The Therapeutic Stage/Page: Facts and Fictions about the Dead to Stir the Living

Theresa Smalec

Department of Performance Studies
New York University
tks201@is9.nyu.edu

 

Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

 
In Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories, Peggy Phelan takes performance and performative writing as bases from which to probe the relationship between private and public grief, and particularly the question of whether there is political agency in public mourning for women. Her introduction makes it clear that she hopes to answer this question in the affirmative; “This Book’s Body” outlines the author’s hypothesis that certain forms of live drama respond to our postmodern society’s need to “rehearse for loss, and especially for death” (3). She begins with the broad propositions that we are currently ensnared in what D.A. Miller has called “morbidity culture,” and that “theatre and performance have especially potent lessons for those interested in reassessing our relations to mourning, grief, and loss” (3). Near the end of the chapter, however, Phelan engages in a detailed discussion of the socio-sexual barriers preventing Sophocles’ grief-stricken sisters, Antigone and Ismene, from honoring their bond to each other even as they mourn the loss of their brother. This section is pivotal in that it reflects her more specific project–namely, to explore various manifestations of “theatrical behavior” as political tools with which women might challenge the repressive conventions and disturbing omissions that presently vex their relations to a patriarchal culture’s sanctioned rites of bereavement.

 

Reflecting her primary interest in peoples’ embodied attempts to expand North American culture’s restrictive customs of grief, Phelan titles the book’s eight sections after different parts of the human anatomy. A short list of the unorthodox losses mourned by this volume includes “Bloody Nose,” a chapter concerned with the contradictory, even hostile relationship between legal and psychoanalytic notions of sexual injury; “Infected Eyes,” a scrutiny of Tom Joslin’s Silverlake Life which uses the gay artist’s video diary about living with and dying of AIDS as a vehicle through which to (re)view the psychic substitutions at the heart of cinematic and sexual difference; and “Shattered Skulls,” an essay combining straightforward commentary on Holbein’s famous painting, The Ambassadors, with a personal “fiction” told in the voice of a neurotic narrator.

 

The self-consciously unstable speaker in “Shattered Skulls” deftly enacts Phelan’s project not only to theorize, but also to dramatize–in writing–the psychic effects of trauma. Here, the textual page becomes a theatrical and therapeutic stage for a woman whose relation to the world has been jarred by several blows, including the brutal riots ensuing from the Rodney King verdict. As the chapter unfolds, readers find themselves caught up in a complex “acting out” of the disjointed yet fiercely overlapping nature of certain culturally troubling events:

 

Martin Luther King was assassinated for trying to live his dream. Maybe I wanted too much with you: maybe you were shot because you would not stay in "your place." A black man moving faster than they liked. Rodney King was beaten for moving too fast--speeding too fast from drugs, from a heavy accelerator, from the thud of a police stick. Martin Luther King. Rodney King. King Henry VIII executed Anne Boleyn because she could not reproduce sons and the Pope told him no divorce. Henry wanted a copy, a way to reproduce himself to maintain succession as King. That was his dream. (121)

 

This essay’s citation, amalgamation, and subsequent transformation of several historical traumas may be of interest to postmodern readers and performers on several grounds. The inventive distortions that Phelan effects here, however, strike me as troubling for reasons that I outline below. Moreover, the public performance of private grief staged in “Shattered Skulls” is reflective of the methodological approach of other key sections of Mourning Sex, in which Phelan seems to forfeit clarity of argument in order to achieve a certain performative force.

 

The speaker recalls as fragments, rather than as complete, culturally-specific events, an allusive series of names and incidents. Her nostalgic evocation of these well-known remnants of sorrow brings them into the present with a poignant sense of pertinence. Yet the narrator’s traumatized acts of re-membering function slowly to merge and confuse the roles of Martin Luther King, Rodney King, King Henry VIII, and other Kings throughout history:

 

Why did Luther want to shorten those commandments? Why did King want to dream out loud? Was King your peaceful Ambassador? King, Martin Luther. Martin Luther King, Junior. Hans Holbein the Younger. I hunger for you still. (121)

 

Phelan portrays the enigmatic triggering of an earlier trauma, as well as the warped, seemingly “irrational” associations that often haunt the one who remembers; the result of this performative playing on words is a disturbing sense of randomness. “Shattered Skulls” not only intermingles private and public traumas, but also several temporal and cultural specificities. This creative fusion and surrogation of certain figures of crisis serves to subsume the different social values that, through time, become fastened to particular names, thus securing them as the markers of distinctly weighted acts of violence. In short, it becomes increasingly hard to identify any one of these racial, sexual, and socio-economic traumas as more worthy of public grief and redress than the rest, since they all blur together as the narrative moves on.

 

Phelan’s narrator seems aware of the palimpsest of erasures that she forges: “Holbein painted The Ambassadors in 1533. It seems I’ve been staring at it ever since. I know too much about the painting. Kafka said he wrote to forget. Am I forgetting you? Painting you over?” (121). Nevertheless, this realization that she writes in order to retouch, alter, and thus survive a personal loss does not alter the way the narrative itself performs, and thus reveals, the violence of this “therapeutic” mis-remembering. The substantive differences between Rodney King and King Henry VIII are collapsed.

 

At one point in this challenging chapter, the speaker recalls the loss of her lover at the hands of a deranged neighbor; she incorporates this desolating, personal blow into the far more public memories of the outrage that erupted after the racist ruling in Rodney King’s case:

 

I was getting over you. I could tell. I finished things, started others. I hardly ever thought of Holbein's painting. It had become a "hollow bone" in my memory. But recently, since the police in Los Angeles were found not guilty of beating Rodney King, I started thinking about Martin Luther King and Martin Luther and the painting. I started dreaming of you and my professor friend in London. I wanted to be an ambassador for the new state. (124)

 

Desperate to restage, and thus come to terms with her own, little-known loss, Phelan’s narrator uses the notoriety of King’s injuries in order to mourn several more obscure yet equally hate-incited forms of shattering. Her appropriation of a black man’s trauma at the hands of America’s predominantly white legal system in order to make visible her own wounds reveals the complex structure and ambiguous power of trauma as a form of social agency; nevertheless, the metonymic logic underlying this piece of theatre, this “critical fiction” (18), suggests a provisional strategy by which women can make their private losses intelligible to a male-centered, mainstream audience. North American culture has, in general, come to avow the significance of the victimization endured by men such as Martin Luther King and Rodney King; meanwhile, the state’s shameful abuse of women like Susan Smith and Aileen Wornos still goes unmarked.

 

Departing from conventional scholarship’s clinical approach to trauma, the organs comprising Mourning Sex mark the author’s concern, at a dramatic level, with how queer (racially, sexually, and/or financially disenfranchised) subjects perform their bereavement: how they recover from loss. By enacting, through a medley of critical and creative prose, the gaps and distortions that often attend socially-unpalatable memories, Phelan shows how both live performance and performative writing may serve as political tools with which stigmatized groups can turn private pain, rage, and terror into collective discourses of healing. Significantly, she defines “trauma” as wounds to both the body and psyche. Furthermore, in proposing a way to redress these linked yet distinct forms of damage, she posits “rehearsal” as the material and mental work of repetition: restaging, revising, and even misrepresenting the past so as to cope with the damage incurred at an earlier time. Through this sophisticated approach to what acts of rehearsal can teach us about the mutable, partly reparable factors of time and remembrance, her book diverges usefully from a recent wave of studies on the relevance of theatre to grief. For once, the dramas of forgetfulness and of “getting it wrong” acquire a theory of value: “truth is what we can make from what we’ve missed” (7).

 

Chapter four contains a potent example of how postmodern subjects use the traces of an obscure past in order to claim legitimacy for their vested interests in the present. Here, Phelan probes the curious fact that one of the most dramatic plots in Renaissance theatre unfolded in London during the unlikely year of 1989: “In a six month dig in Southwark, archaeologists unearthed the startingly well preserved remains of the Rose Theatre, the first home of Christopher Marlowe’s dramatic plays” (73). The surprising twist to this discovery, however, is that it “was surrounded by the prospect of loss” (74). For, rather than bestowing the site with the customary honors of state-funded excavation and memorialization, the fate of the Rose was governed by heterosexist politics and capitalist economics.

 

As Phelan examines the public and private records attending the controversy, she argues that a central albeit tacit reason for the British government’s reluctance to salvage this particular playhouse lies in the decidedly queer racial/sexual interests of its champion dramatist: “The Rose was Marlowe’s stage, not Shakespeare’s. Marlowe wrote plays about a man who consorted with devils, about a homosexual King, about the persecution of a Jew; he also allegedly wrote ‘all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools'” (79). The rest of her essay examines the Rose as a deeply haunting and consistently mutating theatrical “body.” After positing this site as a crucible for multiple cultural anxieties, she endeavors to show how the invention of history “springs from a dense nexus of competing and often contradictory moral, nationalistic, economic and unconscious factors” (78).

 

Throughout Mourning Sex, the author struggles to write “with and toward a theatre of affect” (18). In practice, this emotive writing style makes for a daring mode of analysis. Most of Phelan’s essays unite linear, fiercely coherent critiques of disturbing cultural moments with the meandering, melodramatic, even hysterical narratives that bring these traumas to life in the minds and bodies of readers. “Whole Wounds: Bodies at the Vanishing Point” probes the potential for redemption in our postmodern age of despair by linking a concept derived from Renaissance painting, that of perspective, to current technologies of theatre. Here, she fosters performance theory’s dialogue with art history and theology by claiming that the cathartic value of theatre, like Caravaggio’s classical painting, The Incredulity of St. Thomas, hinges on witnessing: “Western theatre is itself predicated on the belief that there is an audience, an other willing to be cast into the role of the auditor” (31). Working with the problem of how to secure external response to injuries that are internal and often empirically unverifiable, this ground-breaking artist/critic goes on to uncover theatrical strategies that help women forge embodied form–hence credibility–for that which is no longer present.

 

Chapter two, “Immobile Legs, Stalled Words: Psychoanalysis and Moving Deaths,” couples the voice of a rigorous female academic with that of an injured dancer who once had an illustrious career as a member of the New York City Ballet. By retracing, literally and metaphorically, the mis-steps that marred both the dancer’s ties to her academy and the analyst/analysand relations informing the history of psychoanalysis, this stirring movement of voices acts out the “talking cure” that lies at the heart of Mourning Sex. Chapter five, “Bloody Nose,” explores the temporal nature of memory, and specifically sexual memory. Here, Phelan traces a pivotal distinction between legal and psychoanalytic notions of sexual injury, arguing that the liminal forum of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings offers a fascinating stage on which to assess the political stakes of this contrast: “Precisely because they were not conducted in a court of law nor on a psychoanalytic couch, the hearings can illuminate how each system of understanding has both perils and possibilities for redressing sexual injury” (95).

 

Chapter seven marks what for me is the most problematic member of this insightful body of losses and injuries. Moving from public traumas to what Phelan cites, in her introduction, as a more personal one, “Failed Live(r)s: Whatever Happened to Her Public Grief?” enacts a performance of citation, repetition, and mimicry in which feminist scholarship, psychoanalysis, and performance appear as analogous, and analogously troubling, activities. One layer of the labyrinthine mourning staged in this section is an effort to reread and make sense of several academic women’s wounded identifications with the university and one another. Here, the identity of the performing and performative “I” of the narrative becomes most complex, most unreliable (and most troubling) as Phelan’s narrator incorporates, into her own text, the more troubling sections of essays written by three female scholars, one of whom the narrator claims to have treated in the intimate context of psychoanalysis. Chapter seven begins with a personal retrospective about a nun who taught the narrator, in high school, how to (mis)read Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poems of loss. The narrative moves from this seemingly autobiographical account to relay a “critical fiction” involving Rena Grant and Echo. Yet Phelan’s text does not mark this shift in narrative perspective; it never indicates that Phelan herself is not the same person as the analyst/narrator who recounts and interprets the women’s tales. This particular blurring of genres (personal retrospective and public performance) raises some distressing questions about the practical value of both performative writing and pyschoanlaysis as the essay moves on. She dubs her former patient “Echo” because this woman displayed an amazing ability to emulate the actions, thoughts, and physical gestures of those with whom she had contact:

 

In all respects save one, the patient I'd like to describe here appeared to be well adjusted and psychically robust... Her mimicry was responsible for much of her professional success as a critical writer, but it also led to personal unhappiness. In the course of the analysis, she began to mimic me so completely that I was forced to suspend our investigations. In the three years since, I have spent considerable time reflecting on her quite remarkable case. (132)

 

The effect of this unmarked movement from the autobiographical to fictional is disturbing: one is left feeling that one is privy to documents and insights too personal to be made public. Here, the public performance of grief becomes an invasion of privacy as the writers being diagnosed are either dead or rendered as anonymous patients.

 

Echo’s case is particularly vexing because her vulnerable writings seem to be used here without the woman’s knowledge or consent; as the essay unfolds, it seems the friendly and therapeutic relations between Echo and Phelan’s narrator no longer exist. The narrator draws attention to the instability in her role as therapist as she admits that psychoanalysis traditionally tries to remedy distress through a verbal mode of inquiry, namely the “talking cure.” Contrary to this approach, her own dealings with Echo were marred by a focus on what Echo (re)produced textually, rather than on what she actually said:

 

To an extraordinary degree her unconscious controlled her critical writing and thus early in the analysis we decided to use her critical writings as our "text." Under normal circumstances, I would not use a patient's work in this manner, but I believed it would save us time and allow us to isolate her relation to mimicry. (133)

 

Throughout “Failed Live(r)s,” Phelan’s narrator assumes the authoritative roles of the stable survivor and sane-minded analyst. In the course of re-reading her dead and live (albeit lost) colleagues’ critical essays, she scrutinizes their authors’ innermost feelings of guilt, inadequacy, and fraud. One of her most disturbing yet astute conclusions is that white academic women, as victims of patriarchy, masquerade “as” feminine: “As among those who contribute to and benefit from racism, they masquerade as non-complicit and individually benign–purely ‘white'” (140). Another compelling inference pertains to the nature of Echo’s grief for her dead colleague: the “failed liver,” Rena Grant. Echo’s need to mourn for (and possibly mimic) other white, female scholars is rooted not only in the loss of a friendship, but also the loss of a kind of partner in crime:

 

Recognizing their complicity with this system complicated Echo's and Grant's pleasure in their professional lives; further discovering that they saw each other's complicity led them to form a kind of hysterical identification with one another. Their shame and guilt gave them an odd kind of bond. (140)

 

Though intimate and at times rawly moving, the author defines (and perhaps renders as manageable) the private grief fueling this analysis in starkly clinical terms: “a case history of a patient called Echo who grieves over the death of her colleague, Rena Grant, a critic and assistant professor at the time of her death” (20).

 

The narrator’s extensive, pseudo-Freudian bid to cast herself as the accomplished interpreter of another’s neurosis is revealed as increasingly impoverished, as the roles of doctor and patient, as well as the symptoms of blindness and insight mapped by this script, grow increasingly blurred. The closing gambit to justify why she published such a highly allusive memorial seems as prone to guilty repressions and enabling distortions as the public negotiations of trauma assessed in the rest of the book. Even as she cites from Echo’s private and public manuscripts, Phelan’s narrator excludes certain passages; she too pieces together the past differently, in order to “forget” her own embarrassing misrecognitions and thus move on.

 

Keenly aware of the diverse and deeply conflicted investments that subjects of the present make in restaging the past, Mourning Sex speaks for rousing and somehow healing the memories of injury that linger in the cultural unconscious of contemporary Europe and North America. From Antigone to Anita Hill, from Renaissance plagues to the pandemic of AIDS, from theory to practice, this volume’s performative engagement with the losses that haunt postmodern culture is valuable reading for scholars and practitioners of theatre alike. The author succeeds in her bid to forge a different formal relation between the critical thinker and reader, and in her wish to suggest a different way of doing–of performing–critical scholarship. The multiple voices animated within Mourning Sex moved me; they stirred my grief and hope in ways that I did not expect from an “academic” text. Aspiring to extend Phelan’s (en)trails of mimicry, I end this review by citing and retouching a line: “I can still hear her voice with my partial ear” (151).