Hilalah Dughayyim Aldhafeeri of the University of Hafr Albatin, Saudia Arabia, had her work on the representation of female psychic individuality effectively slaughtered by editing gaffes (I can relate). What little survived includes a definition of repression as “the cornerstone of all defense mechanisms” (Advances in Language and Literary Studies 11(2), 1-7, 2020). This framing crystallizes for me what nineteenth century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt may have meant by the question of how the Catholic Church defends herself when under attack.
The pairing generates questions whose attempts to answer could fill libraries. What is the relation between repression – the cornerstone of all defense mechanisms – and innocence? Does there need to be trauma to facilitate forgetting in a structuring, constructive sense?
Literature can help to untangle thorny problems such as these at a safe distance. Gregor Samsa’s sister stretching out in the sun presents the problem of the beautiful beast – a fusion of sudden inexplicable good fortune and absolute forgetting. The problem of men who are fixed on the notion of recompense is explored via the tandem trajectories of the glove and the leek in Shakespeare’s Henry V. The problem of whether a fervent regret is rather what drives the modern break of a too-quick and unevenly carried out advancement from the place plays out deliciously in Gogol’s Dead Souls.
Some say literature encourages precisely the kind of escapism from real-world problems that fascism needs to thrive. They’re not wrong, especially if the alternative is to side with those who promote literature for its promise to distract from and suspend our narrow disappointments and envies, its ability to “expand our horizons” by entering into its perfected state, or on the basis of the goodness of its merits while also claiming ownership on what goodness looks like.
If anything, literature defended on these grounds participates in the peculiar reassurance offered by the image of the white-gloved arm or of the white gate barring entry. It’s not protective of innocence in the ways one would think, but has always signified a guarding of interests premised on a learned binary of innocence and repression. It’s what laments the tragic consequences of my ignorance while deriving interest from the stasis thereby produced.
Not to say literature is in need of defense, least of all by me, but my own preference tends toward a kind of forgetting said to characterize the animal or childlike perspective, marked by another kind of innocence than traumatic forgetting. Trauma-free forgetting is innocence proper; trauma-induced forgetting is called repression. The distinction is missing in Nietzsche’s counsel that forgetting is “essential to action of any kind where it is altogether impossible to live at all without forgetting.”
A structuring premised on trauma-induced forgetting where the other kind would do is like the most advanced civilization Burckhardt wrote about that retains certain elements in “petrified form.” These elements are recognized not only where they run counter to a new ethical sensibility, but where their ineffectiveness is brought into view. For example, is a current state of affairs ever ‘at bottom’ simply a reflection of itself? Even if some other misrecognition is righted, such as the frequent mistaking of a people’s “own rage for the wrath of God,” as Burckhardt noted of sixteenth century Protestantism during the time of Reformation, under what conditions does such a one-to-one correspondence obtain and what does it even do other than signal a movement from one misrecognition to another, with the result of a no less undifferentiated state? This suggests to me there are tensions kept in “petrified form” that were never productive tensions to begin with.
As far as the dismissal as ‘naïve’ those who refuse to countenance evil, this misses the point, which is an objection to interested evil. Which is to say, let there be pure evil, the kind that exists in good literature, and not the interested kind that hawks its wares in book stalls, and neither the ‘disinterested’ advantage-seeking kind such as that which secures in plain view its doctorate in creepology.
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