Pathology and Poly-vocality in Nina Yargekov's Tuer Catherine (2009)

Abstract

Nina Yargekov's debut novel Tuer Catherine (2009) updates longstanding conceptual links between madness and writing by borrowing ideas and terminology from clinical discourses, including the recently identified dissociative identity disorder. According to Elaine Showalter in Hystories (2007), hysterical conditions such as DID become widespread due to cultural processes analagous to intertextuality which construct their causes and symptoms as part of a shared narrative. Yargekov's intertextual borrowings in Tuer Catherine, presented as voices inside her narrator's head, combine literary and psychiatric discourses to reflect the ‘anxiety of influence’ (Bloom) suffered by the writer whose narrative is shaped by the literary tradition. By playing on stereotypical associations of women with madness, Yargekov also engages with the ‘anxiety of authorship’ Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar identify as a historical constraint on women writers. Drawing on Suzanne Dow's updated account of this notion in her study of more recent women's writing, I argue that while Yargekov's narrator's literary production is sometimes hindered by the dissociative voices of her literary influences, the novel as a whole produces a more positive image of madness and literature as mutually illuminating categories, and of the associative power of the reader.