

This chapter is a critical diagnosis of these worlds veiled in Lahiri’s
narrative grace and stylistic elegance. It dwells primarily on the themes of conflicting
times and confronting geographies inhabited by the uncanny beings and the resultant
sense of incommunicability and trauma that they undergo. In the course of the
discussion this chapter will engage the title story, “When Mr. Pirzada Came to
Dine,” and the last in the collection, “The Third and the Final Continent” in detail,
while the other stories will be touched during the discussion of these themes.

The Watch of the Sandman:
Upon looking closer almost all stories in the collection reveal a consistent

pattern - a room or a house, mis/matched couples or families trying to overcome the

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strangeness imposed most of the time by tradition, and a visible and at times secret
presence of the third other, sometimes in the form of a person, but most of the times
a ghost or a memory, a land or home rendering the rooms and houses and their
neatness and orderliness all unhomely.

In “A Temporary Matter” rooms become both refuge as well as abodes of
secrecy or even haunting spaces, especially after Shoba ends up with delivering a
premature stillborn and her relationship with her husband gets more strained than
ever. She starts preparing on her own to leave her husband:

She would look around the wall of the room, which they had decorated

together last summer with a border of marching ducks and rabbits playing

trumpets and drums. By the end of August there was a cherry crib under
the window, white changing table with mint green knobs. . . For some
reason the room did not haunt him the way it haunted Shoba. In January,
when he stooped working at his carrel in the library, he set up his desk
there deliberately partly because the room soothed him, and partly because

it was a place Shoba avoided. (8)

“When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” is a story about a guest who comes
regularly to the narrator’s house in Boston for dinner. Mr. Pirzada, the guest, is from
a place caught up in the throes of partition, as a result of which he cannot be
introduced in same way as a person from a fixed place. He looks like an Indian, but
he is not; he came to the US on a grant from the government of Pakistan, but he is
not in true sense a Pakistani either, despite his being a citizen of Pakistan. His family
is missing from home in the Eastern Pakistan due to the war for independence and

since the Eastern Pakistan is not yet independent, he cannot be called a Bangladeshi

yet. To make the matters worse. Lilia, the narrator, who knows everything about

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American history, does not seem to have even a slightest idea of the historical turns
that part of the world has been taking.

Almost every evening at six, Mr. Pirzada would come to their house and
announce: “Another refuge, I am afraid, on Indian territory” (28). And he would
hand his coat with no recognizable tags inside to little Lilia along with a variety of
chocolates, and a theatrical bow to her, the “lady of the house,” before they would all
sit in front of the TV invariably every evening after his arrival. Along with him
would also come, as in Hoffmann’s “Der Sandman,” the disturbing news from
another place to which Lilia had never been. The little lady narrator of the story
describes this invasion of her little world in Boston by another place, another time
and another history in very moving terms. The dinner would be served and the diners
would move from the table to the TV, and Mr. Pirzada, would do a very curious
ritual-like thing before eating: he would take out a watch without a band from his
breast pocket, hold it briefly to one of his ears, wind it and put it in front of him
during the dinner time. Since the watch was set to the local time at home in Dacca,
he would never consult it, but he would do the same every evening before meals. The
narrator describes her feeling of uneasiness at the sight of this man, who keeps
multiple times and inhabits multiple locations:

When I saw it that night, as he wound it and arranged it on the coffee

table, an uneasiness possessed me; life, I realized, was being lived in

Dacca first [since Dacca is almost 12 hrs ahead in time]. I imagined Mr.

Pirzada’s daughters rising from sleep, tying ribbons in their hair,

anticipating breakfast, preparing for school. Our meals, our actions, were

only a shadow of what had already happened there, a lagging ghost of
where Mr. Pirzada really belonged. (31)

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During and after the dinner they would concentrate on the news, and the
narrator would occupy her self with her book, but that day her father insisted that she
pay attention to the news, which further eroded her sense of insularity from the
happenings around the world. She describes her exposure to this sandman guest, who
brought the news of destruction and catastrophe:

On the screen I saw tanks rolling through dusty streets, and fallen

buildings, and forests of unfamiliar trees into which East Pakistani

refugees had fled, seeking safety over the Indian border. I saw boats with
fan—shaped sails floating on wide coffee-colored rivers, a barricaded
university, newspaper offices burnt to the ground. I turned to look at Mr.

Pirzada . . .he had an immovable expression on his face, composed but

alert, as if someone were giving him directions to an unknown destination.

. . I wondered if the reason he was always so smartly dressed was in

preparation to endure with dignity whatever news assailed him, perhaps

even to attend a funeral at a moment’s notice. (31)

The Uncanny Hymen:

The story “The Third and Final Continent” talks in its subtle way about
home, belonging and migration. It is a story about a no-name man, who comes to the
third continent to work full time in MIT library. It is narrated by this no-name man,
and is about his experiences in a multiple continents that include Asia, Europe and
North America; but the story revolves round two female figures: a very old woman,
older than a century, and the narrator’s wife, Mala, who follows him to the third
continent.

The narrator lands on the third continent interestingly on the day which

man landed on the moon. His journey from the penury of Bengal to his broke days in

London to the YMCA and MIT is the replica of man’s journey to the moon. When

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his plane began its descent over the Boston Harbor, this nameless narrator hears the
pilots announce the news of “two American men [landing] on the moon,” for which
President Nixon had declared a national holiday. Still in the sky, suspended between
the continents and probably between worlds, as if in a certain sense the two
American men and this half-Bengali - for he was on green card, which is a kind of
citizenship, but not quite, - shared what Immanuel Levinas in his essay “Heidegger,
Gagarin and Us” would call “the absolute of homogeneous space” (233); both the
parties - the inhabitants of the geometrical space, but less geometric and absolute
than Gagarin’s techno-induced abode - the Americans landed on the moon, and the
narrator is about to or at least intends to land in the First World.

The exodus of the narrator and the opening of the final frontier by the
Americans are put together by the almost-metaphysical-conceit of the writer as if to
imply parallels of agency and ingenuity between the acts that seem to demand and
deserve equal credits and recognition. But one needs to be more careful than Levinas
seems to be to praise technology and its alleged capacity in the bid to do away with
human sense of rootedness and the related sense of exile. It took years of labor for
the narrator of the story to shift from SS Roma to the plane. On the other hand, Mrs.
Croft, the narrator’s first American landlady, is obsessed with the idea of the
American conquest of the moon, the splendid feat of science and technology in
which she wants to stay enrooted rest of her sedentary life.

As the story begins we have this Bengali version of Neil Armstrong sailing

on the SS Roma, an Italian cargo vessel, with a certificate of commerce and an

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equivalent of ten dollars to his name. When the story wraps up, he is no longer a
foreigner in Massachusetts, he is a naturalized citizen, has a house, a devoted wife
and a son who is at Harvard, a very much American story with a rags to riches motif.
But there are also patterns of repetition. The nameless narrator’s days, especially
nights at YMCA, remind one of the busy Calcutta streets, with impatient traffic
honking throughout the night, and the stained glasses of the lodging have uncanny
reappearance of the cheap Dharmashalas (lodgings often free of cost) scattered
throughout India. To make the matters worse, Mrs. Croft, his first American landlady
is so typical of her kind that she can be universalized without much harm, and her
rules, especially her objection to lady visitors, remind us of a typical Indian censure
against the unmonitored mixing of young men and women. One cannot fail to hear
the echo of a possessive parent somewhere in India in Mrs. Croft’s directives to her
daughter Helen against talking to the nameless narrator:

When we stood [Helen and the narrator after being called by Mrs. Croft

from downstairs] before her she did not slap the bench, or ask us to sit

down. She glared.

“What is it, Mother?”

“It’s improper!”

“What’s improper?”

“It’s improper for a lady and gentleman who are not married to one

another to hold a private conversation without a chaperon!” (186)
The narrator’s relationship with his wife also was not “proper” in this sense since
they lived like strangers in the house until the day they called on Mrs. Croft.

Marriage in Lahiri is not only an affair of arrangement, as one might just

as well guess to be the case if the cast is typical Indian, but it has an uncanny ring to

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it, an undecipherable ambiguity that reveals the writer’s ironical, if not cynical
attitude towards the issue. The questions of gender and sexuality, identity and
agency, subjectivity and critique of patriarchy, exploitation of the domestic labor and
the debatable issue of reproductivity seem to be artistically articulated without letting
them overwhelm the tone of the “tales.” Whether it is Mrs. Sen, who is also the
mistress of spices married all at once to fish, Bengal and the Professor, displaying the
division of her emotional loyalty to all of them in her scalp parted evenly by the
blood-red verrnillion, or Bibi Haldar uncannily obsessed with the idea of being a
canny housewife, all speak of the ambiguities of arranged marriages, its ills and
illusions, its challenges and hopes, mimicry and mockery.

In this story, “The Third and the Final Continent,” the nameless narrator
married Mala simply because he had to. In his own words: “I regarded the
proposition with neither objection nor enthusiasm. It was a duty expected of me, as it
was expected of every man” (181). As usual it was an arranged marriage to a woman
not fair enough to get married on time. The parents of the girl were ready to send
their daughter overseas instead of keeping her with them eventually to be a spinster,
a kind of culturally sanctioned banishment. If the bargain of marriage was a ritual
exile, her relationship with her husband is one of alienation. Lahiri describes it in her
well-weighed prose, economic and calculative enough to lay bare its theme:

For five nights we shared a bed. Each of those nights, after applying cold

cream [a deliberate attempt to acquire whiteness and desirability, perhaps]

and braiding her hair, which she tied up at the end she turned from me and

wept; she missed her parents . . .. I did nothing to console her. I lay on my
side of the bed, reading my guidebook by flashlight and anticipating my

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journey. At times I thought of the tiny room on the other side of the wall,

which belonged to my mother. Now the room was practically empty; the

wooden pallet on which she had once slept was piled with trunks and old
bedding. Nearly six years ago, before leaving for London, I had watched
her die on that bed, had found her playing with her excrement in her final

days. (181—82)

The narrator begins his married life with, what Derrida in Dissemination
would call the double session, “a double scene upon a double stage” (221). The
nameless narrator leaps fi'om the second continent back into the first to reenter it as if
it were a cave, a vault, a natural grotto or to borrow from Derrida once again, the

antre:

“Antrum, Sanscrit, antara, cleft, cave. Antara properly signifies “interval”

and is thus related to the Latin preposition inter. . . And the entry for

ENTER [“to entef’] ends with the same etymological reference. The

interval of the entre, the in-between of the hymen: one might be tempted

to visualize these as the hollow or bed of a valley (vallis) . . . (212).

The narrator at the moment is in such a dark grotto, the Platonic cave or
more precisely the Platonic bed, which is at once an antre and an entrance, an
opening as well as a closure that opens on the other side, a house that is unhomely,
which turns the inhabitant into an entity which is contiguous with antara, which also
means “difference.” The hymen is such a habitat wherein borders the union of
marriage on the membrane of separation: Mala getting separated fi'om her parents,
and the narrator, instead of reposing in the marriage bed, reading the guide book for
the third and the final continent. In the double session of the hymen the beds

converge - the nuptial bed changing into the one on which his mother gasped her last

in her own excrement.

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The guidebook he was reading by the flashlight eventually takes him to the
flames with which he touched the temple of his mother to ignite her pyre. The logic
of the hymen, the logic of consummation and cremation, unveils the affinities
between the wedding songs and the dirge of mourning, both embedded into the
hymn, huphos or humnos, both etymological references to what Derrida calls the
hymnographies (213).

The house, which is unhomely, the hymen veiled by the film of
remembrance is also an antre, which is an entre, the suspension or in-betweenness of
the binaries of continents and discontents, union and separation, consummation and
cremation, life and death. Derrida tries to differentiate his logic of the hymen fiom
Freud’s Das Unheimliche, in contrast to which he sums up the argument of the
whole book, Dissemination, typically in the footnote:

We are referring less to the text in which Freud is directly inspired by

Abel (1910) than to Das Unheimliche (1919), of which we are here, in

sum, proposing a rereading, we find ourselves constantly being brought

back to that text by the paradoxes of the double and of repetition, the
blurring of the boundary lines between “imagination” and “reality,”

between the “symbol” and the “thing it symbolizes.” (220)

Derrida’s rereading of Freud’s interface of heimliche—unheimliche with the
proposed replacement of entre-antre and the logic of the hymen plays out or mimics
the very ambiguity of Freudian uncanny with a difference, as it were with an antara -
at once what is inside and what is different from it, or outside, hence undecidable,

suspended. He continues:

“Undecidability” is not caused here by some enigmatic equivocality , some
inexhaustible ambivalence of a word in a “natural” language, and still less

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by some “Gegensinn der Urworte” (Abel). [In hymen, no repetition of
Hegelian Aufhebung, no marveling over the lucky accidents of natural
languages or the speculative play of dialectics, Freud’s included, as if
Freud’s speculation over the homonymy is merely an identification of
contradiction (Gegensinn) or at worst a misinterpretation]. What counts
here is not the lexical richness, the semantic infiniteness, of a word or a
concept, its depth or breadth, the sedimentation that has produced inside it
two contradictory layers of signification (continuity and discontinuity,
inside and outside, identity and difference, etc.). What counts here is the
formal or syntactic praxis that composes and decomposes it. We’ve indeed
been making believe that everything could be traced to the word hymen
[an apt realization of how much he owes to those whom he criticizes]. But
the irreplaceable character of this signifier, . . .was laid out like a trap. This
word, this syllepsis [which Derrida defines as “mixed tropes . . .consit[ing]
of taking one and the same word in two different senses, probably a
politics of numbers he would return to towards the end of the same book,
as opposed to the constant shift between two words to the effect of
producing the same meaning] is not indispensable; . . . It [hymen]
produces the effect first and foremost through the syntax, which

disposes the “entre” in such a way that the suspense is due only to the
placement and not to the content of the words. (220)

Before we continue with Derrida’s rereading of Freud’s Urworteism, as if

the former never resorts to it, even not when he in the same text follows the traces of
“antre” in Latin, Greek, “Sanscrit,” Spanish etc., and without going into Derrida’s
privileging of the formalistic and the syntactic over what he calls the [Freudian]

“semantic” (221), let us look at the formalistic or textual features of this story.

The houses in all three continents are maintained by the rhythms of entry

and exit and the differences between. The syncopation of entre and antre in the

bachelor house at Finsbury Park in London is described in these terms:

Every now and then someone in the house moved out to live with the
woman his family back in Calcutta had determined he was to wed. (174)

This continues as if it were the only way to create more room for the new comers

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Min;

 

into the house. But the house into the next continent is no less haunted with the
rhythms of the entre, with its dark grotto that seems to open on both sides, as if to
enter is also to exit, which not only suggests constant movement from a continent to
the other, but a conflation and consummation without fulfillment, a movement out
that also draws the one who moves in. After living like a stranger with Mala, the
narrator leaves for the third continent, where he had a job waiting, but no home. He
looks for a place and finds a room in a century-old woman’s house, who is obsessed
not only with the idea of American victory over the moon, but also with keeping her
house locked to all but “boys” from Harvard and Tech. The narrator anyhow moves
out of this place only to come back time and again to her house, which he calls his
first home in America:
Whenever we make that drive, I always make it a point to take
Massachusetts Avenue, in spite of the traffic. I barely recognize the
building now, but each time I am there, I return instantly to those six
weeks as if they were only the other day, and slow down and point to Mrs.
Croft’s street, saying to my son, here was my first home in America, where
I lived with a woman who was 103. “ Remember?” Mala says, and smiles,
amazed, as I am, that there was ever a time that we were strangers. (197)
And one can ask Mala, where is a family which has no stranger or a house
without its ghosts? Aren’t they afraid of their own son, who is getting stranger day
after day? Isn’t that precisely the reason why Mala weeps now, instead of weeping
for people back “home”? They visit him as often as they can, and sometimes bring
this intimate stranger home for a weekend, “so that he can eat rice with us with his
hands, and speak in Bengali, things we sometimes worry he will no longer do after
we die” (197).

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The presence of the intimate alien in the family is almost an obsession in
Lahiri’s stories. Shoba, in “A Temporary Matter,” plays the game of memory, of
revisiting past in anecdotes, in order to prepare her husband and herself for her
decision to break up, - memory and perpetration - an effort to reconcile with the fact
that they have been living together but like strangers. In “When Mr. Pirzada Came to
Dine” Mr. Pirzada and the news from “home” are always intimate strangers. The
presence of the intimate stranger is part of the plot of “Interpreter of Maladies.”
Boori Ma, a refugee of “A Real Durwan” is a stranger (with all her strange stories
that are extremely unbelievable and inconsistent with her present) living in all type
of unhomely places like rooftops, or under the letter box, yet familiar; Dev and
Miranda’s love story in “Sexy;” Eliot in “Mrs. Sen’s;” the blessings littered house of
“The Blessed House,” which starts crumbling in spite of the blessings themselves;
the absent and unknown father in “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar,” who became
instrumental in the treatment of the Bibi, are some instances of strangers being the
indispensable element of the families in the making (or breaking). The figure of the
stranger is not always the figure of the foreigner - in fact some of the stories, like the
title story, “Interpreter of Maladies,” play with this idea of foreigner and stranger. In
the beginning of the title story, Mr. Kapasi, who is supposed to drive the Das family
to the Sun temple, wonders whether they are foreigner as their clothes and accents
suggest or just native strangers, for they look Indian. Nor are the intimate strangers
the elements that alienate us from ourselves, as Kristeva seems to suggest in her

Strangers to Ourselves. Here Derrida’s hairsplitting of antre is more useful, the cave

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as cleft and difference, at once sheltering and exposing to the other(side), which in
turn puts into question the often praised nostalgia for the so-called original home.

However, on the other hand, the textual, formalistic and syntactic effect of
the unhomely of the hymen in the story is, unlike Derrida’s assumptions, neither
dispensable nor replaceable, though repetitious. His critique of the Urwortes, his
deconstruction of a certain practice of semantic analysis that tries to trace the word
back up to its so-called original, which is in turn held against the diachronic
accretion of meaning of the term, get challenged vis-a-vis a system where antre-entre
are controlled by “a certificate in commerce and the equivalent” that allow the
narrator to enter the first continent in the beginning of the story; by the mantras of
Harvard/Tech and the “splendid” to Mrs. Croft’s exhilaration - “There is an
American Flag on the moon,” which reminds the narrator of the endless wreaths of
Sanskrit verses he repeated without knowing what they were during his wedding
ceremony.

All these foreign cards and mantras are as indispensable as irreplaceable.
No supplement, as was the case with Jasmine. Derrida is right in pointing out that the
hymen effect is produced “first and foremost through the syntax, which disposes the
“entre” in such a way that the suspense is due to the placement and not to the content
(emphasis added) of words” (220). The content or the meaning of the words,
whether in the password of Harvard and Tech, (since he was not a student in either),
or of Sanskrit verses that married him to a woman whom he barely knew by the sole

authority that the verses were in Sanskrit, so completely unintelligible; or Mrs.

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Croft’s “she is a perfect lady,” which marries him to his wife in reality, is secondary
since these utterances function as syntagrns or syncategorems, as Derrida would say,
that are effective in terms of their placement, of being in the right place, performed
according to the rules rather than their essential value or content. But they are not
easily substitutable.

Here is a narrator, without a name, but with worlds and continents and not
necessarily an in-between, but a dweller of a cave that opens on all sides without
actually opening. What constitutes the life of this creature is the invasion of the
unroomy texts of/about rooms by the global. What sanctifies the narrator’s marriage
is the seal of the other not simply as an assent and acceptance. Even though in her
room, Mrs. Croft declares from her death bed that Mala is a perfect lady, what brings
the narrator close is the feeling that Mala is what the narrator himself was years back
in London, when he used to confuse “paper” with “piper,” etc. The narrator recalls:

Like me Mala has traveled far from home, not knowing where she was

going, or what she would find, for no reason other than to be his wife. As

strange as it seemed, I know in my heart, that one day her death would
affect me [unlike the old lady, who survived her husband’s death, which
affected her, but not to the extent of succumbing to it, was the case with
the narrator’s mother after her husband’s death], and stranger still, that

mine would affect her. (195)

In “Living On: Border Lines,” Derrida reads Shelley’s “The Triumph of
Life” and Blanchot’s “L’arret de mort” together to show the contiguous borderline of
texts, their interface not only with each other, but with the world outside:

When a text quotes and requotes, with or without quotation marks, when it

is written in the brink, you start, or indeed have already started, to lose
your footing. You lose sight of any line of demarcation between a text and

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what is outside it (81-82).

Without going into the details of the enriching play of words in Derrida’s
text and its bordering upon “The Third and the Final Continent,” which, like the
issue of “the bord, the edge, the border, and the bord de mer, the shore” (82), is also
a shipboard journal that the nameless narrator, not very unlike the nameless narrator
of Blanchot’s “Death Sentence/ Suspension of Death, narrates to his wife, let us go to
the issue of boarding, of rooms with which Derrida opens the merging yet
typographically separated borders of the ‘major’ text and the economy of the house -
the oikos, at once economically room, tomb, crypt, savings, reserve, reversion (76).
What is important here is the ghosting of the “I” and the haunting in the room, which
finally reunited the couple of the story. When the narrator goes to Mrs. Croft’s place
with his wife, Mala, Mrs. Croft sees “ what has to remain hidden.”

In L ’ arrét de mort J is dying, [here in Lahiri’s story the woman has just
broken her hips; J asks for death, if denied, that would be a murder; Mrs. Croft in
Lahiri is full of life in death] and the narrator is called, who arrives only after J’s
death:

“I” arrives in the dead woman’s room. The room is the privileged place of

la chose in all these stories, domestic but utterly foreign (unheimlich), left

in the coldest anonymity [like the room of the narrator’s mother in Bengal
and Mrs. Croft’s room with her long muted piano], sealed off [locks are
important in both stories], usually a hotel room [YMCA in Lahiri], in any
case devoid of any other description, reduced to the most indispensable
constants of Western habitation: a bed on the edge of which one sits, at
times an armchair that one tries to reach, a door, a lock and in L’ arrét

de mort, keys . . .outside, corridors and stairways. (121-22)

It is against this constant of the western habitation, the privileged abode of

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the room, is posited the logic of the unhomely. Even though “I” or in Lahiri “we”
arrive in the woman’s room, yet the “we” get reconciled not by any merger of the
borders, nor by the woman’s death, but by the irreconcilable difference between the
dying woman and the one who is already dead, the narrator’s mother and the one
who has yet to begin her life in the US, his wife. The narrator explains:
I wanted somehow to explain this [the difficulties of a newcomer, her
ignorance about things like the piano] to Mrs. Croft, who was still
scrutinizing Mala from top to toe with what seemed to be placid disdain. I
wondered if Mrs. Croft had ever seen a woman in sari, with a dot painted
on her forehead and bracelets stacked on her wrists. I wondered what she
would object to. I wondered if she could see the red dye still vivid on
Mala’s feet, all but obscured by the bottom edge of her sari. (195)
What follows the description of the good wife is the complicit assent from
Mrs. Croft - She is a perfect lady. The I, the subject that arrives in the room of the
woman, who is dying, gets objectified as the good wife and a perfect lady. As the
narrator suspects, Mrs. Croft might not have any idea of what that dye, the covered
head with the free-end of sari, the dot in the middle of the forehead, cold cream
applied to the brown arms and the coconut oil applied to the scalp divided by red
verrnilion, mean. The complete incomprehensibility as objectified wonder makes
Mrs. Croft’s judgment possible. The “I” arrives with this realization of difference
and incommunicability between the continents, heavily guarded with green cards and

keys.

The Race of the Interpreters:

 

The narrator’s realization of the duty to save Mala, and Mrs. Croft’s

exoticization without understanding becomes more complex in the title story,

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“Interpreter of Maladies.” The figure of the interpreter around whom the story is set
can be traced to the narrative residues of the colonial fictions or the embodiment of
Macaulay’s vision of the middlemen/mimic men between the Raj and the “natives.”
Talking about this “race” of humanity, Bhabha in his The Location of Culture
observes that it owes its philosophy to the Burdwan Plan, 1818, which follows the
vision of Missionary Schools, and which is followed by Tom Macaulay’s infamous
“Minute on Education,” that plans, to quote Bhabha quoting Macaulay, to “form a
body of well instructed laborers, competent in their proficiency in English to act as
Teachers, Translators, and Compilers of useful works for the masses of the people”
(106). To complicate the scenario, Lahiri presents Mr. Das as the double of Mr.
Kapasi, as the former draws, during the rounds of preliminary introduction between
the parties, an interesting parallel between Kapasi and himself:

Mr. Kapasi turned to Mr. Das.

“Where in America do you live?”

New Brunswick, New Jersey.”

“Next to New York?”

“Exactly. I teach middle school there.”

“What subject?”

“Science. In fact, every year I take my students on a trip to the Museum of

Natural History in New York City. In a way we have a lot in common, you

could say, you and I. How long have been a tour guide Mr. Kapasi?” (46)

Their fate is intertwined not only by profession and their belonging to the
race of the interpreters and the tourist guides, but also by their education - one
educated in the model of the British Raj, the other in the model of the New World.
His get up, the way he shook Mr. Kapasi’s hand, his language, his relationship with
the family, his wife and children, the way they take turns to bring their daughter to

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the restroom, all speak of his incorporation of the values of the world he lives in. On
the way to the Sun Temple, Mr. Das had, like American tourists, a flashy tourist
guide in his hand from which he could read the historical details of the shrine, its
importance, its architecture and much more, in a nut shell, exactly like Mr. Kapasi,
who, despite his suspicion that his kids speak better English than himself, could read
almost all the European languages and could speak a fair amount of each without
dictionary. The only difference could be that the Das come every other year to India
to visit their retired parents, who yoked them together in marriage almost by a ruse, a
sort of hodgepodge marriage - both love and arranged -, whereas Mr. Kapasi seemed,
despite his one time ambition to be the ambassador of peace between the nations, not
to have set his foot out of India at all, a reminder on both sides of the fact that their
belonging to either of the world can be justifiably interrogated.

The Das have to go to India, without actually being of it, whereas Kapasi
has to stay there, without belonging to it by spirit and desire, which gets explicit with
the scene at the monastic dwellings of the Udaygiri and Khandagiri, especially the
helplessness that Mr. Das exhibits at the encounter with the monkeys and the dismay
that escapes from Kapasi’s flushed face at the sight of the slip of address, the last
straw of being linked to the West, to the foreign country getting blown by the wind
as Mrs. Das whips out her hair brush from her bag. The double duplicates again into
a loss of a child. Kapasi knows that he lost a child due to his poorly paid job as an
English Grammar teacher and his wife never forgave him for taking up the job of the

interpreter with the doctor who could not save their son’s life. In contrast to this ever

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repeating pain of the loss, Mr. Das is unaware of the fact that one of the kids, who is
always around him, is not his own.

The rounds of misunderstanding, in spite of the presence of the guides and
interpreters, continue with Mina’s complimenting Mr. Kapasi for his job, which she
finds “so romantic” (50). The way the compliment was uttered despite her
“extended silence,” roused even Mr. Das from his book: “What’s so romantic about
it?” (50). Upon her request Kapasi relates a typical situation in his job as an
interpreter - once a patient came to see the doctor with throat pain, which he
described in Gujarati, which in turn Kapasi translated to the doctor. Mrs. Das is
perceptive enough to see that the patient is dependent more on him than the doctor
and his job of the interpreter is a big responsibility. The compliments surprise Kapasi
too, for whom his job is nothing less than a sign of his being a failure. With his
knowledge of many foreign languages he wanted to be the interpreter for the
dignitaries and help them solve the disputes between the nations. But the reason why
the reserved Mina was generous with the compliment was that she also had a wound
inside her which wanted words and interpretation and she thought Kapasi would be
the right person to reveal her wound to. So on their way back fi'om the temple she
decided to stay in the car with Kapasi, while her husband and the children went to
see the monastery. She pointed at Bobby, one of her sons, who was surrounded by a
bunch of wild monkeys, but was fearlessly passing a stick back and forth with a
monkey, and while Kapasi admired the boy, partly in order to compliment Mina,

Mina told him suddenly that the reason why Bobby is more courageous than Ronny

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was that he was not Raj’s son.

“A brave little boy,” Mr. Kapasi commented.
“It’s not so surprising,” Mrs. Das said.
“No?”

“He’s not his.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Raj’s. He’s not Raj’s son.”

Mr. Kapasi felt a prickle on his skin. He reached into his shirt pocket for

the small tin of lotus-oil balm he carried with him at all times, and applied

it to three spots on his forehead. (62)

But instead of giving her consolation, which she had expected fi'om a
person wont to hearing complains from patients and translating them to the doctors
and saving their lives, here Kapasi fell silent. He fails to understand Mina’s situation,
especially her marriage, which in reality was a trap set by their parents (both her and
Raj’s) to keep both of them away from other fiiends, possibly non-Indians in New
Jersey:

“Mr. Kapasi, don’t you have anything to say? I thought that was your job.”

“My job is to give tours, Mrs. Das.”

“Not that. Your other job. As an interpreter.”

“But we do not face a language barrier. What need is there for an

interpreter?” (65)

What is a terrible feeling for Mina is just a “common, trivial little secret”
(66) for Kapasi and he interprets it as her guilt rather than pain. These two displaced,
uncanny creatures fail to understand each other.

She turned to him and glared, mustard oil thick on her frosty pink lips. She

opened her mouth to say something, as she glared at Mr. Kapasi some

certain knowledge seemed to pass before her eyes, and she stopped. It

crushed him; he knew at the moment that he was not even important
enough to be properly insulted. (66)

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The confidence that suddenly turned into contempt is reflected in the scene
that follows, when Bobby was surrounded by monkeys ready to attack him. Suddenly
the whole trip of “homecoming” and visiting a familiar tourist place turns sinister
and violent. When Mina went back to her children and husband, Bobby was not
there. They started calling him, and found him surrounded by a bunch of monkeys.
Raj stood all nervous and non—plussed. He made the situation worse by accidentally
clicking the shutter in the camera and with its whirr, excited the monkeys:

“What are we supposed to do? What if they start attacking?” (68)

The whole homecoming changes into an unhomely encounter with the strange or
geheim (secret) life of the visitors and the tour guides, who at the critical moments of
mutual misunderstanding feel more disconnected than close and find each other more

exposed than enclosed in each other’s the personal sphere.

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V. DICTATION, DISPLACEMENT AND DISMISSAL IN DICTEE

I’M nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there ’5 a pair of us—don’t tell!
They ’d banish us, you know.
- Emily Dickinson

Worlding in DICTEE:

Nicole Cooley in her essay on DICTEE quotes Cha, who describes her text
as a “Tracing of names, events and biographies through non-linear narrative accounts
in Nine parts. Interlocking of non-fictional events and mythology based associations”
(Cooley 120). In other words, the writer herself conceived the text in fragments,
which in turn serve as the objective correlative to the theme of disconnection that
pervades the text.

The reception of this strange book also documents the readers’ perplexity
in the face of its fragrnentariness, its uncompromising resistance to any constraints of
narrative forms, genres and themes. Ling criticizes it for its heavy ‘materiality,’ by
which he means its text-centricity or its immaterial theoretical construct devoid of
practical or ideological work. Ling argues that texts like DICTEE exemplify a
politics of dehistoricization and despatialization, which he calls an offspring of
“Nietzschean perspectivism,” by itself false to the historical realities, and a
justification of modern tendency towards “avant-garde celebration of difference”
(Ling 9).

As if to answer Ling, Lowe in Immiggant Acts argues that DICTEE is at

once an Asian American text, a postcolonial text, and a woman’s text (129), which

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resists any heavy materiality or any all-encompassing theories of the text. Besides
arguing for DICTEE’s anti-developmental narrative, its “fragmented recitation,”
“episodic nonidentity,” and its “aesthetic[s] of infidelity,” Lowe thinks that DICTEE
thwarts the reader’s desire to abstract a notion of ethnic or national identity (129).
Not only that it subverts colonial or imperialistic interpellations, but also because it
poses critical problems to the emerging fields of Asian American Studies, Third
World Studies, or Women’s Studies (130). On the other hand though, Lowe finds in
DICTEE crucial connections between anti-irnmigrant sentiments at home in the
United States and imperialistic expansion in the third world (131). In other words, in
spite of the problematic of categorization, the topos of DICTEE’s aesthetics of
infidelity is at once opposed to ethnicization or nationalization of the origin and the
wholesale assimilation into or annexation by the Western cultures.

Ling’s suspicion is not wholly unfounded or unwarranted, though, for
there are readings of this text that primarily focus on its avant-garde tendencies. For
example Elizabeth A. Frost, in her essay on DICTEE notes that Cha represents
“contemporary women conceptual artists and avant-garde poets” (181), and for Frost
DICTEE connotes “a postmodern fractured state of being” (182). Even though she
finds hybridity, diaspora and postcolonial dispersal embodied into the text, yet she
thinks that the images belie their hermeticism.

As opposed to these debates over ideology, textuality and avant-gardism,
Elaine Kim in her contribution to the collection of critical essays on the text believes

that the insertion of Korea into the text resists the effacement of Korean history in

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the West (10). She also believes that it helps correct the assumptions that East Asians
are either Japanese or Chinese, and it critiques the vilifications of North Korea by US
military and government leaders as the most dangerous nation on earth. In contrast to

the alienating and reifying character of DICTEE Kim recalls a Korean student in her

 

class, who usually kept quite, but actively took part in the discussion on DICTEE.
She argues that DICTEE gave him an opportunity “to be “of’ instead of merely “in”
America by giving him something from American Literature to call his own” (21). In
short, for her, DICTEE as a text acts like a world in doubles, the in—between of the
world; and its ideological work is at once its affirmation and reinscription of identity
against attempts of erasure and elision. She thinks that DICTEE is an attempt to be a
Diseuse, who finds herself in many in-betweenness - in-between the worlds, selves,
nations, cultures, languages, identities, roles, relations etc. She argues that DICTEE
is about “negotiating the tensions between self and the world, the interior and the
exterior, the body and language, the creator and the viewer, nationalist and the
female concerns” (14).

The third space of the exilic selves, the locus beyond the either/or and of
not-belonging for her are forms of agency and empowerment. The text is a “personal
dwelling place that makes survival possible,” and for her the text itself becomes the
hyphen that separates Korean from the American in Korean-American identity.
Otherwise argues Kim, there are only two options open for people of color in the
United States: inferior difference or invisible sameness.

Even though Kim’s attempts to bring DICTEE to “critical” notice is commendable,

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her theoretical approach celebrating “the third space” or the in-betweenness, fails to
account for the state of uncanniness a dictee is constantly exposed to. Kim notices
the spectralization of the whole nation on the basis of the ideology or politics it
follows, but she fails to extend it to the individuals, who, due to their non-relational
relation with “home,” get converted into dangerous beings to be suspected, dismissed
and finally persecuted.

Juliana Spahr pushes Kim’s position further in her appreciation of the text
and argues that MB is “a prime textual example of what Mary Louise Pratt calls
a “contact zone,” by which she means a social space where difl‘erent cultures meet,
clash and struggle with one another in an asymmetrical relations of domination and
subordination (129). For her the porosity of m as a text represents challenge to
conventional reading as well as dominant patterns of thinking (124). She employs the
in-between metaphor once again as a way out of the deadlock that Rushdie’s
remaking of English language and Ngugi’s rejection of English have posed to the
readers, for m breaks colonialism’s policing of language, control of culture
through its “non-native language practices, collage, translation and multilingualism
(127). She also thinks that DICTEE is engaged in a creative and critical dialogue
ever since its publication with texts like Catalina Cariaga’s Cultural Evidence, Carla

Harryman’s In the Mode of, Myung Mi Kim’s Under Flag and The Boung, Walter

 

Lew’s Excerpts from Aik_1h_, and Trinh Minh-ha’s “Grandma’s Story” in Woman

 

Native, Other (152).

Spahr is right in observing that DICTEE seems to unknot the impasse

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posed by Rushdie and Ngugi, but the politics of translation, transition and
transliteration is more problematic in DICTEE insofar as its collage of various
languages and media suggests a state of incommunicability rather than inspiration.
Not only that the text leaves several terms and notions un—translated or un-
transliterated, but also that even the tentative translation defies its basic rules. As a
result the contact zone of languages and cultures becomes a site of disorientation and
disillusionment.

In her essay on DICTEE Shu-mei Shih proposes a diasporic nationalism

 

and postcolonial hybridity and the trauma of separation and loss as the guiding
themes of the text. She also gives a succinct history of the external invasion and the
internal colonization of Korea by the dictators, who act as the puppets in the hand of
foreign powers to maintain themselves in power. The palpable history of bloodshed
can be said to have begun, says Shih, with the Japanese colonial rule of 1910-43,
which is followed by the partition of Korea after the defeat of Japan in the second
World War, the Korean civil war of 1950-53 that results in the neocolonial military
presence after the war. The aftermath of these foreign incursions is the “autocratic
rules of Rhee Syngman and Park Chung-bee until 1979, and numerous political
coups, and demonstration from the 19605 to the present day including the bloody
Kwangju incident (1980)” (Shih 147), during which probably Cha was in Korea for
shooting her film.

Hyun Yi Kang in her essay “The Liberatory Voice” of Theresa Hak Kyung

Cha’s Dicte'e” recounts her encounter with DICTEE in a slightly different way:

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My subjective positioning [meaning probably her place as “a bilingual

Korean immigrant woman embarking upon an uncertain future”] in

relation to the text was most evident during the very first encounter when I

found myself literally yelling at the book. (75)

Her reaction to this “slippery text” (75) leads Kang to conclude that the
text is itself an articulation of inaccessibility and incomprehensibility, which resists
any simple act of identification, or what she calls “the instant mirroring” (76). For
Kang DICTEE is a collaborative work by “writers,” who take multiple positions of
enunciation and representation. The writer for Kang is all at once “a story teller, a
scribe, a transmitter, a revisioning historian, a translator, a camera lens, a catholic
penitent, a poet writing in French, a student, a reciter” (78). For her DICTEE
represents a refusal of the individualization of the genre, which it is supposed to be -
autobiography.

But instead of dwelling more on the problems of the incommunicable in
the text, Kang goes on to enumerate the ways in which the multi-layered narrative of
DICTEE contains the voice of liberation. As a result of which the readers like Kim
or Kang at once perceive the tension in the text and miss it by trying to give or seek
from it a direction.

The Problem of the Genre:

The problem of non-belonging or non-relation, which constitutes the major

tenor of the text continues from languages, subject positions, narrative voices, and

worlding to that of the genre as well. If Lowe and Kang calls it a multi-text by

multiple author functions, thus un-appropriable, for Kim it is ownable, identifiable

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revisionary history, or the story, argues Kim, obviously following Trinh T Minha,
that Cha’s mother could not tell.

Eun Kyung Min on the other hand proposes that ME is made of
citations, and it is an art of reproduction and displacement, of putting excerpts from
one text and medium into the other, thus devoid of any referential value at all (319).
Cheng’s reading of the text as a novel, a work of difference, mirnesis and fantasy
comes close to what Min has in mind. In her book The Mglancholy of Race. she
argues that the first thing one confronts in QICLEE is its resistance towards its own
visibility (142). Besides rendering the text invisible, along with its drive towards
anti-documentation, decontextualization, and homelessness, especially through
uncaptioned or stranded images, she thinks that the “subject” of this text, if there is
any in the first place, is hardly locatable or identifiable.

Her “original” contribution in the interpretation of the text is her analysis
of race in the text as collective fantasy or the unconscious, in which she draws
insights fiom Freud, Lacoue-Labarthe, Michael Omi and Howard Winant. The
relevance becomes at once obvious when she supports Omi and Winant’s idea of
race as the fantasmatic, the only “organizing principle, which traverses both public
and private experiences.” For her the psychoanalytical concept of the fantasmatic
breaks down the division between what is real and material and what is dreamed and
illusory (167-8). Thus the fantasmatic world of I_)_I_(_3_T_E_E is also the world of echoes
and ghosts. Cheng tries to problematize Lowe’s Althusserian reading of DICTEE by

arguing that interpellation is void if the hailing is not always already present in the

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subject hailed.

Michael Stephens’s essay on DICTEE which is probably the first critical

 

notes ever written on the text, calls it a “song,” and relates it to the Korean instinct
for songs and Korea’s lyrical landscape. He sets the notes on the background of
Korean mountains, which he thinks to be partly the reason for Chinese, Japanese, or
Russian - he doesn’t mention the U. S. - lust for Korea. For him DICTEE is a small
novel that can be better understood, “not as fiction, not as a philosophy [even though
a little earlier he found it influenced, as he thought the whole country was, by
Chinese Confucianism], not as religious meditation, all of which it is to various
degrees - but as a song” (191). He continues to feminize and exoticize it by arguing
that its “sound is that of a Korean woman speaking in her invented English, . .
.jagged and broken like the mountains, and always resonating” (191). Thus Stephens
locates this resonating song in the jagged mountains of Korea and effaces the travails
of the “someone fi'om a far” that we encounter on page one of the text. It is taken to
the extreme with his comparison of Cha with two other twentieth century Korean
poets - Kim Souol and Yi Sang, who he says died early like Cha herself (197).
Stephens’ “American” perspective on D_IC_TE is pushed further by his
European counterpart, Kirsten Twelbeck, who like Stephens, thinks that D_IC_T__E§ is
a musical text, but unlike Stephens, she does not locate it in the lyrical landscape of
Korea, but in the “semantic breakdown” [not the syntactic] of the text (195). In her
comparative and highly textual analysis, she thinks _I_)_I_C_T;E_E to be at once an

experience in cultural otherness and suggestive of the former class enemy crossing

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the German iron curtain (195). The beauty of her essay is her attempt to walk the fine
line between her criticism of the contributors of Writing Self and Nation, especially
Kim, for their pretentious claim of being the cultural insiders, which, for Twelbeck,
implies the “claim to cultural ownership” (185), and her own attempt to read it vis-a-
vis Hyun, another Korean American writer’s autobiography, In the New World,
which she thinks shares with DICTEE what she calls their “cultural perspectivism”
(194).

Almost similar reading is found in Trinh’s Woman, Native, Other, where
she compares DICTEE with a Grandma’s story that passes on “from generation to
generation” (119) and becomes the history of people’s coming into being. For her if
history tells us what happened in a specific time and space, a story not only tells us
what might have happened but what is happening too, its revelatory power vis—a-vis
the present. She compares the figure of the diseuse with the African griot or griotte,
whom she defines as keepers and transmitters in contrast to writers and creators; they
are for her the archives of human memory that teem libraries all over the world.

Diseuse, Thought-Woman, Spider-Woman, griotte, storytalker, fortune-

teller, witch. If you have the patience to listen, she will take delight in

relating it to you. An entire history, an entire vision of the world, a life
time story. Mother always has a mother. And Great Mothers are recalled as
goddesses of all waters, the source of diseases and healing, the
protectresses of women and of childbearing. To listen carefully is to

preserve. (121)

In this poetic world of the healing and destroying Mother, who is but a link

in the chain of the mothers, what is not accounted for is the disjunction or difference,

forced or voluntary rupture created into the filiative circle of the generations of the

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mothers or “peoples.” Trinh’s use of Cha in the discourse of the native or even just
Woman, with capital W in singular is bound to miss the violence involved in the act
of translation, the act of transmitting experiences in the language that is not one’s
own. Nor does it do justice to the multivocal world of DICTEE.

Shelley Sunn Wong, on the contrary, notes that DICTEE is anti-
representational, by which she means its resistance to be a type, specimen or
example. She blames western aesthetics since Schiller for its gesture of trying to fix
the “location of a site of reconciliation and resolution and its function to “harmonize
the individual within “himself” and with society” (47). Cha, as “an Asian Immigrant
artist, film maker and writer trained within the western academy,” struggles with this
tradition and tries to problematize the inheritance rather than incorporating it or
letting it assimilate. Wong cites two notions - home and contestation as example of
Cha’s struggle against the trend. She argues that home within the western tradition
generally is “end point or finalization,” whereas for a postcolonial subject like Cha,
“home will be a situation continually being fought over, [and] for ever in the
making” (47).

Turnigof the Tables or the Figure of the Diseuse:

The politics of home, world, and genre continues into the problematic of
the location of the figure of the diseuse that recurs in the text. For Elaine Kim, it is a
Korean entertainer- kisaeng, the Korean equivalent of Japanese geisha, who
represents a romantic character of Korean heritage often born of a noble man and a

low-bom woman (14). For Wong on the other hand she is a Greek figure often

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associated with the mythical Demeter and Persephone. The interesting figure of the
diseuse - somewhat a diminutive version of the French diseuse de bonne aventure -
the fortune teller, is such an unfortunate creature that she at times is hardly able to
say anything, let alone telling fortune or entertaining. Diseuse of the text seems to be
no other than the infantalized version of the culturally displaced, who has to start her
life in the new culture from the rubble. She often sounds like a subhuman mimicking
human speech or, as the text has it, her mimicking ends up producing endless drone
of bared noise, groan or bits from words (3).

In After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives which is in many ways similar to

 

DICTEE Edward Said also points out in a different site to the production of this

 

subhuman figure mimicking human speech, at times in mockery. He tries to create
explanatory links between a series of photographs of Palestinians in refugee camps.
Aware of the difficulty inherent in such a task, he makes an interesting remark,
which might as well be true about DICTEE itself:
Exile is a series of portraits without names, without contexts. Images that
are largely unexplained, nameless, mute. I look at them without precise

anecdotal knowledge, but their realistic exactness nevertheless makes a
deeper impression than mere information [or in DICTEE narration]. (12)

 

If Said’s nameless and muted exiles are capable of leaving deeper
impressions, Rushdie’s experience in a similar context is no less disorienting. His
frequently quoted essay, “Imaginary Homelands” begins with the description of a
photograph of “his” old house, a black and white picture, not very unlike the pictures

in DICTEE shot before he was born. He had no other options than to feed on the

 

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monochromatic images like this, which renders all past before exile foreign. But the
photograph, in spite of its drab monochromaticism, and its apparent foreignness,
leads him to believe that his present is what is foreign as all the colors come back
during his encounter with the house. He describes Midnight’s Children as his attempt
to replace the gray memory of the childhood home, to “restore the past to myself, not
in the faded grays of old family-album snapshots, but whole, in CinemaScope and
glorious Technicolor” (10).

Cha never bothers to replace the gray mnemonics of her photographs with
the brilliant CinemaScope; the imaginary homeland somehow preserves in Cha its
representational value, or, to appropriate a Lacanian term, a “gestur ” value, or even
to go further, a traumatic value. In other words, instead of she imagining the lost
house of the past, the house imagines her or she is haunted by the images of the
home she lost in the traumatic experience of her brother’s death, the Japanese
occupation of Korea and the eventual partition of the nation due to the Western
imperialistic interventions. The traumatic experience, in short, continues to dictate
the very subject formation in the text.

The question of the beginning of this text and its title is thus put into
question; a text made of quotations - from films, text book exercises, poems, history,
or colonial documents, photographs, calligraphy, letters, diary, etc.- has probably no
beginnings, probably because its beginning is always elsewhere. Therefore Shelley
Sunn Wong cautions those readers who start, as usual with the first page and do not

even bother to look what precedes it, which in the present text, thinks Wong, is

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inextricable from the rest of the text. So the first page that talks about the first day of
dictation dictating about the first day of a person from “a far away” in a foreign
place, is not the beginning in the real sense of the term, for it is preceded by another
important “text” - for it stands on its own; it is a text that has its own history, its own
separate language, separate script, the Hangul script of the Koreans, the only text in
Hangul in the whole book - the frontispiece, which is a photographic representation
of Korean characters etched on the wall of a coal mine by a Korean exile in Japan,
one of the thousands, says Wong, who were forced into various kind of labor by the
Japanese (46). The frontispiece reads: Mother I miss you, I am hungry, I want to go
home.

In spite of her carefulness, however, Wong too missed the picture of the
Egyptian ruins that precedes the photograph of the Korean exile’s writing on the
stone. So the problematic question of beginning remains as does the issue of the
worlding of this text. Elaine Kim believes Korea to be the inevitable reference point
to the text and she thinks that postmodern readings of HEB—E interpret the text off
without referring to the context and their prioritizing “text” over “history,” or
geographic reference point hardly do justice to a text like DICTEE.

Where should one home DICTEE now? Is it to be the photograph of the
Egyptian ruins that precedes the “frontispiece” carrying the Korean exile’s longing,
or the Greek muses, who, even though slightly altered [Euterpe, the muse of music
changed to Elitiere], happen to be the inspirational as well as the formalistic

principles of the text? Or is it the French poetry and the exercise on translation, or

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the Chinese calligraphy, which “genders” or “engenders” it, for the two sets of
Chinese letters are woman and man, and mother and father? Should we anchor the
text in Korea and Korean history, which is actually the history of Korea’s
disappearance and division, in spite of, as the text says, 5000 years of Korean
antiquity?

For Freud one is always on the way to return home; every drive, every

impulse, is occasioned by human homesickness. Yet DICTEE in spite of the Korean

 

exile’s hungry homesickness, seems to forestall, not only the narrative, as Wong
argues, but the idea of home as well; it seems to be displacing the place called home
along different locations ranging from Greece, Manchuria, Korea, to America, as
though home is only the effect of this displacement.

The diseuse, in whom are blended the ontic and the epistemic, is on the
one hand an empty urge to speak, an urge coming from an empty below (5), a void
that aches to articulate. On the other hand every utterance that escapes her sounds
like an “other” she cannot help allow into herself:

She allows others. In place of her. Admits others to make full. Make

swarm. All barren cavities to make swollen. The others each occupy her.

Timorous layers, expel all exercises until in all cavities she is all flesh. (3)

The diseuse, the fortuneteller, represents the unholy me’lange of the self
and the other; as in Freud’s heimlich and the unheimlich, she makes the subject of
this text indistinguishable from a non-entity, therefore it is uncanny. Therein lies the

reader’s fascination with the exotic “figure” of the diseuse and its inherent

vulnerability due to its non-relation not only to the dominant ideologies of nation,

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culture and linguistic-artistic practices, but also with itself. Like the infant of Freud’s
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, this subject blended with a non-subject starts playing
the game of fort/da, which is at once the game of separation and sadness and
restitution and recuperation. She groans and pauses, groans and punctuates, and
utters again, slow and thick. Even though her fortune and her life depend upon
articulation (141), she is aware that the moment of articulation is in itself a moment
of alienation, for the words themselves mostly constitute the other, the words as
other, the words of the He-God, He-God as the Word, as if she were to dictate herself
into articulation, into the body that she is, which is denied by the very words that
preach abstraction. She wants the word to flesh it, the word made flesh.

Bhabha, in his essay “Signs Taken for Wonder,” in The Location of
C_uLu_r§, talks about the “sudden fortuitous discovery of the boo ” as myth of the
origin, the inauguration of the literature of empire, a balance between epiphany and
enunciation, the moment of originality and authority. Even though the circumstances
are different, because Bhabha is strictly talking about British presence in India and
the English book as the measure of mimesis, and Cha’s QI_CIE_E is more plurivocal
than Bhabha’s examples, yet the situation is almost the same. Bhabha traces the
trajectory of the colonized subject in mimicry from being “disciplined to the
desiring.”

The first titled section of w opens with mimicry: She mimicks the
speaking. That might resemble the speech (Cha 3). But this repetition is not a
mimesis; it is mimicry, including the way ‘mimic’ is spelt. The authority of the

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language to be spoken is recognized, but with a ruse for, as Bhabha in the same essay
says, this mimicry is the problematic of colonial representation and individuation
that tends to reverse the effect of the colonialist disavowal, so that the other denied
knowledges, or here, tongues enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the
basis of its authority (114). Thus by mimicking the authoritative discourse of/on the
Word she is, as Bhabha would say, making the presence partial, as a result of which,
“the book retains its presence, but it is no longer a representation of an essence; it is
now a partial presence . . .an appurtenance of authority (114-115).

And by the time we reach the invocation (of the muses) it seems as though
she were dictating the muses - “Tell me the story,” not just any story, but “of all
these (emphasis added) things (that precede and follow the invocation). The muses
are allowed only one choice, that of the beginning; like the text itself, they can begin
wherever they wish, but not of the story 0/”). Thereupon follows the dictation, the
Greek muses dictated, as it were, to tell the stories of the women (and some men)
almost all over the world, since the mythical time.

The catholic catechism is more of an occasion to speak: “I am making up
the sins. For the guarantee of absolution” (16). - than a religious submission. She
repeats: “I am making confession. To make words. To make a speech in such
tongues” (17). The ambivalence of the mass, the organ song, given mostly in French
is accentuated with the confessor’s uncertainty, apparently due to her inability to
capture the song, but implicitly her theological quibble about the infant of Mon Sacre'

Coeur, his Word (Promesse), which is our (nos) hope, our (notre) fortune (bonheure)

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and her telling doubt, within parenthesis- (or was it votre) — not our but ‘your” hope,
His own or certain people’s not everyone’s, “dans la tendresse,” or as doubts the
neophyte, was it my (ma) tenderness, all of which amounts to the questioning of
whose word, whose happiness or fortune?

So is the novena, nine days of recitation and prayer, of the immaculate
conception, which repeats the nine muses, which in turn is a repetition of the table of
the Chinese scheme of things given first in Chinese towards the end of the text and
then in translation, with the surplus of Chung Wai - the Tenth, a circle within a
Circle, a series of concentric circles, imitating each other. Or as Michael Stephens
argues, it might be the mimesis of the ancient Korean text, Nine Cloud Dream, a
humanistic text on the mystical nature of number nine (197).

Thus the subject alien-ated from itself, the subject who is the uncanny
double of the other as well, is herself seduced in DICTEE by the duplex of
contradictory promises this position seems to hold: that of imagining, inventing, and
creating oneself perpetually, thereby, exposing oneself at times to the existing
politico-ideological structures as well. To understand this self-betrayal we need to
follow Cha’s disillusionizing remarks about her hope of homecoming and her
victimization to what we called politico-ideological structures. While describing the
mother’s homecoming after her long exile in Manchuria, Cha exclaims:

No more sentence to exile, Mother, no black crows to mourn you [as if the

one in exile were as good as dead, so mourned at ‘home,’ not as surviving,

but as already dead]. Neither takes you neither will take you Heaven nor

Hell they fall too near you let them fall to each other you come back you
come back to your one mother one father. (53)

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This return to one mother and one father is repeated in the next page as if
to double it by Chinese calligraphy of woman-man, but this time the letters are left
untranslated, so unique and irreplaceable. The whole paean to oneness and
uniqueness, however, gets quickly replaced by the highly reproducible version of the
American identity:

The united States of America. Somewhere someone has taken my identity

and replaced it with their photograph. The other one. Their signature their

seals. Their own image. (56)

This betrayal at the moment of achievement, the game of fort-da that the
uncanny subject of trauma is bound to repeat, is further elucidated at the mother’s
second shot at homecoming and her eventual dismissal or permanent banishment

from it:

They say you look other than you say. As if you didn’t know who you
were. You say who you are but you begin to doubt. (57)

Cha explains the effect of this perpetual loss or, in other words, of being
stranger in one’s own house. How else does a person get persecuted by uncanniness
and estrangement if it’s not in one’s own home and with one’s intimate relatives? To
talk about estrangement in a foreign place is a platitude. This is what perhaps Freud
meant when he said uncanny is what is once familiar. It is to be or to be made into an
uncanny being at one’s own place either by the colonial force or by the native armies
camouflaged, as in this text, as nature.

After eighteen years Cha comes home and she is given away by her own

tongue that she painstakingly cultivated all those years in the West.

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FF

 

 

Eighteen years pass. I am here for the first time in eighteen years, Mother.

We left here in this memory still fresh, still new. I speak another tongue, a

second tongue.This is how distant I am from then. From that time. (85)

Being unheimlich is to find out that one remains, in Cha’s own words,
“neither one thing nor the other” (20). This uncanny being is left to repeat the
inexorable yet forever incomplete “sentence of the exile,” while the black crows,
notes Cha, continue to mourn for her (53):

Our destination is fixed on the perpetual motion of search. Fixed in its

perpetual exile. Here at my return in eighteen years, the war is not ended.

We fight the same war. We are inside the same struggle seeking same
destination. (81 )

125

VI: THE RESISTANCES OF THE UNCANNY

Writing about minority, ethnic or third world literatures, to use terms
usually employed to describe literatures dealing with issues that include migration,
translation, displacement and diaspora, from the perspective of the uncanny is itself
an uncanny critical practice, especially when these texts themselves presuppose and E
require certain critical models such as ethnic studies, postcolonial theories, feminist
studies or cultural studies. This thesis has tried on the contrary to look at these texts

from the theoretical point of view of the unheimliche for a couple of reasons, which

 

would be pertinent to enumerate here.

Generally speaking “Asian American literatures” in the US exclude
literatures written by writers of South Asian descent. It is not surprising if one finds
no contribution on literatures written by the latter in the collections dedicated to
studying Asian American literatures. The metaphysical conceit of this thesis is to
violently yoke these two together by discussing Cha and Okada and Lahiri and
Mukherjee together. The implied assumption behind this yoking could be a disbelief
of the “gaps,” cracks and fissures between just Asian American and South Asian
American invoked, for instance, by Shankar and Srikanth’s anthology of critical
essays, A Part, Yet Agog. If we function by their circulars, Mukherjee and Lahiri, for
instance would not get a place in a reading like this, because Shankar and Srikanth
argue, with Garrett Hongo, that sheer inclusion of any work into mainstream

American institution is the evidence of its inauthenticity and its ineligibility for being

126

considered in any reading lists of Asian American or Ethnic Studies courses (11).

The other violent yoking would be reading Okada’s novel with its
“masculine protagonist” together with the texts mostly focusing on women, their
experiences and the issues of gender. The assumption is that these texts at a certain
level articulate, without screening their differences, similar anxieties over the state of
what we have been calling the uncanny beings. If the violence involved in the

making and unmaking of being is the issue in Jasmine the same problematic

 

continues in No-No Boy, especially in Ichiro’s experience of abandonment and non-
relation to both inside and outside his family, which in turn reveals the true nature of
the nationscape that turns every one into the pre-political bare existence for the
operation of its repressive mechanism.

From the self caught in the violent cycles of building and unbuilding in
Jasmine, to the being hemmed as bare existence in No-No Boy. we encounter in
Lahiri’s stories haunted selves at home neither in the world they reside nor the one
they frequently visit both physically and in memories. In Cha’s complicated text, we
have a traumatized and aphasic self dismissed and displaced from languages,
cultures and homes.

This reading is also responding to certain theoretical resistances: first,
resistance manifested in the critical neglect of the term uncanny in aesthetics and
also in the fear that the term as a critical concept has lost its force altogether;
secondly, resistance of psychoanalysis, both in the sense of modern suspicion of

certain version of psychoanalysis, and the resistance of psychoanalysis itself to

127

overcoming its own traditional and highly atavistic frameworks.

This return to the uncanny as intervention is consonant with one of the
basic traits of the uncanny: the return of the repressed. The critical exhumation of the
repressed here also hints towards yet another, and more dangerous, form of
resistance, especially from the “critics of postcolonial reason”: to studying literatures
written by/on the uncanny beings, namely the immigrants, the double exiles, not only
the ones whom Griffith calls the double exiles brought up in a culture radically
different from that of the West yet writing in English (9), but the unhomely beings at
once in and beyond the spaces and categories of belonging.

In the “manifesto” of the critique of postcolonial reason, Spivak makes her
position clear by asserting that her project is “to track the figure of the Native
Informant,” who for her is an autochthon (ix). Spivak swerves away from the
immigrant, who for her passes as the native in the first world, thereby obviating and
obfuscating any attempt towards reaching the native. Spivak’s position, which is
somewhat similar to Ngugi’s eulogy for the “homecoming” to “African
consciousness” celebrated in Caribbean literature (89), interestingly comes close to
that of Freud’s when in Death of a Discipline she takes up Freud’s essay on the
uncanny to elucidate her views on planetarity to argue in favor of the perspective of
the pterodactyl, “who can claim the entire planet as its other” (80) over against the
postcolonial perspective fixated on the mobile figure of the of the immigrant.

The present study not only holds suspect any form of “homecoming,” it

also hesitates to exhort the perspective of the diasporic, the outsider, or the other not

128

only because the biopolitical globality that Pease, as we discussed in the
introduction, referred to exceeds all economy of ins and outs, but also because, as
Said and even Freud clarified, nation and exile, natives and foreigners are two
aspects of the same paranoia. If the diasporic becomes the model of cultural and
textual analyses, as it does in Boyarin brothers’ essay on the Jewish diaspora, the
danger is that it might, as the brothers well perceive and surprisingly concede to, E
“allow for stubborn hanging-on to ethnic, cultural specificity. . .” (108). Or it might
as well lead to a foolhardy statement of Rajiv Shankar’s, which is parallel to

Freudian anxieties in front of the painted faces of the Italian women, that “South

 

Asia, with its legacy of British imperialism and its internal strife and poverty, has
offered to America (and the world) considerable wealth in terms of spirituality, peace
and civilization” (ix). The uncanny beings upheld in the thesis not only defy all
civilizing missions from all sides, including the East and the West, the North and the
South; but it is also avers to the politics of recognition that Freudian uncanny
postulates with its - I have been here before.

The unheimliche provides a critique to any ethnico-cultural, or politico-
sexual specificity insofar as it is a space concomitant to the polis in general which,
with the bulwark of home, nation and culture, stages all versions of sandman effects:
the other as the fright, the Terror, etc. But on the other hand, it also represents the
agency of rendering the home unhomely by the very virtue of the impossibility of the
other’s being co-opted into the polis. Uncanny therefore is not only a global politico-

cultural “experience.” Nor is it merely the fundamental essence of Beings, as

129

Heidegger would say. It is also imagining nation and reflecting upon exile and refirge
from the negative space occupied by the unhomely, who is related to the polis only
through its non-relation.

This is the reason why Fanon’s description of the native in his 1h_e_

Wretched of the Earth as a “being hemmed in,”(52) overlooks the other half of the

 

scenario, where the same could be observed for “the immigrants,” who are hemmed
both at the places they try to leave and the ones they expect to arrive. As we have
seen in chapter four, their arrival is as ghosted as their departure is haunted. The
sandman of the arrival, to risk a gross illustration, is the same one who is accused of
soaking up resources safely in the First World only to “send money and guns,
circulate propaganda and build intercontinental computer information circuits” to the
zones of his “ultimate destinations” (Anderson 327). Thus the overlap of the nation
and the desti-nation continues through the identity, as we noted earlier in chapter
two, of the sandman and the monster of the sea, which in turn helps reveal the fact
that it is the figure of the monster that makes both nation and destination unhomely

through his critique of the monolithic nation and the myth of the ultimate destination.

130

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