Sexual Violence, Narrative Authority, and Spectral Reading

Abstract

Sexual Violence, Narrative Authority, and Spectral Reading Judith Goldman (bio) Total Recall Samantha Giles Krupskaya www.krupskayabooks.com/giles.html 185 Pages; Print, $17.00 Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents ([1929] rewriting Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals [1887]) obsessively speculates on the genesis of bad conscience. Offering up theory after theory behind the introjection of the super-ego, Freud comes to formulate the circuit of guilt as self-propelling, with conscience lacerating us even for sins sinned in thought only: indeed, the more acetic we are, the more we are unconsciously driven to punish ourselves and to seek punishment. He rues civilization for the pervasive discontent it causes through this moral masochism. In view of contemporary American culture, Freud's concern harbors a certain dramatic irony, as the malaise of interminable neurotic guilt seems to have given way to a psychotic incapacity for guilt. Of the sadistic pleasures pursued with impunity, perhaps the most enabling is the meta-sadism of gaslighting, whereby a sadistic pleasure is taken in the disavowal of sadistic pleasure. I read Samantha Giles's magnificent book Total Recall when it appeared shortly following the truncated investigations and hearings around, and speed confirmation of, Brett Kavanaugh, one of so very many sadistic episodes densely darkening the interminable time of the Trump administration. Total Recall is a tour de force, hybrid genre work dealing with incest. It comprises three, thematically interrelated prose pieces interleaved with two groups of poems, all of which deal with questions of traumatized memory in the aftermath of sexual assault. This review focuses on the two longer narratives bookending the work. The opening piece, entitled "Total Recall," is written in an elegant braided structure, the three discursive strands told by the same narrator: the family drama around the founding of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation; a plot summary of Total Recall, the 1990 science fiction thriller whose crux involves the indistinction between real and "implanted" memories, whose recounting the [End Page 11] narrator continually qualifies by commenting on the potential fallibility of her memory and understanding of the film; and a first-person narrative that describes an unsettling reunion, after a year-and-a-half hiatus, between a daughter (accompanied by her male partner), and her parents, due to a fight whose cause is never specified, but is implicitly connected to her father's physical, psychological, and sexual abuse of her in childhood. As this narrator explains, her life has been filled with her father "remembering things for her"—a problem of telling especially endemic to the manipulative, distorting representation of incest events by perpetrators to children even as they are unfolding. All of Giles's narrators' speech in this book is riddled with self-reflexive phrases that underscore the uncertainty of the accounts being given: "I think I remember," "maybe what happened," etc. In this particular piece, rather than undermining her epistemic authority, these qualifying tags shore up the narrator's account, as she offers a precise, considered sense of exactly how fallible her recollections may be: where, exactly, she may have inserted a merely probable, verisimilar detail, rather than an actual detail; where her "facts" may be wrong or her memory vague. As everywhere in the book, contesting evidentiary rubrics are perspicuously foregrounded: here, the juxtaposed threads work through implicature to offer the reader the sense that memories of childhood abuse do not yield, and do not need to yield, to a forensic approach. The False Memory Syndrome Foundation, as the narrator herself notes, doesn't directly refute the prevalence of sexual violence in families. What it focuses on, as has egregiously ramified in our culture, is that memory lacks provability, a verifiable, unshifting ontology, which thereby also leaves its referent in suspension. Which is to say, it shifts the stakes of the matter away from the real problem: that the patriarchal family formation is a machinery for the abuse of power. The father does not say the abuse never happened: he says she has "false memories." We catch patriarchal abuse in the act, as the executive power to declare its own narrative authority and to control the dispensation of epistemic positions. In the very gesture of violently disallowing...