CHAPTER NINE

PSYCHIC UNEASE AND UNCONSCIOUS

CRITICAL AGENCY:
FOR AN ANATOMY OF POSTCOLONIAL
MELANCHOLY
ROSSELLA CIOCCA

Melancholy and the postcolonial

Not without justification psychoanalysis has for a certain time been
rejected by many postcolonial thinkers who objected that it imposed a
uniform Eurocentric notion of self onto the world. Others, more recently,
have begun to argue that psychoanalysis, being itself a colonial discipline1,
is for that very reason usefully to be searched in order to provide cogent
mental frameworks and mechanisms for the critique of postcoloniality and
neo-colonialism. Melancholia, which from the very start of Freudian
enquiry was conceived as a category pertinent to it, has asked in the same
way for a hermeneutical practice alert to detect and interpret its symptoms
with relation to postcolonial matters.
Traditionally in the West, melancholia, as grave humour and speculative
character, had for a long time been inscribed under the sign of Saturn, the
planet of spirit and thought. Intensified reflection and self-consciousness,
and the sufferings accompanying them, were the markers of an attitude
which, with all its encumbrances, could nonetheless vindicate a certain
culturally useful function. Melancholy occupied the soul-ennobling sphere
1

R. Khanna for example argues: It brought into the world an idea of being that
was dependent on colonial political and ontological relations, and through its
disciplinary practices, formalized and perpetuated an idea of uncivilized, primitive,
concealed, and timeless colonized peoples.(Khanna 2003, 6)

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of contemplation and intellectual insight2. Slowly, in time, the humoural

understanding of the world was displaced by the disciplinary apparatuses
of modernity3. During the nineteenth century, the rise of psychiatry and
psychoanalysis had their specific and specializing say in the codification
of melancholia. In this context the term depression began to supplant it. In
modernity melancholia underwent medicalisation; it became a form of
mental illness to be studied, categorized, and treated4.
Making a substantial departure from previous theories, Freud proposed
that the cause of melancholia resided in the failure to mourn a loss. In
Mourning and Melancholia, he wrote that the normal affect of mourning
was to be considered the regular reaction to the loss of a loved person, or
to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as
ones country, liberty, an ideal, and so on (Freud 1963, 243; my
emphasis). On the other hand melancholia was identified in terms of a
pathological condition, the state where the work of mourning fails to
reach completion. The individual internalizes the lost object into his or her
very subjectivity as a way of refusing to let the loss go.
Freud described the process by which the shadow of the object fell
upon the ego and the loss of the object, whether it be a person or a loss
of a more ideal kind(Freud 1963, 245; my emphasis), gradually became
the loss of the ego. In other words while a mourner, a griever, gets to a
sense of closure and moves on, the melancholic embraces the condition of
lingering, keeping the wound open and infected. In mourning, he famously
affirmed it is the world which has become poor and empty; in
melancholia it is the ego itself (Freud 1963, 246).
Since the Freudian turn, and its primal opening to dimensions broader
than the strictly interpersonal sphere, melancholia far from being kept
within the boundary of therapeutic treatment, has repeatedly been
interrogated also as social dispositive, to such a great degree as to be
2

This is of course an allusion to R. Burtons encyclopaedic treatise The Anatomy

of Melancholy (1621).
3
As J. Bowring holds in her extensive coverage of the notion of melancholy:
Melancholy is profoundly interdisciplinary, and ranges across fields as diverse as
medicine, literature, art, design, psychology and philosophy. It is over two
millennia old as a concept, and its development pre-dates the emergence of
disciplines. While similarly enduring concepts have also been tackled by a breadth
of disciplines such as philosophy, art and literature, melancholy alone extends
across the spectrum of arts and sciences, with significant discourses in fields like
psychiatry, as much as in art. (Bowring 2008, 14).
4
For this topical shift in perception and codification of melancholy, see: Flatley
(2008, 39ff.)

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successively reclaimed by almost every poststructuralist theoretical trend:

Lacanian, deconstructive, feminist and queer in primis, more recently by
trauma and holocaust studies5, and by the field of the postcolonial.
Julia Kristeva, adopting in her Black Sun the famous oxymoron coined
by Nerval (Soleil noir), conjugated the whole Freudian train of thought
with Lacan and his linguistic twist. For the French psychoanalyst cum
linguist, the primary loss became that of the maternal as she explained
that:
The child king becomes irredeemably sad before uttering his first words;
this is because he had been irrevocably, desperately separated from the
mother, a loss that causes him to try to find her again, along with other
objects of love, first in the imagination, then in words. (Kristeva 1989, 6)

Thus loss becomes invested by the foundational role of triggering

language and, overall, nothing less than human culture6. Loss becomes the
original field on which personality constructs itself: the loss of the mother
establishing itself as a site of repetition which will structure the whole
psychic life of the individual. When the normal elaboration of the original
bereavement is fulfilled, what makes such a triumph over sadness possible
is the ability of the self to identify no longer with the lost object but with a
third party: such an identification, which may be called phallic or
symbolic, insures the subjects entrance into the universe of signs and
creation. (Kristeva 1989, 23). But if, on the other hand, there is the
refusal to commit the original matricide, what ensues is the entrance of the
subject in the cone of shadow of the black sun7.
Marking a shift from the symbolic to the more historicised scene of
Western societies dominant institutions and practices, Judith Butler used
psychoanalysis to interrogate the working of cultural repression and linked
5

According to Schor (1996, 2ff) in her One Hundred Years of Melancholy,

melancholy has become such a popular keyword that a recent flood of criticism
focused on it has not been confined to any particular approach.
6
S. iek for example would go as far as to posit melancholy with its
disappointment with all positive, empirical objects, none of which can satisfy our
desire at the very core of the human philosophying attitude: melancholy ... is in
fact the beginning of philosophy. (iek 2001, 148).
7
For man and for woman the loss of the mother is a biological and psychic
necessity, the first step on the way to becoming autonomous. Matricide is our vital
necessity, the sine-qua-non condition of our individuation. But when matricide is
unaccomplished, the violence entailed in the act gets hindered and redirected
towards the self: the maternal object having been introjected, the depressive or
melancholic putting to death of the self is what follows (Kristeva 1989, 27-28).

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melancholy to those social and regulatory forms of power which both

determine and maim subjectivity8. Like Kristeva, she thought of melancholy as an uncompleted and then unresolved experience of grief but,
unlike Kristeva, she conceived of it as being mainly caused by societys
intolerance and not by peoples failure to break their maternal primary
bond.
Butler sees melancholy as a symptom of pre-emptive renunciation,
rather than an actual act of repression, envisioned mainly in terms of
foreclosure. She recognizes the foreclosure dispositive as particularly
active in those forms of desire which are unthinkable within the available
public discourse and which produces the ungrievability of a certain kind of
loss, in particular within the domain of homosexual attachment.
There are certain kinds of love that are held not to be love, loss that is held
not to be loss, that remain within this kind of unthinkable domain or in a
kind of ontologically shadowy domain; it's not real, it's not real love, it's
not real loss. (Bell 1999, 170)

For Butler heterosexuality with its normative apparatuses plays the role
of paradigmatic catalyst for melancholy(Maxwell 2002, 70); nonetheless
in a conversation with Vikki Bell, she applies her perspective of a
melancholia that's discursively given also to race; defining interracial
relationships in terms of a love foreclosed by discourse.
I think that there are cultural forms, culturally instituted forms of
melancholia. It's not a question of this ego not being able to love that
person it's rather what it means to have one's desire formed as it were
through cultural norms that dictate in part what will and will not be a
loveable object, what will and will not be a legitimate form of love. To the
extent that there are racial foreclosures on the production of the field of
love, I think that there is a culturally instituted melancholia because what
that would mean is that there is a class of persons whom I could never love
or for whom it would be unthinkable for me to love. (Bell 1999, 170)

Indeed a further useful understanding of melancholia, as possible focus

upon the question of the racialization of affects, had already been provided
by the notion formulated by Abraham and Torok of a trans-generational
form of repression. In another move towards the enlargement of the
8

Following Butler, a certain amount of melancholy is to be seen as the ground of

all subjectivities since the subject is not only formed in subordination to external
forms of power but subordination itself is considered the very subjects
continuing condition of possibility (Butler 1997, 8).

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181

traditional Freudian scenario about melancholia, they had produced the

distinction between the process of introjection and that of incorporation,
this latter intended as a very sort of entombement of a lost object which
could be passed down through blood lines, so that one could be in
possession of, or rather been possessed by, someone elses experience of
un-worked mourning9.
Elaborating on this, postcolonial critics have introduced a further
swing, enlarging the context for the trace of an incorporated un-mourned
loss to manifest itself from the private familial sphere to a historical, social
or even ideological context:
... we can consider how a shift from the private familial context for the
phantom10 to a public and ideological one may be useful for a discussion of
postcoloniality, and perhaps for nationalism more broadly. This involves
not only a shift from the medieval (feudal) familial framework to a
communal (nation-state) context, but also from a model of filiation to one
of affiliation; in this new model phantoms could be transmitted through an
artificial group rather than through a bloodline. (Khanna 2003, 256)

In other words this is to say that historical circumstances can shape

lives and destinies as powerfully as the familiar story through which the
single subjects emerge: along the most various pathways, sorrow may be
conveyed in time and space, from the past to the present, from one country
to another. Since the discourses of racial or ethnic identity became
practices and technologies of discrimination, the acquisition of an identity
that excluded one from the normal brought with it not only the loss of a
state-provided civil status but a definitely deeper sense of being lost, of
being left out of the human community in general. Fear, shame and
humiliation, suffocated rage, even if long passed, stay with the victims,
and difficult-to-mourn losses become a central feature of lives in which
melancholia, passing through generations, resurges to affect the deepest
nature and structure of subjectivity.
9

Whereas Freud didnt distinguish between introjection and incorporation N.

Abraham and M. Torok (1994, 125-138) drawing from Ferenczi, formulated the
notion of incorporation as the swallowing whole of something lost. The thing lost
and incorporated may be carried through generations and is liable to appear
through symptoms in language. It could manifest itself at particular historical
moments in which particular events may facilitate its coming back. Not
surprisingly Abraham and Toroks conceptualization has been used to deal with
literary figures such as the phantom, the ghost and the revenant.
10
Khanna uses the term as symptom of an unmourned loss, see previous note.

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Damaged identities. Loss and guilt

Franz Fanon was one of the first intellectuals to deal with the affective
byproducts of colonization inasmuch as it not only damaged the invaded
societys material culture, it traumatised both the coloniser and the
colonised at a psychological level, by dividing the members of
communities from one another and individuals from themselves.
(Maxwell 2002, 64). Thinking transgressively on the borders between
politics and the unconscious he evoked the colonial condition primarily in
terms of profound psychic unease, elaborating in his analysis the concept
of psychopathology of racialization. In his Black Skin White Masks, the
operation of curving the European existentialist and psychoanalytic trends
towards the condition of the Negro stemmed as much from his education
as from his atavistic deeply ingrained memory. When the Martinican
psychiatrist of African descent described the process of racial
identification as one in which the body was returned to the person
sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning his competence had
the quality of direct experience and unconscious ancestral knowledge.
What Fanon resented most was being condescended to and patronized:
To speak pidgin to a Negro makes him angry, there is no wish, no
intention to anger him. I grant this; but it is just this absence of wish, this
lack of interest, this indifference, the automatic manner of classifying him,
imprisoning him, primitivizing him, decivilizing him, that makes him
angry. (Fanon 1986, 32)

He compared the damaged identity of the negro to a psychological

island in the sea of white faces. Occupying the position of the colonial
subaltern, as Spivak (1999, passim) would explain in her analysis of the
epistemic violence coextensive with postcolonial reason, meant identifying
through language and culture and education and popular models with the
white side of humanity and consequently it also meant feeling upon
oneself, and seeing through that, the same dissecting and reifying gaze.
Self-denial and neurosis become the introjected effects of this loss of
the self, the loss of dignity deriving from the internalized sense of
inadequacy and reification mixed with that specific compound of rage and
shame that proves to be the connatural affect of discrimination.
Introducing the 1986 edition of Fanons text by Pluto Press, Homi
Bhabha states that for Fanon in his therapeutic practice and theoretical
inquiry: Remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection.
It is a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to
make sense of the trauma of the present. (Bhabha 1986, xxiii).

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183

The function of memory as painful re-membering of a dismembered

past is pivotal in two novels whose main characters through the
recollection of their ashamed and enraged youths evoke at the same time
the traumascapes of their ancestral past. These are The Enigma of Arrival,
the most autobiographical of V. S. Naipauls works and The Inheritance of
Loss by Kiran Desai. The two protagonists are in the first case the author,
in his not too much fictionalized narrator persona, and in the second novel
the character of the old and cantankerous retired judge Jemubhai Patel.
The two share a very similar existential pattern made of a whole primeval
arsenal of colonial and racial complexes whose resurfacing to the level of
lived emotion is triggered by their coming of age through voyage to the
colonial mother country. For the writer, this means a subsequent painful
quest to find a place and a creative condition in which to mitigate the
deeply felt impossibility of being ever at home. For the other, a lost soul
infected at the heart with an ineradicable sense of inadequacy, the
activities of forgetting and removing will be pursued with a tenacity as
strong and deliberate as destined to failure. The writer will spend all his
life seeking to reunite his split-self, whose symptoms are social
nervousness and timidity, a brooding, hypochondriac attitude, aloofness,
affective and misogynist backwardness. For the judge, life is spent in an
ongoing autistic ego-restriction, consolidating, in various forms of
haughtiness, contempt, sadism, unpleasantness, as well as self-loathing
and deep-rooted guilt, the internalization and epidermalization Fanonian
terms of his inferiority complex.
The Enigma of Arrival begins with the narrator almost hiding in the
English countryside:
There was no village to speak of. I was glad of that. I would have been
nervous to meet people. After all my time in England I still had that
nervousness, in a new place, the rawness of response, still felt myself to be
in the other mans country, felt my strangeness, my solitude. And every
excursion into a new part of the country was for me like a tearing at an
old scab. (Naipaul 2002, 6)

The old scab and scar date to the days of his first journey from the
colonial Antilles to the centre of Empire. Humiliation is the glue that
pieces together the mosaic of his damaged identity. Upon the ship for
example: when he is given a separate cabin of a higher class because of his
unexpected un-Englishness, and again during the night when another
passenger is brought to the same cabin:

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there was trouble. The man who had been brought in was making
trouble. He was rejecting the cabin. His voice was rising. He said. Its
because Im coloured youre putting me here with him. Colored! So he
was a Negro. So this was a little ghetto privilege I had been given.(Naipaul
2002, 136) I was ashamed that they had brought the Negro to my cabin.
I was ashamed that, with all my aspirations, and all that I had put into this
adventure, this was all that people saw in meso far from the way I thought
of myself, so far from what I wanted for myself. And it was shame, too,
that made me keep my eyes closed while they were in the cabin. (Naipaul
2002, 137)

The young immigrant so full of desires and dreams of literary glory

finds himself in the very same condition Fanon had so clearly denounced:
racialized, objectified, primitivized, imprisoned in the clichs of ethnicity:
he pretends to be sound asleep so as not to face, and be obliged to accept,
this reduced version of himself. A reduction which will nonetheless affect
his idea of himself, of his place in the world. The basic cluster of
symptoms developed by this diminution will be everlasting sadness, a
combination of incommunicable anguish and isolating grief: loneliness
and pretence. The bright boy who used to act for his teachers and parents
at home now begins to act for himself:
with the humiliations of my first twenty-four hours of travel, with my
increasing sense of solitude in this world, (not having a home audience
now, not having any audience at all) I felt a fraud; I felt pushed down
into a part of myself where I had never been. With the new silence of my
solitude I watched the two sides of myself separate and dwindle ...
(Naipaul 2002, 130)

On the outside the man of lettres, the writer pretending experience and
nonchalance; inside the insecure boy full of shame and resentment and
within this also the expatriate, the colonized, the indented labour...
To see the possibility, the certainty, of ruin ... was my temperament. this
mode of feeling went deeper, and was an ancestral inheritance, something
that came with the history that had made me: not only India, with its ideas
of a world outside mens control, but also the colonial plantations or
estates in Trinidad, to which my impoverished Indian ancestors had been
transported in the last century. (Naipaul 2002, 55)

A racialized genealogys echo resonates through the existential journey

of the writer who tries endlessly to achieve his pacified Arrival. But till the
end the Arrival seems to keep its enigmatic slippery and uncompleted nature
if still in the last section of this complex and sorrowful novel Naipauls
words are about a profound and ineradicable sense of melancholy:

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185

In my late thirties the dream of disappointment and exhaustion had been

the dream of the exploding head: the dream of a noise in my head so loud
and long that I felt with the brain that survived that the brain could not
survive; that this was death. Now, in my early fifties, after my illness I
began to be awakened by thoughts of death, the end of things; and
sometimes not even by thoughts so specific, not even by fear rational or
fantastic, but by a great melancholy. This melancholy penetrated my mind
while I slept; and then, when I awakened in response to its prompting, I
was so poisoned by it, ... that it took the best part of the day to shake it off.
(Naipaul 2002, 375)

Naipaul long-life malaise, with its symptomatic evolution, calls to

mind the process reconstructed by Giorgio Agamben when he describes
the ways in which the lost object survives within the melancholic ego:
Covering its object with the funereal trappings of mourning, melancholy
confers upon it the phantasmagorical reality of what is lost; but insofar as
such mourning is for an unobtainable object, the strategy of melancholy
opens a space for the existence of the unreal and marks out a scene in
which the ego may enter into relation with it and attempt an appropriation
such as no other possession could rival and no loss possibly threaten.
(Agamben 1993, 20)

The protagonist of The Enigma of Arrival incorporates the lost object

conferring upon it a phantasmatic reality which he is unable to get rid of,
varying only what Abraham and Torok referred to as the re-emerging of
symptoms through language. In other words the subject continually stages
a signifying practice recalling the primary loss and its incorporation. In
this novel, Naipaul tells the story of his migration as a young writer and
translates his deep soul disquiet into an existential script which sees
history, namely colonial history, and his personal story endlessly rewriting
each other. Still he is unable to avoid repetition, and the haunting feeling
of the impossibility, and compelling necessity, of re-vocalising the depth
of humiliation; what it means to be living a life which cannot but be
haunted by the atavistic spectres of shame and hollowness.
In 2006 Kiran Desai published The Inheritance of Loss. From the title
itself the reader is introduced into a very sad report about the heritage of
Empire and the afterlives of defeated surviving ex-colonials. Jemubai, a
judge whose whole life has been a tragic mimicry (Bhabha,1994), is a
minuteman along the lines suggested by Macaulay in his infamous 1835
Minute on Indian Education. The old official of the Indian Civil Service
hides in the Himalayan hills in an isolated now crumbling house built out
of an English fantasy, when the arrival of his orphaned granddaughter
forces him to revisit his past. He also has a damaged identity. When,

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almost against his will, he re-members his voyage from India to Britain the
repeated mantra sounds again of humiliation and shame, of humiliation
and solitude. In his recollection, like in that of the young Naipaul, we find
again: the noisy and boasting adieux staged by the enlarged families
Jemubhai looked at his father, a barely educated man venturing where he
should not be, and the love in Jemubhais heart mingled with pity, the pity
with shame.(Desai 2006, 50) ; the recommended, but unperformed,
rituals He didnt throw the coconut and he didnt cry. Never again
would he know love for a human being that wasnt adulterated by another,
contradictory emotion.(51) ; the same revealing smelling food mothers
hide in luggage; even the selfsame bananas11:
The cabinmates nose twitched at Jemus lump of pickle wrapped in a bundle
of puris; onion, green chilies, and salt in a twist of newspaper; a banana that
in the course of the journey had been slain by heat. No fruit dies so vile and
offensive a death as the banana, but it had been packed just in case. In case of
What? Jemu shouted silently to his mother. (Desai 2006, 51)

Jemubhai, who visits 22 houses before being accepted as a paying

guest, just because the 22nd landlady is afraid of not being able to find
another lodger, learns gradually to recognize himself as the source not
only of distrust and prejudice but even of physical embarrassment,
absorbing day after day the idea of his own corporeal repulsiveness.
He retreated into a solitude that grew in weight day by day. The solitude
became a habit, the habit became the man, and it crushed him into a
shadow. He began to wash obsessively, concerned he would be accused of
smelling he would never be seen without socks and shoes and would
prefer shadow to light, faded days to sunny, for he was suspicious that
sunlight might reveal him, in his hideousness, all too clearly. Eventually
he felt barely human at all. (Desai 2006, 54-5)

Jemubais condition of self-devaluation and self-despise punctually

summons up Freudian description of melancholias distinguishing mental
features:
... a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world,
loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the
self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches
and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment.
(Freud 1963, 244)
11

Rotten bananas figure also in Naipauls story (2002, 122-3).

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187

But as a stranger and melancholic outsider, Jemubai, also combines

Freudian symptomatology with Fanonians specific experience of the
introjected psychopathological effects of racialization:
I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my
ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my
blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms,
cannibalism, slave-ships (Fanon 1986, 112)

As the Martinican psychiatrist felt battered and objectified under the

gaze of the white child, Jemubai suffers the likewise reduction of his
identity to the scanty features drawn by atavism and primitivism; in the
end he will be nailed irrevocably down to his savage internalized avatar.
As a result, he will inevitably look for safety behind the shield of a white
mask, moulding his personality around the shape of the perfect mimic.
Snubbed and reviled he learns to snub and revile: when he is re-sent to his
country to Indianize the Civil Service, it is with a new capacity to exercise
power and discrimination upon friends and relatives. His wife, with her
cumbersome sticky stolid Indianness, is the perfect target of his enraged
revenge. He sees reflected and multiplied in her what he had learnt to feel
ashamed of in himself12.
Indeed Jemubai represents the superseded melancholic misanthropist
affected by the crisis of identity the Indian ruling class faced at the time of
the birth of the new independent nation. The judge is positively nostalgic
of his role in the colonial anglicized lite. His nostalgia for the good old
times of the Empire points at the fact that, however paradoxical it might
seem, the loss of Empire actually left a void that had to be mourned from
both sides of the colonial divide, and when and where this wasnt properly
done a melancholic mood got to contaminate the whole prospect.

Postimperial melancholy
In After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?, Paul Gilroy
examines the situation on the British side of the postcolonial rift, and
speaks about an anxious, melancholic atmosphere that has become part of
the cultural infrastructure of the nation. Defined in terms of: an
immovable counterpart to the nation-defining ramparts of the white cliffs
12

Humiliated, beaten, rejected and re-sent, when being with child, to her family,
the poor creature will catch fire by the stove and end her life, as so many rejected
Indian wives, in a terrible death by fire.

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of Dover (Gilroy 2004, 15), Gilroy describes an ambivalent mix of

dejection and neurotic hostility, selfpity and wretchedness which,
pervading the social scene, exhibits the pathological mark of melancholias
signature. A sort of morbid fixation on topics such as invasion,
contamination, loss of identity takes the shape of a widespread
despondency which refuses to acknowledge the existence of racist
violence and discrimination only to be startled with absolute surprise at the
extent of the anger and resentment that it can cause amongst those who
happen to suffer its bite:
... confusion and disorientation arise from a situation in which melancholic
Britain can quietly concede that it doesnt much like blacks, foreigners,
Muslims and other interlopers and wants to get rid of them, but then
becomes uncomfortable because it doesnt like the things it learns about
itself when it gives vent to feelings of hostility and hatred. (Gilroy 2004,
114)

In other words Gilroy defines Britains xenophobic responses to the

strangers in terms of guilt-ridden depression and un-worked mourning.
Post-imperial physiological mourning for the crumbling of the colonial
edifice, that is, began to turn to melancholia when the living ruins of the
fallen temple started to be swept across the borders towards the very core
of the imperial sacred area.
Gilroy speaks about the refusal to accept the simple fact that: The
immigrant is now here because Britain, Europe, was once out there
(Gilroy 2004, 110) and he connects Britains inability to mourn its loss of
empire to the rejection of responsibility for all its injustices and cruelties.
Once the history of the Empire became a source of discomfort, shame and
perplexity, its complexities and ambiguities were readily set aside. Rather
than work through those feelings, he maintains, that unsettling history was
diminished, denied, and then, if possible, actively forgotten (Gilroy 2004,
98; 102).
But the inability to answer for the past has now become the refusal to
accommodate its consequences. The inability to accept the active British
colonial role in unsettling economies and frontiers and setting peoples in
motion makes them feel that the deindustrialisation, the destruction of the
welfare state, and the general decline are somehow the responsibilities of
strangers and aliens, things for which immigrants are held to be
responsible while their marginal lives come to symbolise national
immiseration and loss of status.
Melancholia this is to say once again enters the contemporary
picture largely in terms of the symptomatic trace that tries to reveal the

Psychic Unease and Unconscious Critical Agency

189

causes of its own covert presence: the ex-colonisers find themselves

confronted for crimes and injustices which they refuse to be accountable
for, yet the effects of which continue to reverberate through and trouble
the present day. (Punter 2000, 64)
Nostalgia for imperial status and monoculturalism inside England,
together with the problems posed by illegal migrants, and the difficulties
to build a convivial culture in multiethnic society are the themes of the last
novel by Anglo-Bengali author Monica Ali. In the Kitchen is a sort of
state-of-the-nation novel. It has two main locations: the first is the
Victorian, once-splendid, Imperial hotel with its multi-national/
cultural/confessional kitchen crew; the second is an ex-industrial district
where the historical mills have been transformed into as many tourist
malls and shopping centres.
The Imperial is in some ways a post-imperial hotel which, like the
whole nation, is trying without much success to recover a sense of itself.
After the thriving decades of the first half of the 20th century it has
experienced a long decline and has now become a sort of low-paid hub for
refugees and illegal workers from all over the world. The kitchen in
particular, a place described as part prison, part lunatic asylum, part
community hall, represents the melting pot of deregulated contemporary
labour, harbouring immigrants whose back-stories are commonly
interlaced with the evils of war, rape, human trafficking and other horrors.
The story of very silent and detached Kono is just one among many of
corresponding dreadfulness:
Then one day Kono went on a raid, and they did the usual stuff, raping,
looting, killing. When they had finished this work, they relaxed for a while
in this village. Some of the boy soldiers began playing football, and Kono
went to join in. He saw that they were using a womans head for a ball.
Kono joined in the game. (Ali 2010, 157)

The globalised kitchen remains invisible to the affluent guests of the

hotel and famous restaurant, and largely invisible to the rest of the city, till
the discovery of a corpse in its basement brings it to the attention of the
press. As the story unravels around the wouldbe mystery, which is
nothing of the kind as the death of the porter will prove accidental It
was loneliness, certainly, that killed Yuri, (33) a damaged
consciousness and impaired personality of the victims of violence and
abuse emerge as the commonest features of its protagonists, as clandestine
and illegal migration is investigated also as a source of psychic alienation.
Among them there is the shadowy figure of Lena, a young East-European
girl connected with the death, who has been trafficked and forced to

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prostitute herself. Irremediably psychologically maimed, the helpless and

hopeless girl opposes passive resistance to any possible sentimental
interlocution or social rescue. The essence of her attitude is not to feel in
order not to suffer, not to love in order to avoid being betrayed and
exploited again and again as she is unable to leave the traumascape of a
past which continues to fashion her present. Following Maria Tumarkin,
traumascapes are to be considered much more than merely physical
settings of tragedies: they emerge as spaces, where events are
experienced and re-experienced across time. Full of visual and sensory
triggers, capable of eliciting a whole palette of emotions, traumascapes
catalyse and shape remembering and reliving of traumatic events.
(Tumarkin 2005, 12).
Opacity, indifference, distrust and disenchantment mark Lenas
devitalised existence. In her relationship with time we recognize the
attitude towards the future described by Kristeva: Melancholy persons
manifest strange memory: everything is gone by, they seem to say, but I
am faithful to those bygone days, I am nailed down to them, no revolution
is possible, there is no future(Kristeva 1989, 60). In depicting Lena and
her resistance to communication, Monica Ali restages a particular instance
of the loss of the maternal: the loss of the mother-country, the loss of the
mother-tongue are experienced and incorporated as betrayal and
abandonment and manifested as loss of the language of affectivity.
Whatever quality it was that breathed life into words was missing from
Lenas voice. (Ali 2010, 109) She joins the queue of so many narrative
portraits of female melancholic outsiders whose sense of emptiness
produces the effect of having nothing to feel and thus nothing to say. The
melancholic has nothing to talk about. Signifying sequences appear
violently arbitrary to a person in despair, a process that is coextensive with
a loss of reference, that is, with a loss in linguistic contextuality that is the
basis of the function of meaning. (Rao 2002, 27)
Beyond repair, Lenas life is blanketed in nihilism and meaninglessness,
lost amongst the flotsam and jetsam of post-imperial tide.
By contrast, in the North a village of ex-millworkers and weavers
represents the countrys crisis of heart in terms of nostalgia for clear-cut
cultural and social identities. A kind of elegiac lament for the loss of a
more cohesive community built around the mill takes the form of
resentment of immigrants, giving voice to working-class jingoism. Race,
migration, the dilution of national identity and the waning of community
are the topics dealt with in this section of this sort of new North and South
(Gaskellian) novel. In consonance with Gilroys analysis it seems that in
Alis northern plot both the appeal of the good-old-day cultural and ethnic

Psychic Unease and Unconscious Critical Agency

191

uniformity and the deeply felt diffidence towards postcolonial settlers

and hospitalityseeking people are the two sides of the same coin: a
melancholic inadequacy to elaborate the loss of standing and power and
above all to accept responsibility for the present, matching it with the past.
The picture of the nation that emerges is partly one which, having not yet
fully mourned the profound change in circumstances and moods that
followed the end of the Empire, is now having its difficulties in coping
with the shocks and anxieties arising from the consequential loss of a
coherent and distinctive cultural identity. As Gilroy maintains: Neither
the appeal of homogeneity nor the antipathy toward immigrants and
strangers who represent the involution of national culture can be separated
from that underlying hunger for reorientation. But Turning back in this
direction is also a turning away from the perceived dangers of pluralism
and from the irreversible fact of multiculture. (Gilroy 2004, 97)
Indeed in the novel the presumed idealized social solidarity of the
industrial past proves liable to betray the exploitative and repressive
character of a society which, when looked at more closely, reveals to have
something in common with the illegal employment practices of the hyperliberalist labour market of London. A labour market which, as shown by a
grim investigation of the illicit mechanisms supplying the citys
storekeepers with workers, is revealed in its most feral cruelty and at the
same time in its banal bureaucratic cynicism.
Do you knowyou can buy a national insurance number, you can buy a
passport, an identity, and also you can buy a story. If you think that your
own story is not strong enough, if you worry that your own suffering is not
sufficient to gain permission to stay in this country, you can buy a story
and take it with you to this government office in Croydon. Somali stories
can get a high price. I suppose, said Gabe, that everything is for sale.
(Ali 2010, 152)

In this novel Monica Ali seems to share other authors skepticism and
concerned pessimism about a postimperial globalization which is still very
far from the optimistic perspective of a realized hybridization understood
as the process which, whatever its local and temporary difficulties, will
nonetheless end up adding to the sum of positive social experience. And
she seems, in conclusion, to agree with what the character of a politician
gets in the end to admit, and that is that the whole country seems to have
been marketised: "We talk about the multicultural model but it's really
nothing more than laissez-faire. (Ali 2010, 364)

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On lost causes: failures of the postcolony and unconscious

critical agency
On the other side of the colonial divide, that of the postcolony,
melancholia has correspondingly come to constitute a sort of latent
undertone in many forms of postcolonial reflection. Indeed, it could be
said that since the inception of the disciplinary formation itself melancholy
has been thematized one way or another, making forlornness and
disillusion its pervasive, almost endemic, mood. It was not by chance then
that the category of the lost hopes received a special inspection by
Edward Said in his famous lecture On Lost Causes13. Commenting upon
disillusionment and failed dreams, this essay dealt with melancholia in a
number of different ways, the first and foremost of whom was the
reflection upon the failures of the independent nation-states to keep the
promises made to their peoples of social justice, political fairness,
distributed affluence and democracy on the eve of decolonization14.
In India, the postcolony par excellence, such promises were famously
pronounced in the most celebrated official speech of decolonization: Tryst
with Destiny, delivered by Jawaharlal Nehru to the Indian Constituent
Assembly in the occasion of India's birth as independent state. It has been
considered one of the greatest pieces of nationalist rhetoric of all time, not
only because it celebrated the triumphant culmination of the non-violent
Indian struggle against Imperialism but above all because it gave voice
and form to the hopes and the confidence of a whole newborn nation in its
future.

13
E. Said delivered his Tanner Lecture on the subject of Lost Causes in 1995
(published 2001). Increasingly interested in political and literary loss in the years
since he was diagnosed with leukemia, and in what Adorno, writing of Beethoven,
would refer to as the late style, Said combined in this essay personal affect with
political analysis, and the study of literary and musical genre and form.
14
In R. Khannas reflection this topic is elaborated in a most subtle way. She
maintains that formerly colonized nations keep a sort of secret at the very heart of
their State identity: that the concept of nation-statehood was constituted through
the colonial relation, and needs to be radically reshaped if it is to survive without
colonies, or without concealed (colonial) other. The specter of colonialism (and
indeed its counter- the specter of justice) thus hangs over the postcolonial
independent nation-state.(2003, 25) For the concealed colonial other I here
understand the subaltern social strata or specifically in India the backward castes
and the tribals.

Psychic Unease and Unconscious Critical Agency

193

That future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving so that we
might fulfil the pledges we have so often taken and the One we shall take
today. The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer. It
means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of
opportunity (Dadi Nani Foundation, 2012)15

Those words by Nehru have since been perused and verified in their
outcome many times. In A Fine Balance (1996), they are investigated as
under a particular cone of gloomy sadness. Rohinton Mistrys novel is a
deeply melancholic account of the lost hopes in the Indian process of
democratization and rescue from poverty and the evils of casteism. It
constitutes a sour denunciation of the betrayal on the part of the new state
towards its most frail citizens: constructed in the story as the lonely female,
the idealist, and the very poor. The novel is narrated from the perspective
of a group of losers: a widow, Dina Dalal, who strenuously, but
ineffectually (she will lose house and work), strives to preserve her
independence; a student, Maneck, who, following the calls of duty and
friendship, searches his way in the world but, overwhelmed by the sense of
injustice and futility, will in the end commit suicide; and the socially
dispossessed Om and Ishvar, two low-caste trespassers, tanners by
hereditary profession, who try to escape their destiny leaving their casteridden oppressive village to become tailors in a big city. Harassed by the
police as well as by criminals and high-caste old enemies, the two will be
abducted and sterilized against their will just before the marriage of the
youngest; they will end severely crippled and reduced to beggary.
One of the most violent acts of betrayal of the nationalist commitment
towards social justice and equality had been indeed to forcibly sterilize the
poorest sections of the population during the so-called Emergency in the
70s.
What to do, bhai, when educated people are behaving like savages. How
do you talk to them? When the ones in power have lost their reason, there
is no hope. (Mistry 1996, 535)

Mistrys realism results in an extreme denial of any form, not only of

residual hope, but of catharsis, too. No chance of mourning or of release is
conceded except for a meek trust in human solidarity amongst the victims.
Reiterated symbols, which interlope the hyper veristic narration, seem to
run bravely after a possibility of order and meaning only to point with
15
http://www.dadinani.com/capture-memories/read-contributions/major-eventspre-1950/139-nehrus-tryst-with-destiny-speech-text (Accessed October, 1).

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their own language at the same irredeemable failure. Connected with the
patchwork quilt Dina keeps sawing for years, and a chessboard, this
latter the reminder/remainder of the murder of Manecks best friend, killed
for his political activism , the sense of closure or moral rescue are denied
all along.
God is dead God is a giant quiltmaker. With an infinite variety of
designs. And the quilt is grown so big and confusing, the pattern is
impossible to see, the squares and diamonds and triangles dont fit well
together anymore, its all become meaningless. So He has abandoned it.
(Mistry 1996, 340)

The death of a God of order and meaning has not so much a

metaphysical innuendo as a very political one. It stands for the loss of trust
in post independent India. How, in Saids terms: something that had
began in hope and optimism had ended in the bitterness of disillusion and
disappointment. (Said 2001, 552)
Maneck was silent as they persevered to rescue the shreds of their
livelihood. Not all their skills with needle and thread could sew it together
again. (Mistry 1996, 440)

Adding to their transgenerational burden of fatalistic melancholia, Dina,

Om and Ishvar, the weak for gender and caste subjects, will somehow
accept and accommodate their respective cruel existential defeat with the
capacity for endurance typical of accustomed victims.
In idealist Maneck, the loss of the ideal, of his very intimate raison
dtre, can manifest neither as acceptance nor as rebellion, but only as
turned inward anger, whose critical thrust is to produce nothing less than
the traumatic undoing of both self and lost object.
There was no way out, it was checkmate for him. (Mistry 1996, 441)

His death will be a last desperate act of faithfulness to his lost causes,
duty and above all friendship; before throwing himself under a train:
Manecks last thought was that he still had Avinashs chessmen.(Mistry
1996, 612). At the same time, in his suicide, depression acquires the
strength of an act, however desperate, of denunciation. And this sets the
question about the possibility of a, however unconscious, critical power
connected to melancholy.
Indeed in Mistrys novel a sort of melancholic critical agency, even
though one spectrally manifested, seems to produce what Ranjana Khanna
defines as a form of nonrepresentational critique, one that cannot be
represented but nonetheless alerts to a different form of disenfranchised,

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195

subaltern call for justice (Khanna 2003, 21). This is to say that, although
melancholia is a disabling affect it is also true that implicitly it can provide
a sort of ethico-political gesture. Following Slavoj iek in his somewhat
sardonic preliminary considerations about faithfulness and melancholy, we
find him ready nonetheless to recognize that:
Against Freud, one should assert the conceptual and ethical primacy of
melancholy. In the process of the loss, there is always a remainder that
cannot be integrated through the work of mourning, and the ultimate
fidelity is the fidelity to this remainder. Mourning is a kind of betrayal, the
second killing of the (lost) object, while the melancholic subject remains
faithful to the lost object, refusing to renounce his or her attachment to it.
(iek 2000, 660)

In other words it could be said that melancholia is able to bring to

critique what had initiated by a refusal or an inability to assimilate, by an
act of incorporation of a lost object of attachment, a lost ideal. As Ranjana
Khanna more positively holds melancholia doesnt simply represent a
crippling attachment to a past that acts like a drain of energy on the present.
Rather, the melancholic's critical agency, and the peculiar temporality that
drags it back and forth at the same time, acts toward the future: towards an
understanding of colonial pasts, postcolonial presents, and utopian
futures. (Khanna 2003, 30)
This proposition which sees a possibility of resistance even in
depression and melancholia is, I think, particularly valid if conceived in
relation to narrative, not in terms of closure or catharsis but in terms at
least of re-membering and re-voicing. In other terms it is possible to
break free of melancholys paralyzing effects even while remaining
wedded to the space of protest that it symbolizes. (Maxwell 2002, 65)
As David Punter says: The literary can be defined as the major site on
which that crucial question Do you remember? is insistently
asked.(2000, 131). This is not to affirm the notion of a possible
recuperation, that somehow traumatized material can by mere processes of
introspection or self-expression be rearranged into a compensatory, or
redemptive moment. But as Jonathan Flatley maintains, melancholizing is
also something one does: longing for lost loves, brooding over absent
objects and changed environments, reflecting on unmet desires, and
lingering on events from the past. It is a practice that might, in fact,
produce its own kind of knowledge (Flatley 2008, 2). A knowledge
which may allow us to see the value of ones suffering also in the
perspective of the possible articulation of a critical agency, a melancholics
anguished attitude devoted, however indirectly, to the demolition of
conformity, and to the erosion of the stability of status quo.

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