Preface

I borrow the title of this issue from a book by Diane Sadoff (1982), as the phrase "monsters of affection" evocatively captures the common thread that links together the following four essays—the acts of emotional and physical violence that people often inflict on those nearest and dearest to them. As Aristotle recognized in the Poetics, tragedy affects spectators most deeply when its horrors occur among members of a family; and this theme readily lends itself to psychoanalytic elaboration.

There is probably no more famous monster in all of literature than that in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Employing an object relations perspective that draws chiefly on Winnicott and Bion, Lee Zimmerman goes beyond traditional readings of the novel that acknowledge the monster to be the double of Victor Frankenstein, but proceed to contrast Victor's abandonment of his creature with Victor's ostensibly loving upbringing at the hands of his mother and father. As Zimmerman argues, Victor's superficially glowing account of his childhood is actually a "defensive idealization," and it is Victor's own "murderous rage (and guilt)" resulting from "a premature violation of his sense of early omnipotence" that "must be split off and disowned" in the form of the monster. Thus, the monster's murders of Victor's brother, best friend, and family servant are crimes for which not only Victor, but Victor's parents, may be held indirectly responsible. Zimmerman traces out the implications of his notion that Shelley's novel "centers on a creature defined by the impossibility of being seen," proposing that the "failure to be seen" can be equated with a "failure of containment." The consequences of these twin failures culminate in the monster's burning down of the house of the De Lacey family where his longings for human sympathy were most cruelly frustrated.

As Lee Zimmerman's essay on Frankenstein is exemplary in its deployment of object relations theory, so Nouri Gana's meditation on Joyce's "The Dead" is a model of postmodern psychoanalytic criticism. Dialectically responding to Paul de Man's proposal that prosopopoeia is the rhetorical trope constitutive of autobiography, Gana's reading of Joyce's story will both challenge and reward the reader. No one is murdered in "The Dead," but, Gana contends, the narrative is structured by the "empiphanic jolts" delivered by the return of the memory of Michael Furey first into the consciousness of Gretta Conroy, for whose love he died at the age of seventeen, and then into that of her initially complacent husband Gabriel. (Gana's neologism condenses "empathic" with "epiphany," a keyword of Joyce's aesthetics.) Gabriel Conroy, whose "appropriative and manipulative" relationship with Gretta qualifies him as a monster of affection, undergoes, in Gana's account, a "generative transformation" that reaches fruition in his invasion "by the uncanny realization that she is infinitely other." This realization, in turn, makes it possible for him to begin to engage in genuine mourning, not only for others, but also for the prospect of his own death. Nonetheless, since to experience one's own death "is by definition impossible," and even Gabriel's "heightened empathy . . . knows no sense of proportion," his breakthrough to authenticity remains perpetually deferred, a consummation that is "only emblematically foreshadowed in the white cerecloth" of the falling snow with which Joyce's masterpiece ends.

Like Joyce, Proust is one of the giants of literary modernism, and Roy B. Lacoursiere approaches Proust's oeuvre from the distinctive angle of his experience as a forensic psychiatrist. His point of departure is a 1907 newspaper article, "Filial Sentiments of a Parricide," in which Proust reflects on the case of an acquaintance, Henri van Blarenberghe, who had killed his mother and then committed suicide. Comparing van Blarenberghe to tragic heroes such as Oedipus and Orestes, Proust writes that "this commonplace event was exactly one of those Greek dramas," and "the poor parricide was not a criminal brute . . . but a noble example of humanity." Lacoursiere goes on to sift the evidence of Proust's own "filial sentiments" as these can be gleaned from...