Creative component title:

Tarrying with mother: A sequence of fictional dialogues

 

Exegesis title

 

Tarrying with silence: A research-creation exploration of maternal loss.

 

Abstract

 

The creative component consists of extended dialogues and some interpellations between myself and my mother, structured in sections according to mood, presented in a blend of fiction and memoir. Dialogue is deployed as a technique to centre voice and agency. Through these dialogues, I represent my mother’s move from a particular rural Jewish Austrian identity to a middle-class non-Jewish Anglo identity.

 

My mother was silent about her past and my creative work is a response to what I imagine

was her experience of structural anti-Semitism and migration. While the creative component of this study is personal, the exegesis is a commentary that  provides a psycho-social, and poetic exploration of mind states and affective states that are illustrated through the fictional dialogues.

 

The exegesis explores anti-Semitism as a particular form of racism and its instantiation in what I term the Catholic gaze, with regards to my mother’s experience in Austria up until her flight to England in 1938, and subsequently the Protestant gaze. Within the terms of my mother’s psycho-social context, I consider Christo-normativity as a particular structure of racism which she internalised. Central to this is shame. This work will provide an original contribution to understandings of micro dynamics of structural anti-Semitism utilising critical theories of race and affect, and how this played out in a move from a normative Jewish identity to one in which being Jewish was shameful and therefore hidden.

 

Aims

 

How might fictional memoir enable an exploration of identity as a process of self-fashioning in the context of anti-Semitism?

Through fictional dialogues, I aim to represent the process of double consciousness in my mother.

How might psychosocial and critical race theories help make sense of the internalisation of anti-Semitism? This will build on academic writing on double consciousness, associated with De Bois, and critical studies of passing, which have been largely centred on Black American experience.

 

Literature Review

 

‘The equation between writing and sepulchre would thus be proposed as the reply furnished by the discourse of the historian to the discourse of the philosopher’ (Ricoeur 2004: 351).

"Loss is perhaps the ultimate philosophical problem ... The great absolute architectonics of systematic thought are intended to secure the world against loss. Maturity is achieved when things are let go, left to be on their own, allowed their specificity ..." (Lyric Philosophy, L89)

My experimental memoir is about my mother’s process of self-fashioning. It starts before she left Austria for England in 1938 and continues until and beyond her death. Tarrying with Mother is largely made up of dialogues between her and me, between her and her mother, and between her and school friends she left behind.

 

The creative project and the exegesis are basically about thinking. It is not just about thinking at a meta level but in a more general, everyday way. Tarrying, in the way I am using the term, relates to thinking. It is as if meandering and slowing down are prerequisites to a certain sort of cognizing. Tarrying with Mother is a creative exploration of the relationship between my mother and me, of her as a person, and about how and why she imposed a barrier to thinking. But already I am moving too quickly…

 

There was a trigger, a before, that acted as cause for my story and for its expository supplement. Thinking does not take place in a vacuum even though it might seem like it at times. For me, the impetus was the boundary of silence. In my experience this silence was like nothingness. The problem was in recognising it. That was hard because it was as if the silence was pointing away from itself.  I had to turn away and still somehow attend to what was not there.

 

The issue for me from the start of writing, was how to think about the silence. Silence about the past was always there, and curiously I was barely aware of it.  It was as if what was not talked about and what was not referred to, did not exist. In that context, silence denotes something like non-presence. If it is not named, there is no consciousness of an absence. In time I became aware of something missing that began to seem like something repressed. That is how to think about it now and it is a way for me to think through it. In addition, I have the need to feel it too. Sometimes the feelings have led the way, as if discomfort signals a thought about to form. Maybe it does and maybe not, but the muddiness, the indistinctive coloration of a wispy sense, increasingly alerts me to keep on tarrying.

 

Tarrying is about lingering, going slow, waiting. (Harold Schweizer 2008). Gadamer, the German philosopher, attributes a particular form and structure of temporality to tarrying, or Verweilen (Sheila Ross 2006) This mode of time involves something like a non-instrumental mode of attention and intensity. Schweizer links tarrying to Simone Weil’s particular view of attention; an experience close to not knowing.  Elizabeth Bishop writes: “What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.” I agree with this sentiment. In that sort of space, intensity is amplified from moment to moment.

 

What follows is in keeping with this. All the texts, in one way or another, are affordances, that have allowed for thinking or pondering in the absence of a preconceived solution to a specific question. That’s to say, each one has allowed for meandering and, more importantly, has enabled me to think about the silence that I experienced - a multi-faceted silence, deeply implicated in my inheritance.

 

For a long time I really did not know how to begin. I felt overwhelmed by thoughts, concepts, categories and a jumble of references that seemed not to cohere.  But in a project as this, such an experience might be an advantage. After all, the descriptor tarrying might well indicate that whatever direction I am following, it is not going to be a straight line. Part of the issue for me has been a sense that there is a rather firm categorial split between my creative work and the exegesis. Perhaps I imagine this, but whether or not it is true, it has led me to think and explore the relationship between these two entities. Writing on the conjunction of artefact and its expository relation influences my creative work and my thinking about it.

 

I really don’t know how to begin without including everything, in which case one thought after another would be joined together by and. That will not do, so I will start with an image and then an indicator of absence.

 

The image is a mosaic. It is not necessarily a large one. What matters is that it contains many different shapes and many different colours. There is of course a boundary around this mosaic, an inside and an outside, and each shape or tile denotes a different thought, scene,  image, concept or gesture. It would seem that from a distance the whole does not constitute a clear gestalt. But, paradoxically, that too is part of the mosaic. For now, I shall call that a multiverse. Yes, that makes sense. The mosaic is, or depicts, or can be seen, as a multiverse. That is, from a distance. But what about from a close-up view?

 

In this mosaic, links can be made between any of the coloured shapes - in any order - no matter how counterintuitive that might sound. What about a key? How is meaning made?

This mosaic is a transitive construction. Its object is twofold. The double object is complex absence(s). Silence and Mother.  Both signify absence, though in rather different ways.

One problem I have is that silence and Mother are both inside and outside the mosaic. The internal links, shapes and colours are all linked to Mother and silence in one way or another. The gestalt of the mosaic bears on what is also external to it.

 

I realised that for a long time I had not thought about my mother. At the start of my creative writing I looked for works by sons about their mothers, and was surprised at how little was there. Roland Barthes, Peter Handke, David Rieff, Nicholas Royle, Allen Ginzberg - and then the names stop. Tarrying with Mother is about my mother. It is about my mother and me, and this needs to be addressed in the exegesis. But how? Does mother in the exegesis need to be an abstraction? Is the split between artwork and exegesis a sort of binary opposition of the particular and the general?

 

I still don’t know how to begin. Mieke Bal wrote about travelling concepts, which I guess is an analogue of Edward Said’s travelling theories. I wish to allow for travelling thoughts, but maybe tarrying thoughts will have to do. That keeps coming up for me in a way that feels disruptive, something to do with knots. If I were to enumerate all the problems, all the issues that have confronted me in my writing, then what stands out, is how language becomes a paramount issue. It is as if these problems seem disconnected from one another, but the issue of language and its reference, unites them.

 

What follows is not so much a beginning, but at the very least, a mode of sense-making. I suddenly remembered the work of Kurt Wolff. Wolff entitled one work, “Surrender and Catch”. That was also a methodology, and the name for something deeply personal. So for him, in his fieldwork in Loma, there was no such thing as epistemology as some sort of discrete entity of doing or being. That designates surrender, and the catch is the attempt to make sense of the surrender. However, catch and surrender are linked in such a way that making sense is inextricably linked to the personal.

 

Many years later, one of the co-founders of relational psychoanalysis, Emmanuel Ghent, also used the word surrender as a descriptor for a certain sort of attention to the client / patient.

 

As I confront the mosaic of thoughts, concepts and images, I am aware that a significant part of that construction is experiential. So whereas I initially thought of the exegesis as a hermeneutic exercise, I now think of it as poetic. To be more specific, I think of it in terms of lyric. Key here is the work of Jonathon Culler and Jan Zwicky.

 

Two issues coalesced in my mind, more recently, in a way that has been helpful and fruitful. Structure, form and method are in my work, inextricably linked to the maternal. This gives rise to a multilayered conceptual structure that criss-crosses from the demotic to the abstract. This is very close to what Jane Gallop and then Lisa Baraitser term anecdotal theory, which involves the linkage of the mundane and the theoretical, the singular and its other. In my reflection on this I have thought of the connection between narrative and its expository twin as recursive, in which case each is changed by the interrogation of the other. Mieke Bal terms this auto-theory which for her is “…an ongoing, spiraling form of analysis-theory dialectic…”

 

Jacques Derrida was asked, “What philosopher would you have liked to be your mother?” he responded, “It’s impossible for me to have any philosopher as a mother . . . my mother couldn’t be a philosopher. [Switches to French] A philosopher couldn’t be my mother” (Derrida 2007).  What on earth does Derrida mean by this? I have no idea, but it seems like a defence.  A defence that allows him an exalted position, and the illusion that he has achieved eminence without a biological inheritance. Thus, a lie.  And that leads into silence and what is linked to that, in terms of my filial experience of Mother, namely, the idea of giving birth to oneself.

 

SILENCE

 

The trigger for the whole enterprise is silence because for a long time I had no idea about what some people might term my familial inheritance. This already suggests something curious about silence, because it’s not just about absence of speech or absence of sound. It can also suggest a resistance or defence or a barrier, as in a sort of parental cry of ‘We don’t talk about that sort of thing here!’

 

Silence can be sweet or sour and sometimes both at the same time, because what might be unspoken may, if put into words, be too painful to bear. Invariably, within the context of the Holocaust, silence is associated with trauma. But I think that is misleading. Trauma is overused and has almost become a floating signifier as a descriptor that can be associated adequately with genocide.

 

But the silence that I think of as mine, or maybe of theirs, my parents, I don’t think was the silence of trauma. It was something else. It was another sort of silence with a very different feel. One way of thinking about this silence is to bring in the next key term, which is voice, because paradoxically the silence I’m thinking about as I write this, is voiced. This needs to be unpacked, of course. My sense of voice in the context of silence is closely allied to mood.

 

This is a provocation. An ever-present thereness, always and maybe necessarily out of focus. It could, I suppose, not be otherwise.  I do not know what term to use as a suitable all-encompassing descriptor - this absence, this erasure, this boundary -  seems to me to demand a particular mode of treatment. It is not just a matter of how to project words or sounds into the space of silence, or what words do justice to the experience. It  seems essential that the words be contained in an apposite structure.

 

I treat silence as a palimpsest. It has a quality and texture and ‘sound’ that covers over, displaces and hides what is beneath or below or behind. It is about denial and repression, and is  linked here to a particular loss of voice. For me voice is all important, and almost unthinkable outside of dialogue.

 

Key for me here is the lyric philosophical reading of Wittgenstein, by Zwicky. In addition to this, is a sort of discursive construction of silence that is associated with Pecheux, Munoz and Laclau & Mouffe. Here we can think of language and silence as almost naturally part of a discursive formation. As such it has limits, a boundary marking inside from the outside. If the outside is stable then there is stasis. If the outside is unstable then that poses a threat to what is internal.

 

The lyric issue here is a double issue. Back to Wolff. Surrender involves giving in to, or attending to, silence as an experience that itself might be resistant to language, and the catch is the attempt to make sense of that experience. Helpful to this process has been Jacques Ranciere and his idea of the distribution of the sensible, which I find immensely useful. It seems to me a very creative concept, as it directs attention to what in the sensorium might give rise to silence. In a soundless space, something has gone wrong. I am thinking here of the idea of interiority. Yes, it is a metaphor. But in my mother’s silence about her past, something was gotten rid of. But it was still there. Thus, the problem of language. How to describe what is there and not there? Wittgenstein, in his first major work, The Tractatus, manages to do this through connotation. Thus visibility and invisibility become con-extensive in those who are marginalised.

 

VOICE

 

I thought that maybe voice should be central to the exegesis. Maybe it is in a way, as I shall try to show. If I think of my mother and silence, I think of her voice as one attempting to modulate sonically her own sounds and mine. One word for this process is civility. And within the English class system, civility involves a set of regulatory mechanisms or codes that, for an outsider, need to be learned. Something not dissimilar was present in pre-Second World War Austria. This was reflected in speech habits or dialects that can be thought about in term of country versus city, and one might think of civility as a set of discrete codes implicit in Jewish consciousness and manifested in the differences between assimilated Jews, middle class Austrian Jews who may have self-identified as Jews, and Jews from the east who were perceived as foreign and inferior.

 

With voice goes civility, and with civility goes shame. There are two problems with this. My mother de-identified as Jewish and identified as English. The danger was always that her disguise would be discovered. The other problem was a fear that she might make a mistake in her introjection of the codes of conduct. Both have to do with voice.

 

One of the ways in which these processes were carried out was through careful attention to idiolect: vowels might be exaggerated in the mimicking of BBC English. In addition, there was an attempt to speak quietly. Here, voice is fundamentally a performative process that links to self-fashioning. This self-fashioning started when my mother was a little girl living on a farm in rural Austria.

 

Self-fashioning is also voiced. The voice in this particular context has to be opened up and linked to other terms, such as energy and will. I shall develop that, especially the idea of will that I link to aspiration. But for the moment I want to go to another term that I think is core.

 

The other context which may be linked to this is that of energy. The psychoanalyst Daniel Stern has written about this. This opens out into something else, which I have been wondering about. Psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic studies of mothers and babies, and more broadly the psychotherapeutic process, focus on empathic attunement between the parent and the child, or the therapist and the client. What is important is that there is some sort of resonance.

 

This work is looking at perceived or felt feeling states from moment to moment. The link here is to double consciousness, where, from the outside in, resonance is turned upside down. It’s as if there is an external constraint that appears as a violent force that must totally distort emotional regulation. This is the background for any experience of racism.

 

There’s a cliched way of putting this. I am, at a particular time, on the same page as my lover. And that is expected. But within the racist context, the emotional dysregulation becomes permanent, in the sense that the victim cannot avoid being in an object position. They might be, so to speak, on the same page as another victim. But that space is a space suffused with shame.

 

Double consciousness is a cognitive notion. I want to explore this from a different angle. My creative piece is about my mother and it’s about our relationship. But insofar as it is about my mother, it is also about her mother, because her model of mothering, of course, would have been derived from her own mother. So there is inheritance there.

 

This work is also about mother in a generic sense. Insofar as it is about mother, it is also about mother and child. So it seems very important that I explore what I imagine to be the mothering my mother received. This means trying to make sense of mother as a racialized object, and what it might be for a racialized object to make contact with and sustain contact with her baby, and how that contact is necessarily marked by what is tantamount to what is a caste system. There is something projected here, and something introjected and passed on.

 

This is about voice and shame, and forever dealing with something tainted. My sense of voice here is that it is an emergent phenomenon tied to what one might think of as a primitive narrative that is wordless. It is about how a mother tonally vocalizes with the baby. But in this case, the mother has a racialized body that, though white, is perceived differently by the dominant group.

 

There is no starting point here, not a Big Bang. It’s like a line of mothers marked in different ways as inferior.

 

DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS

 

What I have explored so far is a response to what I imagine having been the profound experience of everyday anti-Semitism in Austria. So what I call self-fashioning is in part a valiant attempt to deal with what was taken for granted, namely, everyday racism.

 

The work of Du Bois is essential here, as is Fanon and others, who give a sophisticated account of how racism is internalized. These accounts, to an extent, reverse a dominant psychoanalytic understanding of the mind that sees a certain emotional dynamic that proceeds from the inside to the outside. So the way a Jewish girl would have been interpellated in 1929, is meaningfully linked to the idea of double consciousness - for example, Austrian and Jew. The point of this process is that it is irresolvable, unless one negates one of the terms.

 

Double consciousness offers what is a phenomenological account of a consciousness that has been subjected to racism. The work of Du Bois is actually very close to the work of someone like R.D. Laing, who uses very different concepts. Most famously he writes about a mind divided and throughout his work he explores the way people respond to attributions.

 

So what my mother had to deal with, and indeed what anyone of her generation and ethnicity had to deal with, were deeply negative attributions that concerned identity. These attributions became more intense and invidious throughout the 1930s. What is on offer here is a particular phenomenology of a psyche under strain and distress that is also in some sense divided. What is clear in double consciousness is the all-pervasiveness of shame.

 

SELF-FASHIONING

 

All these themes are connected, entangled. When I think of my mother, I think of somebody who fashioned herself in ways that separated her from her family of origin. She dealt with what she internalized with regard to anti-Semitism by dismantling one of the key terms and changing her nationality, which dealt with the other.

 

The Jew as inferior, as shameful, as worthless, was dealt with through a process of dis-identification, as if that part, in being disowned, was almost literally, eliminated. All of this is predicated on a sense of identity that might involve a diminished notion of interiority.

 

It seems to me that the work of Richard Rory, Foucault, Judith Butler and others, conceptualize identity as performance.  That fits with my mother’s mode of self fashioning. To an extent the performance works as long as the script is not forgotten and mistakes made. The only problem with her performative identity was the problem of a slip up, and that very easily led to shame and anger. Voice of course is essential here. The right tone, the right mode of speaking within particular contexts, involved what was key to my mother’s performative identity.

 

METHODOLOGY

“A thought never unfolds in one straight line”. (Christel Vesters)

I mentioned earlier the image of a mosaic. Methodology bears on how and why such an image appears, and what work is done with it. I could as easily have used the metaphor of an archive even though they, archive and mosaic, are different. The pattern can of course be contained within the archive. Just as legitimate is using the mosaic as metaphor. With its multitude of different coloured parts, it can be regarded as an archive. Either way what they represent are thinking spaces.

 

That, then, is foremost in my attempt to define the how, the movement from intention to both the creative writing and the exegesis. But it is also the what.

 

Is methodology the thinking space or is that what it creates?

 

There are two rather different methodologies in operation here. With regard to Tarrying with Mother, the method or mode is an attempt at writing without regard for what I term conceptual punctuation. It is not so much an approach that is disinhibited, rather, it is dreamlike, a reverie, that attempts to be propulsive and focused. It is focused and also exploratory. The method of the creative work is writing with as little self-conscious ratiocination as possible. The process and experience of it seem to fuse and it is best thought of as transitive reverie. This sounds contradictory.

 

“…When one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work.” (Deleuze and Guattari. 1987)

 

In many ways thinking of Mother gives rise to an internal sense of the inchoate. Sense here denotes something cognitive and affective. So methodology seems essential to give structure to my attempt to articulate this experience and explore its antecedents. And of course that is another word for history.

 

In numerous iterations of trying to put this process into language I am almost always brought back to the idea of the archive. I associate the archive with Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin. But what is the method? For Benjamin, the archive consisted of scraps, jottings, thoughts, objects, toys, books, stuff. For Warburg, the archive provides a construction that acts as a container, a geometric shape. The shape is that of an ellipse, that is presumed to allow for thinking to take place. Within this elliptic room, there are panels on which are placed hundreds of images. What this thinking space allows for, amongst other things, is something quite aleatoric, namely the possibility of diverse links between the images. These links give rise to new thoughts, new concepts, and new ways of conceptualising  iconography.

 

Fundamental to this work is the task of how to think about silence, with it, through it, behind it. Reverie seems essential as is the idea and method of Zwicky’s Lyric Philosophy. The latter can be thought of as method too. What Lyric philosophical writing involves is both method and process. It is about language and resonance and about itself.  Within this context what is key is loss. So one could characterise this philosophy as one of and on lament. Maybe it is.

 

More important is its mosaic-like exploration of connections of affect. An exploration that is fractured and connotative. Key to Zwichy’s work, to her methodology, is the final proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence”.

 

It is not what must not be spoken about, but it is what cannot be spoken about. And this is a provocation for a poetic inquiry that attempts to turn the following around. I start with silence,  and though I might end with it too, the referents of each are different. Or so I hope.

 

What stands out for me in the Warburg archive, is also loss.  Tarrying with Mother, my creative work, is about loss and the sense that I make of it. This loss involves images, stories and memories that my mother told me not long before she died. I am working, imagining, with scraps, incomplete stories, anecdotes and scenes that I have tried to capture, explore and embellish. Since much of what I am writing in Tarrying with Mother is not my remembering, it is imagined. It is dreamt. The dreaming generates the writing, and the writing triggers the dreaming. And I do not know what will happen next. So essential to this process, the methodology is dreaming, or reverie.

 

I think of this as methodology. Tarrying with Mother is immersive.  I imagine that constructing links between what seem like disparate images is a speculative endeavour. Of course. But maybe more important is how the connections might be a function of a dream-like state.   That is, like the images of Warburg that he assembled and called Mnemosyne. I think of my creative work as imagistic and partly a collection of memories, scraps, and speculative imaginings, or speculative fictioning.  For me it must be like that in order to break through the silence that prevented me from any knowledge of my mother’s history.

 

Thinking the silence here involves thinking about what she hid. The presumption is that a cut off, a strong boundary between an individual and their antecedents, hides and does not hide. Thus, another aspect of my method, archive-like, is to organise my creative writing in relation to two, for me, essential variables. They are moods and dialogue. I think this thematic structure was in part influenced by my reading ‘An Archive of Feeling’ by Ann Cvetkovich, and ‘Venus in Two Acts’ by Saidya Hartman. And the latter involves a mode of writing, which I identify with, that she names ‘critical fabulation’. Is that a method? Sort of. What stands out, as it does in the portraiture methodology of Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, is the fundamental importance of voice.

 

 There is another sense of methodology that is necessary. I got this idea from Mary McLure, the idea of inquiry as divination. It sees methodology as a sort of hermetic process, perhaps intuitive. What’s the point? The point is not to repeat what has been done before. It is in fact to provide the links, to name the connections between the items in the archive, between the images, the thoughts, the memories that allow for a new narrative, that is constituted by different constellations of meaning.

 

I have two rather different sources here that act as background inspiration. One is the philosopher,Jean-Francois Lyotard, and the other is the psychoanalyst, Christopher Bollas. Lyotard is important because his great work, The Differend, is no less than a discursive archive. What exists in his archive are phrases, which are the smallest units of meaning, or sense that might have effective resonance. Part of his task is to show, or describe, what happens when they clash, because when they do any intermediary is another phrase. What is fascinating and creative, of course, are the links between the phrases and the fact that within this structure, everything is immanent, and anything meta is still a phrase. Within this structure of Lyotard, as in the Warburg archive, creativity is intrinsic, because of the leaning towards the aleatoric.

 

Christopher Bollas, in the essay “Psychic Genera”, has a view of the mind which to me is similar to Warburg’s walls of images. For Bollas, what is important, necessary for creativity are genera. These are the antitheses to traumata. They are creative, not destructive. And this constitutes another archive, a psychical construction of the mind.

 

I keep coming back to the idea and metaphor of the archive. Maybe that too is suggestive of method. I think of the last work of Deleuze and Guattari, and their sense, their insistence, that philosophy be and involve the creation of concepts. There is a method here, somewhere.

 

Notwithstanding its somewhat institutional name, the archive for me, denotes a container that might contain data, objects, thoughts, colours, dreams, sounds and more, existing as equals within the space. What matters is that they are like the genera of Bollas - characters, or rather actants, that might help deal with silence. But how to access them, these objects?

Reverie again. I was alerted to this, as method, by the work of Wendy Holloway and Joshua Holmes, who both think of reverie as a mode of research. Now that suits me fine, except it needs to be filled out in all sorts of ways.

 

Reverie is most closely linked with the post-Kleinian mode of psychoanalysis associated with Winifred Bion and Thomas Ogden. Put simply, it’s about allowing the therapist or researcher to be fully open to the other, so that one does not intrude on the other. It has some links to the idea of attention associated with Simone Weil, and even the ethics of Levinas. But again, it’s different, looser somehow. Maybe it has to do with allowing the other to infiltrate oneself, and at the same time to be aware of what’s going on. The other, in Tarrying with Mother, is Mother. In that work reverie is caught up in a dialogical process. This dialogical structure is key for two reasons. One is that it involves the importance of voice. The other reason is that I do not want to colonize my mother. It is as if within the dialogical structure, she has freedom to speak when she wants.