Listening to melancholia: Alice Walker's Meridian
2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 42; Issue: 4-5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/00313220802377388
ISSN1461-7331
Autores Tópico(s)Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies
ResumoABSTRACT Alice Walker's second novel, Meridian (1976), explores both the ways in which racist societies initiate and exacerbate melancholia and how this psychological dynamic can and must be overcome. The novel posits not a simple 'cure' but rather a process of questioning and learning from the past and one's painful attachments to it. In this way it negotiates scholarly concerns about psychoanalytic theory, as manifest particularly in literary criticism and critical race studies. Far from normalizing a form of identity focused on the past, this experimental novel depicts psychological transformation as an effort that requires the willingness to untangle the relationships involved in one's present, one's past and broader systems of social injustice. Keywords: African American fictionAlice WalkerAmerican literaturecontemporary African American women's literaturemelancholia Meridian psychoanalysisraceracismtime in narrativewomanist fiction Notes 1Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose [1983] (New York: Harvest Books 2003), xi. 2Ann DuCille, 'Phallus(ies) of interpretation: toward engendering the black critical "I"', Callaloo, vol. 16, no. 3, Summer 1993, 559; Robert E. Washington, The Ideologies of African American Literature: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Nationalist Revolt (Lanham, MD and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield 2001), 336. 3Toni Cade, 'On the issue of roles', in Toni Cade Bambara (ed.), The Black Woman: An Anthology [1970] (New York: Washington Square Press 2005), 125. 4Madhu Dubey, Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1994), 16–32. 5Keith Byerman, Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2005), 3. 6Lauren Berlant, 'The subject of true feeling: pain, privacy, and politics', in Jodi Dean (ed.), Cultural Studies and Political Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2000), 62. 7Alice Walker, Meridian [1976] (New York: Pocket Books 1986), 14. Subsequent references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text. 8Dubey, Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic, 142. 9Cade, 'On the issue of roles', 133. 10Alice Walker, 'The civil rights movement: what good was it?' [1967], in Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, 119–29. 11Berlant, 'The subject of true feeling', 61–2. 12Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line [2000] (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2001), 28. Bill Lawson noted this sense of urgency in 'Hope, Derrick Bell, and the permanence of racism', a paper given at the Scholars in Critical Race Studies workshop, University of Memphis, 20 November 2006. 13On the discriminatory practices of 'raceless states', see David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell 2002), 227–37. 14Gilroy, Against Race, 52. 15Kenneth W. Warren, 'The end(s) of African American Studies', American Literary History, vol. 12, no. 3, Autumn 2000, 639. 16Achmat Dangor, Bitter Fruit [2001] (New York: Black Cat 2005), 85. 17Hortense Spillers, '"All the things you could be by now, if Sigmund Freud's wife was your mother": psychoanalysis and race', boundary 2, vol. 23, no. 3, Autumn 1996, 88, 83. 18Paul Gordon, 'Psychoanalysis and racism: the politics of defeat', Race & Class, vol. 42, no. 4, April 2001, 31. 19See, for example, Spillers, '"All the things you could be by now, if Sigmund Freud's wife was your mother"', 75–141. 20Slavoj Zizek, 'Mourning, melancholy and the act', Critical Inquiry, vol. 26, no. 4, Summer 2000, 659. 21Byerman, Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction, 1. 22Byerman, Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction, 10. 23Wendy Brown, 'Resisting left melancholy', boundary 2, vol. 26, no. 3, Fall 1999, 26. 24Warren, 'The end(s) of African American Studies', 644; Kenneth W. Warren, So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2003), 90–9. 25Jermaine Singleton, 'Cryptic Conversations: Melancholy, Ritual, and the (African American) Literary Imagination', Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 10 July 2005. 26Madhu Dubey, 'Postmodern geographies of the U.S. South', Nepantla: Views from South, vol. 3, no. 2, Summer 2002, 362, 364, 365. 27Patricia Williams, 'Spirit-murdering the messenger: the discourse of fingerpointing as the law's response to racism', University of Miami Law Review, vol. 42, September 1987, 139. 28For an example of the former, see Ron Eyerman, 'Cultural trauma: slavery and the formation of African American identity', in Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser and Piotr Sztompka, Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press 2004), 60–111; for the latter, see Sheldon George, 'Trauma and the conservation of African-American racial identity', Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, vol. 6, no. 1, Spring 2001, 58–72. 29Rebecca Saunders and Kamran Scot Aghaie, 'Introduction: mourning and memory', Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 25, no. 1, 2005, 21. 30Bessel A. Van der Kolk and Onno Van der Hart, 'The intrusive past: the flexibility of memory and the engraving of trauma', in Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1995), 176. 31Sigmund Freud, 'Mourning and melancholia' [1917], in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. 14, trans. from the German and ed. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press 1957), 253, 252. 32Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia [1987], trans. from the French by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press 1989), 10. 33Ian Hacking, Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press 1998), 95. 34Jennifer Radden, 'Is this Dame Melancholy? Equating today's depression and past melancholia', Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, vol. 10, no. 1, March 2003, 37. 35Peter D. Kramer, Listening to Prozac (New York: Viking 1993), 298, 17. 36Combahee River Collective, 'A black feminist statement' [1977], in Beverly Guy-Sheftall (ed.), Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (New York: New Press 1995), 236. 37Combahee River Collective, 'A black feminist statement' [1977], in Beverly Guy-Sheftall (ed.), Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (New York: New Press 1995), 236–8. 38Joseph A. Brown, S.J., '"All saints should walk away": the mystical pilgrimage of Meridian', Callaloo, vol. 12, Spring 1989, 310–20. 39Brown, 'Resisting left melancholy', 22. 40Saidiya Hartman, 'The time of slavery', South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 101, no. 4, Fall 2002, 774. 41Alice Walker, 'A letter to the editor of Ms.' [1974], in Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, 274. 42Dubey, Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic, 136–7. 43Freud, 'Mourning and melancholia', 249–50. 44Freud, 'Mourning and melancholia', 245–51. 45Lynn Pifer, 'Coming to voice in Alice Walker's Meridian: speaking out for the revolution', African American Review, vol. 26, no. 1, Spring 1992, 77–8. 46Barbara Christian, 'The black woman artist as wayward' [1983], in Harold Bloom (ed.), Alice Walker: Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House 1989), 47. 47Freud, 'Mourning and melancholia', 243. 48Sigmund Freud, 'The ego and the id' [1922], in Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton 1989), 638–43. In 'Mourning and melancholia' Freud also noted that the self-reproach of the melancholic psyche resembled 'conscience' (247). 49Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1997), 167. 50Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2000), 7. 51Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2000), 10–12; see also Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press 2006), 101. For an account of colonial desire and hostility in the intra-psychic encounter with racist stereotypes, see, for example, Homi Bhabha, 'The other question: stereotype, discrimination, and the discourse of colonialism', in Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge 1994), 66–84. For an example concerning the United States, one might look to the 'racial masquerade' Michael North elucidates in the writing of white modernists; see Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press 1994). 52David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, 'A dialogue on racial melancholia', in David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (eds), Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press 2003), 347. 53Freud, 'Mourning and melancholia', 253. 54Singleton, 'Cryptic Conversations', 11–12. 55Sigmund Freud, 'The aetiology of hysteria' [1896], in Freud, The Freud Reader, 98. 56Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York: Oxford University Press 1998), 16. 57Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 19. 58Douglas Crimp, 'Mourning and militancy', October, vol. 51, Winter 1989, 5, 16–17. 59Eng and Han, 'A dialogue on racial melancholia', 363–6; Phillip Novak, '"Circles and circles of sorrow": in the wake of Morrison's Sula', Publications of the Modern Language Association, vol. 114, no. 2, March 1999, 191. 60Zizek, 'Mourning, melancholy and the act', 658. This distinction is a slim one: Freud does not deem melancholia 'pathological' because it is non-normative, but he does accept mourning as 'normal' only because it is so familiar. In his words: 'It is really only because we know so well how to explain it that [mourning] does not seem to us pathological' ('Mourning and melancholia', 244). In other words, here—as in much of his work—he insists that 'normal' describes the assessment of onlookers, or their relative comfort and familiarity with a form of behaviour. 61Freud, 'Mourning and melancholia', 246, 248. 62See also Greg Forter, 'Against melancholia: contemporary mourning theory, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and the politics of unfinished grief', differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, Summer 2003, 139. 63Freud, 'Mourning and melancholia', 245, 251. See also Forter, 'Against melancholia', 138–9. 64Vikki Bell, 'On speech, race and melancholia: an interview with Judith Butler', Theory Culture & Society, vol. 16, no. 2, April 1999, 169–71. 65Eng and Han, 'A dialogue on racial melancholia', 364. 66Judith Butler suggests such a concern about essentialism in 'Subjection, resistance, resignification: between Freud and Foucault', in John Rajchman (ed.), The Identity in Question (New York: Routledge 1995), 233, 243–6. 67Zizek, 'Mourning, melancholy and the act', 659; Freud, 'Mourning and melancholia', 245, 251. 68Spillers, '"All the things you could be by now, if Sigmund Freud's wife was your mother"', 85–6; David Harvey, 'Militant particularism and global ambition: the conceptual politics of place, space, and environment in the work of Raymond Williams' [1995], in David Harvey, Spaces of Captial: Towards a Critical Geography (New York: Routledge 2001), 169, 173–82. 69Dubey, 'Postmodern geographies of the U.S. South', 363–8; Anne McClintock, 'The angel of progress: pitfalls of the term "postcolonialism"', Social Text, nos 31/32, Spring 1992, 96–7; Wendy Brown, Politics out of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2001), 3–17. 70Stuart Hall, 'Cultural identity and diaspora', in Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence & Wishart 1990), 225, 226. 71Zizek, 'Mourning, melancholy and the act', 676; Dubey, 'Postmodern geographies of the U.S. South', 367. 72Alice Walker, 'The black writer and the southern experience' [1970], in Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, 17. 73Karen F. Stein, 'Meridian: Alice Walker's critique of revolution', Black American Literature Forum, vol. 20, nos 1–2, Spring–Summer 1986, 139. 74Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, trans. from the German by James Strachey [1920] (New York: Norton/Liveright 1966), 560–1. 75Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton 1973), 78; Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in Freud, The Freud Reader, 609. 76See, for example, Fredric Jameson, 'Beyond the cave: demystifying the ideology of modernism' [1975], in Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986, 2 vols (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1988), ii.131. 77See, for example, Fredric Jameson, 'Beyond the cave: demystifying the ideology of modernism' [1975], in Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986, 2 vols (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1988), ii.132. 78On linear time, see Thomas Luckmann, 'The constitution of human life in time', in John Bender and David E. Wellbery (eds), Chronotypes: The Construction of Time (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1991), 157. 79Doreen Massey, 'Politics and space/time', New Left Review, Series I, no. 196, November–December 1992, 79–80. 80Kristeva, Black Sun, 12. 81Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. from the French by Constance Farrington (New York: Grove 1963), 94. 82Kristeva, Black Sun, 10, 24. 83The text's insistence on these multiple changes suggests that, though Byerman persuasively describes Meridian's feelings of isolation from rural southern black communities, his representation of those communities as a static folk 'outside of history' is overstated; see Keith Byerman, 'Gender and justice: Alice Walker and the sexual politics of civil rights', in Jeffrey J. Folks and Nancy Summers Folks (eds), The World Is Our Home: Society and Culture in Contemporary Southern Writing (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky 2000), 102. 84Kristeva, Black Sun, 23. Juliana Schiesari argues that Black Sun reflects the author's 'ambivalence, if not hatred, toward women'; see Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1992), 91. 85Alice Walker, 'In the closet of the soul' [1988], in Guy-Sheftall (ed.), Words of Fire, 540.
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