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V.3 N.1, October 1995

Remembrances of Love Past

by Doug Aoki

Interdisciplinary Studies
University of British Columbia

Memories, there were far too many memories;
they raced across her sky like Irish weather.
Julian Barnes[1]

1. A friend of mine was going through a difficult time--the end of a love affair. She was hurting, but she coped. I asked her how she was doing, and she said, "It's pretty bad--but I know I'll feel better in a few months."

2. How did she know? Well, it's something we all know around here; it's no more than common sense. Just as losing in love is an ordinary calamity, and feeling pretty bad about it, the normal response, getting over feeling bad, eventually, is the normal resolution--practically a rite of passage. Still, if heartbreak is such a commonplace, it remains singular enough in its resonances of love passing away. Heartbreak is a metonymy for grief,[2] and gathers to itself like despairs, and like consolations. The amelioration of heartbreak normalizes recovery: its signs elicit sensible gestures in return, and these circulate in the community. Friends and family and colleagues, if you are so fortunate to have people of such good faith about you, give emergency relief and tender small mercies. When love fails you, your loved ones gather round. The systems for recovery are in place; the knowledges are generalized; everyone knows what to do.

3. But you have to hurry, for this offer is only good for a limited time. Grief may be indulged, but it has its allotted season, and its vague but definite end. If heartbreak is an ordinary calamity, then getting over it is a diachronic platitude: "This too shall pass," or "Time heals all wounds" (wounding and healing being just two instances of the cherished biomedical and pathological trope for heartbreak[3]). Emergencies are by definition always transient, so we all know that we're supposed to feel better in a few months--as my friend knows, and so she waits for that comforting and naturalized resolution.

4. Yet the closure of "we're supposed to feel better" is at once sustained and undermined by its polysemy: it tells us not only what we can expect, but also what is expected of us. This is where the medical troping of heartbreak breaks down, for the heartbroken, unlike the merely diseased, are obliged to recover. This is also where our normalizing of heartbreak both ramifies and triangulates: First, through normalization itself being what we can expect. Second, through re-normalizing being what is expected of us. And third, through our returning to normal being the achievement of our own restoration.

5. Normality, when the world of the lovelorn unfolds as it should, is the putative ideal. Resurrecting the medical trope, normality becomes the homeostatic and valorized condition of health. Conversely, heartbreak (and often falling in love in the first place) appears as affliction and hurt--the heartbroken as the sick at heart. In this rhetorical configuration, "feeling better" metonymizes with the body and its treatments. Thus, we are told that we can "get over" heartbreak just as we can get over the flu; the diagnosis comes with the corresponding prescription: "Don't dwell on the past." But the idiom is something of a prepositional misfire for "Don't dwell in the past." Or at least in the recent, distressing past, for homeostatic recovery is a chronological function that converges the way we are to the way we were once upon a time. Before, we were normal; then we were in love; later, we were heartbroken; and now, here we are, trying to get normal, once again. Trying to get over it; trying to not cling to our past; trying to leave it behind, and thereby return to ourselves in some healing place which mediates our present and our distant past. Thus, the strategy is to move to some kinder and gentler ground than the shoals of grief. The tactic is to manage the engagement and disengagement with our remembrances of love past. The key, then, is memory.

6. In the classics, memory is called anamnesis and hypostatized as Mnemosyne, mother to not only Clio, the Muse of History, but also the rest of the Musae. So rhetoric and comedy and tragedy and poetry all motivate the narratives of memory, although conventionally the success of those narratives turns on their presentation as wholly uninspired histories, distinct from art. Thus Mark Twain castigated the fallible for their creative memories, but I think Homer and Virgil were more honest-remembrance is inevitably legitimated through its rhetorical invention. According to Foucault, "truth is the unrecognized fiction of a successful discourse"[4] and according to Hayden White, a "true story" is "a contradiction in terms."[5] Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God? The only truthful response is, "I'm not sure I can tell the truth . . . I can only tell what I know."[6]

7. This admission is as unfamiliar as it is striking; in love, if not in literary theory, we are accustomed to a discourse that conflates the claim to truth with the presentation of honesty. The authority of our own love stories, unlike those of Marcel Proust or Jerry Seinfeld, turns on their credibility as chronicles of pure truth, on their asymptotic approach to zero degree writing. You wouldn't lie to me, would you? This puts the strategy of recovery in a bind between the management of memory and its immaculate re-presentation as truth. The modern solution is to consider forgetting a natural gift. Witness Nora Ephron:

   Two years earlier, when I had been pregnant . . . Mark would sing me a song every night and every morning. We called it the Petunia song. It was a dumb song, really dumb. Mark would make up a different tune and lyrics each time, but it never rhymed, and it was never remotely melodious. I sing to you, Petunia, I sing a song of love, I sing to you even though you are bigger than the last time I sang the Petunia song to you. Something like that. Or: Oh, Petunia, I sing to thee, even though it's much too early and I have a hangover. You get the idea. Really dumb, but every time Mark sang it, I felt secure and loved in a way I had never dreamed possible. I had always meant to write down some of the words, because they were so silly and funny and made me feel so happy; but I never did. And now I couldn't remember them. I could remember the feeling, but I couldn't really remember the words . . . . Which was not the worst way to begin to forget.[7]

8. Here, recovery incarnates as erosion, the gradual, merciful accumulation of forgetting. Such are the underpinnings of the injunction to not cling to the past. Since forgetting is natural--which seductively reiterates the figures of health-you merely need to forego your pathological grip on the past. You just have to stop languishing over him; you just have to stop thinking about her.

   And still you think about her every day. Sometimes, weary of loving her [absent], you imagine her [with you once again], for conversation, for approval. After his mother's death, Flaubert used to get his housekeeper to dress up in her old check dress and surprise him with an apocryphal reality. It worked, and it didn't work: seven years after the funeral he would still burst into tears at the sight of that old dress moving about the house. Is this success or failure? Remembrance or self-indulgence? And will we know when we start hugging our grief and vainly enjoying it?[8]

9. It was the same Flaubert, after all, who wrote, "Sadness is a vice."[9]

10. The appeal of forgetting is indeed utilitarian. If you cling to your past, you hug your grief, and though you may indeed enjoy it at some level, to keep insisting "it's my party and I ll cry if I want to" [10] is ultimately a losing game. If you brood, you get consumed by slow, what-if thoughts that cut deep but [strike] nothing solid [you can] hold on to"[11]--and that's not healthy at all.

11. And health is not only the trope, it is the transcendental signified, the touchstone we hold onto in this New Age of wellnes. Someone once told me she that she dealt with her past relationships by concentrating on the good and not dwelling on the bad. That way, she could be positive about her past and about herself. "No negativity is what she said. Another told me that it's a matter of psychic healing, of cleaning up the messes: health is the power of positive thinking, mental hygiene.

12. But listen:

    Perhaps . . . I have forgotten how I felt. The mind has a way of putting unhelpful memories down its waste-disposal unit. Forgetting yesterday's fear ensures today's survival . . . I might have felt such anger and contempt, but I stifled them with a pillow like two squeaking puppies, and now I can no longer recall where I buried the bodies.[12]

13. This may ondeed be a survival strategy, but it comes with its own cost. If the accomplishment of forgetting is supposed to mark the end of grief why does the forgetting itself still sound so forlorn? What are these new and unexpected reverberations of loss? If we figure forgetting as erosion, we must not mistake what is inevitable and seemingly natural for what is merciful.

    I think of small stones. At the bottom of the lake, rolled aimlessly by the waves, I think of them polished. To many people it would be a kindness. But I see no kindness in how the waves are grinding them smaller and smaller until they finally disappear.[13]

14. We make the erosive gestures of forgetting, sometimes merely to impress the uncritical audience of our selves, and we get by, although the gestures fail us past a certain point. We make the gestures because we are expected to, for we are players in a game that is not of our own making, and if we do not behave ourselves, we risk disapproval, and even the sting of sanctions. A man lingered too long and verbosely over his own heartbreak, and a friend, weary of his self-pity, told him to "get off the pot." There comes a time when the rest of the world won't put up with morbid exceptions to the presentation of everyday self.

15. Nonetheless, the mandated gestures of recovery enact only one production among several now playing in a theater very near you. There, you might let go of the past, but on some other stage, in some other melodrama or farce, the past never completely lets go of you--surely even skeptics of psychoanalysis can take that much from Freud. The reassurances you were given by well-intentioned friends end up being only half right:

    'It may seem bad, . . . but you'll come out of it. I'm not taking your grief lightly; it's just that I've seen enough of life to know that you'll come out of it' . . . Words you've said yourself . . . And you do come out of it, that's true. After a year, after five. But you don't come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting . . . into sunshine[;] . . . you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.[14]

16. Once upon a time, it was amo ergo sum. But that was then; this is now. I loved, therefore I was; I loved, and I came out of it, and therefore now I am . . . what?

17. The question nudges us towards realizing that remembering is more than something that we do, just as heartbreak is more than something that we experience. Remembrance reproduces our past even as it narrates it, and therefore retroactively produces our present selves. Augustine famously writes that the past itself is memory. Then to regard remembering instrumentally as merely something we do is to gloss that subjective productivity, and this is the first suspect ontological consequence of conventional remembrance. To regard remembering as something someone does is to reconjure the ghost of the unified subject, in defiance of its Gallic exorcism from at least the postmodern quarters of the modern academy.[15] It is a rare man who disavows his own passions; it is an even rarer woman scorned who feels more than one heart breaking in her breast. The subject who irrupts into such felt passions is a potently reunified one, the very antithesis of a dispersion of subject positions--and this is the second suspect ontological consequence. Love--or rather, the love we don't want to give up--is too reluctant to decenter. It is a defining passion, and as anthropologists Lila Abu-Lughod and Catherine Lutz note, passions are the last bastion of the naturalized self.[16] And passion under pressure tends to seek the grace of transcendental solace. If it is true that there are no atheists in foxholes, then surely it is also true that there are no postmodernists in heartbreak. Romance and its travails have made for a consummately humanist discourse--but that particular metanarrative is long overdue for incredulity.

18. If we valorize the management of heartbreak, we should not forget that management is a PR euphemism for hierarchical power, nor should we forget that such power has its own severe limitations. After all the positive thinking and psychic cleaning, after the subjection and abjection to the social order, something still remains. The trope of macro-progress, forced upon the putatively micro-workings of love, inevitably fails to totalize.[17] Now, grief presents in many forms, and some can indeed be managed. Spurned lovers threaten suicide much more often than they commit it, and I think that happy fact is due less to disingenuousness than to the relatively successful retreat from despair. Nonetheless, grief is less swept up in recovery than swept into some less troublesome and more neglected corner, where it abides, until some leftover moment when the everyday gestures die away, and we discover that even though we have managed to "keep the wolves from [our] door, they still howl out there in the darkness."[18]
    

19. A man sits on a chair, absorbed in a book. He reaches down to scratch his leg, but his fingers pass through the empty space where his leg should have been. He is an amputee; his limb was cut away many months ago, and his body has healed, but sometimes he still feels that leg itch. His body remembers its own wholeness too well; severed nerves send signs up his spinal cord, and some involuntary part of his brain reads them as messages from the leg that is no longer there. Medicine calls this phenomenon the manifestation of a "phantom limb."

20. A woman is sleeping an untroubled sleep. She has all of her big bed to herself, but when morning comes, she wakes, and she finds that she is neatly curled up on one side, leaving enough space beside her for some other body that is no longer there.
    

21. I still think about her, and when I do, what is most vivid is what I don't remember. I always loved the fragrance of her. The perfume she wore was some not uncommon designer brand, but I can't remember the name, and, try as I might (and I have striven mightily), neither can I bring back the memory of the way she smelled. Perhaps this is just a failure of rhetoric; perhaps it's that I can't say what she smelled like. A perfume, which is no more than a mildly exotic scent, is already well beyond the linguistic indices of my ordinary world. My English has the typical ethnographic failing: it is so visually enthralled that any other sense gets lexical short shrift.[19] The description of smells inevitably turns out to be thin description. Perhaps parfumiers have the just the right words, some exact and evocative vocabulary of perfumes like oenophilists have for wines, but I do not. I have nothing to say, except that she smelled like . . . her.

22. Once in a while, though, when I'm browsing in a bookstore or waiting in a theater lineup, unexpectedly I catch that scent in the air, that exact perfume. And even though I could not describe it, I recognize it instantly, "first by the . . . rapid pace of [my] heartbeat,"[20] and only after that by any conscious realization. And out of that suddenly kindled presence erupt her voice and tenderly mocking laugh, her tentative reach for my hand in the dark, her long hair gathered up and turning auburn in the lamplight, the warm evening taste of her mouth, all these memories and a hundred more in the space between two breaths, and yet every one of them impossibly exact and irresistible. My head comes up of its own and with dread I search the faces around me, but in that same moment I realize that perfume is really not the same, but only familiar: the same perfume, but worn by some other woman; the same scent, but inflected by someone else's skin. The recognition, and, close and heavy on its heels, the realization, are too immediate and tangible to be mere matters of the mind. They are the body dealing in its own mute and precise memories.

23. When that woman in the bookshop or theater passes by, those memories ebb away even as her perfume fades, until at last they all disappear. And when they're gone, they're gone. Some of them might be brought back one by one, or even severally, by will, if I concentrate, and there is enough pleasure and pain in such individuated remembrances. But the immense, incomplete invocation of her, that is no more at my command than the elusive memory of perfume. Like certain reactions of chemistry, it cannot come to pass without the provocation of a particular catalyst--which is precisely why such remembrances of love past are so intractable. Subject to neither command nor possession, they make mockery of the hope that they might be "managed." We do not remember, and make the convenient mistake of thinking that we have forgotten. But the unremembered are always waiting to come home again, and there is good reason to crave and fear their unheimlich homecoming.
    

24. Rilke calls this "blood remembering." He says that

    One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still, it is not yet enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves--not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.[21]

    

25. She keeps a box of love letters hidden behind the linens. They were written for her almost two decades ago, by someone she left behind. She's married now, to a man she cherishes and loves, and she has a beautiful home and a family, a girl and three boys. If you ask her, she'll tell you she has no regrets about the choice she made long ago, and she won't be dissembling. But, once in a while, when everyone else is asleep, or away from home, on those rare occasions when she's by herself, she retrieves that box, and she reads those letters once more, even though she's read them so many times that she can recite many of the lines by heart.

26. Perhaps she's reading them at this very moment. And if she is, I know she's handling those fragile leaves with more care than even their advancing age would warrant. But I don't know if she's smiling, or not.
    
    The Problem With Autobiography and True Feelings: A Postscript

27. "Remembrances of Love Past" arises from two motivations: my grandiose ambition to work love through a poststructuralist grid and my uneasiness with the recent proliferation of autobiographical research writing. This conjunction is neither completely manufactured nor utterly accidental. Rather, it frames an ongoing problem whose seriousness I can only outline here.

28. Let me begin with autobiography. This may seem self-defeating, given the autobiographical resonances of "Remembrances," but I have no quarrel with autobiography per se, either as the object of analysis or as a mode of writing. Neither would I ever denigrate autobiography for not being "serious enough"--whatever that could possibly mean. Nor am I concerned with tired old recriminations about objectivity. At its best, it attains a remarkable and even singular power and felicity, which may be why it is enjoying such a flourishing. Unfortunately, most autobiographical research writing--and certainly almost all autobiographical theses that I have read falls critically short of the best. A certain fundamental problem recurs again and again, like some textually transmitted disease. It starts when autobiography gets presented as the ultimate in politically correct non-appropriation, that is, as the quintessential textual grounding in an author's own "real-life experiences."

29. The problem with any such grounding is that it is the nature of ground to slip away. If we believe the astrophysicists, the solid ground that we stand upon each day is not only spinning at supersonic speeds about the axis of the earth and simultaneously revolving about the sun, but also arcing through a galaxy that is racing towards the ends of the universe. Cosmologically, ground is always carrying us away from where we are, in ways we cannot ultimately know, so its solidity is more a production of desire than fact. If we truly accept the metaphor, grounded autobiography can only settle upon the continual and unending displacement of life.

30. This is where love and other difficulties make their signal entry, for the telltale of grounded autobiography is emotional confession--inner turmoil, hope, frustration, anger, joy, sadness, satisfaction, crisis, even heartbreak. Emotion is often written in this way to supposedly demonstrate the radical limitations of "intellectualized" writing, but in doing so, it also materializes a simplistic and totalizing epistemology: "I feel it, therefore it is real." In other words, emotion writing aspires to the performative assumption of impossible solid ground: true feelings are posited as the guarantors of truth itself. Weeping on the page has become the new metaphysics of presence. This cries out for some seriously Derridean sobering up.

31. Such textual failing is made all the more acute by its political fallout, for the epiphanic equation of feeling and "what's real" all too frequently parades itself as the very embodiment of radical democracy. In this way, the epistemological presumption to solid ground returns in universalized and individuated claims to truth: "I feel it, so it is real, and I have as much right to the truth of my feelings as anyone else." This has such a nice egalitarian, anti-elitist sensibility. Should we not honor the right of every person to her or his own feelings?

32. In a word, no.

33. Daniel Cottom writes that "there is more to liberation than the feeling of release--fascists have orgasms too."[22] Likewise, fascists have sincere feelings, including genocidal hatred. What is reprehensible about the familiar and vacuous piety about "not one truth, but a truth among many truths" is how it slithers away from the ethical imperative to distinguish homicidal racists from those who oppose them. To put it another way, race hatred should garner no credit for being either genuine or honest. If this heavy- handed invocation of the Holocaust seems overmuch, consider the problematics of the simple ubiquity of our valorization of love. Because love is so celebrated, it is the place where bigotry of any stripe appears acceptable. While you can't place a newspaper ad for an employee of a certain race or ethnic group or religion, there is nothing to stop you from advertising in the same paper for a mate or lover according to precisely those discriminations. One of the special things about that special someone is that s/he is isn't Chinese or Jewish or First Nations or white or . . . .

34. My point is not to take away the "right" of people to have their feelings, but to refuse to honor them, if honoring means elevating them above interrogation, critique, or ethical evaluation or reproach. It seems to me that one of the purposes of the academy is to deny any such privileging. This is not to assert any transcendental status for "intellectualized" work (although I am perplexed by new-ageist aversion to thinking that is implicit in most claims to the truth of one's feelings), nor to impose a single overarching standard upon all texts, but simply to maintain that all human work and play, whether intellectual or emotional or something not reducible to either, should always be open to being opened up. Every human life, however textualized or autobiographed, is susceptible to a shifting of its purported ground of lived or felt experience.[23] It is my conviction that one measure of academic writing, including the autobiographical, is how it works towards that shifting.

    
    
    Portions of this paper came out of conversations with Aruna Srivastava and Alexandra Best, at that time both of the Department of English at U.B.C. It also benefited from the acute reading by Lucy De Fabrizio.

    This paper was made possible in part by a fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, whose assistance is gratefully acknowledged.

End Notes

1. Staring at the Sun (Toronto: Random House, 1987), 142. [back]

2. Without venturing into the treacherous complications of love and desire, compare this metonymy of loss and heartbreak with Lacan on metonymy and desire (and lack):

   Metonymy is, as I have shown you, the effect made possible by the fact that there is no signification that does not refer to another signification, and in which their common denominator is produced, namely the little meaning (frequently confused with the insignificant), the little meaning, I say, that proves to lie at the basis of the desire, and lends it that element of perversion that it would be tempting to find in this case of hysteria.

   The truth of this appearance is that the desire is the metonymy of the want-to-be.

   ("The direction of the treatment and the principles of its power," in Ecrits: A Selection, Jacques Lacan, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977, 259) [back]

3. Catherine Lutz makes some acute comments on how the rhetorical medicalization of emotions has critical social consequences, including the valorization of control and legitimation of the intervention by medical and quasi-medical professionals, like psychologists and psychiatrists. Hence her concern for the "mental politic." (Catherine Lutz, "Engendered emotion: gender, power, and the rhetoric of emotional control in American discourse," in Language and the politics of emotion, eds. Catherine Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), 72-4). [back]

4. Jonathan Cook, "discourse," in A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms, revised edition, ed. Roger Fowler (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 64. In "Truth and Power," Foucault says

   Truth isn't the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its 'general politics' of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true.

   ("Truth and Power," in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 131) [back]

5. Hayden White, "'Figuring the nature of the times deceased': Literary Theory and Historical Writing," in Future Literary Theory, ed. Ralph Cohen (New York: Routledge, 1989), 27. [back]

6. Cited by James Clifford, "Partial Truths," in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, eds. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1986), 8. The quote is (ironically) not attributed by Clifford, beyond a vague description of a "Cree hunter" testifying in Montreal about the huge James Bay hydroelectric project that threatened his hunting grounds. In fact, Clifford qualifies the quote as possibly apocryphal, by prefacing it with a parenthetical, "the story goes." [back]

7. Nora Ephron, Heartburn (New York: Knopf, 1983), emphasis in original, 177-8. Ephron adapted this novel for an unsuccessful feature of the same name, and subsequently mined it for her screenplay for the very popular When Harry Met Sally. This quote closes her book; earlier, she sets it up with a rather different perspective:

   "You picked the one person on earth you shouldn't be involved with." There's nothing brilliant about that--that's life. Every time you turn around you get involved with the one person on earth you shouldn't get involved with. Robert Browning's shrink probably said it to him. "So, Robert, it's very interesting, no? Of all the women in London, you pick this hopeless invalid who has a crush on her father." Let's face it: everyone is the one person on earth you shouldn't get involved with.

   And what is all this about picking, anyway? Who's picking? When I was in college, I had a list of what I wanted in a husband. A long list. I wanted a registered Democrat, a bridge player, a linguist with particular fluency in French, a subscriber to The New Republic, a tennis player. I wanted a man who wasn't bald, who wasn't fat, who wasn't covered with too much body hair. I wanted a man with long legs and a small ass and laugh wrinkles around the eyes. Then I grew up and settled for a low- grade lunatic who kept hamsters. At first I though he was charming and eccentric. And then I didn't. Then I wanted to kill him. Every time he got on a plane, I would imagine the plane crash, and the funeral, and what I would wear to the funeral, and flirting at the funeral, and how soon I could start dating after the funeral. (83, emphasis in original) [back]

8. Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot (London: Pan, 1985), 161. I am taking some unsubtle liberties with Barnes here, whose original text concerns the death of a wife, and therefore makes the Flaubert reference less mediate. [back]

9. Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot, 161. [back]

10. Herb Wiener, Wally Gold and John Gluck, Jr., "It's My Party and I'll Cry If I Want To" (World Song Publishing Inc., 1963). [back]

11. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1987), 221. The passage continues,

    So he held his wrists. Passing by that woman's life, getting it and letting get in him had set him up for this fall. [back]

12. Barnes, Staring at the Sun, 124. [back]

13. Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine (New York: Bantam, 1989), 73. [back]

14. Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot, 161. [back]

15. Of course, the subject-as-agent yet thrives in those sectors of the academy which remain comfortably and vociferously un-postmodern, and making a comeback, albeit in unfamiliar forms, in post-colonial and other recent theory. [back]

16. Lila Abu-Lughod and Catherine Lutz, "Emotion, discourse, and the politics of everyday life," in Language and the politics of emotion, eds. Lutz and Abu- Lughod, 1. [back]

17. In Lacanian terms--at least as read by Slavoj Zizek-the Symbolic register, compact of language and social relations, presents as being systematic, reliable, and complete--but it fails at some point to conceal its own insufficiency, its own ineluctable lack. It is there that something very other intrudes, the Real, utterly resistant to symbolization and domestication, and therefore palpably terrifying. See Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 133-46. [back]

18. John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman (New York: Signet, 1970), 29. [back]

19. Clifford, "Partial Truths," 12. [back]

20. Jerzy Kosinski, Passion Play (New York: Arcade, 1979), 209. [back]

21. Ranier Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Briggs, cited and trans. in Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations of Rainier Maria Rilke, John J. L. Mood, (New York: Norton, 1975), 94. [back]

22. Daniel Cottom, Text & Culture: The Politics of Interpretation (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1989), 15 [back]

23. There is a parallel problem when autobiography gets characterized as "telling one's story," for most such narrations betray an alarmingly naive understanding of narration. Storytelling in the social sciences and education generally seems ignorant of the sophisticated and diversified theoretical armature of literary criticism. [back]