The Division of Grace

Modernism as a dissociated zombie

When threatened with real or implied violence, the protagonists of Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace at some point all enter the dissociative state commonly identified with responses to traumatic events. Some remain trapped within cyclic behavioural patterns that come to define their existence, while others manage to break out of their narrowly defined roles to become “other”. Coetzee and Rhys both reference the traumas experienced by their colonial countries of origin – and the subsequent post-colonial post-traumatic behaviours displayed – to literally become dissociative States. So too do the characterisations of modernist literature – with all its disruptions, disjunctions and dislocations and repetitive, cyclical fragmented discourses –signify a form removed from itself in response to trauma.

For the reader familiar with the condition, the behaviours of our protagonists – teenage chorus girl Anna Morgan, ageing Casanova professor David Lurie and his late-twentysomething lesbian farmer daughter Lucy – are immediately recognisable as being symptomatic of dissociative states. Symptoms described by individuals suffering post-traumatic disorders encompass complications with concentration and memory; compulsive actions; feeling foggy, spacey or out of control (Lanius and Hopper, 2105). The sufferer may feel like a spectator on the sides, watching what’s happening as time slows down, speeds up or goes missing altogether. Perceptions are warped and objects or the body itself are experienced as different shapes or sizes (betterhealth.gov.au, 2015).

For Anna and Lucy, two women violated and dominated in both novels, dissociation is experienced as a form of zombiism: both become the walking dead, moving through life in a post-traumatic haze of lost time and division of identity from which we do not see them released. David is already a ghost, suddenly rendered invisible to women by his age. Rather than react to his own traumatic violation of having been brutally beaten, set alight and left to burn, David instead focuses on the implications of his daughter’s rape and subsequent pregnancy and so is able to find release by the story’s end. Rhys and Coetzee position the traumatised women as post-colonial states caught in ongoing cycles of denial and neglect while Coetzee grants the man release from his sins, casting him in the role of the coloniser who finds grace in letting go of the past.

Anna

Rhys conveys the effect of trauma on the human psyche by positioning Anna, a white West Indian girl sent “home” to England, as experiencing life in either a dreamlike fugue or as bitter reality. Anna exists in contrasting worlds of the “real” dreary cold of old England or the “dream” bright, warm New World of the Caribbean. Carol Dell’Amico (2005, p. 1) describes Jean Rhys as “a measured assessor of imperial modernist culture... through her method of employing psychoanalytical tropes to refer to imperial formations.” In the first part of the novel, when Anna loses her virginity to Walter, a much older, English gentleman, she becomes detached from what is happening to her and is unable to think of anything but him sniffing at a glass of wine and how much she hates him. Given that she responded to Walter’s advances by demanding “Look here, let me go...damn you, let me go, damn you...” the ordeal can be read as a rape (Rhys, 2000, p. 20). When it is over, she wishes “...it could go back and be just as it was before it happened and then happen differently.” She instead retreats to the bedroom, lies down on a cold bed and “goes out of herself – as if in a dream” (p. 21). The following day, Walter sends her money. She has been raped, and she has been compensated. Her ruin is now a given and her dependence upon her abuser is set.

Nearing the end of the final coda of Voyage, Anna makes the connection that her sexual encounters, nearly always bought and paid for by the men she picks up, happen “always on foggy days” (p. 132). Is she creating sexual opportunities as a result of her “foggy days” or does she become foggy because of the sexual encounters, constantly returning her to her first sexually dissociative state? In this way, Rhys applies “psychoanalytical tropes” to Anna. Cast in the role of a post-colonial paradise suffering an on-going cycle of abusive behaviours beneath a succession of abusive men, Anna replicates the Caribbean trauma: slavery, piracy and revolution that has left some states impoverished and dependent on handouts from subsequent antagonists (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2015).

http://horrorpedia.com/2015/01/08/soucouyant-folklore/

Shifts in time and repetitive behaviour, significant in modernist prose and post-traumatic symptoms alike, are used by Rhys to punctuate significant events for Anna. Rhys further amplifies Anna’s fears through the use of traditional folkloric forms of dissociation. When Anna receives notice of the end of her relationship with Walter she falls into a reverie of long past conversations, only awakening at the memory of Englishmen “who were monkeys too” to find that she “had been sitting there like that for two hours.” (p. 81) Later in the narrative Anna acknowledges her pregnancy by rhythmically chanting to herself “Don’t think of it. Don’t think of it. Because thinking of it makes it happens” (p. 138) and falls into a hallucinogenic dream state: “Obeah zombis soucriants – lying in the dark frightened of the dark frightened of soucriants...they suck your blood.” (p. 140)  A seemingly simple Creole phrase that not only evokes the trance-like state of the zombie, but with the threat of Anna being consumed by the very pregnancy now ensuring her outcast status, Rhys also invokes centuries-old vampiric heritage.

Obeah is Caribbean folkloric magic similar to Haitian Voodoo, outlawed since 1760 as “the wicked Art of Negroes... pretending to have Communication with the Devil and other evil spirits." (BBC News, 2015)  The zombis is the wandering, soulless corpse animated by black magic. The soucriant is a female vampire, usually hag-like and she comes to you in the night to suck your blood. (Welland, 2009, p. 66) In personal letters, Rhys says that Anna is “divided. Two people really.” (Savoury, 1998, p. 83). Dual personalities of social exile divide Anna, just as the Caribbean is divided by post-colonial conflicts for independence

David/Lucy

Many of the symptoms used by Rhys to describe Anna’s dissociative episodes are reflected in Coetzee’s story of an ageing white South African Lothario forced to face his own and his daughter’s disgrace in a post-Apartheid world. A narrative constructed solely around David, it is the rape of his daughter Lucy – “a minor character who doesn’t make an appearance until halfway through” (Coetzee, 2000, p. 198) – that becomes the defining traumatic moment of his life. It is at this point that dramatic irony steps up to the modernist plate. David’s earlier fall from grace, thanks to his Byronic sexual proclivity, is not the titular dis-grace the reader has been lead to expect. Nor is his trauma that of being beaten and set aflame by three black men who move on from David's violation to the defilement of Lucy. David is traumatised by having failed to protect his daughter. He projects this trauma onto Lucy, seeing in her his own misplaced anger and disappointment, but unable to understand what it is that will release him from his post-traumatic fugue state.

Until the rape of Lucy, David’s own experiences of being detached from himself are found during moments of sexual release, when he “tumbles into blank oblivion” and comes to, to find the weather has changed. (p. 19) David is himself witness to and the cause of another’s forced separation from reality. During his “not quite rape” of Melanie Isaacs, the student with whom his affair brings about his professional suicide, David characterises Melanie’s response to his ministrations “as though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck” (p. 25). He knows that he is trespassing and that what he is doing is unwanted yet still he continues. He does not care – it is Melanie’s duty to share her beauty that she does not own (p. 16). It is not until he fails to prevent – or even witness – the rape of his daughter that he begins to slowly awaken. Yet even then, the drama is all about him, how he feels and what his daughter should be doing.

During the attack at the farm, David and Lucy both experience time slippage, the afternoon seeming to have passed for David “in a flash” (p. 99) while Lucy describes to the police the whole incident taking twenty to thirty minutes. Pamela Cooper positions Coetzee as defining David in terms of a South Africa that “is shedding the skins of both colonialism and the hybrid neo-colonialism of the apartheid era” (p. 26) David and Lucy almost exist as a single but split personality, divorced from one another and from reality.

David knows there is something just out of his reach to be grasped for, but he is succumbing to "listlessness, indifference, but also weightlessness as if he has been eaten away from the inside and only the eroded shell of his heart remains" (p. 156). David is fading away to become the ghost he foretold. Lucy however, tells David that she is “a dead person” who does “not know yet what will bring [her] back to life” (p. 161). Indeed, to David she “sounds like a zombie” (p. 198). In the opening pages of Disgrace, David confidently informs the reader that his temperament is:

…cold, surly, impatient to be alone. That is his temperament. His temperament is not going to change, he is too old for that. His temperament is fixed, set. The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body. Follow your temperament… [He lives] within his temperament… [His sexual] temperament, though intense, is never passionate (p. 2).

David is assured of his permanent temperament, but by story’s end, he has found that while things get harder, they get easier too. In his new vocation as a euthaniser of unwanted dogs, “Lurie lets go of his need for comprehension and control; he disinvests in knowledge as a weapon and relinquishes his need for a rational and lucid world” (Cooper, 2005 p. 33). David comes to the realisation that “one ceases to be surprised that what used to be as hard as hard can be grows harder yet” (p. 219). Finally, David admits that yes, he is “giving him up” (p. 219). But whom is he surrendering? The dog? Himself? Or the ghost of himself? Is David giving up the ghost? Regardless, Coetzee grants David at least some form of release from his dissociative state, while Lucy’s fate remains unclear. And let’s not forget Anna, who in the opening pages of Voyage experiences  a disconnection from reality “...almost like being born again” (p. 7) and ends with light thrusting into her consciousness and “starting all over again, all over again...” (p. 159) repeating the cycle of trauma and its associated dissociation. There is to be no release for the women.

They do rape

The women of Voyage in the Dark and Disgrace are not simply under threat of violation or domination – they are violated and dominated. Just as their home nations were not simply the subjects of threats, the lands themselves were desecrated and despoiled and their peoples sullied and debased by colonists. By combining the bleakness of England in Anna’s present life, with the fragmentary glimpses into her Caribbean, idyllic past, using dream sequences, hallucinogenic interior monologues that rupture and destabilises the narrative, Rhys emphasises the desecration and ruin of Anna as an individual and reflected in that, the rape of the colonies. Likewise, Coetzee positions David and Lucy as dysfunctional and opposing sides in an unwinnable war, but with at least one hope of breaking free from their post-traumatic struggle in the form of an unwanted but undeniable new life.

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