This dissertation argues that the psychic force that Freud named “the death drive” would more precisely be termed “the disability drive.” Freud’s concept of the death drive emerged from his efforts to account for feelings, desires, and actions that seemed not to accord with rational self-interest or the desire for pleasure. Positing that human subjectivity was intrinsically divided against itself, Freud suggested that the ego’s instincts for pleasure and survival were undermined by a competing component of mental life, which he called the death drive. But the death drive does not primarily refer to biological death, and the term has consequently provoked confusion. By distancing Freud’s theory from physical death and highlighting its imbrication with disability, I revise this important psychoanalytic concept and reveal its utility to disability studies. While Freud envisaged a human subject that is drawn, despite itself, toward something like death, I propose that this “something” can productively be understood as disability. In addition, I contend that our culture’s repression of the disability drive, and its resultant projection of the drive onto stigmatized minorities, is a root cause of multiple forms of oppression.

“The Disability Drive” opens with a question: “What makes disability so sexy?” This is a counterintuitive query; after all, the dominant culture usually depicts disability as decidedly unsexy. But by performing a critical disability studies analysis of Freud’s writings about sexuality and the death drive, I theorize sex as an intrinsically disabling experience and suggest that fantasies of disability may have an unrecognized sexual appeal. These possibilities lead me to introduce a new interpretive framework, “the sexual model of disability,” which I posit as an alternative to disability studies’ prevailing analytic paradigm, the social model of disability. While the social model defines disability as a system of oppression that isolates and excludes disabled people, the sexual model of disability goes deeper than this, locating the impetus for these exclusions in our culture’s repression of the disability drive. Because disability may provoke an erotic excitement that the ego cannot bear to acknowledge, ableist culture is often torn between an urge to witness disability (e.g., by staring at disabled people) and an impulse to hide disability from view (e.g., by confining disabled people to institutions).

The sexual model of disability has the potential to make interventions not only in disability studies but also in a range of other disciplines. In Chapter 1, I bring my account of the disability drive to bear on signal texts in queer theory. In doing so, I proffer an answer to a question that has long troubled disability scholars: given the many similarities between ableism and homophobia, why have queer theorists often been reluctant to engage with disability studies? Observing that founding texts in queer theory repudiate “feminist identity politics” and liken this discourse to madness and to figurative states of blindness and paralysis, I argue that these texts project the disability drive onto feminism, thus allowing queer theory to portray its own erotics as mobile, playful, and physically and mentally able. In Chapter 2, I show that the sexual model of disability can subvert a foundational concept in psychoanalysis: the disease category “hysteria.” Analyzing Freud’s case history Dora, which was published in 1905, in conjunction with Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which was published in 1920, I argue that Freud’s notion of hysteria adumbrates his later theorization of the drive. The diagnostic category of hysteria, I contend, constitutes a projection of the disability drive onto people with what I call “undocumented disabilities,” that is, nonapparent impairments for which mainstream western medicine cannot identify biological causes. One effect of this projection is that people with undocumented disabilities are figured as epistemologically disabled; that is, we are seen as distinctively lacking in the capacity to know ourselves.

The social position of people with undocumented disabilities differs from that of the paradigmatic subject of disability studies: while people with undocumented impairments are often denied recognition of the disabling suffering that shapes our lives, people with disabilities that are visible and/or documented are frequently subjected to unwanted displays of pity. For this reason, “no pity” has long been a rallying cry of the disability rights movement. But is it possible to proscribe pity? In Chapter 3, I argue that instead of seeking to banish the affect of pity, disability scholars might do better to attend to the complex ways in which this affect can be incited and expressed. Toward this end, I propose a distinction between what I call “primary pity” and “secondary pity.” The term “secondary pity” accords with the everyday understanding of pity, in which a person who feels pity is assumed to occupy a position of superiority in relation to a person who is pitied. Primary pity refers to a very different affective process, which is profoundly destabilizing to the ego of the person who feels pity. Derived in part from Freud’s notion of “primary narcissism,” my concept of primary pity occupies a liminal position between the erasure of the ego that primary narcissism entails and the buttressing of the ego involved in secondary narcissism. Because primary pity involves a complex process of identification, in which the subject and the object of pity risk becoming fantasmatically indistinguishable, this emotion threatens the ego’s belief in its self-sufficiency and autonomy. I argue that primary pity’s threat to the ego can be understood as a manifestation of the disability drive, and I suggest that the “no pity” position taken up by disability activists and scholars may be invested in a fantasy of overcoming the disability drive.

This dissertation argues that rather than seeking to overcome the disability drive, cultural critics and activists should work to acknowledge the myriad ways in which the drive determines us. It is important to recognize and acknowledge one’s determination by the disability drive because denying or repressing the ways in which this psychic force governs us will inevitably lead to the drive’s being abjected onto groups of stigmatized others. In Chapter 4, I argue that in contemporary US American culture fat people constitute one such group. This chapter focuses on the drive to eat, a compulsion that I define as inseparable from the disability drive. Dependence, (on food), loss of mastery (over the intensities of the pleasures of eating), and failures of control (over what, and how much, one eats) combine to make hunger a fundamentally disabling drive. But instead of acknowledging that we are all disabled by the drive to eat, our culture abjects this drive onto fat people, whom it depicts as being driven, in ways that thin people are assumed not to be, by an out-of-control compulsion to eat. US American culture’s projection of the disability drive onto fat people is intensified by racially inflected assumptions about “primitive” versus “civilized” forms of embodiment and by heteronormative constructions of “perversion.” Resisting fatphobia therefore necessitates an intersectional analysis of the disability drive, an approach that takes measure of the ways in which repressing the drive reinforces multiple forms of prejudice.

The central aim of this thesis is to show that the disability drive is a force that we must understand if we are to effectively challenge the many intersecting and overlapping modalities of oppression that define present-day cultural and social relations. “The Disability Drive” offers an invitation, to scholars and activists in a variety of cultural locations, to consider the ways in which our own beliefs and practices may be implicated in a hegemonic cultural endeavor whose goal is to overcome the disability drive. Because denying the drive results in the reentrenchment of oppressive social structures, I maintain that it is imperative to develop political strategies that resist the impulse to overcome the disability drive.

Abstract

Real Talk: Direct Discourse and the Victorian Novel

by

Alexandra Irene Dumont

Doctor of Philosophy in English

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Kent Puckett, Chair

This dissertation proceeds from the idea that, although it is everywhere present and routinely discussed, we have nevertheless neglected to talk, thoroughly, about “talk” in the Victorian realist novel. It also proceeds from the idea that we have done this because it is precisely what such novels, and Victorian culture more generally, have taught us to do. Talk, I argue, both as a subject and a mode of novelistic representation, is cast as an other to the novel, one that is simultaneously alien to and containable within the realist text. As a verbal activity, talk suggests an orality that is quotidian and amorphous, a flow of words submerged in the social world that elicits it. This formlessness and sociality render talk an ideal figure for the vast, teeming “life” to which the realist novel refers, and whose heterogeneity is as much a model as a vexation for novelistic form. As a textual formation within the novel, I argue, talk as direct discourse functions as a “real fictional object”: a place in which the language of the novel shifts from a mode of representation to an object thereof, and consequently becomes at once more and less “real.” For authors like Harriet Martineau, George Eliot, and Henry James, such ambiguities provide a means of navigating realism’s competing imperatives of extra-textual reference and aesthetic self-sufficiency. Talk’s minor quality allows it to animate the novel’s rhetoric even as that rhetoric disavows talk as mere chatter, gossip, or report.

My focus on talk, then, is a way of getting at a larger and in many ways more elusive subject: Victorian realism and the critical discussions thereof. Though talk as dialect or idiolect has an important place in the critical history of realism, it has not been the defining marker of either the realist mode or the putative formal sophistication of the Victorian novel. I begin my project by considering the primacy accorded by novel theory to free indirect discourse, and suggest that literary criticism’s obsession with this form stems in part from the parallels between free indirect discourse itself and the methodology of those who have theorized it. Conversely, I argue, direct discourse has been read as a mere starting point, from which narrative complexity evolves. Yet it is because, not in spite, of this basic or minor quality that talk is fundamental to the realist novel. I examine the function of these minor forms of talk and direct discourse in the didactic stories and political essays of Harriet Martineau, the aphoristic “parables” and omniscient narration of George Eliot, and the “impressionizing” fictions and all-consuming style of Henry James. I trace the ways that Victorian realism casts talk as a foil for its more totalizing forms, arguing that in centering itself around this vanishing, minor object, realism centers itself around an absence. It is not, then, the presence of the world in the text that makes the realist novel possible, but rather the world’s absence that makes space for the novelistic real.

This dissertation is a close look at poems written during the Great War by Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, and Wilfred Owen. I describe how each deploys poetry’s formal resources to engage the affective, cognitive, spiritual, and political problems the war produces for them. I argue that strategies of poetic doubling allow them to address—if not quite assuage—the effects of the war that trouble them the most. Each poem manifests this doubling in different ways, but the tactic of doubling is pervasive. Ultimately, I argue that this doubling is equally an effect of the war’s incessant production of antagonistic cultural forms, and of lyric poetry’s fundamental ability to accommodate internal opposition at the formal level. The intrinsic ambivalence of poetic form makes it a particularly effective discourse for examining war’s social and political contradictions.

This unifying theme of formal doubling or what I call the “poetic versus”—double timeframes in Hardy, double identities and locations in Thomas, and two or more opposing verbal registers in Owen—is a careful instantiation of Isobel Armstrong’s influential figure of the “double poem.” I track examples of how poems formally enact the kind of doubleness Armstrong describes—how they enact a second-order commentary on their own primary expression. Doubling is a broad but apt name for the strategies by which the war’s disturbances and antagonisms are transferred between the poem’s double levels of engagement, whether conceived as formal/social (Raymond Williams), literary/political (Caroline Levine) or expressive/epistemological (Isobel Armstrong).

The prominent forms of doubling I identify line up with tenets of liberal political thought threatened by the war: Hardy’s trouble with time is tied to a belief in rational human progress that the war renders increasingly difficult to maintain. Thomas’s dual identities, in light of the economic forces that ultimately forced him to abandon writing for a soldier’s salary, are traceable to a crisis of alienation underlying liberalism’s basis in the individual. Owen’s project of incorporating voices of inherited cultural tradition and authority, only to expose them as the very origins of the war’s depredations is a critique of liberalism cast as a personal betrayal. Drawing on critical work by William Empson and Paul Fussell, I identify a complex form of irony as the crucial intellectual and affective stance which poetic doubling enables, a stance that becomes an increasingly important cultural survival strategy as the war persists.

The Unfeeling Poem: Documentary Scenes from Reznikoff to Rankine traces the evolution of documentary from the early 1930s to the American present, examining how experimental writers have recorded reality in their work. Developed through close readings of three long prose poems – Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony (1934), Bernadette Mayer’s Memory (1972) and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014) – the unfeeling poem is characterized by its resistance to immediate affective engagement and its emphasis on the gaps between document and event. Rather than attempting to close these gaps, the unfeeling poem makes them visible and meaningful. The dissertation introduces “the unfeeling poem” less as a critical descriptor for documentary works than as a provocation to consider how much transparency or immediacy is possible, or even desirable, across the distance between document and event. In Testimony, the unfeeling poem manifests in the stark presentation of reworked legal documents, which displace emotional response from the poet onto the reader. Memory pushes the unfeeling poem further, overwhelming the reader with an excess of documentation that challenges our capacity for affective response. Citizen mobilizes the unfeeling poem to engage present absences, employing a carefully modulated affective register to train readers in a set of critical reading practices, an alertness to what is not documented as well as what is. The dissertation situates these works within their specific historical and artistic contexts, examining Reznikoff’s participation in the “Objectivist” movement, Mayer’s forays into conceptual art, and Rankine’s interventions in contemporary digital culture. By reading these “scenes” from each writer’s career, the dissertation shows how documentary practices contribute to the formation of sensible, cultural, and intellectual communities. Methodologically, the dissertation combines literary close reading with art-historical description, sketching connections between poetic texts and visual media including FSA photographs, conceptual artworks, and online content. Activating three landmark projects in twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry, The Unfeeling Poem provides a new framework in which to understand the relationship between documentary practice and readerly response.

“The Group: Victorian Novels of Milieu,” defines and defends the mid-sized group as a form that challenges the way much novel studies thinks about social organization. Our usual models tend to operate at scalar extremes of the individual and the state or the one versus the many, reproducing an antithetical relation that may date from the Victorian period but does not fully represent its cultural forms or how they continue to shape us today. What if group thinking were not a simply a statistical abstraction or an ideological mirage? Then we might be able explain why queer communities, by definition anti-normative, nevertheless produce norms; or why the tourism industry excuses its attachment to colonial architecture by evoking milieu, an antiquated and thus evasive racial formation. Unlike recent affect-based or biopolitical scholarship, my project resolves questions like these by identifying a significant middle scale: the group, or a site-specific assemblage that is improvised, temporary, and productive of surprising identities and new modes of distributed agency and intention. In contrast to other accounts of the novel’s social form, “The Group” historicizes how Victorian fiction quantifies the social, drawing on strategies in emerging disciplines like sociology, art history, and philosophy of language as well as feminist and queer life practices that are more systematic than you might think. Combining genre analysis with more fine-grained sociolinguistic techniques, I examine how the novel relies on specific group concepts (milieu, party, and school) to exemplify, exploit, and undermine acts of reflexive self-definition characteristic of modern life. By examining neglected Victorian group-think and thinking about the group, this project raises still pertinent questions about how we experience local and transient identities, while addressing conversations in literary studies around linguistic anthropology, queer (anti-)normativity, and quantitative reading practices.

In the entwined history of the teenager and the disabled person, both are trapped in uncertain temporalities, framed as figures of rehabilitation: sighs of relief come only when the disabled person “becomes normal” or when the teenager “grows up.” This history is present in the popularity of the young adult as conceived by young adult (YA) literature. The discomfort around the liminal figures of the teen and the disabled person manifests in the self-contradictory concept of the “young” “adult” which has expanded beyond the teenager alone, appearing across many genres of literature, film, TV, social media, and Internet culture. Much like the disabled person, the young adult is a figure simultaneously born of the market and resistant to it. Since the 1990 signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the millennial young adult represents a cultural shift from the linear rhetoric of child-to-adult growth to a complex superimposition of time, body, and space in reaction to the failures of twenty-first century neoliberalism. This form of the “young adult” reorients us from the traditional teleologies of reproduction and productivity interrogated by queer theorists to a new fixation on the present, most simply exemplified by the present tense narration popularly used by YA novels. The formulations of the present that the young adult brings into focus are not only queer, but also versions of “crip time.” Crip time originates in the nonlinear unpredictability and “unproductivity” of chronic pain. It has since been generalized to describe the times through which disabled people’s bodies move. The common act of “bending the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds” is disavowed in mainstream culture, even as crip time exemplifies how people’s bodies are incommensurable with the temporal demands of neoliberal capitalism. I identify and historicize four crip modes of “bending the clock” that the narrative form of the “young adult” brings to light—procrastinating, confounding, swapping, and dwelling. Using a narratological and historicist approach, Cripping Time names those temporal strategies that demonstrate the struggle between the entertaining, engrossing figure of the young adult and the ways in which they move through the often bleak realities they inhabit. In turn, I illustrate how disability or cripness, has become the predominant lens for the popular literature and culture of the new millennium.