Here is a remarkable passage from William Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom! which I alluded to in class today. Quentin and his friend Shreve are trying to disinter the family crypt, as it were: trying to figure out what happened several generations ago with Quentin's ancestor Thomas Sutpen, what Q's father knows or doesn't know about this, and so on - and Quentin is suddenly struck by an awareness that traumatic events go on and on, transmitting down the generations:
‘Maybe we are both Father. Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space, to the old ineradicable rhythm thinking Yes, we are both Father. Or maybe Father and I are both Shreve, maybe it took Father and me both to make Shreve or Shreve and me both to make Father or maybe Thomas Sutpen to make all of us.’
Needless to say, the back-story turns out to involve incest.
3 comments:
'Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once..." - there's a ripple in those two sentences alone; or already a sort of scrambling of the 'signifiers' circulating round that secret they're trying to get at.
The essay I referred to regarding this idea of trauma and inheritance - Abraham's 'Notes on the Phantom' - is in Abraham and Torok's 'The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis'. The whole section on 'Secrets and Posterity: The Theory of the Transgenerational Phantom' is relevant I think.
I didn't quite catch the reference Tom made to the group of psychologists also interested in this sort of thing.
It seems to me that the group of psychologists was the Palo Alto School - that I knew for other things than the ones Tom mentioned. But I might be wrong?!
Cecile
Yes it's the Palo Alto School - although I can find remarkably little about them on the internet. They were credited in a couple of (French) books I read while researching my own book on family secrets in Hergé's work as being the ones who discovered that second and third generations of a family can be traumatised by an event of which they know nothing: they sense the 'shape' of family silences, the web of censorship around a certain subject, and 'transmit' that down to the next generation, and so on...
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