Boxwood grove as small room

In my chapter on Don DeLillo and Chang Rae Lee, I emphasize the small room as a site of masculine reinforcement, a site where gender hierarchies are ordered against the perceived disorder of postmodernity. I've written here, in the context of Roth's American Pastoral how the small room can be imbued with feminine energy as well; in Roth's work, Merry's terrorist cell becomes not, as it is for Oswald, a locus of masculine affirmation, but of a threatening, semiotic femininity, a femininity that utterly refuses patriarchy, within the designified realm of the counterculture's excesses.

Toni Morrison's Beloved contains yet another type of small room, one that indeed reinforces identity, but does so in the context of both the natural and the feminine. Lonely and isolated, pummeled by the "hurt of the world," Morrison's Denver takes refuges in a boxwood grove that functions as a room:

First a playroom (where the silence was softer), then a refuge (from her brothers' fright), soon the place became the point. In that bower, closed off from the hurt of the hurt world, Denver's imagination produced its own hunger and its own food, which she badly needed because loneliness wore her out. Wore her out. Veiled and protected by the live green walls, she felt ripe and clear, and salvation was as easy as a wish (35).

Morrison emphasizes the way the grove becomes a kind of Bachelardian anchor for Denver, keeping her identity intact in the face of the multiple forces that would destroy it, which would include the violent legacy of enslavement (which takes shape as her mother murdering her sister), as well as the rejection heaped on Denver and family by the community. So the grove, like the small room, serves to reinforce Denver against the storms raging around her. And yet, this room bears no connection to wider networks of power; Denver does not identify with imaginary women or men elsewhere.

Still, though, Morrison positions the grove as part of a wider state of dysfunction at work in post-murder, pre-reconciliation 124. In this sense, the grove serves both as a figure for isolation and an artificial differentiation from the enveloping domestic energies of the house. Moreover, Denver frames her subjectivity in terms of mystical forces, which offer something of the same kind of false-transcendence/connection proffered by conspiracy theory:

None of them knew the downright pleasure of enchantment, of not suspecting but knowing the things behind things. Her brothers had known, but it scared them. Grandma Baby knew, but it saddened her. None could appreciate the safety of ghost company. Even Sethe didn't love it. She just took it for granted--like a sudden change in the weather (45).

As it does for Oswald and others, "knowing the things behind things" offers a compensatory affirmation for Denver's character. Denver fills the void left by the loss of community and mother by both fleeing to small room and figuring herself as occupying a separate social realm from the rest of the community. Of course, Morrison is working in a much different tradition than DeLillo, Lee, or Roth, and yet I wonder what she's pointing toward with grove and ghost. What response to terror and paralysis is figured here? Might Morrison be pointing to a tendency toward mysticism and/or isolation in an African American context? This does beg the question of whether such rooms are too common to serve as tropes. And yet, they're each invested with a very particular energy which concerns individual and self.

The Psychologization of Everday Life

In a recent Critical Inquiry article, clinical psychologist Jan De Vos makes the case that "the pscyhologization of everyday life"--the widespread dissemination of psychology as a framework for interpreting--structures the understanding, critique, and solutions posed for Guantanamo and Abu Grahib. Rereading the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment and Milligram experiments, De Vos demonstrates how psychology itself served as the ultimate rationalizing fantasy for everyone involved in these experiments (Zimbardo explicitly recruited volunteers for a "psychological experiment"). If he's right that psychology itself is a widely applied function of biopolitics--that the belief that we are psychological creatures structures our submission to psychological discipline--then there's an uncanny reflexion between critics of Guantanamo and the torturers themselves; both see their efforts through a psychological framework, and both fantasize about their ability to view the Real of torture or human existence (Zimbardo claimed to have "laid bare" the human impulse to torture), even as what they really view is a product of psychology's own narrative fantasies. It's possible that this, too, is part of the disruptive work that Acker does in Empire of the Senseless and elsewhere: to lay bare the commonly circulating jouissances at work around torture and torture's observers.