Historical Trauma and the American Dream: The Plague of Identity Quest and Its Ethical Landscape in Faulkner and Morrison
Date Issued
2006
Date
2006
Author(s)
Shao, Yuh-chuan
DOI
en-US
Abstract
Abstract
Historical Trauma and the American Dream:
The Plague of Identity Quest and Its Ethical Landscape
in Faulkner and Morrison
Yuh-chuan Shao
This dissertation focuses on identity quest as it is constructed through the stories of those dream-driven, trauma-ridden characters in novels by William Faulkner and Toni Morrison. Both writers have expressed penetrating and sympathetic insights into the problem of white and black identities, and their perceptive dramatizations of pathological identities enable us to see not only the political economy of the dominant culture but the libidinal economy of both the privileged community and that of the underprivileged community. The dissertation argues that the major novels by Faulkner and Morrison demonstrate how the subject’s identity is pathologically bound up with the (ideological) fantasy of the social and the legacy of historical trauma and that the ethical landscapes of both writers can be delineated through these works. The dissertation begins by examining Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in light of the psychoanalytic categories of fantasy, desire, jouissance (enjoyment), and trauma, and then, via a common theoretical framework, it focuses on the pathology of the black middle class by exploring Morrison’s Tar Baby and the problem of cultural narcissism and the pathology of the romantic Southerner by dwelling on Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. In Morrison’s work we find that the black subject struggles with the trauma of being black and yet is drawn to the ideological fantasy of the white civilization. Faulkner’s fictional world of Yoknapatawpha County reveals how white Southerners, being drawn to the romantic consciousness of the Old South, narcissistically and aggressively indulge themselves in the fantasy of a paternalist aristocracy, disavowing the trauma of slavery, racism, and the Civil War. The second part of the dissertation will center upon the ethical visions of the two authors. Drawing on Alenka Zupančič’s ethics of the Real, I attempt to provide a more sophisticated ethical model to examine Faulkner’s notion of being an individualist and the (problematic) ethical act of repudiation as configured in Go Down, Moses. Through her writing of self-destructive, loveless communities in Song of Soloman and Beloved, Morrison gives us a mapping of ethical love by exploring the pathological dimensions of love. The trauma-ridden love and identity, in light of Julia Kristeva’s ethics of love, lead us to see the way the persistence of the irreconcilable alterity, within the subject or in social relations, is intertwined with the formation of love and identity. From both writers, we get to see what I would like to call “the real of identity.” This is not only about the historical and ongoing social and racial antagonisms; “the real of identity” is also about the paranoid constructions of self and otherness and the phobic structure underlying what we think and feel we are.
Subjects
疏離
雙重意識
倫理視野
意識形態幻想框架
戀物
身份
個人主義者
愛
自戀情結
病態
真實層
主體
創傷
alienation
the American dream
double consciousness
ethical vision
fantasy
fetish
identity
individualist
love
narcissism
cultural pariah
pathology
the real
the subject
trauma
Type
thesis
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