Interpersonal Relations

Abstract

Interpersonal Relations Tony Hilfer Each of the four essays in this issue examines the depiction of interpersonal relations: as possibility, threat, absence, and erasure of boundaries. John Bruns's ethically engaged and engaging essay on James's "The Beast in the Jungle" invokes Bakhtin as a champion of "the open structure of dialogue," an opening specifically to "the surplus of the other," an other who "should surprise us, not reaffirm who we are." However, Maya Wakana, writing on The Wings of the Dove also sees self as formed via interpersonal relations, building on Erving Goffman's brilliantly paranoiac social psychology to show how such interaction continually negotiates psychic and social survival in a collision (sometimes collusion) of "felt stigmatizations." The social moment ends by controlling and limiting rather than allowing for possibility and, in sum, seems rather Hobbesian, a zero sum game for everyone playing it. In contrast to both of these essays, Anna Wilson reads Cather's The Professor's House as a disengagement from various critical projects—traditionalist, modernist, queering—that attempt to insert her into their versions of canonical structures. Cather even disengages from modernist disengagement, a triumph of averting the "trap of interpretation." Her novel calculatedly avoids socialization. Finally, Susann Cokal analyzes Fitzgerald's analysis of an analyst, the psychoanalyst Dick Diver of Tender Is the Night. Here there is a mess of interpersonality as when Dick and Nicole merge (before fissionating) into the joint self, Dicole. Along with Rosemary and Nicole's father, they form a daisy chain of father-daughter-lover that can only lead to a disastrous meltdown of roles and selves. Selves are formed by relations but evidently need their distances. Copyright © 2005 University of Texas Press