For Tuesday, please write a psychoanalytic interpretation of Tobias Wolff's "Bullet in the Brain." Of course I don't expect you to be comprehensive, or for you to try to apply every psychoanalytic concept. Theory is meant to enrich our reading experience by illuminating things we may not see otherwise. It should work for you, not the other way round. What I am asking you to do, essentially, is take some element(s) of Wolff's story and demonstrate how psychoanalytic theory enriches your understanding of it/them. Below is a list of prompts that may help you, but don't feel obligated to answer them exactly (or at all, if there is something else you would rather discuss).
1. People who fear intimacy often do so because intimate, emotional connections would force them to examine themselves and the core issues that they have repressed into the unconscious. How can Anders' scathing book critiques, and his treatment of other people, be seen as defense mechanisms and/or evidence of a fear of intimacy?
2. The things that Anders remembers as the bullet is passing through his brain can be seen as a kind of dream (many of our dreams, after all, are at least partially made up of memories). If the images he remembers are the dream's manifest content, or the shapes the dream takes because of displacement and/or condensation, then what, in your view, is the dream's latent content? In answering this question, you should discuss any clues that the story gives us as to what the dream symbols and characters might mean.
3. Begin reading on page 266 with the sentence, "It is worth noting what Anders did not remember, given what he did recall," and end on page 268 after the sentence, "He did not remember when everything began to remind him of something else." There is plenty in this section (family disfunction, sexuality, traumatic experience, destructive behavior) that is ripe for psychoanalytic interpretation. Choose one or two elements and discuss their importance to a psychoanalytic reading of the text.
4. One reason we are so reluctant to change destructive behaviors is that we form our identities around them. We cling to our masks and destructive actions because we cannot face what is in our unconscious, what would otherwise cause anxiety and discomfort. Yet these repressed desires and conflicts still organize our experiences and govern our behavior. Anders' behavior is destructive in several ways. Does the story give you any clues as to what he might be repressing/avoiding with these behaviors?
5. Lacan would probably argue that Anders is haunted by a longing that can't be satisfied, and that he is continually trying to reclaim a lost object of desire (even if he doesn't know it), one that stands in for the original union with his mother. We might call this his objet petit a. What do you think Anders longs for? What is his objet petit a?
6. It is interesting that prior to the moment when Anders gets shot, Bullet in the Brain is written as a formulaic work of genre fiction, riddled with cliches. It is only after Anders is shot that the story rises to the level of literature. One could argue that the bullet destroys not only Anders, but also the Symbolic Order of predictable storytelling, the "formula" of linear narrative and typical plot devices. In this sense the reader is, at least to a degree, returned to the Imaginary Order ("Heat. A baseball field. Yellow grass, the whir of insects..."). Are there other formal elements of the story that seem to lend themselves to a Lacanian interpretation?
7. We can only deal with repressed desires, fears, needs, and wounds by bringing them into the open, but we often resist doing so to our last breath. Ironically, Anders' unconscious is only revealed to the reader (and perhaps to himself) after Anders has been shot and has no chance to deal with what he has repressed. However, as a reader, we reinvision the first part of the story, see it in a new way, after we get inside Anders' head (quite literally). How does what we learn after Anders is shot help us understand the actions that cause the shooting? More specifically, how could an understanding of his own unconscious have helped Anders prevent his death?
Have fun with this. See you on Tuesday.
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