Abstract
This chapter deals with personal, interpersonal, and familial dis/continuity, with how the autobiographical “hinge” (as Wittgenstein called it) can be broken. Obsessive-compulsive disorder presents here as a Wittgensteinian family resemblance of psychophysical stuttering and (like-minded cancerous) metastasizing form. The unhinging of belief in grounded definition(s) renders origin not so much false as merely isomorphic, with contested relationship. Anxiety is, in the sense of forms or creates, a pseudo-hinge. Hypnagogia and “paraphase” (Joseph McCarthy’s term) come between the self and the scenes it dreams (up) for itself not only in but also beside time. Leibniz’s principle of “sufficient reason” argues the possibility of being “otherwise” alongside Moore’s paradoxical construction of how the appearance of being otherwise is explicable by means of a shifting subject.
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Notes
- 1.
Judge Daniel Paul Schreber’s paranoid-schizophrenic Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) influenced both Freud and Jung.
- 2.
McElroy, Lookout Cartridge, 6.
- 3.
The nefarious husband in both films is also named “Tony.” Both want to dispose of their heiress wives and inherit their disposable incomes.
- 4.
Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §136, §166; Moyal-Sharrock, Understanding Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, 83, 91, and 92.
- 5.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was released in 1960, six years After Midnight Lace.
- 6.
A character says this to Mickey Sabbath, age sixty-four. Roth, Sabbath’s Theater , 17 and 81.
- 7.
The oil-burner man tells Billy Pilgrim, whose house is cold: “Mouse ate through a wire from the thermostat.” Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 171.
- 8.
McElroy, Lookout Cartridge, 4 and 425.
- 9.
McElroy, ibid., 59; Joseph McElroy, “Neural Neighborhoods and Other Concrete Abstracts” (1974), 8, DocSlide. https://documents.tips/documents/joseph-mcelroy-neural-neighborhoods.html.
- 10.
Joseph McElroy, Ancient History: A Paraphase (Ann Arbor: Dzanc Books, 2014), 114, 115, 236–37, and 252. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/solute.
- 11.
Spansion Flash Memory awaited the new millennium.
- 12.
I grew up believing that regularity was a goal of Jewish-American culture. The Jewish summer camp I attended posted a regularity chart on the wall of each bunk to make sure that each one of us was biologically processing the kosher food we were being fed properly as our parents would presumably want to know, whether they were kosher (which mine were) or not.
- 13.
McElroy, Lookout Cartridge , 512.
- 14.
Geraldine Chaplin, who plays both grown-up Ana and young Ana’s mother, played her own grandmother in Richard Attenborough’s biopic of her father, Chaplin (1992).
- 15.
McElroy, Lookout Cartridge, 194.
- 16.
McElroy, Ancient History, 227 and 228.
- 17.
Leibniz, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sufficient-reason/; G.W. Leibniz, The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, ed. H.G. Alexander (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 1956.
- 18.
Leibniz, “The Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason” (1714); G.W. Leibniz, “The Principle of Sufficient Reason and His Argument for the Existence of God.” http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil100/leibniz.html.
- 19.
McElroy, Ancient History, 187 and 225.
- 20.
Barney Hoskyns, Smalltown Talk (New York: Da Capo Press, 2016), 43.
- 21.
Ibid., 21; McElroy, The Letter Left to Me, 48.
- 22.
Ibid., 38. “Inside ‘Inside Llewyn Davis,’” documentary on the making of the film, directed by David Prior, Criterion Collection, 2013.
- 23.
The album Dylan recorded in Woodstock, John Wesley Harding (1967) was named after the celebrated Texas outlaw John Wesley Hardin, one of whose granddaughter’s sons was Tim Hardin, who took her maiden name as his own. http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/HARDING/2000-12/0978009103.
- 24.
Hoskyns, 6.
- 25.
Dylan’s 1974 album Planet Waves featured the Band as his backup musicians.
- 26.
Philip Roth, American Pastoral (New York: Viking, 1998), 98.
- 27.
“Autobiographical hinge” is Moyal-Sharrock’s term, Understanding Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, 124.
- 28.
Roth, American Pastoral, 101 and 103.
- 29.
Ibid., 144, 191, and 226.
- 30.
Ibid., 231 and 232; Wally Wood, “Flesh Garden!” in MAD Magazine 11 (May 1954). In one of my few youthful rebellious moments, I had The Mad Reader that ran this story confiscated from me in class by my sixth-grade teacher.
- 31.
Samuel Beckett, “Not I,” in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 379 and 382.
- 32.
Nathan Englander, “Reunion,” in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, 64.
- 33.
Legend and wishful thinking on the part of Russian émigrés said that Anastasia escaped her family’s murder by the Bolsheviks following the 1917 revolution. This has since been disproved. Anastasia was seventeen years old at the time of her murder, so the chronology is off even in the Zakharenko fantasy family history as Natalya was only born in 1938. Suzanne Finsted, Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001), 16–17 and 20.
- 34.
Ibid., 5, 12, and 19.
- 35.
Roth, American Pastoral, 117 and 146.
- 36.
Ibid., 138, 143, 149, 250, and 251.
- 37.
“A gruesome inner life of tyrannical obsessions, stifled conversations, unanswerable questions. Sleeplessness and self-castigation night after night. Enormous loneliness.” Roth, American Pastoral, 93 and 173.
- 38.
William Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold” (1888); Roth, American Pastoral, 206 and 231.
- 39.
Roth, American Pastoral, 167, 202, 253, and 272.
- 40.
Ibid., 37.
- 41.
Philip Roth, The Anatomy Lesson (New York: Vintage, 1996; orig. pub. 1983), 41.
- 42.
Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 215 and 388–89.
- 43.
In Hebrew, “Ben” means “son.”
- 44.
See Melvin Konner, The Jewish Body (New York: Schocken Books, 2009), ix; Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), 38–59.
- 45.
Allen no doubt had Strangers on a Train (1951) in mind when he made his protagonist a tennis pro. Hitchcock’s (and author Patricia Highsmith’s) Guy Haines rejects the wish-fulfillment fantasy presented to him by charming sociopath Bruno Anthony of swapping murders (Bruno’s father, Guy’s wife). Chris makes a bargain with himself to murder his mistress to “save” his marriage.
- 46.
Dirty Dancing (dir. Emile Ardolino, 1987).
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Golub, S. (2019). Generational Loss. In: A Philosophical Autofiction. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05612-4_5
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