“Thernstrom's
The Dead Girl: The Renunciation of Storytelling.”
CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction
January
1, 2002
Hollowell,
John
As with many modern narratives, the process of mourning
and the duty to tell the other's story control the narrative process. This is
tree of Conrad's Marlow as he tells the story of Kurtz and the Congo, or
Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway, who tells the story of Gatsby and the Jazz Age. My
aim in this essay is to apply some of the insights from those classic novels to
a contemporary work of nonfiction, Melanie Thernstrom's The Dead Girl, thereby
calling into question the distinct boundaries of fiction and nonfiction and the
supposed clarity of "real life" events. This analysis also tests the
unreadability or unknowability of the Other, who, despite all the words about
her, remains paradoxically hidden and concealed in a narrative that seeks to
reveal her. Thernstrom's narrative commemorates her dead friend Roberta Lee,
while at the same time raises many problems of writing narrative, especially
those concerned with ethics and narrative technique.
As becomes clear as my hypothesis develops, the fact that
Roberta Lee actually lived and that the narrator of the nonfiction novel knew
her "in life" in no way diminishes the complexity of our rhetorical
analysis. What is at stake in this "true story"? Is a true story any
less fictional or rhetorical than any other? Initially, I ground my analysis
particularly in ethical moments when the narrator confesses to problematic
decisions about how to write, what to write, and with what authority. To do so,
I focus first on passages where "the ethics of reading" is at stake
because at points Melanie (the narrator) must decide what to tell and how to tell
it in the context of her ethical concerns to make sound, responsible decisions.
Underlying these ethical dilemmas are the metaphorical nature of all language
and the distance that any attempt in language moves away from the once-living,
breathing person who is now a dead girl. Second, I examine the contradictory
evidence surrounding the ambiguity of Roberta's death, particularly
Thernstrom's handling of the criminal trials of Lee's accused boyfriend Bradley
Page. Third, for the latter part of The Dead Girl, I examine the relationship
between mourning and the act of storytelling and show how Thernstrom must
renounce compulsive storytelling to restore her sanity and to gain closure on
the Roberta Lee case.
Melanie-as-narrator desires to create a permanent story,
subtle and revealing yet faithful to the complexity of Roberta in life. To
write at all Thernstrom must confront all of the previous false or partial
stories, such as those of the tabloid press, the rescue group at Treehaven,
Roberta's family, and the confessional story of boyfriend Bradley Page. I want
to show, then, how the ethics of Melanie's reading Roberta and the
configuration of all of her stories become like another version of Marlow's
reading Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, finally doubting and questioning the
possibility of any narration in the failed medium of language.
The Ethics of Storytelling
Thernstrom conveys her conflicted motivation--her scene of
writing--to the reader in a number of quick strokes. Her first act of avowed
ethical concern is the preservation of her dead friend; she says in effect,
"I will save or protect my friend from the predatory forces or
counter-narratives that threaten." From the moment of Roberta Lee's
disappearance, the actuality of her life gives way to its tabloid representation--a
beautiful and talented college student who disappears. In short order,
Thernstrom recognizes, Roberta has become a commodity, the center of different
kinds of stories created with various motives--a dead girl. Melanie's concept
of faithfulness, what Jacques Derrida calls fidelity, centers on the ethical
impulse to remember and record, against forces of dissipation and doubt, the
kind of young woman that Roberta was (see Derrida, 20-22). By the narrator's
careful act of memory, says Thernstrom, Roberta Lee shall be known in the
future.
The telling of a story is never innocent, and Thernstrom
self-consciously stresses the ethical dimensions of her chosen task. Her
awareness of the constructed nature of language and story is apparent in the
early portions of the book when she feels trapped by her conscious, deliberate
choices about symbolism and the difference between living people and characters
in a story:
At the
time they were not symbolic. They are of a pattern now; then they were not
patterned, as people are not patterns. Only characters are patterned, and
people who are alive are not characters. They are almost characters, and the
decisions they make each day about who they are and
what
they ought to do are constantly forming a character, but it is not formed, or
not quite formed, because they are still deciding, and because the story has
not been written yet. And as long as it is not written anything can happen,
because the smallest changes change the story, and the story shapes its characters.
(4)
The disturbing element for Melanie is her growing
dissatisfaction with language as a medium and her constant awareness of the
gulf between experience-as-lived and the possible art of narration.
Intensifying the "failed promise" is Thernstrom's construct of a
hypothetical "one true text" that might ideally be written about
Roberta. She knows, however, that it is an imaginary perfect text, which would
potentially reveal her as she was and stand as a permanent memorial. Although
it cannot be fully realized, this "one true text" becomes the
benchmark of the narrator's dissatisfaction, calling into question every
narrative decision Thernstrom must face. Driving this desire for the perfect
narrative is Derrida's idea of fidelity, the intense power of friendship
exhibited by the mourning subject longing for the lost object. As with Conrad's Marlow, there is a sense of an untellable story, a
story that resists any resolution and completion. Marlow
is a tortured narrator in this moral sense because he fears that he will never
get it right, that his experience with Kurtz "out there" cannot be
translated to his auditors aboard the Nellie anchored in the Thames estuary.
Initial ethical problems are staged when, while reviewing
the first few pages that she has written, Thernstrom stops to ponder the
difference between "characters" and a living person:
This
isn't Roberta; this is a Dead Girl. And any Dead Girl too, who died young and
violently, who was beautiful but tragic, and whose memory people mourn in the
language of mourning and speak of solemnly. The glossy finish of the
photograph; the endless attempt to make sadness seductive. And it is seductive
if you tell it well. People will cry for the girl who died if you tell it well
enough, [...] Your friend is what is forgotten among the glamour of symbolism,
the pose of the photo, the closure of narrative. (6)
What ethical dilemmas of narrative arise here? This book
is not simply a particular and unique story about "any dead girl" who
died "young and violently"; that story could be derived from a
tabloid newspaper or a cheap novel, not from the artistically crafted
"statue" or elegy to memory that Thernstrom is trying to write.
"Your friend" stands for the unique and individuated life of Roberta
Lee, but Thernstrom fears that she will be overcome by the seductions of
telling a good story, will be trapped in the well-known pattern of performative
language, or will succumb to the "glamour of symbolism" and
"closure of narrative." Thernstrom fears these seductions are
artificial constraints of narrative structure and not "the real
story." A perfect tribute of a true story might be possible, she initially
believes, if only she could locate the right neutral and unadorned language,
free from all rhetorical tricks.
Her awareness of the constructed nature of language and
all stories becomes apparent in the beginning pages of the book where she
worries about symbolism. The narrator reveals a sophisticated concern about
pattern making and her own role as the one who tells the story. The storyteller
takes advantage of the characters, and the writing of a history shapes the
person and the character he or she is about to become. Why worry about a
symbol, a trope, or an artifact of language? Here Thernstrom is expressing an
unbridgeable gap between the living and the dead ones remembered in a written
text, confirming the paradigm revealed in the classic novels alluded to
earlier. Those symbols and tropes--the staples of storytelling--possess a
double valence, both positive and negative. On the one hand, they are needed
for the enhancement and creation of Roberta's life as memorial, the discharging
of the faithful friend's fidelity; on the other, they feel like cheating,
supercharging the tale with meaning and phony artifice that Roberta's existence
did not possess in real life. The proper ethical stance for Melanie might be to
create a pure form of memory that would enable her to reproduce the exact
Roberta she knew, but the symbols and tropes and inadvertent moments of intense
memory show her that writing is always secondary and distorted as artificial,
reflecting deviance from the true story. The writing of a history is an
important act for her to accomplish, but she acknowledges the literary nature
of the work she has undertaken. The ethical dimension of the narrator's
obligations suggest her role as a guide through earlier false stories, a
passage through the labyrinth of all the possible stories, to get to the
"one true story." For example, Marlow has to narrate all of the false
rumors and opinions about Kurtz to arrive at a complex, enigmatic figure. One
significant role for the narrator, then, is to evaluate and rectify prior false
or partial stories as a method of seeking the truth about the dead Other.
What oppositions are posed here? What ethical standards
are set forth for the narrator? "Your friend," the lost Roberta,
"is what is forgotten"; and as craft works against conscience, the
seductions of false narrative produce this dead girl, any dead girl. The danger
always concerns a false ring of a narrative that is totalized by achieving a
premature closure. Ethical considerations trouble Melanie as she approaches the
task of the narration, for she recognizes that she must meddle with and
manipulate the "pure memory" of Roberta to make her appear to
readers.
Another problem Melanie identifies in the ethics of
storytelling is the temporal difference between the moment of Roberta's death
and Melanie's later act of writing. The fact of death and Thernstrom's desire
for commemorative narrative distort "the one true text" she hopes to
write. Her awareness colors and distorts all the events--in light of
death--because her mourning gaze modifies the viewing of the evidence. In real
life, events occur simultaneously, but all narrative possesses an inevitable
need to establish a temporal continuum within the text.
I know
that the forward motion of time is one of life's most definite
rules-- no exceptions permitted, yes, of course that
includes you. Why shouldn't it include you? Time progresses forward at exactly
the same measure; it only seems sometimes to go faster. And it only seems
sometimes to stand still, like a still lake, as if you could look down to the
very bottom and see the shape of the trapped leaves, and the colors, and you
imagine the past is accessible to you, but--you are wrong. It's a trick of the
light. See how difficult it is to think without metaphor. It's metaphor that
makes time appear like still lakes. Time isn't anything or like anything. It
moves forward, neither fast nor slow, just forward. And once it has moved a
beat ahead, as it has always just moved a beat ahead, it
doesn't go back, even for a small minute. Never. (32)
Closely related to the scene of writing is Thernstrom's
desire for telling the story, but she is trapped by various perceptions of
time. As a result of those reflections, she recognizes that distortions may
grow from perception and desire, just as her grief may cloud her vision. As
with other fictional narrators, Thernstrom reinscribes the old problems: What
is the motivation for such a story? Does authorial desire color the story?
Given the constraints of time and memory and the ever-present medium of
language, is the past even accessible? At the heart of those problems is the
conflict between avowed goals and the eventual achievements that arise in
producing the text itself. If she could only access pure memory with no
mediation of time and distortion, her goals would be steadily achieved. Yet as
she writes, the elusive text she creates moves away from her intentional
control. Melanie's avowed goal is to preserve the memory of Roberta, but that
goal is subject to erosion over time and to appropriation by other
storytellers. Therefore, Thernstrom confronts the allegory of the unreadability
of a system of tropes and figurative displacements, no matter how direct her
approach to telling the story may be on the surface.
Despite Thernstrom's struggles with these ethical dilemmas
of the biographical mode in which she seeks to write, she is confronted by
Derrida's concept of fidelity, the obsession to be true to the Other's story
while acting faithfully. But what control does she have over her narrative?
Despite her lofty goals established in ethical struggles, Melanie knows she is
trapped by the "prison-house" Frederic Jameson speaks of, a
labyrinthine structure that pre-dates and subsumes her (Jameson 3-43). She
feels that the force of language is "writing her" and that the
narrative form is controlling her ethical decisions. What strategy arises from
those ethical dilemmas within the scene of writing? If Melanie cannot achieve
the hypothetical "one true text," she must find another strategy. If
she cannot tell one true story, then she might as well attempt to tell all the
stories, showing a series of narrative replacements as one partial or false
story gives way to another and another.
Narrative Strategy: Embracing Multiplicity
The inability to tell one true story begins with something
as simple as naming Roberta Lee. Derrida points out that the proper name of
someone has a conjuring power and that naming is never innocent but already is
conjuring with previous texts. Naming someone properly would seem to be the
first necessary step in writing a biography. In his second essay in Memoires, thinking
of his friend Paul de Man, Derrida considers the incantatory power of speaking
the name of his literary friend, "Paul de Man," thinking the
utterance may have magical power with memory.
Similarly, the proliferation of multiple identities, the
slippery multiplicity of the subject's name enhance Thernstrom's meditation on
Roberta Lee. Textually, Roberta is never a single person or self or identity:
like Faulkner's Quentin, she is a ghost or a commonwealth. As she pens her
"letters" to Melanie, she signs them alternatively as
"Roberta" or "Bibi," or sometimes, "B. B."
depending on her mood. She is sometimes "Rosamunde" or
"Mei-hua"; she is Chinese; she is American; or Chinese-American. From
her looks and photographs, she speaks, too, of being androgynous; her physical
features suggest a male-female blending. Therefore, her own strategies of
self-presentation, as revealed by the problematic letters, show her as a
multiple identity. One cannot expect that her biographer could easily tell her
story because her name becomes an overdetermined signifier, just as her
personality must be perceived from the outside. Similarly, Conrad's Kurtz was a
journalist, an artist, a politician; Marlow says, "All Europe contributed
to the making of Kurtz."
Roberta's multiple identities encode her as a mystery;
throughout the book, a number of stories circulate about her name. Melanie as
narrator seeks to sort out and clarify those stories. The impossibility of
"the one true story" is quickly reinforced by looking at the table of
contents of The Dead Girl. Thernstrom's strategy is to embrace multiplicity,
indicating that the book is about interpreting someone's story, but it is soon
clear that various ways of interpreting and narrating are interlinked. The
narrative focuses on the life of Roberta Lee, but it also is displaced into
chronicling the narrator's own life. As such, it records Melanie's reactions
and those of Bibi's friends and family over a considerable time, beginning with
Roberta's disappearance.
The first part, "Memory: The Story," establishes
the links between pure memory and its narration. Parts 2 through 5 are
entitled, respectively, "The First Interpretation," "The Second
Interpretation," "The Third Interpretation," and "The Last
Interpretation: The Little Match Girl." These titles, like Faulkner's
multiple narrators, suggest the epistemological position that a single exposure
to a person's life is not possible or totally valid. Because the one true story
is not available, Thernstrom attempts to tell all of the stories. She sets
forth a partially correct story constructed by the narrator, which soon
collapses and is replaced by various new "story lines" that arise
from the emerging and frequently changing perceptions of Roberta's
"case." Parts 6 through 9 begin to tell an opposite story by negating
or undoing the earlier affirmations and ending with Thernstrom's vow to
renounce her habitual storytelling. This renunciation is part of her eventual
"cure"--the letting go of Roberta's memory--that allows Thernstrom to
achieve feelings of closure on mourning. A good subtitle for these final four parts might be "How I Learned
to Give Up Storytelling" as a neurotic and obsessive pattern. Freud's
essay "Mourning and Melancholia," which I discuss later, is directly
relevant to establishing the relationship between storytelling and the
narrator's final release from mourning.
The titles in the second half of the book reveal the
pattern of negating or unraveling any simple or straightforward account.
Cumulatively, their titles indicate a systematic problematizing of the earlier
stories told about Roberta's disappearance and life. Part 6,
"Uninterpreting: Characters," uninterprets or reinterprets
characters; part 7, "Rewriting: The Little Match Girl," reinscribes
"The Little Match Girl," with Melanie as the poor heroine who falls
into fear and self-loathing; part 8, "Misinterpreting: The True Story and
the Fictions of Memory," analyzes the distance between the true story and
the competing interpretations of law; and part 9, "A New Story:
Memory," reveals a healing, closing narrative that enables the narrator to
achieve peace by completing her compulsive acts of narration. Taken
collectively, these four parts become a renunciation of the simplistic
"story values" affirmed throughout the first half of The Dead Girl.
In a broader sense, Thernstrom deploys parts 6 through 9
to challenge the epistemological value of stories as a form of direct knowledge
about the past. How is this so? The spinning out of Roberta Lee's example
becomes a general parable of biography's indeterminacy, giving the particular
example a cultural and philosophical weight. The narrator's rhetoric says
"I am a good reader, and simple cases I can read easily, but this life
exhausts my powers of reading and observation," thereby demonstrating the
impossibility of accessing the past through reading and writing. Melanie in
effect says, "Because I cannot tell the one perfect story, I will tell all
the stories while admitting simultaneously that each story is false and always
fails to represent the `real life' person for whom it substitutes."
A Meta-Level of Awareness
Reflecting a postmodern concern with theory, Thernstrom
often cites literary theorists to frame the narrative problems she faces. With
citations from Walter Benjamin and Terry Eagleton, she establishes that
theorizing "story values" is as significant a force in her narrative
as the loss of Roberta Lee. To a greater degree than some novelists I have
mentioned, she questions the truth value of narrative and the hermeneutical
complications of all interpretative acts. For example, at Bradley Page's second
trial, Melanie's enduring desire to tell stories that are coherent and make
sense is most acute, reinforcing the notion that this memoir is really about "competing
stories" or ways of seeing as much as a mourning story for Roberta's life.
As the second trial begins, some two years after Roberta's death, Melanie
thinks the court proceedings will provide a clear-cut, unambiguous revelation
of truth. She hopes the trial will become "a most serious human
enterprise--the sorting of interpretation into truth" (325), characterized
by the certainty and authority that are reassuringly reduced to simple
oppositions:
Yes,
no, he did it, he didn't do it. They have come to the end of the
book
and they want to know who done it. Guilty or not guilty; pregnant, not
pregnant; alive, dead. Dead, she was dead. (italics in the original 325)
On the opening day of the trial, the prosecuting
attorney's statement about Bradley Page and Roberta rapidly produces a simple
story: "What started as a love story, and ended as a nightmare ..."
(327). Thernstrom's impulse is to criticize this canned story: "[...I]t
didn't start as a love story and end as true crime. Why do they borrow these
formulas from dime-store romances?" (327). Her own complex, nuanced story
is: "[W]hat began ambiguously and nevertheless somewhat ominously, and
ended extremely ominously and very ambiguously, as you might have
guessed--[...]" However, she also knows her story will not convince a
jury, will not persuade anyone of Bradley's guilt, so she must soon retract her
effort: "Jesus, Melanie, can't you speak more clearly? Who is going to buy
your version?" (327). With those moves, slippage occurs from the expressed
desire for certainty--for simple yes or no answers--to a view that law is not
really a search for absolute truth but a competition of story versions vying
for a jury's acceptance. What begins upon the supposed bedrock of hermeneutical
certainty soon dissolves into the inevitable intertextuality of legal
discourse:
What is
there, after all, in the case besides discussion? Conversations about
conversations about conversations. The first trial was a long conversation
interpreting a conversation between Brad and the policemen one afternoon three
years ago: this trial is a longer conversation about the inconclusiveness of
the first one. There is nothing to say other than comments on what has already
been said. (333)
In addition to the obvious play with "story
values," the narrator exhibits a meta-level of awareness or
self-consciousness about language, narrative making, and truth value. She
frequently questions language as a medium, wonders about the evasiveness of
metaphors, and quotes from literary critics like Eagleton and Benjamin, who
view stories as self-contained constructions of their own rather than mimetic
replicas of empirical reality. One crucial example occurs in part 8, chapter 2
when the narrator discusses Brad Page at the second trial. Brad's somewhat
naive confession and later retraction are based on an ingenuous idea that he
was never confessing to a crime but helping the police build a scenario. He is
trying to remember, to "see if" the cops might have been correct
about his suspicious knowledge of details, his possible criminal involvement in
Roberta's death.
To convey to her reader her mistrust of such talk,
Thernstrom establishes the allure of theories of language and explains how such
theoretical awareness challenges the usual straightforward or common sense
viewpoint that stories are supposed to refer to "the world out
there." Her epigraph to the chapter establishes this idea of socially
constructed reality, as she quotes from literary theorist Eagleton:
Reality was not reflected by language, but produced by it: it was a
particular way of carving up the world which was deeply dependent on the
sign-systems we had at our command, or more precisely which had us at theirs
... Meanings are not so stable and determinate ... and the reason they are not
is because ... they are products of language, which always has something
slippery about it. (qtd. in Dead Girl, italics and ellipses in original 350)
If language is as evasive as Thernstrom claims, then it is
apparent how Page both can confess and later disavow his earlier admissions to
the police. The heart of Page's problem is twofold: his unusual naivete about
the world and how the police work and his "English major" values that
allow him to inhabit a realm of abstraction. The psychiatrist who examined Page
confirms this abstract tendency by stating that if Page is asked, "Well,
Bradley, what do you think the effect of this particular situation would be on
you?" then he would answer, "Life is growth." And the
psychiatrist would say, "That is fine, what does that mean in reference to
the situation?" (356). Such sequences of questions and answers establish
Page's tendency to take simple questions and complicate them.
Thernstrom's narrative report emphasizes Brad's platitudes
and generalities, his evasiveness about his actions surrounding Roberta's
death. The narrative method in this chapter involves first quoting directly
from actual court testimony, then adding (often in italics) ironic comments to
heighten the baffling exchanges:
Mistakes of metaphor--the substitution of the abstract for the concrete.
Reality becomes language; perspective is everything. Not mental illness
exactly, but a fatal flaw all the same. (italics in the original 356)
This same tendency toward abstraction blocks Brad from
confronting his exact feelings and his memories of the night of Bibi's
disappearance. He tells the police one story--of what may have been his
involvement--but he later suggests he was merely telling a story, developing a
hypothetical scenario, assisting the police to theorize about the shreds of the
evidence. How could this be? Page's recantation is most apparent in the second
trial when he disavows certain statements made in the earlier confession tapes.
According to Page, he was not actually confessing to a crime but resolving
problems of failed memory.
Q.
And, as you closed your eyes and tried to remember what happened, did the
officers continue to question you?
A. I
closed my eyes. They said, "That's good, close your eyes. Sit back, relax
and remember what happened." They said to remember seeing Bibi [for the
last time]. (bold in the original 360-61)
But after seeing Bibi in the park and perhaps
"backhanding her," Page cannot recall what happened next. He later
tells the court that striking her was not an actual memory but "an
image" in his mind. Consequently, he was joining the police in a
theoretical exercise to discover what might have occurred the night that Bibi
disappeared. Soon after, when Page is on the stand, he is asked about the
apparent confusion between his knowledge of many important details about
Roberta's burial and the whereabouts of her body contrasted with his steadfast
insistence upon his innocence:
A. If
there was a possibility I might have done it, I was trying to find
out,
and help [the police] find out, what had happened. (364)
Looking back to the conversation with police, he then
affirms that his recollections in the "confession" scene were not
actual "memories" but images:
A.
Well, they [the police] said there was a possibility that they [the
memories] were real, that they already had me up there doing things I
couldn't remember, so that somehow we had to make up a story that I could have
done it. (364)
For Page this hypothetical story making is a kind of
intellectual game or abstract to deal with conflicting evidence. Because it
entails building a scenario, testing his memory, it remains for him
mysteriously meaningless when applied to real life. He later says that he was
disoriented and confused by the police asking him questions "on different
levels." He never requested a lawyer because it did not occur to him that
he was suspected of murder:
A. But
they also--they are asking that on two different levels, like ... in this
scenario, how would this [particular detail] fit in? Or, why did you put it in
knowing that it was a scenario? (366)
As the compiler of all these various texts (the confession
tape, the cross-examination in court), Thernstrom cannot resist her own ironic,
theoretical comment:
In
other words, does the narrative function primarily ontologically or
mimetically? What is lost in the distance between the signifier and the signified? Difficult questions, of course--even with your
background--no
wonder
you were confused. (italics in the original 366)
In these comments her role as an avenger of Roberta Lee is
clear, for she wants justice done and prosecuting the presumed killer will
allow her to achieve closure on her unresolved mourning.
When Brad Page recants his earlier confession, he refuses
all the simple yes or no categories offered in his discussion with the police.
Under sharp questioning at the second trial, for example, Page explains that he
never had guilty thoughts about his actions, but rather that he and the police
were having a discussion about truth and lying:
Q.
[...]--pardon me, that you talked about lying and fiction and truth and these
different subjects, what again, with an overview, was the nature of the
discussion?
A.
That I said that I was sitting there trying to remember that these
were--
they were fiction, and [the DA] said, "They were lies then." And I
said, "Well, no, they are not lies." (bold in the original 367)
Perhaps because of his middle class and college background
in language theory, Page is uniquely unprepared for the idea that he is a
suspect in a murder case. Instead, he believes he is merely discussing with the
police a theory of narrative or fiction making, like one that might occur in
philosophy or linguistics courses at the university. Finally, a psychiatrist
for the defense suggests that during the confession Page experienced something
like brainwashing. "[W]e must remember that Brad is a much more
suggestible, less sophisticated, immature person who has never had any
preparation for this kind of encounter [...]" (372-73). The psychiatrist
reiterates her earlier remarks that Page has a tendency generally "to deal
with life in abstractions" (356) rather than presenting facts as they are. Immediately following, Melanie makes
her Didion-like ironic repetition, showing her own generational traits that
link herself, Page, and Bibi Lee: "Bibi's tendency, Bradley's tendency, my
tendency. The tendency" (373). A narrator's awareness of the complications
of narrative is occasionally present in Didion and in Faulkner, but Thernstrom
explicitly brings a philosophical sophistication of narrative that raises the
same kinds of questions I have been addressing in this study. Thernstrom
stresses theory making as a part of the narration, raising these concerns to a
meta-level of awareness more powerfully than have the earlier narrators that we
have mentioned. The police are eliciting a confession, but Page is trying to
remember by telling a story, and Melanie is playing a hectoring role in the
courtroom by reminding us of the generational defect that all three young
people share. They all substitute abstraction for a common sense understanding
of guilt and innocence, the routine value of cause and effect.
A Submerged Narrative: Her story-My story
Although the surface story of the second half of The Dead
Girl appears to be the second trial and its quest for certainty about Roberta's
murder, the submerged story is Melanie's movement from grieving to health,
working through her powerful feelings of mourning. An underground story is
present also in the novels mentioned earlier--the dynamics of self and Other
and the presence of obsessive writing as a cure. For example, Nick Carraway
faces the meaning of Gatsby's dream before moving on with life, and Didion's
Grace uses Charlotte Douglass's life as an allegory to discover her own
illusions. Faulkner's Shreve taunts Quentin Compson with "Why do you hate
the South?" and thus links the Sutpen story to the narrator's perpetual
sadness because storytelling is no antidote for ancestral guilt.
Despite Thernstrom's conscientious attempt to tell her
version of Roberta's story, the plot of The Dead Girl progressively becomes
Melanie's own struggle to repudiate story values and recover, thereby releasing
herself from the obligation to remember and to mourn. As she rewrites
Andersen's "Little Match Girl," she pictures herself as the ill-fated
heroine, partially because she is depressed and partially because her long-time
saintly boyfriend Adam leaves her, saying: "I needed someone who was happy
with me. In the long run, not making you happy made me unhappy too" (296).
However, it takes time for a new, hopeful story to break through Thernstrom's
morbid and pervasive way of viewing her life:
Doomed is knowing you can't cheat--the girl who must die
must die. What can you do? I told you this was a sad story. Doomed is knowing
this is a modern story and there is no deus ex machina anymore. Doomed is more
than an event: doomed is, and I stop, unable to think of anything big enough to
describe doomed. And then, remembering: oh yes, doomed, of course—doomed
is--doomed is a way of thinking. (276)
The feeling of "doomed" as excessive melancholia
is best understood in terms of the psychic dynamics presented in Freud's essay
"Melancholia and Mourning." For Freud the dejected feelings of
mourning, like those of melancholy, entail "lowering of the self-regarding
feelings," which often find "utterance in self-reproaches" and
finally "culmin[ate] in a delusional expectation of punishment"
(Freud 244). Hence, part of this recovery story requires a shattering of
Melanie and Roberta's shared world of images, the web of meaning they jointly
crafted in adolescence. This suffering is well expressed by the jacket copy
that suggests a tortured meaning to life's events:
...to
Melanie, it was also the culmination of the dark mythology of adolescence, the
intricate web of meaning she and Roberta had spun together since childhood. As
it unravels before us, we enter their world and meet their friends and lovers.
Many, like themselves, are the privileged children of well-to-do families,
members of a generation both blessed and blighted. Beneath the gloss of early
accomplishment lies another reality: adrift in a spiritual world, they are
alienated and often depressed.
Freud's idea of the guilty association between mental
suffering and the loss of the Other is illustrated in a session with Melanie's
therapist, as Thernstrom begins to understand the pathology of clinging to
Roberta's memory. Her memories play a dominant role in her own life, just as
story making about Roberta's loss reaches the intensity of an illness. In a
classic breakthrough moment, Melanie wishes to emulate Roberta by figuring her
own life into the sad story of Andersen's Little Match Girl. She compares
herself to Roberta because surrendering her friend's memory would be selfish, a
perverse form of betrayal:
"Who would you be hurting or leaving out by being selfish?"
"I don't know."
"Roberta? If you were happy, you wouldn't be like Roberta anymore,
would you?"
"No," I say, really worried now. "I won't be like Roberta
anymore."
"So, it's as if you would be moving away from what you were
together."
(300)
Taking action on that recognition is not immediate, for
time must elapse before Melanie can move forward; she must first heighten her
own pain and live in the "doomed" scenario of one who grieves
perpetually. Effective minor characters such as Bob and Claudia, often
pointedly and impolitely, exercise the role of bursting the bubble of Melanie's
grieving with the reality principle Freud calls for. Claudia, for example, says
that breaking up with Adam is not tragic, as Melanie sees it, but rather normal
and realistic:
Adam
is not breaking up with you because you are ugly or stupid or fatally flawed.
The two of you are breaking up because there were problems in the relationship.
He treated you like a child, for example. That kind of thing. Normal
psychological problems, [...] (288)
Although the reader senses that Claudia's diagnosis is
absolutely correct, Melanie's strong identification with her dead friend grips
her in a lengthy depression. In addition to her good friend's counsel, Melanie
also receives occasional advice from the departed Adam, who creates a sign to
end the dark mythology.
He
takes a piece of my lined notebook paper and prints out in his big clumsy hand:
MELODRAMA. Then he draws a prohibition sign around it, with the line running
right through the word. [... writing], "By order, the Board of
Health." (italics in original 289)
Such moves parallel the progressive and gradual diminution
of Melanie's melodramatic tendencies. The gradual dawning of reality comes
about in fierce discussions with her friend Bob, who explodes into sarcasm over
Melanie's pathological mythologizing: "Concentrate as hard as you can on
being as miserable as possible all the time. Suffer. That definitely ought to
help matters. O depth and symbolism [...]" (339). Such feelings are
consistent with Freud's model, because a strong cathexis exists with the lost
one inspiring pain and suffering as the gradual detachment of the mourner's ego
occurs:
Nevertheless its [reality's] orders cannot be obeyed at once. They are
carried
out bit by bit, at great expense of time and cathectic energy, and in the
meantime the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged. Each single
one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object
is brought up and hypercathected. [...] Why this compromise by which the
command of reality is carried out piecemeal should be so extraordinarily
painful is not at all easy to explain in terms of [mental] economics. (Freud
244-45)
In The Dead Girl, for example, Melanie struggles to
configure her own life to read like the sad fate of the Match Girl, shaping
every event to fit her pre-established scenario of doom. Hence, losing Adam,
attempting suicide, and feeling that she has no future collectively support her
inverted loyalty to Roberta:
But
Roberta was murdered, I think. But Adam has left me. But I have no future. I
can't go back home, I have no home, I have no plans, and the
things
I plan won't turn out well. I know they won't turn out well because they've
already not turned out well because--(italics in the original 309)
This moment is perhaps the height of self-abnegation and
self-loathing that Melanie falls prey to, but lighter moments foreshadow
eventual health as when she calls her self-crafted cloud "the dark
mythology" (309), or when she ironically notes that a certain incident
will become "prime Match Girl material" (298).
As Freud explains, the grieving subject requires most of
all the passage of time to complete the process of mourning and re-emerge into
"reality." For Thernstrom, the process of healing involves both
getting closure on Roberta's murder and, as mentioned above, renouncing her
compulsive storytelling. The best image of closure is achieved when she is
hoping for a "story" or an "image" that will provide
closure at the second trial,
Even
if this were all fictional, a trial scene, and you were writing the lines for
the D. A., what could you think for him to say that would be powerful enough to
close the story--to tie up all the stray threads of a narrative too long--an image,
an idea, an epitaph. (386)
This desire thematizes the drive that many narrators
experience: to tie up loose ends, to make a good story, to bring about closure;
and to achieve totalization. In the second trial, the D. A. locates the
"image" Melanie wants in a videotape depicting the discovery of
Roberta's corpse. As in all
ceremonial rhetoric, the duty is to bring forth the body:
you
remember it as blue because there is something blue or blue-colored about
memory and remembering death, and particularly remembering things lost and
inaccessible, as what is lost in and illuminated by this blue light is utterly
lost. I want, I need, I believe, I think. You imagine, at first, you see only
branches, and then you realize they give way to something in the center, and
entangled submerged in black earth and branches, you see white limbs--a knee,
part of thigh, half a face, long dark hair. [...] A vine grows from what you
think was her stomach. [...] You imagine she could still shake it free, this
earthsleeping girl--brush the brambles from her black hair [...] but she is so
laden with black ground, it is difficult to distinguish which is which. (387)
This scene provides an emotional culmination, for
Thernstrom, for on the next page, she obsessively repeats the phrase "she
was dead" eight times, reinforcing a final acceptance of Roberta's death:
"It doesn't matter what she looked like; she was dead. She was sleeping in
the earth; she was held in the blue light, she was dead, she was dead. The
machine is turned off, the image dissolved" (388). Here Thernstrom locates
the proper image, one that is wrapped in memory's blue light that sums up for
Melanie her long suffering and long mourning. From that point forward in her
narrative, she gradually releases herself from story values and from the
suffocating responsibility that blocks her re-entry into the real world.
For Freud, the mourning libido is gradually able to detach
itself from the lost object as reality returns. For Thernstrom, this process
comes in the final three chapters after Brad Page's second trial has ended with
a sentence of manslaughter. Healing in this context entails a renunciation of
compulsive storymaking as reality gains the upper hand, just as Melanie begins
accepting the world, "normally," on its own terms. The emotional
release of the scene is coupled with a comprehensive rejection of storytelling
and a new level of acceptance that her journey--the process of mourning--is
nearly over. Now she knows that her repetitive storytelling was a displacement
of her difficult, complex feelings over Roberta's irreparable loss:
It's
easier to think about fiction and the construction of fictions and anything
likewise elaborate than the feeling that lies beneath. All the simple things,
which you would think someone would naturally feel right away, I never got a
chance to feel. I only felt the exaggerated versions--the story themes. I said
all these things, but I never got to say the plain ones, like my friend Roberta
was an especially wonderful person and had the loveliest glossiest hair.
(404-05)
More than three years after Roberta’s death, Thernstrom's
healing is documented in part 9 of the book. The closure of this submerged plot
means accepting the intense feelings for Roberta while being able to say
"goodbye," as if to move on with her life. The mention of
"loveliest, glossiest hair" even dwells on sentimental thoughts that
occur as she gives up on storymaking as a cognitive, intellectual activity and
says "goodbye" on more personal, emotional grounds. Three pages
before the end of the book, she renounces storymaking in a quite similar way to
Didion's Grace saying, "I have not been the witness I wanted to be."
Late at night, on her knees in the bathroom, Thernstrom prays for release from
her lengthy labors of mourning:
Dear
God, I say, I return the story. I return the story and the meaning of the story
and the need to make meaning of the story. Our knowledge is imperfect and our
prophecy is imperfect and I can't do it anymore and I never could do and I
return it all so 1 have nothing left. (427)
Now the submerged story of The Dead Girl is not Roberta's
story of life and death but Melanie's story of suffering over her friend's
death and her eventual resolution of all-powerful feeling. To become healed,
Melanie must escape from her descent into narcissism, so that the self that is
expressing grief is not overwhelmed by the constant story of the Other.
This same underground story has been present in varying
degrees, of course, in the earlier narratives alluded to; a tension between the
self and the Other has colored all of them. We saw Nick Carraway pausing to
reflect on Gatsby before moving on with his life and Didion's Grace using
Charlotte Douglass to understand the illusions of her own life. Or, we might
think of Faulkner's Shreve's question to Quentin as hinting that the Sutpen
family story is a link to a wider story of the aftermath of the Civil War in
the South and Compson's own ancestral guilt.
Thernstrom documents the emergence of a young woman from
adolescent dreams into full responsibility of adulthood. A superimposed
narrative, beneath the Roberta story of the Other, is Melanie's own story of
mourning and disturbance, followed by her "healing" and letting-go of
memory. As deconstructionists make clear, all writing involves this metaphysics
of presence, the illusion that writing recovers some lost subject, bringing it
magically into being. The world of adult responsibilities and duties now must
be accepted. In one sense Melanie's narrative reveals "survivor's
guilt," for she has been condemned to live while Roberta must die. Forced
to live implies inventing a new version of herself, which is achieved by the
end of the book, largely by the renunciation of storytelling and grieving. In
psychological terms, it means giving up, letting go, and saying a final
good-bye to all that was Roberta Lee.
WORKS CITED
Derrida, Jacques. Memoires for Paul de Man. Trans. Cecile
Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava, and Peggy Kamuf. Wellek Library Series.
Rev. ed. New York: Columbia UP, 1986.
Freud, Sigmund. "Mourning and Melancholia."
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 14,
Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1953.
Jameson, Frederic. The Prison-House of Language: A
Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1974.
Thernstrom, Melanie. The Dead Girl. New York: Basic, 1990.
JOHN HOLLOWELL
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE