Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Watches The Deconstruction of Comedy

Psychoanalyzing Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, which is streaming on Netflix, is redundant.  In this kaleidoscopic, cubistic, fractal performance piece, Gadsby psychoanalyzes humor – she tears it apart and rebuilds it and then abandons it.  She plays the part of the professor – explaining humor – and you’d think if she had to explain her jokes she wouldn’t be a very good comedian – but she is.  And a confident one.  And she takes her jokes apart because she is uncomfortable with them as a means of connecting us.  Self-deprecating humor on the part of a marginalized person is, she says, not humility but humiliating.  She is dissatisfied with jokes as a means of telling what she calls her story – they preserve trauma rather than releasing her (and us) from it – they prevent her from evolving – and instead she wants to engage in a different way of telling her story, and she does that, using the comic stage as a bully pulpit, but also as an analytic couch, telling her audience what has actually happened and what she feels in response to that in order to heal herself, but also to promote our healing – not in a touchy feely, let’s all have an encounter group hug kind of way – in fact she hates hugs with strangers- but in a “Let’s get down to business and figure out how to attack the problems that we need to work on” kind of way– with the primary problem being figuring out how to talk with each other when we have strong feelings towards and about each other.

Gadsby reveals humor to be a two part means of addressing an issue.  There is a set-up – some kind of tension – and this gets “resolved” by a punch-line – but the punch line, she says is not a true resolution - it is a means of reducing tension, but it does not go on, as a story does, to produce a new way of seeing the situation – there is not a resolution of the tension, but a preservation of it because it gets sidestepped, not directly resolved.  In psychoanalytic terms, we defend against the tension – we use it as a spring board to a new place that is really just a different version of the place we left.  We have rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic, but not actually solved the problem.

Gadsby ingeniously demonstrates this by taking two passes at her comic material.  She first gives a “straight” rendition of lesbian themed humor told as first person stories, then she returns to that material and exposes what has been hidden in it to make it funny – and we see that the material is actually much more painful and difficult, but also more vivid and real, than in the “edited for humor” version.  And Gadsby herself, or should I say Hannah, is transformed from a performer who is manipulating us into a raw and real person who is communicating uncomfortable truths – and as she does this the camera moves in to take the tightest shots – and we are not allowed to look away.

But Gadsby is not satisfied with communicating with us what it feels like to be her.  She wants us to get that, viscerally, and I think we do, in so far as we are able to handle the discomfort that is involved with that, but she doesn’t want us to stay stuck there – even though she won’t relieve us of that.  Instead she opens the door to our moving forward – but doesn’t do it for us.  She points us in the direction that she believes we should travel – through the genius of Art History – to what it is that we need to do to help her – and therefore to help ourselves.  And she implores us to do that – to love one another - so that the pulpit feels a bit like a Sunday morning one, and we are now being led, not in the uncovering the meaning of scripture, but the meaning of the culture we are part of.  We are worshiping at the altar of the comic turned, what? Priest?  Artist?  Confessor? Analysand?  Analyst?

For what it is worth, I think that Freud would have agreed with a lot that Gadsby is observing about humor, but she would have schooled him on the interpersonal aspects.  He was more interested in how humor worked within the individual mind – what that mind finds funny.  He likened humor to dreams and noted that the same mechanisms that make dreams work do the same for humor.  Thomas Ogden then noted that not all dreams help us move forward.  Many of them, like Gadsby’s concern with humor, end up keeping us stuck in rehearsing over and over the same material – keeping us stuck in trauma, as it were.  These Ogden distinguishes from generative dreams – dreams that move us forward – that give us new room to operate or, in Gadsby’s language – new stories to tell – or new ways to move the stories forward.

I think Nanette is an important work.  It calls attention to the conservative nature of humor – which often feels edgy, but more often than not, humor conserves rather than tests or moves the edges it runs into.  I am thinking about assigning this video to my history of psychology class to watch as an assignment.  I think it would help them realize that, just as the history of art is useful to this comedian, the history of psychology may come in handy someday…  Ok, that was lame, but on some level true.  More importantly, I think that being grounded in who it is that we are which means knowing where it is that we have come from can help us understand where it is that we are going.  And we can realize some of the flaws in the culture that we have inherited by hearing from those at the margins.  Plus it will be relevant to the section on women in psychology and working to help the students understand how women have been treated.

The New York Times article that accompanies the write up of the Nanette performance looks at the way that comedy has become ubiquitous in our culture.  Here at home, stand-up comedy streams from our television – especially when the eldest reluctant step-daughter is in residence, on a pretty regular basis.  Stand-up comics have also long been the stars of sitcoms – most notably Seinfeld and now there is a retrospective comedy The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, that imagines a female comedian who could go toe to toe with Lenny Bruce.  Cable, with Comedy Central and then streaming video allowed the comic the bits on TV to break the confines of the host’s opening monologue and the five minute windows on late night talk shows where it used to be sequestered (though it was also, of course in comedy clubs that a few accessed).  We, the viewing audience, have now been admitted to the clubs and the stages where comedy is being performed, because it is now filmed and streamed.

Gadsby’s thesis is that her humor preserves her trauma rather than being a vehicle for her to work it through.  I think that this applies to humor more generally, not just to hers.  Comics ask us to laugh at them or at others – in either case, they are frequently implicitly telling us what not to do – don’t slip on this banana peel because others will laugh at you.  And when you tell someone what not to do, you are telling them to stay in their lane.  The not too subtly coded message is, “Don’t do this, or you will be ridiculed.”  Comedy, then, becomes a vehicle for maintaining the status quo through managing shame.  We laugh at the way that others have been ashamed – and by laughing at them we distance ourselves from our own shame.  But we also preserve the shaming voice – the voice that makes fun of anyone on the playground who differs from the norm in any way – including in extraordinarily beautiful and productive ways.  From Gadsby’s position, we take the person we are laughing at as representing not me rather than connecting with and identifying with them as someone like ourselves (frequently this occurs at the very same moment that we are recognizing ourselves in them, “Yup, I’ve done that, too.  Wasn’t that stupid.  I’ll never do that again,” when, of course we will).  The distancing - the labelling of the humorous as something that is not me – maintains the laughed at material as shameful and keeps us from owning that material and engaging with it in ways that would allow us to address them – e.g. I will work to prevent things like that from happening to anyone vs. I won’t ever put myself in a situation like that again.

Gadsby takes angry straight white male comedians to task by calling them the canaries in the mineshaft.  If their lives aren’t good, she poses, what does that say for the rest of us.  Well, I’ve got news for you Hannah: it is challenging to live all of our lives – even those of us with great privilege aren’t always up to the task – and she cites many examples of those who have failed miserable at the  task.  Her concern – and I share it – is that many of these inhuman people – take Harvey Weinstein or Woody Allen for instance – have been responsible for our stories.  Meaning, their inhumanity must needs have polluted the story making that we rely on to find heroes with whom we can identify.  Again, Hannah, I’ve got news for you.  We have a long way to go, baby.  The stories that these people have produced reflect a culture that includes and in many cases supports toxic behavior.  Telling new stories will contribute to, but also be a result in shifts in a culture whose roots are very very deep.  This won't come easy.

A minor fear is that blaming those who have privilege and have abused it sets up the idea that just getting privilege and somehow not abusing it will lead to happiness.  This seems to be the driving force behind the Gwyneth Paltrow GOOP movement.  Fortunately, Hannah states that women are every bit as corruptible as men – I think when we see this though, we might say, “Oh, look, you can’t let them run things.  Look what a mess they make when they do that,” while we seem to have given many straight white males license to do things even when they have made tremendous messes.  But I have wandered away from the main point – doing things well is hard work.  There is a kernel of truth to Gwyneth Paltrow’s position that her perfect life has to do (in part) with hard choices and hard work that she has done.  We should use our privilege to work on improving our own lives and those of others in an active way – not just by buying things that make us feel good, but by doing the hard but important work of connecting with those around us.

The set-up in Nanette is that this piece is named after a woman that Hannah though she would find interesting enough to devote an hour of material to.   Nah.  Nanette wasn’t that interesting.  So who was?  It turns out that it was Hannah – Hannah and her relationship with the world – including the people in it who have abused her, the people who laugh with her, and, perhaps most importantly, the people who have supported her.  And even more centrally, it is Hannah herself.  Who is she?  And what, it turns out, has comedy done to her?  And what is it doing to all of us?  Yes, as she says, laughter is good medicine, but penicillin is better.  What will it take for us to continue to move, in our incredibly slow and bewilderingly chaotic way, out of our messes?  I agree with Hannah that love is the basic ingredient.  And I am appreciative that Hannah has pointed us in that direction.  It will be interesting to chart where this leads – it feels a little like it felt when Lorde burst on the scene – another underprivileged person from the southern hemisphere - is this kind of work sustainable when the star is in the public eye?

Gadsby has decided that she will continue with comedy – or something – after all.  As she said on Jimmy Fallon, she wrote this show to quit comedy.  She did not expect it to be a hit – she expected it to be her swan song.  But now that it has taken off she can be an idiot and quit or be a hypocrite – and she is choosing to be a hypocrite.  Of course, those she brings to task are all hypocrites, too.  Not that she doesn’t recognize this.  Hopefully her self-awareness will help her stay a bit above the fray…

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Asymmetry II – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Continues to Mull Lisa Halliday’s Ode to the Power of Love

I just wrote a post about Asymmetry, and then I reread the book – this is a book that deserves rereading – and on the reread I have a second take on it.  Yes, it is the same book.  No, I am not taking down the first post (here).  I believe it stands as written.  But a good book, and a great book even more, means different things at different moments, just as we ourselves do; as Amar Jafaari, the protagonist in the second part notes while looking in a mirror, “...that like all mirrors… gave back startlingly little of the worlds within worlds a single consciousness comprises, too dull and static a human surface to convey the incessant kaleidoscope within.” 

Hegel revised our Platonic notion of unchanging truth when he radically proposed that our efforts to understand something actually changes it – we are in a dialectical relationship with truth.  It is not a thing that is unchanging, but truth is a thesis, waiting for an antithesis that will result in a synthesis – something that is new and informed by both positions.  I think this radical revisioning of the world of ideas was a precursor to the modernism that Freud helped usher in – the idea that the subjective is as important as the objective.  We have since devolved into a postmodern world where intention is called into question – intention on the part of the author and the capacity of the reader while reading to engage in something that is shared.

At its worst, this would suggest that all news is fake news and we are able to make up new truths as we move along – truths that are untethered to the world.  The fake news position is, however, indefensible.  We live in a world of flesh and blood, of bone and failing hearts – a world that we are all too briefly given access too.  And this book articulates the opening to that world that love affords.  The subject of this book is the author.  She makes it so when she intentionally reveals in interviews that the first part is a version of her secret affair with Philip Roth.  And it is about an author who is not present in that first part.  She is written about in the third person by a narrator who has access to some of her thoughts, but she is ultimately a stranger to the narrator – which is doubly strange because the narrator is none other than she herself.

The woman in the first part – titled folly – does not know herself.  She is naïve and seemingly prematurely exposed to someone who is full of self-knowledge.  This is a central Asymmetry of the book.  But the man’s self-knowledge – and his capacity to closely observe the world and this woman – to love her as an object – to groom her – with all of the weird connotations that go with that – includes grooming her to be able to observe – to hear and read authors closely – but more essentially to hear and read herself more closely so that, over time, she, through love, becomes more clearly herself.  More able to articulate herself.

She also, as a result of this process, becomes unlike herself.  In the beginning, she is sitting in the park not reading a book – it doesn’t hold her attention – in part because it contains no quotations marks.  How can a book be interesting that doesn’t contain quotation marks?  She demonstrates how that can be the case when she writes the second section of the book – she takes on aspects of the book by the author that bored her.  But she does this in a way that holds our attention.

The self that she chooses to articulate in the second section of this book – madness – could not, on the surface, be much more different than who she appears to be on a surface level as a person.  A Muslim man who is a citizen of both Iraq and the US, Amar Jafaari, she writes his story not in the third person, but in the first.  To do this, she has to write, not as her particular self, but as his particular self, but she also has to connect on a deeper level with what it means for him to be human – and whether she succeeds in this endeavor is both the promise but also the danger of this book – by writing about someone so different from herself, she is walking a high wire without a net.

All that said, as Ezra – the thinly veiled Philip Roth who bedded her and taught her about writing in the first part – notes in the brief coda at the end, this is ultimately a book about her – it cannot not be – she is the person who is being expressed through Amar Jafaari – the man who is a person without a country in the second book – the man who is caught in Britain with an American and an Iraqi passport and who thus does not have the protection of the British government, even though he had lived there and volunteered to care for children there 10 years earlier.  But this is small potatoes compared to having the country that his family is from be destroyed by the country that he went to as their child to find a better life – and he is called back into peril by his older brother’s greater connection to their country of origin than the destination country.  In the metaphor – the author is drawn into the country of writing – one that is not her native soil – by a native writer – and there feels imperiled.

This book then is about the transience of identity – about how the author becomes someone she is not – she is transformed by some form of love.  In the interview, Ezra maintains that he treats his lovers like children – like the children he never had.  And she has been loved, incestuously if you will, by a man from a different generation.  A man who opened her mind to things that were not of her own generation – and we have profited from that.  We have been moved by the woman she has become to appreciate a world that was largely made by Ezra – the world that the two of them inhabited – but then she took what she learned in his world and created an entirely different world – one that is her own creation.  Ezra approves of this world in the coda – he saw this world and decided it was good – but it is one that is foreign to him as a person and as a writer.  The author has gone there in part, I think, to be on her own.

She anticipates Ezra’s articulation of her writing about Amar as self-revelation when, in the section quoted above about the mirror that Amar is looking into, Amar goes on to opine that, “…even someone who imagines for a living is bound by the ultimate constraint: she can hold her mirror up to whatever subject she chooses, at whatever angle she likes – she can even hold it such that she herself remains outside its frame, the better to de-narcissize the view- but there’s no getting around the fact that she is holding the mirror.  And just because you can’t see yourself in the reflection doesn’t mean no one can.”  This would be about her even without the seemingly PC based other-gender specific language that Amar, a graduate of a US Ivy League School, dutifully is using.
    

But it is also the case that she arrives there and is still herself – including the part of her that predates her relationship with Ezra – but more importantly – it is the part that is part and parcel of the relationship with Ezra and one that was, in fact, partly formed by him.  Would that she could shed this part – I think the writing of something (quite literally) so foreign is an attempt to do that.  But the reflection in the mirror won’t let her get away from him and their relationship together nor will it let her get away from herself.  She states (as Amar), again in the section about the mirror, “… like the embodiment of a line I would later read – something about the metaphysical claustrophobia and bleak fate of always being one person.”

This past weekend I went with the reluctant son to a family reunion near the Salvador Dali museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.  I understand the museum has been rebuilt and reorganized since I was there fifteen years ago.  I hope that the arc of Dali’s life has been preserved – though the agenda at the reunion interfered with finding that out.  Dali was a tremendous but very troubled artist who painted amazing but disturbed works early in his career.  He intentionally painted disturbing elements from his dreams as a means of trying to do Freudian self-analysis.  It may have been quite successful as his later works are integrated masterpieces – works of a mature artist (though with a bit of madness around the edges).  Did the analysis work?  Maybe – but he also fell in love – and it could be that it was the relationship that led to the changes that let him use his talents to express more than his madness – to express beauty.

Lisa Halliday’s relationship with Philip Roth – a relationship that started by chance – but that also felt fated – a theme that Amar Jafaari plays with as a Muslim and as a person – what is determined by God and what do we have control over? – becomes an integral part of who she is as an author.  Roth is the God who has determined her – just as all of us have been determined by the powerful formative relationships in our extended childhood – certainly with our parents – but also as my father was formed in part by his relationship with his older brother whose 90^th birthday was the excuse for our reunion.  So the return to the family becomes an exploration of who we were, but also who we are – and we regress to who it was that we were when we interact with those who knew us when.  Those who connected with something unformed, primitive, but essential to who we are – and we are forever working – on some level - to show them that what we have done is partly their product, but also something that is wholly our own.

Halliday brings us into her familial attempt to articulate her developmental arc in the solar glow and the shadow of one of the great writers of the twentieth century.  And we get to share in that tremendously intimate self-portrait – one that is so specific and so well-articulated that it becomes a universal expression of something true about the process of learning through the vehicle of love from someone we respect and admire – and hate and disdain – and ultimately work to use as a launching pad into the world of possibilities that we will carve for ourselves.

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Asymmetry – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Enjoys Lisa Halliday’s beautiful depiction of power imbalanced relationships

This book is a very good read.  Indeed, it may be a great book.  It starts, inauspiciously, with a gossipy rendition of the author’s affair, apparently when she was 26, with Philip Roth – the giant of American fiction.  The asymmetry between them is depicted, we only realize later, by the ways in which she as a person is erased in her depiction of the relationship.  Roth (under the pseudonym Ezra Blazer) occludes Alice (Halliday’s pseudonym) and we are drawn, with her, into our curiosity about him, and react to the ways in which his not so subtly turning her into a prostitute – giving her a wallet, a watch, a scarf, paying off her college loans – in exchange not just for sex with his decrepit body, but also for love – in whatever ways we do.  But initially there is prurient interest that has a moral tone - especially in this age when May-December romances having a predatory feel to them rather than the kind of free pass they may once have been given.  We watch with fascination her connection to a man who is imprisoned within both his failing body and in the ways in which his fame and his intense openness to human experience makes casual contact caustic, but we also feel a great deal of concern for Alice - can she handle this relationship?

Like all great novels, when read analytically, this book opens up and comments on the inner life of the reader.  For you it will be (or has been) whatever it is, for me: I was a student at an alternative campus of a suburban high school.  Not nearly so glamorous as the literary Manhattan that Halliday describes, it was intentionally created by conservative but caring administrators listening to students at the height of our last cultural upheaval – the one that took place along generational fault lines – in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  They recognized that the main campus of the High School, with 3,000 students and traditional classrooms felt cold, impersonal and irrelevant to a significant minority of bright, creative students who were dropping or zoning out despite considerable promise.  They created a campus with 150 students and 7 faculty members who would, together, determine the curriculum, government, and culture of the campus.  In the process, and intentionally, the faculty became, instead of distant dispensers of information, confidants who were available to talk about the hopes and dreams, but also the fears and difficulties of the students, not just in the classroom, but in the smoking lounge behind the school, on the softball field and in the log cabin we built together on the campus.

Lisa Halliday

Halliday is intentionally addressing the issues of the metoo movement.  It is only incidentally that we discover that the character that she chooses to call Alice – who is intentionally a version of the Alice who has journeyed into the rabbit hole and through the looking glass (both metaphors that are elaborated in the novel) – is more than a sexual bauble.  We discover gradually and seemingly accidentally that she is not just the person who can’t finish anything, the person who can’t pronounce Camus, as she is originally introduced, but a Harvard graduate.  We hear her word play with the lauded author where she gives as well as she gets, and we begin to wonder, with her, whether she is selling herself short in the relationship.  Across time, we discover that Ezra/Roth is more and more dependent on Alice/Halliday and we cringe a bit when she exerts her power to extricate herself from the relationship,when she begins to play the role of her Boston Red Sox - down three none to his vaunted Yankees in the playoffs and the comeback begins and the imbalance of power becomes not as great as it has appeared - we see a shift coming.  Her ability to acknowledge the power of her end of the asymmetry – her youth and the life before her – threatens to expose the possibility that this relationship must necessarily include harm to one or the other of them – and this ending seems unsatisfying – it seems neither of them will have ended up profiting from their relationship after it dissolves.

In the wake of a recent reunion, a student from my school indicated in a school Facebook group that one of the highly regarded faculty members – one of only three faculty members with a room in the school building named after him – had abused him when he was a student (the faculty member is now deceased).  Other students indicated that there were additional abused students who did not want to be publicly identified but had similar experiences.  The student who came forward described his first interaction with the faculty member was when the faculty member asked him to go with him to the store to buy school supplies.  On the main campus, this would have been a red flag – on the alternative campus, this level of closeness was encouraged, and it advertised to the student he could have a special relationship with the faculty member – little did he know how special it would be and how getting into the faculty member’s car was equivalent to getting into the dreaded ice cream truck.

Philip Roth/Ezra Blazer

Blazer invites Alice (one of the asymmetries is that we don’t know Alice’s last name - it is Dodge - until it is mentioned just once when she is on jury duty - while we do know Ezra’s - but we do have a fully articulated alias for her - including a last name - that Roth invents so that they don't end up in the pages of the Daily News) into his affair with her on the occasion of their third meeting in the park by asking her, “Are you game?”  She knows who he is and he knows that she knows who he is from her blush at their first meeting – but they have never spoken of that.  He is Mister Softee (he has offered her the dreaded ice cream but she decides to take it because Pulitzer prize winners don’t poison people (or do they?)).  Their agreement about going out onto the balcony but implicitly about starting the relationship is that “No one throws the other one over…  Deal.”  The relationship between my peer and the teacher was more complicated and even more one sided.  And the relationship was sealed by the shame that the teacher counted on the student to experience and which would guarantee his silence.  And perhaps Blazer counted on Alice’s shame to prevent her describing her participation in their relationship – she wouldn’t throw him over by publicly exposing him out of modesty.  This book, though, takes a turn.  Rather than exploring the dissolution of the relationship, the story ends (until a coda) with the impact of the affair on each of them hanging in the air and abruptly shifts to another, seemingly unrelated story with a different level of asymmetry.

The second story is told, unlike the first, in the first person.  It is as if Alice/Lisa has found her voice.  But the voice she finds is that of a male Muslim who was born in American air space as his parents were immigrating and grew up here as an American citizen, but also as a citizen of Iraq.  And the story, that at first seems unrelated (and remains so in terms of connections between characters or plot), is told in chapters that alternate between his being held in London as an adult on his way back to what is now war-torn Iraq to try to find his brother at the height of the chaos (or as this section is titled: madness), and a kaleidoscopic collection of recollections that allow us to understand the backstory that brings him to this moment.  

Inhabiting the mind of another, and doing that as masterfully as this woman has done, requires a certain hubris.  You have to be a very good writer to do that – and even very good writers draw the line at articulating the experience of those who are essentially different – as Kathryn Stockett did in The Help.  And Alice/Lisa gets the explicit stamp of approval for the writing of the middle section of the novel in the brief coda at the end of the novel from none other than Ezra/Philip himself, clarifying that the relationship between them may have had depth that wasn’t articulated in the early part of this novel and that the resolution was not as problematic as we feared.  Further, her work to bridge asymmetrical divides elevates her over her lofty lover/mentor, who was an exquisite writer of his own (Jewish) experience but who was characterized in one obituary as being an author who “… wrote of suburban, gentile America with clueless banality.”  It is not up to me, of course, to evaluate the “authenticity” of Halliday’s characterization of a Muslim (though it scans well to my ear), but she gets aspects of the male world right as she crashes through the gendered looking glass.  More importantly to the arc of the novel, she gets the asymmetry between the U.S. and Iraq – and the asymmetrical relationship between being a U.S. citizen and a citizen of a third world country that we are at war with (or putatively on behalf of). 

The first section – where the asymmetry is not as pronounced as in the second – is titled “Folly”.  The distinction between folly and madness is one of degree and what the line between those is became controversial in our Facebook conversations about the teacher.  The issue is: What do we do with the positive contributions of our deeply flawed teacher?  We have struggled with that within the psychoanalytic discipline where highly respected writers and teachers have been revealed to have crossed boundaries in asymmetrical relationships with their patients that have wreaked havoc in the patient’s lives.  It has been addressed in art – e.g. Alan Rickman’s performance in Seminar presented an All’s Well that Ends Well version of this – darker visions are available and I’m sure many more are waiting in the wings.  The Asymmetry between the two tales in this novel present a range – and both tales hang without conclusion.  We seem even more certain of a tragic ending to she second tale than the first – but we have no reassuring coda to rescue us.

The kid (which is what he was when things went on) at my school did not realize that not only were things wrong but they should be stopped until his own child approached the age he had been when he went through hell.  As he connected with his child, he was able to see that neither he nor any other child deserved to go through what he had.  He reported the teacher to the police, the school board and the superintendent.  Not surprisingly, he, like the Iraqi in Heathrow airport, was himself put on trial – cross examined as if he were a liar intent on doing something nefarious.  The teacher “resigned” the year after the allegations, but there was never a public acknowledgement of what the student (and others) had to survive.  Fortunately he has received a warmer reception on Facebook, but the question of the legacy of the perpetrator is being debated.  No one seems to disagree that his name should be removed from the school, but there are some who believe that all of his good actions were false and existed only to create a façade behind which he could do his evil.  I think it possible that his generative acts – and the ways in which he positively impacted students – need not necessarily be discarded by those who cherish them. 

Halliday ends as she begins, having Ezra solicit a married talk show host who has two children on air with the same “Are you game?” query that started their folly.  She seems to be, at least on one level, sanguine with the idea that Roth/Blazer was who he was (and he, for his part, seems at peace with the end of their affair).  She has been able to gently expose him (as opposed to Roth’s cruel exposure of his psychoanalyst’s faults after his analyst wrote a thinly disguised critical piece about Roth in analysis).  She acknowledges her own activity in the affair and indirectly credits Roth/Blazer with helping her find her voice.  That said, she, unlike my acquaintance, was 26 when she entered a relationship that she, at least on one level, desired and in which there were compensatory asymmetries - and she, unlike her Iraqi counterpart - was not up against multiple states conspiring against her happiness.  We feel her dismay that Roth/Blazer has the time to read lots of other manuscripts, but does not appear to be reading her writing; indeed, she seems to deny herself as a writer even as he keeps insisting that she is one:  he divines that this is who she wants to be and seems to almost force his vision of her as a writer on her – force feeding her writings which end up nourishing not an imitative but ultimately a clear and original voice.  Certainly America and our policies have done good in the world as well as evil, though we have certainly done evil.  How to evaluate the level of the asymmetry and its ultimate outcome is, I think, left to the reader.  Halliday appears to have come to terms with her own asymmetry (but not pretend that this means that she is OK with all asymmetries) and she leaves it up to us to come to terms with ours.     

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The Hobbit - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads A Tale of Positive Transference

The Reluctant Son is reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings this summer.  He and a friend have decided to focus on reading things they have read before – last summer they reread the Harry Potter novels and this summer it is Tolkien.  He was OK with my joining in this summer.  I thought he was reading the Hobbit, too, which is a prequel to the trilogy, so I started on that.  He then told me that the introduction in the first book of the Lord of the Rings was enough for him and he didn’t feel the need to read it.  I think that’s too bad.  My memory of reading these books when I was 12 or 14 is that the Hobbit was fun and the Lord of the Rings was overwhelming.  This reading of the Hobbit helps me get a sense of what I was experiencing then about the Hobbit.  We’ll see about the Lord of the Rings as I read that.

I think there are two sets of relationships that Tolkien sets up that make the Hobbit such a pleasure to read.  The first is the relationship between him, the author, and the reader.  This avuncular relationship, where he speaks to us and clearly cares about us and about our understanding the world he has created exudes warmth.  Various introductions to the work state that Tolkien wrote the book for his children and it has that feel.  We feel engaged with someone who cares about us – we feel cared for as a father cares for his children.

This avuncular or paternal relationship is reflected, then, in the relationship between the wise wizard Gandolf and the hero of the tale, Bilbo Baggins.  The wizard puts Bilbo up to the adventure – there is a little bit in Bilbo’s genetics that suggests that he might be able to pull off a little bit of an adventure – and Bilbo eventually more than lives up to billing, though we all have our doubts at the beginning that he is going to be able to do that.

Bilbo Baggins is essentially a stay at home kind of guy – he likes the regularity of his six meals a day – and he is short.  He is, from the paternal perch where I am now reading, like the kids who hang around my house – happy to have me take care of things for them – but also delighted to connect with others and hang out in a place that we have created for them that is relatively safe and very social.  And I wonder about their ability to get out there on their own – and then they do – and I, like Gandalf, am frequently surprised at their capacities once they do.  And I take a special interest in them when they do.  I drop in on them now and then – now that they have mostly left the nest – to see how they are doing.  And Gandolf does this, too, disappearing from the adventure once Bilbo and the Dwarves get will underway, and he only returns when it is time for the battle of the five armies – after Bilbo has made the definitive choice that shifts the balance of power among what will turn out to be the allied armies.

The interesting thing, as I’m reading it from this perspective, is that Tolkien keeps emphasizing the smallness of the consequences of what occurs – especially in the introduction to the Lord of the Rings – while also articulating the heroism of all involved.  It reminds me, on the one hand, of reading about the Peloponnesus wars – which meant a lot to the Greeks, but had little impact on me, and, on the other, of the investment that I have in the various affairs of my children – I am keenly concerned with how they manage themselves on the various battlefields they encounter – though the wars they're engaged in are of little consequence to anyone much beyond the immediate circle of those effected.

Today, I am serving my first day of jury duty – waiting to be called and convinced that this is not going to happen.  But it was actually quite moving to have a judge and then the clerk in charge thank us for engaging in a civic duty that is a defining characteristic of our democracy.  Only one group has been called to sit for duty – and I have no idea what kind of case it was – and it likely will not be reported in the papers – but it is none the less a cornerstone of who it is that we are and what it is that we do.  It actually matters, these little actions of ours – and these little actions – heroic or mundane as they may be – determine – in aggregate – what kind of community we live in.

So, from the other perspective, of being the child reading the tale, it is reassuring to have the guidance of Gandalf – and the narrator – as new foes are being met and odd and interesting new friends are being made.  Gandalf turns out to be tricky – as is this world which is filled with Goblins and Elves and Shape Shifters – and I (as Bilbo) turn out to have skills that I didn’t know that I had.  And I develop skills along the way.  And I get tools in unexpected places – I become the burglar that Gandalf has predicted I will become – and, I think in part because Gandalf has given me permission – I use my abilities (as a burglar) to act in moral and ethical ways.  I use my illegal skills in the service of justice and a higher cause.

Tolkien, from this perspective, is offering a counterpoint to Freud’s vision of civilization dehumanizing us – Tolkien is proposing that despite the ways in which the primitive aspects of human drives get expressed – and here I am thinking primarily of war – we can still engage in that activity with honor.  Of course, it is easier to do this when the other armies are wolves and Goblins – not other human beings.  And there is more honor in hand to hand combat than when we are pulling strings from a distance as increasingly happens in modern warfare (see Eye in the Sky).  The challenges to our sense of integrity and honor may be greater in our modern times than even in his, but I think his point is still valid.  Through education and nurture, which he demonstrates as much in the careful way that he tells the tale as through any morals in the tale itself, he believes that we can develop ourselves in ways that allow us to contribute to the world – not just enjoy being in it – and that we can leave our safe dens and engage with the world in all its complexity.

I think that Tolkien is portraying here a variety of relationships.  He is likely drawing on his relationship with his father, who died while he was young - about nine - and his mother who died a few years later - and then the Roman Catholic Priest into whose care he was sent when his mother knew she was dying.  In this sense these are inherited relationships and Tolkien is the child.  But he is also being or becoming the father - and presenting an idealized version of that - perhaps as he is shepherding himself through parenting (where he is both Gandalf and Bilbo) and remembering aspects of Gandalfian parenting - but also as he hopes his children will respond - as Bilbo - to the father figure that he wants to become.  Would that we could all aspire to be paternal with Gandalf and Tolkien as our models - as our positive transference figures.

At the end of the book, Tolkien reassuringly returns Bilbo to his hearth and home – and suggests that after our adventures we can be safe again and have our memories to return to.  I think this version of things is the one that is most appropriate to younger children.  But as those children age, it is important for them to come to grips with the idea that the world is even more complicated than they initially imagined – and that their own wishes and desires are more powerful than they initially appeared.  Perhaps this will be what is addressed in the Lord of the Rings.  Perhaps I simply wasn’t ready for this level of engagement when I read this through the first time.  I think that I wanted a simpler tale (just as I am reluctant in my identification with the complexities of the psychoanalytic perspective).  It does appear, just reading the introduction to the Lord of the Rings, that the author’s tone shifts dramatically – he is “pretending” to be a scholar – which of course Tolkien was – the pretense is that he is writing in a scholarly fashion about a history that does not, in fact, exist.  But he is writing as a professor, not as a father, and he is showing his chops as an adult functioning in the world, not as a safe, warm and fuzzy protector who is making everything – even the really scary things – OK.  I think the Lord of the Rings will likely still be difficult for me…

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Night Hawks: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Feels Charles Johnson's Isolationism

Charles Johnson’s Night Hawks, a book of short stories, was given to me by the reluctant son for Father’s Day to commemorate a particular moment we had together.  I visited him at college and we spent the afternoon at the Chicago Art Institute.  We had been there before but this time he asked me to take him to some of my favorites.  We went to the American wing and spent time looking at Georgia O’Keefes, American Gothic, and we stopped in to see Nighthawks, Edward Hopper’s masterpiece, just as a docent with her tour group walked by.

The docent described the work as a meditation on isolation, noting the lack of a door in the diner – the brightness of the interior versus the outside and the isolation of each of the four people inside the painting from each other.  This evoked in me a dangerous thing – a question.  I raised my hand to ask this question and I was afraid (as was the reluctant son, I later learned but sensed in the moment) that I would embarrass him.  We had just seen a play by my mother, his grandmother, about Jack Warner’s use of the movie Casablanca to help reduce the political isolation of the United States.  Noting the date of the painting, 1942, I asked if the painting was a political statement on Hopper’s part about America’s isolationism.  The docent responded in a kindly manner that thought others had wondered about that as well, there was no evidence that Hopper had that in mind when he painted it.

The people on the docent led tour moved off and we had the painting to ourselves again.  The reluctant son expressed relief that my question had not been experienced as completely off the wall by the docent, the others in the tour, or by he himself.  We also appreciated the painting in new ways – seeing details that we hadn’t before.  It was a nice moment.  So it was great to receive the book with a title that referred to that moment.  That said, I was also a little trepidatious.  My father had once given me a book, American Psycho, Bret Stevens’ book that describes in vivid detail the mind and actions of a psychopath who maims and kills women with pleasure.  I was worried about what my father was saying about me and my interests – and I asked my mother about this.  She reassured me that he had simply chosen the book because of psycho – as in psychological – in the title, so he assumed I would be interested in it.

Johnson’s Night Hawks (the separation into two words was Hopper’s intended title for his work) is a collection of short stories that he wrote over the course of nineteen years for an annual reading he titled Bedtime Stories in which he and others read short stories they had written so that the whole reading took place within a two hour time frame.  Bedtime Stories was conceived as a fundraiser for Humanities Washington and Johnson is a faculty member at the University of Washington and lives in Seattle – and, incidentally, the stories in the collection have worked as bed time stories for me.  Johnson is an African American author who has written a National Book Award book, Middle Passage that is now on my list of books to read.  He is also student of Buddhism, a philosopher, and a person who demonstrates interest in working to understand the experience of marginalized populations working from his own experience as a minority.

The cover of the book is a variant of the Nighthawks painting – it is a photograph of a brightly lit woman in a laundromat waiting for her clothes.  As in the painting, the background is a non-descript street scene but, instead of it being somewhere in Greenwich Village in the forties, it is a contemporary urban picture of a neighborhood that may have been vibrant during the forties, but seems somewhat shopworn now.  Both versions radiate a sense of isolation that is present in all of the intimate stories that are told in this text, but it is the final story – from which the main title is taken – that helped me appreciate that the isolation I felt as a reader from the characters that Johnson describes may reflect something about who he is and where we are as a culture in reading the voices of the marginalized.

While most of these stories are told in the first person – most of them are also clearly about inhabiting the mind of another person.  Whether it is Plato or an Indian student of a Buddhist master, the author is clearly making a leap into the mind of someone else.  Two of the stories might be truly autobiographical, and the last one certainly is.  In it, the author goes out to dinner with another African American Author, August Wilson, author of, among other things, the play and movie Fences, and he describes the delicious intimacy of being with someone like himself – but also the wide gap that separates Wilson, a man raised in the African American section of Pittsburgh – from himself, who was raised in suburban Evanston, Illinois.  Among other things, the two of them talk about whether the arcs of their careers – in which they have artistically depicted African Americans – has made a difference – whether it has made an impact on the race relations landscape of America.

Yesterday, with the reluctant family in North Carolina, we toured two antebellum mansions.  One was on  a peanut growing plantation outside of Wilmington, and, after the tour, the older reluctant stepdaughter was in tears.  The tour had, predictably, focused on the lives of the family that owned the plantation – before and after the “freeing” of the slaves most of whom become tenant farmers who were perennially indebted to their former masters and were, at best, no longer marginalized.  She was disappointed that the lives of those who had supported the family and produced the bulk of the income were not more centrally located in the narrative about the place.  Now, in defense of the place, there was a long and detailed discussion of the lives of the slaves and the tenant farmers in one of the rooms in the basement, and the docent acknowledged the engineering and planting skills of the slaves who had built the home and tended the peanuts and other crops,but the reluctant stepdaughter was right – the tour was about the owners – and the slave’s quarters (rebuilt as a tenant farmer home then moved to be on the property to be easily toured) included a steel frame bed – hardly representative of the conditions that the slaves actually lived in.

Later that day, we toured the Bellamy mansion in Wilmington, NC, built with the profits from one year’s operation of the owner’s nearby turpentine plantation.  It was a magnificent mansion in town and, again, the skill of the plasterer’s and builders – slave and free blacks – were honored.  Indeed, one the great-great-grandchildren of the one of the plasterer’s was there that day being interviewed and filmed.  The grounds house one of seven or eight preserved urban slave’s quarters, and the functioning of the slaves was described.  The lived lives of the slaves were not.  I leafed through a book in the bookstore (about 15-20% of the titles in the bookstore were devoted to slaves and slavery).  It was a collection of slave reminiscences collected by the WPA during the 1930s.  This turns out to be a huge trove of material that is of dubious quality.  Ultimately, 41 volumes of interviews were published (though not until the 1980s were they all in print).  Many of the interviews were conducted by the children or grandchildren of the slave’s former masters, and most involved a highly structured interview format administered by untrained interviewers.  None the less, this is the largest collection of first person accounts of the slave experience.

Slaves were largely illiterate – and there was a virulent effort to maintain their offspring in an illiterate state for generations.  This means that writing – the primary means of giving voice to one’s experience – was not an option for most who experienced slavery and for most who directly heard the stories of it.  There was not a broad first person written record of the African American experience for a very long time.  The writing that Johnson describes he and Wilson doing is writing from late in the civil rights period until now.  The story about their dining together emphasizes the importance of their being able to talk together as peers – to connect with someone else who is doing what they are doing.

I am not certain, but I think it would be easier for “white” writers to find each other – and easier for African American writers getting started writing today to do so.  Johnson’s isolation is partly a generational issue.  I don’t know how much this informed his choice to study Buddhism, another source of the isolation and the means through which he tells many of the stories that he does, but it must.  There is a sense of “if I can’t control it, I will let go of it” that emanates from the stories.  This is, I think, a reasonable response to being out of control of one’s life, which the Buddhist’s point out, is true for all of us.  But this lens, then, creates a universal – but therefore not very particular vantage point from which to experience marginalization (though JamesCone would argue that the marginalized person has a particularly acute understanding of this perspective – indeed an essential perspective).

So these stories are not about a marginalized people, but are the perspective of an isolated man.  A man who is isolated by various factors – he is an African American, he is Buddhist, and he is smart – he is a faculty member at a prestigious university and is somewhat emotionally remote – he likes to think about things rather than to feel them.  So when he imagines himself into a student’s mind, he gets something about being that student in the same way that I do when I imagine what is going on in the mind of one the reluctant children.  I get the words, but not necessarily the music.  Interestingly, though, the story about the student, Guinea Pig, includes the student being in an experiment where he is induced to have the experience of being a dog – the experimenter’s dog – and he becomes interesting to the experimenter as a result of accessing the dog’s consciousness.  It is nicely done – and it, like most of the stories feels a bit like a thought exercise.  It is interesting.  I am glad to have watched him do it.  I get what he is doing, but it feels like an effort that is overly cerebral. 

That said, I think that this is an important bridge to something that I think we are, as a culture, working towards.  I think we are trying to come to grips with what it has meant to have enslaved people – and then to have worked to keep them in a disadvantaged state.  We need a range of African American voices, including some overly cerebral ones, to create a broad ranging palette from which people can draw as we continue to work towards coming to grips with that it must have meant to be an enslaved people – and to have enslaved people.  We will need to dig into something like a collective unconscious – not the spiritual everlasting cloud that Jung imagined – but a much more brutal and immediate one.  It will require us to use our cranium, as Johnson is doing, and to use our guts – as people who have preceded and will follow him have done.  Unfortunately we will have plenty of current experiences – including separating children from their parents in inhumane ways – to study and experience what it means to not be who we think we are.

Having stood on that little soap box, I feel as naked as I was asking the question of the docent.  Is Johnson writing as an African American?  I think he is and he claims to be.  How conscious of his isolation is he?  I think his title and the cover photograph speaks to that.  Does he value intimacy?  Yes.  In the third to last tale he co-writes a science fiction short story about a time – 4189 – when people are immortal – and the illicit drug is one that interrupts the healing powers that keep us all alive and young so that we can die.  I think Dr. Johnson would join me in thinking that we may need to do our work and then step aside to let the next generation gnaw on the bones we have been working on.   Ours is not the work of a single generation.

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