Posthumous citizenship

Transcription

Hi, my name’s Brian Norman. I’m an associate professor of English at Loyola University of Maryland, where I also direct the African, African American Studies Program. My new book is called “Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature,” published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Well, generally, dead women are pretty quiet, same thing goes for dead men, but in American Literature, they’re actually quite chatty. Once you start looking for them, all over American Literature, you’ll find dead women who talk. You’ll see them in writing by Emily Dickenson, Henry James, William Faulkner, more contemporary writers such as Tony Morrison, Tony Kushner, Alice Walker, uh, they’re all over the place, they’re also all over the place in contemporary culture. You see there’s a posthumous narrator on Desperate Housewives, they’re all over the place in Six Feet Under, The Lovely Bones, Drop Dead Diva, and so, basically, I’m trying to figure why these women who are dead are nonetheless talking, and that’s what the book attempts to answer. Well, nowadays, we’re pretty used to seeing things like zombies, vampires, revenants, possessions, but the women who are dead and talking in my book seem to be somewhat different, and, um, partly, I’m trying to figure out what makes them different, and so, partly, it’s that they have bodies and they’re inserting themselves into the contemporary community among the living, and they don’t see themselves as necessarily any different from the rest of us. They’re hanging around, they’re chatting. They want to be recognized as formal members of a community, which is, to say, citizenship. And so, I ended up finding out that what these dead women sought was something potentially quite more disturbing then these more familiar characters, which is posthumous citizenship. Well, partly, I just noticed that the novels I was teaching in classes, the novels that I was drawn to and had generated such good discussions, just happened to feature these recurring, this recurring trope of dead women, and once I started putting them all together, I started to notice that there was an actual literary tradition that develops over time from the mid-19th century, in the sort of crevices where gothic literature meets realistic literature, and now, up through the 21st century, they’re all over the place, and I think they’re actually doing something quite difficult and quite profound. I think they’re helping us to address pasts, especially unjust past that were prematurely buried. Probably the best example is Beloved. Uh, it is set about a generation after slavery, uh, and just after the end of reconstruction, but, clearly, the legacy of slavery lives on, and so too a hundred years later, the time when Tony Morrison writes the novel, we’re still trying to figure out how to address this, the legacy of our slave past. There are more dead women who are talking than dead men, and I think partly it’s also that, in American literature and culture, women tend to be the bearers of history, the bearers of cross-generational continuity. And, also, the concepts of voice and silence also very much have gendered components. So, silence has often been the mark of oppression, and, uh, much of the feminist movement throughout American culture and history has been one of coming into voice. So the fact that some of these women are talking at all in itself is noteworthy because many of them were quite silent in life. Probably the best example is Addie Bundren from William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, who doesn’t, who says almost nothing while she’s alive. I think her one line is “you cash” as she looks at her older son building her coffin through the window of her death bed. But once she dies, she is quite chatty; she has a very long and revealing chapter. You find out about adultery, blasphemy, and sadism. It’s really quite steaming. One of my goals when I was writing about each of these novels was to sort of finally answer the question, finally answer questions that had perplexed me. For instance, Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying, one of the ongoing jokes throughout the novel is that she starts to smell, around day 9, in the hot Mississippi sun; her corpse is really quite powerful, as they might say. And so I was trying to think about, what would happen if we started to think about other forms of speech. I had already done that when I was looking at The Fall of the House of Usher, where we encounter Madeline Usher, who never really says any words, she just sort of wails, so is a wail a form of speech, I ask then. Well, by the time we get up to William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Addie Bundren, while we are listening to her posthumous chapter, I think the form of speech that’s most heard in her community is, um, the rotting stench of her own corpse, and, in fact, that’s quite a loud stench, you might say. It’s actually the job of the living to address unjust pasts. Probably the most respectful thing we can do for the dead is to let them rest in peace, let them be quiet, not do our job for us and address these pasts that we, ourselves, need to address.