Lost and Found
2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 31; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/10462937.2011.602709
ISSN1479-5760
Autores Tópico(s)Gender, Feminism, and Media
ResumoAbstract This essay revisits my earlier work on the intersections of adoption, relationships, performativity, and storytelling. Some years removed from adopting a child, learning about my grandmother's adoption, and writing how relationships are made in the performance of stories, I reconsider the power of texts that tell us into and out of being. Using pluralized voices—differences in form and mode of exchange and address—I write to show how identities and lives are performed in relation to others. Through modularity, I use repetition to show how more-or-less discrete forms and scenes happen again and again not only in accounts of our lives, but also in our identities and relationships. Specifically, I write in and through a series of changes, losses, and discoveries: the death of my grandmother, the disintegration of my marriage, the decision not to adopt another child, the forging of a new queer identity, and the gifts that a return to writing these stories provides. Keywords: Relational SubjectivitiesPersonal AccountsPerformative WritingChange Acknowledgement This essay is dedicated to the memory of Bernice B. Holman. I would like to thank Sara Dykins Callahan, Christopher McRae, Jeanine Minge, Deanna Shoemaker, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this essay. Portions of this essay were presented at the 2009 National Communication Association Convention in Chicago, Illinois. Notes 1. The title of this section comes from the portion of R.D. Laing's poem Knots which reads, "[t]he patterns delineated here have not yet been / classified …. They / are all, perhaps, strangely, familiar. / In these pages I have confined myself to laying out / only some of those I actually have seen. Words that / come to mind to name them are: knots, tangles, / fankles, impasses, disjunctions, whirligogs, binds" (n.p.). 2. Laing writes into the knot of mine-not-mine, me-not-me that I imagine as a conversation on gratitude and entitlement in adoption. He offers: "All I have has been given me and is mine … I haven't it/but I can get it / therefore, / because I have been given the capacity to get it / it is mine. / It is not mine / but it has been given me and I have it / therefore I am grateful for what I have, or / have been given. / But I resent being grateful / because if I have been given it, it has not always been mine. / therefore, if I don't feel grateful / I won't have been given it. … (41). 3. My wording references Timothy Materer's (125–26) and Sara Lundquist's (31–32) analyses of James Merrill's The Inner Room. 4. Merrill (Inner 57). 5. Jeffrey Woodward notes that haibun "wed prose and haiku" and may adopt the form of travelogue or diary, may be autobiographical, may be confessional, and may focus on experiential and sensory observation—though these conventions are not givens or safely assumed (8–9). Haibun may also offer a paragraph of prose followed by a haiku to end a thought or scene, but may just as likely depart from this form. See also Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Dialogue (194). 6. Materer (126). Sedgwick describes Merrill's use of this "unfamiliar form" as prose "spangled with haiku … his very sentences fraying / into implosions / of starlike density or / radiance, then out / into a prose that's never quite not the poetry—" (Dialogue 194). 7. I first read about Merrill's "Prose of Departure" in Sedgwick's essay, "Teaching 'Experimental Critical Writing.'" Sedgwick offers Merrill's poetry as a prompt for lessons on "pluralizing voices" and "modularity." The lesson on pluralizing voices focuses on how differences in form (moving between poetry and prose) can be felt in how we hear writing; how the time and space of the piece might change; and how the mode of address, as well as "the expectation of just who might be listening, and how," might be understood as a relation among readers and writers, identities and expectations (111–12). The lesson on modularity focuses on the "effects involved when more or less discrete units of the same form (sonnet, haiku) keep happening again and again" (113). In this essay, I hope to use pluralized voices—differences in form and mode of exchange and address—to show how identities and lives are performed in relation to others. I am also interested in how modularity happens again and again not only in accounts of our lives, but also in our identities and relationships. 8. Materer takes up this criticism of Merrill's poetry—its lack of emotion, its control and impersonal tone, its pleasurable wordplay, and its superficiality—arguing that these criticisms mistake Merrill's restraint and desire for an affirmative (if not happy) ending as shallowness while overlooking the "deeply emotional and nearly despairing poems" that he wrote in the 1980s until his death in 1995 (124). 9. My wording is drawn from Lundquist's observation that Merrill's poetry holds together opposites "in a knot that tightens toward the centre, allowing logic to leap the space between two worlds, two opposites" (32). Lundquist also writes that the haiku in Merrill's prose poems create "inner rooms" (also the title of the collection in which "Prose of Departure" is included) that summon an "incantatory, momentary magic" within the "surrounding, louder prose of immanent departure" (44). In these haiku, within the inner rooms they create, we are "still in touch," "still linked by love" (45). 10. Sedgwick (Dialogue 42). 11. Merrill (Inner 72). 12. This section is based on my reading of collections including Voices from Another Place: A Collection of Works from a Generation Born in Korea and Adopted to Other Countries (Cox), Seeds from a Silent Tree: An Anthology by Korean Adoptees (Rankin and Bishoff), and Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption (Trenka et al.) and single-author memoirs, in particular Trenka's Fugitive Visions and The Language of Blood. 13. Trenka (Fugitive 196). 14. Trenka (Fugitive 91–94). 15. Jacqueline Taylor (Waiting 212). 16. Michael Taussig (3). 17. Taussig (6). 18. Taussig notes that "upon his death Walter Benjamin entered the official records . . . not as a Jew but as a Roman Catholic with the name of Benjamin Walter" (5). Julian Yates writes that this "specular doubling or reversal" of Benjamin is due to his mis-translation, as well as to how translation points to the loose connections between meanings and signs (par. 13). That Benjamin wrote about translation and then was, in death, mis-translated is no irony. Translations are both "possible and impossible. Translation occurs—but necessarily it involves transformations—good and bad" (Yates par. 13). 19. Taussig is one among numerous writers who have made the journey to Port Bou (Yates par. 5). 20. The monument, titled Passages, was designed by Israeli artist Dani Karavan and completed in 1994. Taussig describes discovering the monument: "about thirty feet in front of the [cemetery] entrance, jutting out of the ridge line like a bent elbow, on the side of the sea, there is a curious triangle of deep brown iron, at least ten feet high . . . suddenly we saw that it formed the doorway to a chute running underground parallel to the slope of the hill [with] steps that led down almost as far as the eye could see to end in a perfect triangle enclosing a view of the sea" (16). At the bottom of the passage, an impassable glass door is inscribed with these words from Benjamin's theses On the Concept of History: "[i]t is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless" (qtd. in Taussig 16). Taussig attributes the focus on the nameless to the fosa común—common grave—where all here are eventually buried, nameless, "even if you were first buried with a name"; where Benjamin is surely buried; and where descending the monument's steps sends its visitors (17). 21. Taussig (20–21). 22. Lisa Fittko (qtd. in Taussig 9). Fittko took Benjamin over the French-Spanish border. Her story of this journey is told in her autobiography Escape Through the Pyrenees. Though, as Yates points out in his "Invent/Story" of the briefcase and missing manuscript and the proliferation of "Benjaminiana and Benjamin-themed texts and objects" (par. 6) they have inspired, Fittko's account of the journey, the case, the missing manuscript, and their import and relation to Benjamin's work and life have been subject to multiple revisions. 23. Taussig 9. 24. See my essay, (M)othering Loss. 25. Michelle Lee writes about the uncertainty and fear of writing—of telling—her desires: "Lifting the mask might reveal something I don't know if I can share. Something taboo. Then what would I do?" (195). 26. Taylor (Being 59–60). 27. My wording references Taylor's construction of "'becoming a lesbian' at the moment of the kiss," which violates the more common conventions of coming out narratives that describe the "discovery of one's always already there and fixed sexual orientation" (Being 71). 28. While I am reluctant to focus on the "death-call, the funeral and that first difficult year" (Gingrich-Philbrook, "Autoethnography's" 305) following my grandmother's death in this essay, I also want to call attention to how the loss of a loved person and relationship asks us to consider other losses in our lives (Gray), particularly losses that are not acknowledged, discussed, and recounted as the deaths of loved ones are. If we are, indeed, at least "one loss behind" in our grieving, becoming aware of our ongoing (and perhaps unfinished) grief can help us revisit losses as they exist in relationship (Gray 103). With Ragan Fox, I attempt to work through these relationships and the relationships they bear to both the theory and the emotion of this piece. I also return to my earlier writing on doing the work of mourning and connection in writing and in performance (Mourning). 29. Birth stories like the ones my mother used to tell (and, I would argue, most popular adoption stories tell) are marked by a relentless repetition that casts "a pall of immutability, or what often passes for fate, over parent and child alike," fixing their characters into "set identity or 'subject' positions" (Pollock, Telling 68). Such stories have, as Pollock puts it, a "reality-effect: a child, a self, an identity produced and reproduced within given narrative terms" (Telling 69). My grandmother's choice to wait to tell me her story—so full of missing names, information, and knowledge—signals the mutability of storytelling and with it the possibilities and impossibilities of reproducing or translating an identity or a life. 30. My grandmother was a white child adopted domestically by white parents. Still, the admonitions my grandmother heard to let go and leave alone her desire to know her younger brother and to search for her father are echoed by transnational adoptees. Trenka writes, "[o]f my lost family, my American mother told me, 'Get over it' " (Fugitive 185). 31. Pollock writes, "[t]he story self is a double self—a self doubled up in . . . the art of making memory, doubled over in memory of lost selves, divided against itself in the performativity of answering to others' stories" (Telling 69). 32. This is the lesson of a possible real—stories that in their telling charge "the self and its (internalized) others with the possibilities of becoming (otherwise)" (Pollock Telling 69). 33. Yates recounts the inventory and activity of Benjamin's stay at the Hotel de Francia, which included four phone calls, one letter, and five sodas with lemon, and of course his purported suicide by an overdose of morphine (par. 12). 34. Yates writes that the letter was a farewell addressed to Theodor Adorno. Benjamin gave the letter to a fellow traveler, Mrs. Henry Gurland, who later wrote that she destroyed the letter, but recounted its content from memory (par. 66). 35. This line references writing about several types of calls: Taylor's interweaving of being "called" to surrender to God and the "call" bearing news of a child that prospective adoptive parents wait to receive (Waiting), Craig Gingrich-Philbrook's "death-call" ("Autoethnography's" 305), Robert Coles's The Call of Stories, and Yates's invent/story of the call to writing in absence in search of possibility. 36. This line draws on Yates's description of the writing Benjamin's missing briefcase/manuscript/life sets in motion. Yates resists the "irresistible haunt" of the briefcase, which he argues invites others to write "botched or partial" imitations of the missing manuscript (pars. 42, 5). Even if such writing endlessly anticipates "the possibility of its posthumous return, its acceptance, and by that acceptance, redemption" that in turn derives meaning from death (par. 5), I want to answer the call of such writing, of acceptance and affirmation, or at least, to try to do so in this essay. 37. The first line of this haiku references Taussig, who writes that Benjamin's idea of an image that evokes the past touching the present is effervescent and disappears just as it emerges, like a falling star (19). The last two lines of this haiku are drawn from Lundquist's analysis of Merrill's poetry. She writes, "to empty and to scatter are last acts of faith and love" (48). 38. This line is drawn from Michel Foucault, who considers of how the performative act of confession substitutes—rather than expresses—an inner and private self with a manifestation (speaking) of truth and, in turn, the creation of a public self. He writes, "you will become the subject of a manifestation of truth when and only when you disappear" (179). In Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler reads the manifestation of a public self as a performative "act of sacrifice, one that constitutes a change in life" through disappearance (114). 39. This queer sensation is rooted in the commitments and practices of queer theory, which works to disrupt normalizing discourses; writes against fixity and firmness, certainty and closure, stability and rigid categorization; and makes discursive trouble in the service of change. My writing here echoes the work Tony Adams and I have done to articulate the interrelated commitments and practices of queer theory and personal writing (see Holman Jones and Adams). 40. Butler reads Foucault as signaling a break with a confessional, truth-telling subjectivity that means to "open freedom, to inaugurate a possible transformation, to interrogate the conditioning limits of one's time, and to risk the self at that limit" (Giving 122). 41. My wording references Butler's discussion of the constitutive costs of a confessional, truth-telling subjectivity and the import of these costs (and the power relations they signal and use) for performing a relational ethics of responsibility when giving personal accounts (Giving 121–22, 125–26). 42. Rose (101). 43. This passage echoes my discussion of personal writing, change, and the politics of evidence ("Crimes"). 44. This line is adapted from Butler, who writes, "when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human" (Giving 136). 45. In Butler's earlier work, the promise of performativity is founded in a failure to repeat—to perform—normative and disciplining scripts, selves and identities (Gender). Elin Diamond adds that the promise of failure is located in the tensions between doing (performance) and the thing done (performativity). Pollock writes, "although I rely on Butler's reclamation of the embodied self and the pressure Diamond puts on performativity through performance, failure is not enough . . .. I want to claim more power for performance: to think about the tension between the thing done and doing as a collision of past and present producing the excess of what's as yet undone, what's yet to be done" (Performative 243). In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler can be read as opening up failure (of self-knowledge, of an ethics of responsibility absent a "self-sufficient 'I'") to embrace the charged and changing relationality of performance. 46. Pollock (Beyond 639). 47. Pollock (Beyond 638–39). 48. Butler (Giving 132). 49. This line is adapted from Walter Benjamin, whose storyteller writes in interaction, in conversation. This storyteller "takes what he tells from experience—his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale" (87). Benjamin terms this conversation "living speech" (87), which I read as akin to Butler's notion of giving an account of oneself which "acknowledge[s] that speaking is already a kind of doing, a form of action, one that is already a moral practice and a way of life. Moreover, it presupposes a social exchange" (Giving 126). Further, I read the responsibilities of the storyteller's account as centered in the reflexive process of performance (Langellier and Peterson 3; see also Rose; and Pollock Performative and Beyond). 50. This line is drawn from Butler, who writes of the "grace of self-acceptance or forgiveness" (Giving 136). 51. Taussig (x). 52. This line references Trenka, who writes, "[m]y longing has always been exactly the same: I want love. I want to be safe. I want to go home. How these simple wishes have gone unfulfilled . . . ." (Fugitive 186) and "[i]n my loneliness, let me be whole. In my loneliness, let me be human" (194). 53. Sedgwick (Dialogue 42). 54. Sedgwick (Teaching 113). 55. In addition to the obvious debt this essay owes to Merrill's The Inner Room, Sedgwick's A Dialogue on Love, and Trenka's Fugutive Visions, my work is also inspired by and indebted to Taussig's introduction to Walter Benjamin's Grave and Kathleen Stewart's Ordinary Affects. Each of these texts approaches the "visceral connections" (Taussig x) between words and relationships, among bodies and texts through forms of affirmation, "attention and attachment" (Stewart 5). 56. This line references Rebecca Kennerly's closing poem to her essay on roadside shrines, particularly her words, "between / grief / and / memory, / between / life and death, / and between research, writing, the page, and the stage" (252). 57. Taussig writes that it is a "memorial, too, a type of monument, to slow down and think" (29). 58. My wording is borrowed from Kathleen Stewart's Ordinary Affects, which "tries to slow the quick jump to representational thinking and evaluative critique long enough to find ways of approaching the complex and uncertain objects that fascinate because they literally hit us or exert a pull on us" (4). For Stewart, part of what this means is signaling an "ordinary world whose forms of living are now being composed and suffered, rather than seeking the closure or clarity of a book's interiority or riding a great rush of signs to a satisfying end" (5). 59. Kristin Langellier writes that the point of a "story and its tellability" are grounded in the concerns of performativity, which ask us to question "what matters and who matters and to whom it matters" (133–34). 60. Gingrich-Philbrook ("Ambition" 41). 61. Stewart (127). 62. Merrill (From 340). 63. Taussig (7). 64. Merrill (Inner 72). 65. Materer writes that Merrill's later work enacts the complicated intersections of intimate connections, death, and gifts, particularly of fabrics and garments (kimonos and ropes) (126–28). 66. Merrill (Inner 72).
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