Thomas Fink
PSYCHOLOGICAL DETERMINISM AND NAVIGABLE INTERSTICES
IN SANDY McINTOSH’S POETRY
Most who have written about Sandy McIntosh’s work have focused on the humor in his poetry. “Unlike a lot of comic poets who rely on easy punchlines and hermetic in-jokes,” asserts Steve Fellner, “McIntosh balances verbal inventiveness with significant personal inquiries.” Steven J. Stewart speaks of McIntosh’s ability to help readers overcome the deadening effect of mundane “adult life” “by taking [them] elsewhere” through the use of “sharp, and very funny, surreal scenes and vignettes.” Frank Allen declares, "At any time the zany can burst out of the customary, the past out of the present. . . . For McIntosh, surprise is discovery of selfhood. His poems step back from actuality and reconsider what's familiar. . . . Poems depart from (and critique) reality, delight in fantasy and return, and this act of escape is empathetic transformation of what lies beyond 'the real binding.' He . . . emphasizes the importance of 'something real' among 'hallucinations.' (p. 28)
Erica Wright does not concur that “self” or “something real”is necessarily discovered. Linking his use of humor and his interest in absurdity to “natural speech,” Wright calls McIntosh “a sort of detective” who “uses whatever tools are available to shed light on his family and poetic pasts,” yet she laments that The After-Death History of My Mother (2005) “is no kinder to its readers than to its speakers whose quests for understanding are not realized in these pages. This collection is more about the challenges of discovery.” If Wright appears frustrated by this “unkindness,” I would say that she is close to making an important point about what is especially engaging about much of McIntosh’s work: the male speakers (and sometimes female characters) in his poems and prose-poems often seem to be caught in the grips of a psychological determinism that, to greater or lesser degrees, thwarts their agency, or else their lack of insight about how they are manipulated by external forces prevents them from perceiving possibilities for agency that can increase their range of freedom.
Although his formulations are articulated in slippery ways, indicating his own sense of language’s duplicities, and shift markedly at various points in his long career, Jacques Lacan provides cogent ways of thinking about the barriers to and “challenges of discovery” in McIntosh’s poetry. Lacan, the psychoanalytic theorist whose “return to Freud” has had significant influence in literary critical and cultural theory over the last 30 or 40 years, speaks of the interactions of the three orders—the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real—in varying ways as they concern the unconscious of the human subject.
According to Lacan, “it is the symbolic order which is constitutive for the subject” (Ecrits p. 12). The order of the symbolic, the realm of signifiers, constitutes the locus of desire, and the subject’s “desire finds its meaning in the other’s desire, not so much because the other holds the keys to the desired object, as because his first object(ive) is to be recognized by the other” (Ecrits p. 222). Lacan characterizes “the unconscious” as “(the) discourse about the Other” (689) and adds that“man’s desire is the Other’s desire,” or “qua Other that man desires…” ((690), even though he later notes that the “Other… does not exist” (700). For Lacan, the object petit a (the little [object] other), is the “lure” seen “in the dialectic of the eye and the gaze. . . . The objet a is something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ. This serves as a symbol of the lack. . .” (Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, p. 102-3). The objet a entails particular features that entice the subject, often on an unconscious level.
In a review of an imagined author’s collection of poetry, “Argol Karvarkian, Otiose Warts (Bergen: Univ. of University Press, 2006),” McIntosh unfolds the narrative of a bizarre psychological dynamic between two men, the critic and the poet, that problematizes questions of desire The nameless reviewer discloses how he has devoted his entire academic life to what cited passages would indicate to most readers (but never him) is the work of woefully inept, tuneless, silly poet, and he makes Karvarkian’s alleged development from a “primitive, brutish sensibility” to “minimalist clarity and grace” (Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways to Escape Death p. 66) a cause for celebration. But he also narrates how Karvarkian has stolen and, bored with his catch, has returned, one by one, each of the reviewer’s forty-six wives. Unlike Dr. Kavorkian, who helps end the lives of those who are in relentless pain, Argol Karvarkian allegedly ends marriages that have practically begun. The critic enables and affirms Karvarkian’s sense of women as disposable objects: “There then seemed to be an endless supply of wives in the Everglades, so I had no trouble marrying again” (Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways p. 67), and again and again. (He makes himself look like a beacon of responsibility to the ex-wives and never assumes that they can fend for themselves.)
Rather than accepting the unbelievable hyperbole that the reviewer marries so many woman and then acts as sole financial support for all of them once Karvarkian has discarded them, the reader can assume that the number is much smaller and that that in general, the poet has continually imposed on his critic. Although the major figure in the poetry is “the Procurer,” the object of alternately gentle and snarling demands, a singular lack of gratitude, and abiding contempt: “that littleb*****d / better deliver/ me f*****g flame-retardant/ flapdoodle another beer/ in f*****g skirts/ or I crush his f*****g/ smooch . . . ” (68), the critic does not recognize himself in the mirror of his subject’s writing: “but o my sissy-brother,/ there is nary the consumer/ absent the consumed. . . . Whether this mysterious Procurer will ever be brought fully from the shadows must wait on future Karvarkian collections. . .” (69). Of course, an actual “procurer”would be paid; Karvarkian does not see himself as paying the critic anything or even consider the possibility of reciprocity.
Something in Karvarkian’s poetry, rather than in any of the critic’s wives, is the speaker’s objet petit a. The ideals of criticism as an enterprise that influences literature and the maintenance of a canon of style constitute the Big Other whose recognition he seeks, and for him, this is tied to the poetry’s positive development. The critic’s desire is not so much to feed the poet’s sexual cravings, but to contribute to the poetry’s greatness, and this, he believes, is an adjunct to that project. After a while, we learn, the speaker did not protest Karvarkian’s wife-theft, because, each time it happened, “a new book. . . would appear,” and he would “greatly marvel at [Karvarkian’s] progression of intellect and technique from volume to volume” (Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways, pp. 67-8). He expresses satisfaction in his own contribution to that “progression”: “After all, he seemed to extract a tangible grace from the women I married — and, I flatter myself — possibly because of my own connection to them” (69). Then the critic goes further: "I’d also like to think that my judiciously crafted critical prose, which my wives have assured me they read aloud to him each evening, helped to discipline his earlier poetic unruliness.”
Lacan’s use of Hegel’s “master-slave dialectic” is pertinent here. In Seminar I, Lacan states: “A law is imposed on the slave, that he should satisfy the desire and pleasure (jouissance) of the other. It is not sufficient for him to plea [sic] for mercy, he has to go to work” (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I, 233). In Lacan’s thinking, this dialectic’s representation evolved, as Slavoj Žižek points out, “toward the end of the 1960s” into “the four discourses (master, university, hysteric, analyst), i.e. the four possible types of social bound or. . . articulations of the network regulating intersubjective relations” (Looking Awry 130). Even as “the discourse of the master” is supposed to dominate signification totally, “this operating of signifying representation” creates “some disturbing surplus . . . designated by a small a,” and “the other discourses” serve as “attempts to ‘come to terms’ with this remnant, . . . to ‘cope’ with it.”
According to Žižek, “the discourse of the university. . . takes this leftover for its object, its ‘other,’ and tries to transform it into a‘subject’ by applying to it the network of ‘knowledge’” (130-1). Although, improbably enough, the critic in McIntosh’s text does not teach for a living but only writes criticism, Žižek’s formulation about university discourse still applies, because his work has an audience that he is striving to teach about poetic qualities: “. . . out of an ‘untamed’ object (the ‘unsocialized’ child), we produce a subject by means of an implantation of knowledge,” and “the gesture of the master” exists “behind the semblance of the neutral ‘knowledge’ . . .” (131). In many respects, the critic behaves as Karvarkian’s “slave”: he suffers egregious psychological and financial hardship, however exaggerated (“I support forty-six ex-wives on the meager receipts of my modest critical efforts” [Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways, p. 69]) by submitting to the whim of an exploiter of despicable character and dubious aesthetic gifts. Yet, on some level, subscribing to the university discourse, the reviewer implicitly posits himself as a kind of “master” (teacher) in the “university discourse” and Karvarkian as the “’untamed’ object” whom he has been making a “great” poet. He can see himself as worthy of recognition from the Big Other of Criticism.
By the review’s end, even if the critic, as he had done at the beginning, bumblingly misreads the poetry as elegantly (not crudely minimalist, he uses his position as judge (not merely as explicator) within the conventions of the discourse of the university to assert his status as master and Karvarkian’s as supplicant: “I think, in the end, [Karvarkian’s poems] will share the fate of all delicately created things. Like Faberge eggs they will abide as objects that we can admire, but that, once having admired, we relegate to the collector’s shelf without further thought” (Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways 70). Is the discarder of women finally discarded — the former master relegated to the position of a slave? Has the critic ceased to be a “procurer” of readers as well as women? We do not have access in the prose-poem to Karvarkian’s own thinking; he may not consider his mastery challenged, even if he has to look for a new supply of women or reviews from another source.
The critic’s own assertion of mastery, however, ironically undoes his bid for recognition from the Big Other of criticism. Since he seems to have spent a whole career writing on one poet whom he himself now deems forgettable, his own work will lose relevance. The fact that this does not dawn on him (yet?) dovetails with his persistent misrecognition of central elements of his narrative. (By writing this poem, does McIntosh entrap his critics — in this case, me and maybe you — in the situation that the poem dramatizes? If I deny any desire for recognition and power within the framework of university discourse, I will seem to protest too much. Presumably, I might “procure” readers for McIntosh, just as Lacan procured adherents for Freud, as well as himself, but I see no evidence either that my subject is in the thrall of the kind of repetition compulsion that Karvarkian is, nor does my “procurement” seem to feed one. Further, separate from recognition or power over others, is it not possible to pursue edification and intellectual or aesthetic pleasure for its own sake and to take pleasure in enabling others to achieve the same? Thus, one goal for me in writing this essay might be to contribute to my own and others’ realization of how application of Lacanian theory can enrich the reading of McIntosh’s poetry and a consideration of topoi that it raises.)
In “Bride of the Mall,” a 2005 prose-poem with a dominantly narrative component, McIntosh’s male speaker, lacking a name (as does the reviewer in the“Karvarkian” text), finds himself influenced as a subject by important aspects of the symbolic order: the institutions of family, engagement, and marriage, insofar as they are represented and transmitted through language and imagery. His girlfriend Wanda first expresses her interest in an engagement ring that she sees in a jewelry store and through a series of rhetorical questions beginning with “’Isn’t that gorgeous? Don’t you just love it?’” (The After-Death History of My Mother 39) maneuvers him, even though neither has proposed marriage, to take “a layaway option” on the ring and, shortly after, to purchase the expensive item outright. At each turn, the speaker, who cringes whenever Wanda calls him“darling,” is reluctant to move to the next stage but convinced that he must acquiesce each time to delay the occurrence of something more disagreeable. To the “difficult question,” “’Were you thinking what I was thinking?’”, the speaker “diplomatically” responds, “What were we thinking?” (The After-Death History 39). He is willing to follow her lead as a thinker in order to seem agreeable. When Wanda answers that “’if [they] ever thought about getting married” — planting the idea in his head, so that he, the one traditionally supposed to ask, would eventually do so—“this would be the ring [he] would buy [her],’” he feels that he is entering “a hazy dream” and responds with a simultaneous hesitancy and reassurance that only enables her to step up her “attack”: “’That would be the exact ring, if we were thinking about, you know . . . er, doing that.”
When the speaker refers to how he and Wanda had “enjoyed a mild pleasure in each other’s company—and that, not every day” (The After-Death History 39) prior to the day at the jewelry store, he allows us to understand that none of Wanda’s traits constitute his objet
petit a. Further, his limited perspective grant no access to Wanda thinks beyond her demand for the ring. The dialogue suggests that she finds his responses interesting only insofar as they set her up for her next move. We can only guess whether the ring reflects her desire for some quality evinced by the object itself, as though this material is her objet petit a that mediates her relation to the Big Other of martial respectability, or whether the object is a pretext for her actual aim, the securing of marriage itself with any available anonymous candidate.
As his sense of the situation being out of his control grows, the speaker never refers to his own lack of assertiveness as a cause, nor does he suppose that different behavior might produce a less irksome result. For example, after he agrees that Wanda should be able to wear the ring for several days since it “did look wonderful on her finger” (The After-Death History 41), and, quite understandably, her family, seeing this, assumes that he is engaged, he does not link his own concession to their misunderstanding:“Wanda’s family was waiting for us. Wanda opened the door and held up her left hand to show her parents. ‘Look what we’ve bought!’ ‘You’re engaged!’ her family proclaimed in joyous unison. And so we were from that moment on.” The ring on Wanda’s finger stands as a metonymy for the engagement that, unconventionally, has occurred without a traditional proposal. Since the speaker does not supply the context, the family can validate its tacit assumption that the usual procedure has been followed. He does not reflect on his silence or on his reluctance to oppose Wanda’s series of maneuvers.
The prose-poem’s opening paragraphs vaguely gesture toward an external culprit for how the marriage is poised to fail at its very start. The speaker “had been browsing the bookstore in a disconnected sort of way for some twenty minutes, [his] anxiety mounting over the absence of [his] wife of just two weeks” (The After-Death History 39). He fears that “she might have gotten lost herself” in such “a big mall. . . .” Wondering “if, since [their] marriage, instead of learning to better recognize each other, [they] had begun to forget who [they]
were,” he had doubts about whether he could “identify her” upon her return. He holds the “engagement and everything that followed” responsible for the confusion, but claims, “I don’t know how it happened.”
Never acknowledging a bit of his own complicity while narrating events, the speaker blames the confusing “engagement” and aftermath on a series of events and a muddle engineered by vague external forces—like “Fate.” In the last paragraph, after the speaker and Wanda find each other again and have to reassure themselves of their mutual identity, he has a nagging doubt, though “arm in arm” with her, that misrecognition still reigns: “Was it possible this stranger had misplaced her newly wedded husband and come upon me in error. That I was a confused husband who had misplaced his newly wedded wife and, against all odds, accepted some substitute?” (The After-Death History 42). According to Lacan, “all odds” dictate that one does accept “some substitute” in the pursuit of desire, as “desire is a metonymy” (Ecrits 439), a sliding from one signifier to another. Marriage as a signifier of continuity cannot put an end to this movement.
“After several years” of doubt, McIntosh’s speaker has arrived at “the most radical answer” (The After-Death History 42), but this answer itself is not easy to read. The statement, “We were not the same people who first met, taking mild pleasure in each other’s company,” would usually mean that important aspects of their personalities have changed and that they have grown incompatible, no longer recognizing what brought them together, but the speaker follows with a simile that suggests a more literal notion of mistaken identity: “Like the unfortunate children who wake from panicked dreams desperate to know if they’d been mistakenly placed with the wrong parents. Wanda and I have also been victimized, a hapless couple switched at the altar by forces beyond understanding. I suspect there are many like us.” The simile underscores the belief that children deprived of a genetic lineage are only superficially more helpless and “hapless” than adults caught in an unsuccessful marriage. The speaker is closest to a recognition of the “forces beyond [his]understanding,”the pressure of institutional structures that gain force from the symbolic order, when he complains:
"What followed was, for me at least, a blur lasting several months. Wanda’s mother, sisters, aunts and other female relations took over our lives. Happily for me — or, less unhappily — I was left out of most of the campaigns. I discovered early on this was to be all about Wanda.
"The most vexing thing, aside from the marriage ceremony and reception (during which Wanda force-fed me repeatedly with sticky, sugary, wedding cake, among other outrages), was the necessity that Wanda and I play these curious roles: first, the Engaged Couple, and then the Married Couple. The misdirection inherent in this role-playing, I suggest, was the behavior that caused me to fear, as I stood there awkwardly in the mall’s bookstore, that I would not recognize Wanda when she eventually found her way back." (The After-Death History 41-2)
Wanda, along with family members, has been behaving in conformity with a pre-existing set of aims and, to a large extent, symbolic structures for realizing those aims, and the speaker finds such “role-playing“ “outrageously” inauthentic, though he does not articulate what authenticity would be like for him. Indeed, from a Lacanian perspective, an important aspect of the speaker’s misrecognition here is to assume that there is a distinction between “this role-playing” and the identities of a “real” Wanda and a “real” self of his own, rather than a distinction between people’s thought, speech, and action subject to the influences of the symbolic, as evidence by institutions/conventions of family, engagement, and marriage and those elements subject to influences of the symbolic attributable to other constructs. Further, from a Lacanian perspective, someone in the speaker’s situation, one who does not keep effacing his own agency, could essay a “heroic” model of resistance to the strictures of the symbolic. The speaker’s sole “resistance” is sulking in the “presence” of his audience. He does not seek jouissance, which Dylan Evans, citing both Lacan’s Ecrits and several of his Seminars, characterizes as a transgression of “the prohibitions imposed on [one’s] enjoyment, to go ‘beyond the pleasure principle’” (91-2). He is motivated by avoidance of pain, not even pleasure, so he shirks anything resembling conflict and compounds his pain. In the long run it does no service to Wanda, who might also find the marriage a miserable form of confinement sooner or later. Further, the speaker cannot sustain or elaborate on his partial representation of the role of the symbolic in the narrative, though his audience (that is — McIntosh’s audience) can find edification in his recognition of this factor and perform the elaboration.
McIntosh’s“The Occasion of Desire,” a 2002 poem seemingly derived from a dream, features a very different mode of the persuasion of a woman by a man with equally different results. The first strophe reads like a seduction handbook: “Marilyn Monroe threw herself onto the sand/ as we walked along the beach./ ‘Look,’ she teased, ‘I’ve found the fool-proof way/ to drive men wild!” (Between Earth and Sky 12). This method turns out to be a rather conventional use of time in a strip-tease:
"Each time I take something off,” she explained,
“I wait a little longer before taking off the next.
By the time I get to the flesh,
every man will be insane with desire.”
She removed piece after piece,
arousing me as never before. (12)
The title is relevant as a gloss on this strophe because, rather than allowing desire to happen (or not) because of the mere proximity of two people, Marilyn Monroe in the dream creates an “occasion” for “desire” through her performance as a moving object of lust. Moreover, she expresses great confidence that she can make the other’s desire occur from this staging, and the strophe’s final gerund clause indicates that it works on the speaker. Or does it? “As never before” indicates the speaker’s unprecedented arousal by anyone, but it can also mean that she had never aroused him before —perhaps because they were meeting in the dream for the first time. The second reading would suggest that the arousal’s intensity is not being assessed. Featuring gradually lengthening and then shortening free-verse lines that mimic arousal and its fading, the second, shorter strophe executes a deflation of both the occasion’s impact and the famous stripper’s self-assurance:
When she reached the last, she called:
“Come into my arms, lover.”
I looked at my watch: I was late for work.
“I’m sorry,” I answered. “I have to go to work.”
She looked into my eyes with such silent anguish,
I knew she would be dead by morning.
All I could do was show her my watch.
“See?” I pointed out sadly.
“I’m late already.” (12)
On the one hand, the speaker may be “ego-tripping” by supposing that his resistance can “kill” a woman who is desired from afar by so many men. Yet there is another explanation for the speaker’s prediction. The desire that motivates the Marilyn Monroe figure to stage her performance is not to elicit the poem’s speaker’s desire, but to do so for the Big Other as non-existent totality of“every man”; the speaker is only a synecdoche. One can say that lack of fulfillment of her desire for recognition creates the “silent anguish” that makes the speaker believe that she cannot survive the disappointment.
As for the speaker’s reaction, we can merely conclude from this strophe that work trumps pleasure for a respectable bourgeois fellow or that the traditional Freudian superego conquers the unruly id or that the speaker is afraid of the dangerous impact of uncontrollable passion. I propose instead that, even if an element of arousal, as stated, is present, the speaker suddenly finds that this is not the occasion of his desire.
Marilyn Monroe, who died when McIntosh was 14, was (and perhaps still is) the Hollywoodactress most celebrated for the kind of self-and media-fashioning into an image amenable to objectification. While some cultural critics might call her image a stereotype, and others might perceive sufficient nuance in the image and complexity in the character of the actual, off-screen Norma Jean Baker to resist that judgment, it is possible to say that “Marilyn” is a media creation designed to “sell” an objet petit a for mass consumption by American males from the fifties onward. Indeed, the first strophe of McIntosh’s poem/dream supports the idea that Marilyn Monroe abets this process of production, and more importantly, she tells the speaker of her technique for acting as a “lure” just as she performs it.
The very demystification of the process may dampen the mystique of the potential objet petit a for the speaker, and perhaps she sabotages her own aim because she is ambivalent about encouraging her own objectification. Another possibility, one that might be intertwined with the first, is that the speaker finds Marilyn Monroe’s beach-writhing to be an inadequate object cause for his desire, precisely because he resists how the symbolic apparatus of his culture expects him to be seduced by particular features of this objet petit a. This is not a foreclosure of jouissance or a rejection of desire per se; the speaker might accept an object cause that will not carry the ponderous freight of a culture’s manipulations. Whether this is conscious or unconscious awareness on his part is a moot point; after all, this can most convincingly be read as a dream-poem. If the speaker is “sad”that she cannot fulfill her goal, “work” is a polite (if ineffective) excuse to mask his lack of interest. It is too “late already” for another repetition of her manufactured performance. “The occasion” here is the thwarting of “Marilyn’s” “desire”to gain the other’s desire and the deferral of the speaker’s. Thus, from the perspective that foregrounds instances of the tyranny of the symbolic order, the speaker of “The Occasion of Desire” fortunately accomplishes what the addled boyfriend/fiancé/husband in “Bride of the Mall” cannot bring himself to do.
I will now move from the analysis of desire to a consideration of two last McIntosh texts that concern the disquieting encounter with the order of the real and a concomitant need to deploy the resources of the symbolic to “manage” loss and fear. It is especially difficult to give a discrete definition of the Lacanian real, but Lacan’s 1954 statement, “what did not come to light in the symbolic appears in the real” (Ecrits 324), seems to allow the real to pertain to events—for example, disastrous ones—that occur but that can either be predicted or explained by science, philosophy, etc. Žižek declares that, given “the fact that the big Other is just a retroactive illusion masking the radical contingency of the real,” we cannot “simply suspend this ‘illusion’ and ‘see things as they really are,” because “this illusion’ structures our (social) reality itself” (Looking Awry 71).
In the first poem in the series called “The After-Death History of My Mother,”collected in the book of that name, McIntosh addresses how a son might approach the work of mourning for his mother. For Žižek, “the funeral rite,” exemplifying "symbolization at its purest,” the inscription of “the dead. . . in the text of symbolic tradition,” provides assurance that the deceased “will ‘continue to live’ in the memory of the community,” whereas the often ghoulish “return of the dead,” who, according to Lacan, have “not” been “properly buried,” takes place in order “to settle symbolic accounts” (Looking Awry 23). That such “accounts” have not been settled seems evident in the immediate disjunction between McIntosh’s title and the strange events in the long opening strophe:
She showed up at my front door one morning
having walked away from the Alzheimer’s institution.
She thought it was spring but it was winter
and she had been sleeping in the snow.
I finally found another institution that would take care of her:
our public library, which had a small budget for videotape.
“As long as the money holds out
your mother can stay with us. We’ll photograph her
from time to time, and you can watch her touching progress --
or regress or decline, as the case may be.” (The After-Death History of My Mother 13)
One can assert metaphorically that someone with advanced Alzheimer’s simultaneously possesses a continuing history but is ”dead” compared to the life she led as a rational adult who can tell, for example, one season from another. It seems terribly unfair, though, considering that such individuals can feel pain and pleasure, and there is a continuum of lived experience that persists despite the rupture of mental capacity.
The local“public library” is such an absurd, dream-tinged substitute for “the Alzheimer’s Institution” that it throws doubt on whether the speaker is referring to a living person. Is she, instead, alive only because of the representational power of her son’s book of poems, videotape, or photographs? To “stay with us” — those who make the library function as an archive—may mean, in keeping with Žižek’s notion of a funeral serving as re-integrative “symbolization,” to give the mother a proper “after-death” “life” in the mind of the son, who is“invited to [his] mother’s latest screening each week. . . .” (The After-Death History 13). The library staff have not invited the speaker to visit his mother herself, but only her image and voice on screen, and so the effects of mediation might help him come to terms with her absence. As the son watches “her journey through whimsy, vagueness,/ petulant tantrums, until she [is] finally silent—/ unwilling or unable to answer/ the interviewer’s questions,” the son is both apart from and symbolically reconstructing the process of decline as a narrative to the point of her voice’s disappearance but not quite her death. The narrative’s end is achieved outside the progress of the filming:
Then I was told that the library’s funds had run out
and my mother’s project would be terminated.
I would never see my mother again,
since over time she had become an image on a screen,
and the library would pull the plug. (The After-Death History 13)
Perhaps the tropes of “funds” and “terminated” “project” are not direct enough to make the speaker register the fact of his mother’s death But the impossibility of visual presence declared in the strophe’s third line has a greater ring of finality, and the fourth line’s equation of her with a mere “image” “disconnects” representation from a renewal of her living presence. The son arrives at this realization “over time,” even if the trope refers to the mother’s transition. “The library” in the dream creates the symbolic structure for this recognition, and it is fitting that a published book that may occupy a space on a library’s shelf would be the locus for the ritual recognition of this absence. Although one might surmise that a reason could arise for assuming“improper burial” that would trigger a disquieting “return of the dead” and a bout of melancholic mourning, I read the poem’s sliding from trope to trope (or image to image to non-image) as a way of helping the speaker navigate the challenges of mourning and facilitating his encounter with the real of absolute separation rather than indefinitely prolonging his avoidance of it. Thus, a literal sense of the title cannot hold; instead, the poem can be seen as the son’s record (“history” or his story) of learning how to recognize the period after his mother’s death as a time for constructing memory of her only in relation to her absence and not an opportunity for supposing the narrative of an after-life as a continuity with her life.
In a 1997 article, Slavoj Žižek holds that “the big Other is somewhat the same as God according to Lacan” (“The Other Doesn’t Exist”). “God,” Zizek continues, “was dead from the very beginning, except He didn’t know it,” and “the ‘big Other's’ inexistence is ultimately equivalent to Its being the symbolic order, the order of symbolic fictions which operate at a level different from direct material causality,”and so this inexistence "is strictly correlative to the notion of belief, of symbolic trust, of credence, of taking what others say ‘at their word's value.’"
In McIntosh’s four-paragraph 2007 prose-poem “Their God,” this “divine” Big Other does not only not know that he is dead, because his community has not told him, but the speaker entertains the fantastic premise that the deity can speak directly to those who believe in him. Although the “God” is identified in the text’s title as “theirs” — not belonging to the “us” of the poem — first-person plural pronouns are frequently used beginning in the last sentence of the first paragraph. The speaker seems to have been absorbed against his will by the community’s array of beliefs — or at least consequences stemming from their use of those beliefs.
The prose-poem’s god is a version of the wrathful Old Testament Jehovah or the Roman Jove. Enraged, “as usual” by “a silly joke” that “someone had made about him,” “their God announced that he would destroy the world” and, seemingly for maximum punitive effect, would “do it in a way” that those addressed “would understand” (Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways To Escape Death 47). He would, in fact, imitate his supposed creation in making something comparable to a nuclear bomb,“an explosive device of incomparable destructive power.” The speaker does not provide information about who claims to witness this display, which is replete with kitsch showmanship that leavens sublime terror with comedy: “Then he roiled the sky with red and blue theatrical lights, swirling clouds. From out of the sea he rose to confront us, his splendid figure magnificently muscled, standing almost seven feet tall, and wearing a peek-a-boo loincloth.” The gap in narration indicates that the speaker shares the anxiety of the god’s believers and participates in validating the fabricated “life” of this dead (non-existent) Big Other, because it would be even more terrifying to confront what is unknown and seemingly unknowable and thus makes the path to individual and collective survival uncertain.
We are stuck with some regime of the symbolic, but McIntosh’s text indicates that giving credence to the particular regime represented therein encourages specific consequences that merit reflection. In the second paragraph, after the showman god’s disappearance, whichever community members are responsible for “broadcasting” fresh links in the chain of signifiers available for the representation of their deity as Big Other displace the previous terrifying figure with an ordinary one: “Then he disappeared into our city. We’d heard that he’d set up shop in an old barn. Someone saw him at the dump, scavenging parts from discarded televisions” (Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways 47). Perhaps these agents of the symbolic who wish to hold the real’s “radical contingency” at bay have been trying to present a picture that they and their community “would understand”—that of an ordinary human initiative that is, nevertheless, linked with divine power. The god assumed to be incarnated as a man (and thus seen by a larger number of people) is able to become “a community big shot,” whose “factory…for… bomb construction” emerges as “the second largest employer in the county,”and after a while, he is considered to be a strong potential candidate for public office.
The effort of domestication grows so successful that the fear of apocalypse begins to fade: “anyone could see that he was enjoying himself,” and people “began to relax” (48). However, the problem of people’s anxiety about their inability to control the real—to prevent what they might consider a negative individual or collective “Fate” — is still present, even if temporarily submerged, and it resurfaces. Perhaps because of all of the tragedies and disasters in historical memory, members of the community return to interpreting their genuine uncertainty about the future as “the threat of imminent annihilation,” which is “there like an annoying insect, buzzing and biting when you’d least expected it.” And so, the psychological impact of overall uncertainty is not reduced by the projection of responsibility onto the “ordinary guy” as a stand-in for an all-powerful being. Ironically, belief in the ultimate cruelty of that being — both in a belief in his “announcement” of destruction and in his delay that makes them not “know whether to” fulfill ordinary responsibilities like “renew [their] magazine subscriptions or pay the cable bill”—intensifies the malaise:
“'Why torture us this way?' I asked my wife when the newspaper hinted that he might be secretly dating a movie star. 'Why doesn’t he just get it over with?' My wife mused: 'There’s something about these immortal beings,' she said. 'They’re thinking, ‘Screw‘em!
We’ve got all the goddamn time in the world.''" (48)
Since their“god” is perceived as the one who can and will “damn” humankind in time, the community members are distracted by their fear of the absent Big Other from focusing on how their own individual and collective behavior produces substantial effects and, with this kind of recognition, from improving their lives in ways that strengthen the ability to combat potential disasters involving the environment and the political sphere.
The fact that McIntosh published the prose-poem six years after the 9/11 attacks and amid the prominence of fundamentalist Christian conservatism during the waning years of George W. Bush’s time in the White House, opens it, and especially, the wife’s closing remark, to an additional set of allusive possibilities that involve disturbing human agency. Religious groups that have developed a construct of “their god,” saturated it with ideological significance, and imagined (hallucinated?) their fusion with the divine will of (what they don’t recognize as) a construct derived from the reservoir of the symbolic do not necessarily sit around and wait for the end of the world. “Their gods” have directly told them exactly how to behave. The “immortal beings” have supposedly filled them with a view of eternity and their place in it. Islamic fundamentalists do not perceive murder of “infidels” and the game of delaying terrorist acts after making threats as acts of violence and psychological torture respectively but a gradual achievement of divine justice through human action. True believers can share the feeling of having “all the… time in the world” with their Big Other “god,” as they “know” that they possess the Truth. This possession entitles them to ultimate victory; they do not have to rush to achieve it. Christian fundamentalists who bomb abortion clinics may be in a greater hurry, but they, too, must work by stealth.
The idea that those engaging in murderous action (and delay) hold that they are merely instruments of “their god’s” intention and not acting by and for themselves corresponds neatly to the prose-poem’s ways of positing “their God’s” presence in the world and its omission of significant human agency separate from a divine hand. However, the ironic perspective available to a reader of “Their God” (equipped with Lacanian concepts) enables her/him to utilize the poem to “tell” the divine Big Other that he is dead and, even if there is no escape from the mediation of the real by the symbolic, the reader can reconfigure how signifiers permit possibilities of human agency so that individuals and communities do not conceive of their basic choices are to destroy or wait passively for destruction. McIntosh’s poetry in general offers a compelling account of the dynamics of psychological determinism; at the same time, there are navigable interstices that point to the loosening of strictures.
Bibliography
Allen, Frank. “Journey from the Predictable.” American Book Review 24.4 (May/June 2003): 28.
Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1996. Print.
Fellner, Steve. “Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways to Escape Death by Sandy McIntosh.” Rattle. 20 Mar. 2009. Web. 1 Apr. 2012.
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits.Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2006. Print.
____. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton, 1998.
Print.
____. The Seminar, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-1954. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. John Forrester. New York:
Norton, 1991. Print.
McIntosh, Sandy. TheAfter-Death History of My Mother. East Rockaway, NY: Marsh Hawk P, 2005. Print.
____. Between Earth and Sky. New York: Marsh Hawk P, 2002. Print.
____. Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways to Escape Death. New York: Marsh Hawk P, 2007. Print.
Stewart, Steven J. “Book Review of Sandy McIntosh’s Between Earth and Sky. Sidereality 2.3 (2003). Web. 1 Apr. 2012.
Wright, Erica. “The After-Death History of My Mother.” ForeWord. 21 Aug. 2009. Web. 1 Apr. 2012.
Žižek, Slavoj. “The Big Other Doesn’t Exist.” Journal of European Psychoanalysis (Spring/Fall 1997). Žižek Bibilography. Lacan.com
2012. Web.
___. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Print.
PSYCHOLOGICAL DETERMINISM AND NAVIGABLE INTERSTICES
IN SANDY McINTOSH’S POETRY
Most who have written about Sandy McIntosh’s work have focused on the humor in his poetry. “Unlike a lot of comic poets who rely on easy punchlines and hermetic in-jokes,” asserts Steve Fellner, “McIntosh balances verbal inventiveness with significant personal inquiries.” Steven J. Stewart speaks of McIntosh’s ability to help readers overcome the deadening effect of mundane “adult life” “by taking [them] elsewhere” through the use of “sharp, and very funny, surreal scenes and vignettes.” Frank Allen declares, "At any time the zany can burst out of the customary, the past out of the present. . . . For McIntosh, surprise is discovery of selfhood. His poems step back from actuality and reconsider what's familiar. . . . Poems depart from (and critique) reality, delight in fantasy and return, and this act of escape is empathetic transformation of what lies beyond 'the real binding.' He . . . emphasizes the importance of 'something real' among 'hallucinations.' (p. 28)
Erica Wright does not concur that “self” or “something real”is necessarily discovered. Linking his use of humor and his interest in absurdity to “natural speech,” Wright calls McIntosh “a sort of detective” who “uses whatever tools are available to shed light on his family and poetic pasts,” yet she laments that The After-Death History of My Mother (2005) “is no kinder to its readers than to its speakers whose quests for understanding are not realized in these pages. This collection is more about the challenges of discovery.” If Wright appears frustrated by this “unkindness,” I would say that she is close to making an important point about what is especially engaging about much of McIntosh’s work: the male speakers (and sometimes female characters) in his poems and prose-poems often seem to be caught in the grips of a psychological determinism that, to greater or lesser degrees, thwarts their agency, or else their lack of insight about how they are manipulated by external forces prevents them from perceiving possibilities for agency that can increase their range of freedom.
Although his formulations are articulated in slippery ways, indicating his own sense of language’s duplicities, and shift markedly at various points in his long career, Jacques Lacan provides cogent ways of thinking about the barriers to and “challenges of discovery” in McIntosh’s poetry. Lacan, the psychoanalytic theorist whose “return to Freud” has had significant influence in literary critical and cultural theory over the last 30 or 40 years, speaks of the interactions of the three orders—the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real—in varying ways as they concern the unconscious of the human subject.
According to Lacan, “it is the symbolic order which is constitutive for the subject” (Ecrits p. 12). The order of the symbolic, the realm of signifiers, constitutes the locus of desire, and the subject’s “desire finds its meaning in the other’s desire, not so much because the other holds the keys to the desired object, as because his first object(ive) is to be recognized by the other” (Ecrits p. 222). Lacan characterizes “the unconscious” as “(the) discourse about the Other” (689) and adds that“man’s desire is the Other’s desire,” or “qua Other that man desires…” ((690), even though he later notes that the “Other… does not exist” (700). For Lacan, the object petit a (the little [object] other), is the “lure” seen “in the dialectic of the eye and the gaze. . . . The objet a is something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ. This serves as a symbol of the lack. . .” (Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, p. 102-3). The objet a entails particular features that entice the subject, often on an unconscious level.
In a review of an imagined author’s collection of poetry, “Argol Karvarkian, Otiose Warts (Bergen: Univ. of University Press, 2006),” McIntosh unfolds the narrative of a bizarre psychological dynamic between two men, the critic and the poet, that problematizes questions of desire The nameless reviewer discloses how he has devoted his entire academic life to what cited passages would indicate to most readers (but never him) is the work of woefully inept, tuneless, silly poet, and he makes Karvarkian’s alleged development from a “primitive, brutish sensibility” to “minimalist clarity and grace” (Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways to Escape Death p. 66) a cause for celebration. But he also narrates how Karvarkian has stolen and, bored with his catch, has returned, one by one, each of the reviewer’s forty-six wives. Unlike Dr. Kavorkian, who helps end the lives of those who are in relentless pain, Argol Karvarkian allegedly ends marriages that have practically begun. The critic enables and affirms Karvarkian’s sense of women as disposable objects: “There then seemed to be an endless supply of wives in the Everglades, so I had no trouble marrying again” (Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways p. 67), and again and again. (He makes himself look like a beacon of responsibility to the ex-wives and never assumes that they can fend for themselves.)
Rather than accepting the unbelievable hyperbole that the reviewer marries so many woman and then acts as sole financial support for all of them once Karvarkian has discarded them, the reader can assume that the number is much smaller and that that in general, the poet has continually imposed on his critic. Although the major figure in the poetry is “the Procurer,” the object of alternately gentle and snarling demands, a singular lack of gratitude, and abiding contempt: “that littleb*****d / better deliver/ me f*****g flame-retardant/ flapdoodle another beer/ in f*****g skirts/ or I crush his f*****g/ smooch . . . ” (68), the critic does not recognize himself in the mirror of his subject’s writing: “but o my sissy-brother,/ there is nary the consumer/ absent the consumed. . . . Whether this mysterious Procurer will ever be brought fully from the shadows must wait on future Karvarkian collections. . .” (69). Of course, an actual “procurer”would be paid; Karvarkian does not see himself as paying the critic anything or even consider the possibility of reciprocity.
Something in Karvarkian’s poetry, rather than in any of the critic’s wives, is the speaker’s objet petit a. The ideals of criticism as an enterprise that influences literature and the maintenance of a canon of style constitute the Big Other whose recognition he seeks, and for him, this is tied to the poetry’s positive development. The critic’s desire is not so much to feed the poet’s sexual cravings, but to contribute to the poetry’s greatness, and this, he believes, is an adjunct to that project. After a while, we learn, the speaker did not protest Karvarkian’s wife-theft, because, each time it happened, “a new book. . . would appear,” and he would “greatly marvel at [Karvarkian’s] progression of intellect and technique from volume to volume” (Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways, pp. 67-8). He expresses satisfaction in his own contribution to that “progression”: “After all, he seemed to extract a tangible grace from the women I married — and, I flatter myself — possibly because of my own connection to them” (69). Then the critic goes further: "I’d also like to think that my judiciously crafted critical prose, which my wives have assured me they read aloud to him each evening, helped to discipline his earlier poetic unruliness.”
Lacan’s use of Hegel’s “master-slave dialectic” is pertinent here. In Seminar I, Lacan states: “A law is imposed on the slave, that he should satisfy the desire and pleasure (jouissance) of the other. It is not sufficient for him to plea [sic] for mercy, he has to go to work” (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I, 233). In Lacan’s thinking, this dialectic’s representation evolved, as Slavoj Žižek points out, “toward the end of the 1960s” into “the four discourses (master, university, hysteric, analyst), i.e. the four possible types of social bound or. . . articulations of the network regulating intersubjective relations” (Looking Awry 130). Even as “the discourse of the master” is supposed to dominate signification totally, “this operating of signifying representation” creates “some disturbing surplus . . . designated by a small a,” and “the other discourses” serve as “attempts to ‘come to terms’ with this remnant, . . . to ‘cope’ with it.”
According to Žižek, “the discourse of the university. . . takes this leftover for its object, its ‘other,’ and tries to transform it into a‘subject’ by applying to it the network of ‘knowledge’” (130-1). Although, improbably enough, the critic in McIntosh’s text does not teach for a living but only writes criticism, Žižek’s formulation about university discourse still applies, because his work has an audience that he is striving to teach about poetic qualities: “. . . out of an ‘untamed’ object (the ‘unsocialized’ child), we produce a subject by means of an implantation of knowledge,” and “the gesture of the master” exists “behind the semblance of the neutral ‘knowledge’ . . .” (131). In many respects, the critic behaves as Karvarkian’s “slave”: he suffers egregious psychological and financial hardship, however exaggerated (“I support forty-six ex-wives on the meager receipts of my modest critical efforts” [Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways, p. 69]) by submitting to the whim of an exploiter of despicable character and dubious aesthetic gifts. Yet, on some level, subscribing to the university discourse, the reviewer implicitly posits himself as a kind of “master” (teacher) in the “university discourse” and Karvarkian as the “’untamed’ object” whom he has been making a “great” poet. He can see himself as worthy of recognition from the Big Other of Criticism.
By the review’s end, even if the critic, as he had done at the beginning, bumblingly misreads the poetry as elegantly (not crudely minimalist, he uses his position as judge (not merely as explicator) within the conventions of the discourse of the university to assert his status as master and Karvarkian’s as supplicant: “I think, in the end, [Karvarkian’s poems] will share the fate of all delicately created things. Like Faberge eggs they will abide as objects that we can admire, but that, once having admired, we relegate to the collector’s shelf without further thought” (Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways 70). Is the discarder of women finally discarded — the former master relegated to the position of a slave? Has the critic ceased to be a “procurer” of readers as well as women? We do not have access in the prose-poem to Karvarkian’s own thinking; he may not consider his mastery challenged, even if he has to look for a new supply of women or reviews from another source.
The critic’s own assertion of mastery, however, ironically undoes his bid for recognition from the Big Other of criticism. Since he seems to have spent a whole career writing on one poet whom he himself now deems forgettable, his own work will lose relevance. The fact that this does not dawn on him (yet?) dovetails with his persistent misrecognition of central elements of his narrative. (By writing this poem, does McIntosh entrap his critics — in this case, me and maybe you — in the situation that the poem dramatizes? If I deny any desire for recognition and power within the framework of university discourse, I will seem to protest too much. Presumably, I might “procure” readers for McIntosh, just as Lacan procured adherents for Freud, as well as himself, but I see no evidence either that my subject is in the thrall of the kind of repetition compulsion that Karvarkian is, nor does my “procurement” seem to feed one. Further, separate from recognition or power over others, is it not possible to pursue edification and intellectual or aesthetic pleasure for its own sake and to take pleasure in enabling others to achieve the same? Thus, one goal for me in writing this essay might be to contribute to my own and others’ realization of how application of Lacanian theory can enrich the reading of McIntosh’s poetry and a consideration of topoi that it raises.)
In “Bride of the Mall,” a 2005 prose-poem with a dominantly narrative component, McIntosh’s male speaker, lacking a name (as does the reviewer in the“Karvarkian” text), finds himself influenced as a subject by important aspects of the symbolic order: the institutions of family, engagement, and marriage, insofar as they are represented and transmitted through language and imagery. His girlfriend Wanda first expresses her interest in an engagement ring that she sees in a jewelry store and through a series of rhetorical questions beginning with “’Isn’t that gorgeous? Don’t you just love it?’” (The After-Death History of My Mother 39) maneuvers him, even though neither has proposed marriage, to take “a layaway option” on the ring and, shortly after, to purchase the expensive item outright. At each turn, the speaker, who cringes whenever Wanda calls him“darling,” is reluctant to move to the next stage but convinced that he must acquiesce each time to delay the occurrence of something more disagreeable. To the “difficult question,” “’Were you thinking what I was thinking?’”, the speaker “diplomatically” responds, “What were we thinking?” (The After-Death History 39). He is willing to follow her lead as a thinker in order to seem agreeable. When Wanda answers that “’if [they] ever thought about getting married” — planting the idea in his head, so that he, the one traditionally supposed to ask, would eventually do so—“this would be the ring [he] would buy [her],’” he feels that he is entering “a hazy dream” and responds with a simultaneous hesitancy and reassurance that only enables her to step up her “attack”: “’That would be the exact ring, if we were thinking about, you know . . . er, doing that.”
When the speaker refers to how he and Wanda had “enjoyed a mild pleasure in each other’s company—and that, not every day” (The After-Death History 39) prior to the day at the jewelry store, he allows us to understand that none of Wanda’s traits constitute his objet
petit a. Further, his limited perspective grant no access to Wanda thinks beyond her demand for the ring. The dialogue suggests that she finds his responses interesting only insofar as they set her up for her next move. We can only guess whether the ring reflects her desire for some quality evinced by the object itself, as though this material is her objet petit a that mediates her relation to the Big Other of martial respectability, or whether the object is a pretext for her actual aim, the securing of marriage itself with any available anonymous candidate.
As his sense of the situation being out of his control grows, the speaker never refers to his own lack of assertiveness as a cause, nor does he suppose that different behavior might produce a less irksome result. For example, after he agrees that Wanda should be able to wear the ring for several days since it “did look wonderful on her finger” (The After-Death History 41), and, quite understandably, her family, seeing this, assumes that he is engaged, he does not link his own concession to their misunderstanding:“Wanda’s family was waiting for us. Wanda opened the door and held up her left hand to show her parents. ‘Look what we’ve bought!’ ‘You’re engaged!’ her family proclaimed in joyous unison. And so we were from that moment on.” The ring on Wanda’s finger stands as a metonymy for the engagement that, unconventionally, has occurred without a traditional proposal. Since the speaker does not supply the context, the family can validate its tacit assumption that the usual procedure has been followed. He does not reflect on his silence or on his reluctance to oppose Wanda’s series of maneuvers.
The prose-poem’s opening paragraphs vaguely gesture toward an external culprit for how the marriage is poised to fail at its very start. The speaker “had been browsing the bookstore in a disconnected sort of way for some twenty minutes, [his] anxiety mounting over the absence of [his] wife of just two weeks” (The After-Death History 39). He fears that “she might have gotten lost herself” in such “a big mall. . . .” Wondering “if, since [their] marriage, instead of learning to better recognize each other, [they] had begun to forget who [they]
were,” he had doubts about whether he could “identify her” upon her return. He holds the “engagement and everything that followed” responsible for the confusion, but claims, “I don’t know how it happened.”
Never acknowledging a bit of his own complicity while narrating events, the speaker blames the confusing “engagement” and aftermath on a series of events and a muddle engineered by vague external forces—like “Fate.” In the last paragraph, after the speaker and Wanda find each other again and have to reassure themselves of their mutual identity, he has a nagging doubt, though “arm in arm” with her, that misrecognition still reigns: “Was it possible this stranger had misplaced her newly wedded husband and come upon me in error. That I was a confused husband who had misplaced his newly wedded wife and, against all odds, accepted some substitute?” (The After-Death History 42). According to Lacan, “all odds” dictate that one does accept “some substitute” in the pursuit of desire, as “desire is a metonymy” (Ecrits 439), a sliding from one signifier to another. Marriage as a signifier of continuity cannot put an end to this movement.
“After several years” of doubt, McIntosh’s speaker has arrived at “the most radical answer” (The After-Death History 42), but this answer itself is not easy to read. The statement, “We were not the same people who first met, taking mild pleasure in each other’s company,” would usually mean that important aspects of their personalities have changed and that they have grown incompatible, no longer recognizing what brought them together, but the speaker follows with a simile that suggests a more literal notion of mistaken identity: “Like the unfortunate children who wake from panicked dreams desperate to know if they’d been mistakenly placed with the wrong parents. Wanda and I have also been victimized, a hapless couple switched at the altar by forces beyond understanding. I suspect there are many like us.” The simile underscores the belief that children deprived of a genetic lineage are only superficially more helpless and “hapless” than adults caught in an unsuccessful marriage. The speaker is closest to a recognition of the “forces beyond [his]understanding,”the pressure of institutional structures that gain force from the symbolic order, when he complains:
"What followed was, for me at least, a blur lasting several months. Wanda’s mother, sisters, aunts and other female relations took over our lives. Happily for me — or, less unhappily — I was left out of most of the campaigns. I discovered early on this was to be all about Wanda.
"The most vexing thing, aside from the marriage ceremony and reception (during which Wanda force-fed me repeatedly with sticky, sugary, wedding cake, among other outrages), was the necessity that Wanda and I play these curious roles: first, the Engaged Couple, and then the Married Couple. The misdirection inherent in this role-playing, I suggest, was the behavior that caused me to fear, as I stood there awkwardly in the mall’s bookstore, that I would not recognize Wanda when she eventually found her way back." (The After-Death History 41-2)
Wanda, along with family members, has been behaving in conformity with a pre-existing set of aims and, to a large extent, symbolic structures for realizing those aims, and the speaker finds such “role-playing“ “outrageously” inauthentic, though he does not articulate what authenticity would be like for him. Indeed, from a Lacanian perspective, an important aspect of the speaker’s misrecognition here is to assume that there is a distinction between “this role-playing” and the identities of a “real” Wanda and a “real” self of his own, rather than a distinction between people’s thought, speech, and action subject to the influences of the symbolic, as evidence by institutions/conventions of family, engagement, and marriage and those elements subject to influences of the symbolic attributable to other constructs. Further, from a Lacanian perspective, someone in the speaker’s situation, one who does not keep effacing his own agency, could essay a “heroic” model of resistance to the strictures of the symbolic. The speaker’s sole “resistance” is sulking in the “presence” of his audience. He does not seek jouissance, which Dylan Evans, citing both Lacan’s Ecrits and several of his Seminars, characterizes as a transgression of “the prohibitions imposed on [one’s] enjoyment, to go ‘beyond the pleasure principle’” (91-2). He is motivated by avoidance of pain, not even pleasure, so he shirks anything resembling conflict and compounds his pain. In the long run it does no service to Wanda, who might also find the marriage a miserable form of confinement sooner or later. Further, the speaker cannot sustain or elaborate on his partial representation of the role of the symbolic in the narrative, though his audience (that is — McIntosh’s audience) can find edification in his recognition of this factor and perform the elaboration.
McIntosh’s“The Occasion of Desire,” a 2002 poem seemingly derived from a dream, features a very different mode of the persuasion of a woman by a man with equally different results. The first strophe reads like a seduction handbook: “Marilyn Monroe threw herself onto the sand/ as we walked along the beach./ ‘Look,’ she teased, ‘I’ve found the fool-proof way/ to drive men wild!” (Between Earth and Sky 12). This method turns out to be a rather conventional use of time in a strip-tease:
"Each time I take something off,” she explained,
“I wait a little longer before taking off the next.
By the time I get to the flesh,
every man will be insane with desire.”
She removed piece after piece,
arousing me as never before. (12)
The title is relevant as a gloss on this strophe because, rather than allowing desire to happen (or not) because of the mere proximity of two people, Marilyn Monroe in the dream creates an “occasion” for “desire” through her performance as a moving object of lust. Moreover, she expresses great confidence that she can make the other’s desire occur from this staging, and the strophe’s final gerund clause indicates that it works on the speaker. Or does it? “As never before” indicates the speaker’s unprecedented arousal by anyone, but it can also mean that she had never aroused him before —perhaps because they were meeting in the dream for the first time. The second reading would suggest that the arousal’s intensity is not being assessed. Featuring gradually lengthening and then shortening free-verse lines that mimic arousal and its fading, the second, shorter strophe executes a deflation of both the occasion’s impact and the famous stripper’s self-assurance:
When she reached the last, she called:
“Come into my arms, lover.”
I looked at my watch: I was late for work.
“I’m sorry,” I answered. “I have to go to work.”
She looked into my eyes with such silent anguish,
I knew she would be dead by morning.
All I could do was show her my watch.
“See?” I pointed out sadly.
“I’m late already.” (12)
On the one hand, the speaker may be “ego-tripping” by supposing that his resistance can “kill” a woman who is desired from afar by so many men. Yet there is another explanation for the speaker’s prediction. The desire that motivates the Marilyn Monroe figure to stage her performance is not to elicit the poem’s speaker’s desire, but to do so for the Big Other as non-existent totality of“every man”; the speaker is only a synecdoche. One can say that lack of fulfillment of her desire for recognition creates the “silent anguish” that makes the speaker believe that she cannot survive the disappointment.
As for the speaker’s reaction, we can merely conclude from this strophe that work trumps pleasure for a respectable bourgeois fellow or that the traditional Freudian superego conquers the unruly id or that the speaker is afraid of the dangerous impact of uncontrollable passion. I propose instead that, even if an element of arousal, as stated, is present, the speaker suddenly finds that this is not the occasion of his desire.
Marilyn Monroe, who died when McIntosh was 14, was (and perhaps still is) the Hollywoodactress most celebrated for the kind of self-and media-fashioning into an image amenable to objectification. While some cultural critics might call her image a stereotype, and others might perceive sufficient nuance in the image and complexity in the character of the actual, off-screen Norma Jean Baker to resist that judgment, it is possible to say that “Marilyn” is a media creation designed to “sell” an objet petit a for mass consumption by American males from the fifties onward. Indeed, the first strophe of McIntosh’s poem/dream supports the idea that Marilyn Monroe abets this process of production, and more importantly, she tells the speaker of her technique for acting as a “lure” just as she performs it.
The very demystification of the process may dampen the mystique of the potential objet petit a for the speaker, and perhaps she sabotages her own aim because she is ambivalent about encouraging her own objectification. Another possibility, one that might be intertwined with the first, is that the speaker finds Marilyn Monroe’s beach-writhing to be an inadequate object cause for his desire, precisely because he resists how the symbolic apparatus of his culture expects him to be seduced by particular features of this objet petit a. This is not a foreclosure of jouissance or a rejection of desire per se; the speaker might accept an object cause that will not carry the ponderous freight of a culture’s manipulations. Whether this is conscious or unconscious awareness on his part is a moot point; after all, this can most convincingly be read as a dream-poem. If the speaker is “sad”that she cannot fulfill her goal, “work” is a polite (if ineffective) excuse to mask his lack of interest. It is too “late already” for another repetition of her manufactured performance. “The occasion” here is the thwarting of “Marilyn’s” “desire”to gain the other’s desire and the deferral of the speaker’s. Thus, from the perspective that foregrounds instances of the tyranny of the symbolic order, the speaker of “The Occasion of Desire” fortunately accomplishes what the addled boyfriend/fiancé/husband in “Bride of the Mall” cannot bring himself to do.
I will now move from the analysis of desire to a consideration of two last McIntosh texts that concern the disquieting encounter with the order of the real and a concomitant need to deploy the resources of the symbolic to “manage” loss and fear. It is especially difficult to give a discrete definition of the Lacanian real, but Lacan’s 1954 statement, “what did not come to light in the symbolic appears in the real” (Ecrits 324), seems to allow the real to pertain to events—for example, disastrous ones—that occur but that can either be predicted or explained by science, philosophy, etc. Žižek declares that, given “the fact that the big Other is just a retroactive illusion masking the radical contingency of the real,” we cannot “simply suspend this ‘illusion’ and ‘see things as they really are,” because “this illusion’ structures our (social) reality itself” (Looking Awry 71).
In the first poem in the series called “The After-Death History of My Mother,”collected in the book of that name, McIntosh addresses how a son might approach the work of mourning for his mother. For Žižek, “the funeral rite,” exemplifying "symbolization at its purest,” the inscription of “the dead. . . in the text of symbolic tradition,” provides assurance that the deceased “will ‘continue to live’ in the memory of the community,” whereas the often ghoulish “return of the dead,” who, according to Lacan, have “not” been “properly buried,” takes place in order “to settle symbolic accounts” (Looking Awry 23). That such “accounts” have not been settled seems evident in the immediate disjunction between McIntosh’s title and the strange events in the long opening strophe:
She showed up at my front door one morning
having walked away from the Alzheimer’s institution.
She thought it was spring but it was winter
and she had been sleeping in the snow.
I finally found another institution that would take care of her:
our public library, which had a small budget for videotape.
“As long as the money holds out
your mother can stay with us. We’ll photograph her
from time to time, and you can watch her touching progress --
or regress or decline, as the case may be.” (The After-Death History of My Mother 13)
One can assert metaphorically that someone with advanced Alzheimer’s simultaneously possesses a continuing history but is ”dead” compared to the life she led as a rational adult who can tell, for example, one season from another. It seems terribly unfair, though, considering that such individuals can feel pain and pleasure, and there is a continuum of lived experience that persists despite the rupture of mental capacity.
The local“public library” is such an absurd, dream-tinged substitute for “the Alzheimer’s Institution” that it throws doubt on whether the speaker is referring to a living person. Is she, instead, alive only because of the representational power of her son’s book of poems, videotape, or photographs? To “stay with us” — those who make the library function as an archive—may mean, in keeping with Žižek’s notion of a funeral serving as re-integrative “symbolization,” to give the mother a proper “after-death” “life” in the mind of the son, who is“invited to [his] mother’s latest screening each week. . . .” (The After-Death History 13). The library staff have not invited the speaker to visit his mother herself, but only her image and voice on screen, and so the effects of mediation might help him come to terms with her absence. As the son watches “her journey through whimsy, vagueness,/ petulant tantrums, until she [is] finally silent—/ unwilling or unable to answer/ the interviewer’s questions,” the son is both apart from and symbolically reconstructing the process of decline as a narrative to the point of her voice’s disappearance but not quite her death. The narrative’s end is achieved outside the progress of the filming:
Then I was told that the library’s funds had run out
and my mother’s project would be terminated.
I would never see my mother again,
since over time she had become an image on a screen,
and the library would pull the plug. (The After-Death History 13)
Perhaps the tropes of “funds” and “terminated” “project” are not direct enough to make the speaker register the fact of his mother’s death But the impossibility of visual presence declared in the strophe’s third line has a greater ring of finality, and the fourth line’s equation of her with a mere “image” “disconnects” representation from a renewal of her living presence. The son arrives at this realization “over time,” even if the trope refers to the mother’s transition. “The library” in the dream creates the symbolic structure for this recognition, and it is fitting that a published book that may occupy a space on a library’s shelf would be the locus for the ritual recognition of this absence. Although one might surmise that a reason could arise for assuming“improper burial” that would trigger a disquieting “return of the dead” and a bout of melancholic mourning, I read the poem’s sliding from trope to trope (or image to image to non-image) as a way of helping the speaker navigate the challenges of mourning and facilitating his encounter with the real of absolute separation rather than indefinitely prolonging his avoidance of it. Thus, a literal sense of the title cannot hold; instead, the poem can be seen as the son’s record (“history” or his story) of learning how to recognize the period after his mother’s death as a time for constructing memory of her only in relation to her absence and not an opportunity for supposing the narrative of an after-life as a continuity with her life.
In a 1997 article, Slavoj Žižek holds that “the big Other is somewhat the same as God according to Lacan” (“The Other Doesn’t Exist”). “God,” Zizek continues, “was dead from the very beginning, except He didn’t know it,” and “the ‘big Other's’ inexistence is ultimately equivalent to Its being the symbolic order, the order of symbolic fictions which operate at a level different from direct material causality,”and so this inexistence "is strictly correlative to the notion of belief, of symbolic trust, of credence, of taking what others say ‘at their word's value.’"
In McIntosh’s four-paragraph 2007 prose-poem “Their God,” this “divine” Big Other does not only not know that he is dead, because his community has not told him, but the speaker entertains the fantastic premise that the deity can speak directly to those who believe in him. Although the “God” is identified in the text’s title as “theirs” — not belonging to the “us” of the poem — first-person plural pronouns are frequently used beginning in the last sentence of the first paragraph. The speaker seems to have been absorbed against his will by the community’s array of beliefs — or at least consequences stemming from their use of those beliefs.
The prose-poem’s god is a version of the wrathful Old Testament Jehovah or the Roman Jove. Enraged, “as usual” by “a silly joke” that “someone had made about him,” “their God announced that he would destroy the world” and, seemingly for maximum punitive effect, would “do it in a way” that those addressed “would understand” (Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways To Escape Death 47). He would, in fact, imitate his supposed creation in making something comparable to a nuclear bomb,“an explosive device of incomparable destructive power.” The speaker does not provide information about who claims to witness this display, which is replete with kitsch showmanship that leavens sublime terror with comedy: “Then he roiled the sky with red and blue theatrical lights, swirling clouds. From out of the sea he rose to confront us, his splendid figure magnificently muscled, standing almost seven feet tall, and wearing a peek-a-boo loincloth.” The gap in narration indicates that the speaker shares the anxiety of the god’s believers and participates in validating the fabricated “life” of this dead (non-existent) Big Other, because it would be even more terrifying to confront what is unknown and seemingly unknowable and thus makes the path to individual and collective survival uncertain.
We are stuck with some regime of the symbolic, but McIntosh’s text indicates that giving credence to the particular regime represented therein encourages specific consequences that merit reflection. In the second paragraph, after the showman god’s disappearance, whichever community members are responsible for “broadcasting” fresh links in the chain of signifiers available for the representation of their deity as Big Other displace the previous terrifying figure with an ordinary one: “Then he disappeared into our city. We’d heard that he’d set up shop in an old barn. Someone saw him at the dump, scavenging parts from discarded televisions” (Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways 47). Perhaps these agents of the symbolic who wish to hold the real’s “radical contingency” at bay have been trying to present a picture that they and their community “would understand”—that of an ordinary human initiative that is, nevertheless, linked with divine power. The god assumed to be incarnated as a man (and thus seen by a larger number of people) is able to become “a community big shot,” whose “factory…for… bomb construction” emerges as “the second largest employer in the county,”and after a while, he is considered to be a strong potential candidate for public office.
The effort of domestication grows so successful that the fear of apocalypse begins to fade: “anyone could see that he was enjoying himself,” and people “began to relax” (48). However, the problem of people’s anxiety about their inability to control the real—to prevent what they might consider a negative individual or collective “Fate” — is still present, even if temporarily submerged, and it resurfaces. Perhaps because of all of the tragedies and disasters in historical memory, members of the community return to interpreting their genuine uncertainty about the future as “the threat of imminent annihilation,” which is “there like an annoying insect, buzzing and biting when you’d least expected it.” And so, the psychological impact of overall uncertainty is not reduced by the projection of responsibility onto the “ordinary guy” as a stand-in for an all-powerful being. Ironically, belief in the ultimate cruelty of that being — both in a belief in his “announcement” of destruction and in his delay that makes them not “know whether to” fulfill ordinary responsibilities like “renew [their] magazine subscriptions or pay the cable bill”—intensifies the malaise:
“'Why torture us this way?' I asked my wife when the newspaper hinted that he might be secretly dating a movie star. 'Why doesn’t he just get it over with?' My wife mused: 'There’s something about these immortal beings,' she said. 'They’re thinking, ‘Screw‘em!
We’ve got all the goddamn time in the world.''" (48)
Since their“god” is perceived as the one who can and will “damn” humankind in time, the community members are distracted by their fear of the absent Big Other from focusing on how their own individual and collective behavior produces substantial effects and, with this kind of recognition, from improving their lives in ways that strengthen the ability to combat potential disasters involving the environment and the political sphere.
The fact that McIntosh published the prose-poem six years after the 9/11 attacks and amid the prominence of fundamentalist Christian conservatism during the waning years of George W. Bush’s time in the White House, opens it, and especially, the wife’s closing remark, to an additional set of allusive possibilities that involve disturbing human agency. Religious groups that have developed a construct of “their god,” saturated it with ideological significance, and imagined (hallucinated?) their fusion with the divine will of (what they don’t recognize as) a construct derived from the reservoir of the symbolic do not necessarily sit around and wait for the end of the world. “Their gods” have directly told them exactly how to behave. The “immortal beings” have supposedly filled them with a view of eternity and their place in it. Islamic fundamentalists do not perceive murder of “infidels” and the game of delaying terrorist acts after making threats as acts of violence and psychological torture respectively but a gradual achievement of divine justice through human action. True believers can share the feeling of having “all the… time in the world” with their Big Other “god,” as they “know” that they possess the Truth. This possession entitles them to ultimate victory; they do not have to rush to achieve it. Christian fundamentalists who bomb abortion clinics may be in a greater hurry, but they, too, must work by stealth.
The idea that those engaging in murderous action (and delay) hold that they are merely instruments of “their god’s” intention and not acting by and for themselves corresponds neatly to the prose-poem’s ways of positing “their God’s” presence in the world and its omission of significant human agency separate from a divine hand. However, the ironic perspective available to a reader of “Their God” (equipped with Lacanian concepts) enables her/him to utilize the poem to “tell” the divine Big Other that he is dead and, even if there is no escape from the mediation of the real by the symbolic, the reader can reconfigure how signifiers permit possibilities of human agency so that individuals and communities do not conceive of their basic choices are to destroy or wait passively for destruction. McIntosh’s poetry in general offers a compelling account of the dynamics of psychological determinism; at the same time, there are navigable interstices that point to the loosening of strictures.
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