I'm guessing that this may not be a new thought to everyone, but my background in Freud is lacking. Reading Kristeva's discussion of Freud's ideas of the uncanny reminded me of "The Prioress's Tale." Kristeva says that the uncanny is where the "boundaries between imagination and reality are erased" (188). This describes the moment in which the murdered child in the tale begins to sing; a scene which should exist only in fantasy becomes real. It's particularly intriguing because the fantasy is halfway between a happy miracle (the child coming back to life) and a nightmare (a distortion of the very concepts of life and death). Freud's notion of the uncanny describes why the scene is so unsettling. Kristeva (and I think Freud as well) would argue that the distress we feel in response to the singing undead child comes from some kind of knowledge of our own strangeness. Is this our fear of death? Our secret desire for the child's death of that of the Jews? Something even more unnatural? I'm really not sure, but I thought it was interesting.
The idea of the uncanny also explains the appeal of "The Prioress's Tale" and blood libel stories in general (not for us, but the proliferation of the tale type for hundreds of years indicates some sort of appeal). Kristeva mentions the catharsis that can be reached through the reading of disturbing tales. Tales like this allow the reader/listener an encounter with the uncanny which is "safe"; it allows for readers to also experience vengeance and violence without actually getting his/her hands dirty. Kristeva mentions the need to depersonalize the strangeness of the foreigner. I'm not sure if this is the sort of thing she was referring to, but I find it interesting that "The Prioress's Tale" allows for depersonalization of the undead child and the Jews as well as those that kill the Jews in revenge. For us, as modern readers it also depersonalizes Chaucer's audience to a degree.
Interesting post. P.S. If anyone would like to read Freud's essay, "The Uncanny," I can certainly make a copy available.
ReplyDeleteAs I was reading the "Man of Law's Tale", I thought a lot about Kristina's point about how tales enable distance or a kind of depersonalization because it seems to me that this question of distance or alienation is crucial both to Kristeva's vision of connection with the foreigner and also to the dramatization of love in "Man of Law". We've talked much more about how the traumatic kernel of the real or a shared awareness of weakness or jouissance (i.e. the desire for pain or violence) should be understood as the source of neighbor love (and thus an alternative to kinship, friendship, or citizenship, for example). So from this vantage point, Kristeva's final line, about knowing people "ready-to-help-themselves in their weakness, a weakness whose other name is our radical strangeness" reflects the same preoccupations we've seen in R/S/Z. As Lindsay said in an earlier post, this mode of loving another enables us to know the otherness within--to see in ourselves, in other words, this same incompleteness.
ReplyDeleteBut Kristeva, talking about the foreigner, puts far more stress on distance and alienation. She may be less violent, but as Libby emphasized in her opening comments, K. is drawn to Camus to illustrate the indifference of the stranger (the fanatic of absence and the devotee of solitude, the typical stranger is "without bond and blasphemer of the paroxystic bond constituted by the sacred" (26)). The Man of Law's Tale dramatizes something analogous by making distance, banishment and solitude the catalyst for love: in every case, Custance must be banished to be loved, and she is a figure repeatedly cast out onto the sea, to float adrift of any social moorings. Alla in turn regains her only by embarking on a pilgrimage, a voluntary but still significant form of estrangement. Thus Donegild's outrage, that her son should take "So strange a creature unto his make" (700) seems to encapsulate both sides of what Kristeva emphasizes about the foreigner: that connection requires estrangement.
This line of thought leads me to some simple questions: Is estrangement essential to love? If so, what kind of love does it enable? Or disable?