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

     Theresa Smalec
     New York University
     tks201@is9.nyu.edu

     © 1998 Theresa Smalec.
     All rights reserved.
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     Review of:
     Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. London
     and New York: Routledge, 1997.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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).

  8. 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.

  9. 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).

 10. 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.

 11. 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).

 12. 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.

 13. 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)

 14. 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).

 15. 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.

 16. 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).

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

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     COPYRIGHT (c) 1998 BY THERESA SMALEC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS
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