A Plea for Eros

I who was struggling there alone in the water!
    Harmon’s telling is an agonized
re-collection
of the events that led to his near drowning, during which he loses himself as subject of the story he wants so badly to remember: “There was no such thing as I.” The monologue includes more wood and cutting imagery and a bizarre slide through “a tube” that precedes his regained consciousness. At first, Harmon is divided between the mirrored
figure like myself
(Radfoot) and the
I
. After the birth-like slide, his name returns to him, but he calls out to himself as if he were
somebody else
and addresses that other as
you:
“Struggle for
your
life!” Only after he has recognized himself as another, a separate and distinct whole being, does the corpse vanish, and he is able to assume the first person and his own story. In order for the self to exist, it must be able to represent itself as another, a mirror image, and the recognition of that whole self gives birth to the subject.
    The fear of contamination Dickens’s traveler has for the dead body that keeps returning to him in his imagination has escalated in Harmon’s speech to the terror of complete annihilation. The abject weight that disappears underwater is no longer
“1”
or “you” but “it”—the not-I, or no longer I, not an
other
but an
otherest.
Harmon’s speech is the account of a man trying to pull himself together by remembering, despite the fact that his memory is both marred by the distortions of hallucination and filled with the holes of unconsciousness. The telling takes the form of an internal dialogue during which the speaker interrogates himself, “This is still correct?” As with Zazetsky’s need to record the fragments of his life on the page, Harmon arranges pieces of the past to articulate some kind of order despite his unstable state of mind. Drugged, beaten, intermittently unconscious, and then thrown overboard into the water, Harmon admits that his reflections are “deranged.” He has carried these sick impressions or memories around with him for some time, and remembering them isn’t enough; it’s the telling or reconstruction of the pieces that is therapeutic and eventually reassembles an identity.
    It’s important to stress that the absence of a continuous self-narrative isn’t only pathological—the result of psychotic breaks, brain damage, drugs, or near-death experiences. Normal life includes making sense of fragmentary memories. As Henry Adams writes in
The Education,
“His identity, if one could call a bundle of disconnected memories an identity, seems to remain; but his life was once more broken into separate pieces.” We all collect and re-collect these pieces through self-image, memory, and language. I have long felt the cleft between my inner memories and the telling of them. My own recollections usually appear as images accompanied perhaps by a sentence or sentences spoken by another person or by me, moments that for one reason or another are entrenched in my mind, but fuzzy patches or large gaps remain. Yet am-other corpse story will serve as an illustration. I remember seeing Mao Tse-tung’s preserved body in China in 1986.1 have a picture of the waxy dead man in my mind, but it is no longer perfect, and I can’t recall exactly how he, or rather
it,
was displayed. It was a peculiar experience but not a scary one. The body looked too unreal for that. I have a visual impression of the people around me—my sisters, friends, our Chinese guide, and others waiting on line—but they are not precisely drawn. I do remember clearly that my friend Eric said to me, “Why are hundreds of people waiting for hours to see his body?” Without thinking, I replied, “They want to make sure he’s
really
dead.” Our guide, who had suffered a humiliating and painful exile to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, started to laugh, and in her hilarity she began to pound me on the back. I remember the feeling of her hand hitting my lower spine, but I could no longer give you a description of her face. When I tell the story, however, I rely on the context of the experience and on the conventions of language, on syntax, to turn the bits of memory into a narrative that has the appearance of something far more whole than the various pictures in my brain. After I had told the story several times, the telling began to supplant the images. I had
learned
how to tell it, and my narrative of that little incident has