For Maggie, with so much gratitude
I’m going to start with humour, because I’m thinking through Magdalene Redekop’s Mothers and Other Clowns this week. I’m remembering my first reading of the book about Munro’s stories, in a course Maggie taught on Comedy and Canadian Fiction, possibly my last grad school course before I started my dissertation.
I had good friends in the class, and it was a summer course. The campus of the University of Toronto was sun-dappled and subdued, with most undergraduates having scattered for the season. I love summer courses, teaching them as well as taking them, because there is a holiday air of mild permissiveness.
I’m reminded of a probably apocryphal story a friend likes to quote, about Tolkien at Oxford looking down at the noisy, spirited undergraduates and muttering that they should be gotten rid of to improve the view. Or something to that effect. I’m terrible at repeating jokes and anecdotes, repeatedly missing the punch line (and think about that for a moment: the punch line). But that’s what U of T is like, or was like circa 1995 or 1996, in the summer months.
Maggie’s book is a droll romp of a brilliant scholarly analysis, just as her course was. She tugged us, gently, through Bergson and Freud and discussion of Rabelaisian bodily humour to a sustained, critical analysis of how Canadian authors including Munro incorporate jokes, comedy, and humour of all types into their work.
I would like to be working on something a bit lighter this morning, so when I finish this, I will turn to a long-delayed piece on humour and irony in mystery fiction. And first, I will re-read some of the choice bits in Maggie’s very funny book about a very serious topic.
But for now, let’s think about humour and violence, humour and death, humour and childhood sexual abuse. None of this is funny, but it’s all necessary.
Those of us who experienced childhood sexual abuse, often dubbed survivors, have a complicated relationship to public discourse about the topic. And here, I see I’ve already adopted the lofty academic “we” for some protection. Let me adjust: I/me. I have a complicated relationship to it.
I wrote a doctoral dissertation on trauma while not talking about childhood abuse to anyone except my therapist. It was the right decision at the time, for me personally, and given the context. We were some years into the backlash of women talking about abuse, which had produced the egregiously insincere “False Memory Syndrome” debate and foundation.
In an Intro to Sociology course I took the summer before I started my M.A., the professor (I’m longing to tell you his name, because I’m still aggrieved) decided to interrupt the flow of class one dull July morning. He told us about how awful it was that women were making up stories of childhood sexual abuse by their fathers, uncles, neighbours. A friend of his was going through this, he confided to our lecture hall of 200 startled undergrads, and it was agony. Just terrible. Nothing worse than being accused of sexual abuse decades later, by an adult daughter. Probably out of her mind. Or on drugs. Or wanting money.
Well.
I raised my hand. I pulled out facts, statistics, and quotations. I cited Judith Herman, recently published, and The Courage to Heal. And I upbraided him for inserting irrelevant, and inaccurate, material into a lecture purportedly about group dynamics and social hierarchies.
He was not happy. He did some research and came back to the next class armed with his own statistics, and some spurious studies I couldn’t be bothered to shoot down. The studies of traumatic memory, by a celebrated psychologist, had demonstrated that you could persuade people of a “memory” with stories. These are, to my mind, in line with psych’s long and troubling history of studies of coercion and obedience to authority; they’re not really about memory at all.
This time I stood up and left the class, mid-spiel, and headed straight to his Chair’s office. My 23-year-old self had her moments.
I informed the Chair that our professor was deviating from the syllabus and failing to teach 1st year sociology. I requested an intervention.
The Chair told me about academic freedom, which meant that the prof could discuss any nonsense he personally felt like bringing up during the class sessions we were all paying for. He probably phrased it differently, but that was my take-away.
And then I gave up on the idea that my own experience, personal or academic, of childhood sexual abuse had any place in a U of T classroom.
Depression followed. The first months of my M.A., also at U of T, were a fog of anxiety and insomnia.
But things got better because of my feminist professors, and as always, Heather Murray’s course was a haven. I effectively majored in “English and Heather Murray’s classes” in undergrad.
I started figuring out how to draft a dissertation prospectus, on women and feminism in the 18th century. Conduct literature, specifically, and early epistolary and gothic novels.
Not a hint of sexual abuse, there. Except maybe in Radcliffe. And, oh, actually there were lots of hints, and some more explicit.
But during my first year of doctoral studies, I . . . drifted. Back into depression, insomnia, et al. And then rescued, and yet once more, through feminist scholarship and–oh frabjous day–U of T’s decision to sustain a position in the counseling services for a sexual assault counselor, Patti McGillicuddy. I’d started seeing her as an undergrad, and saw her on and off for a few years as I wrote my thesis. I took her court-support training, and accompanied women testifying against assailants to their court dates. I learned trauma-informed counseling and teaching strategies, years before this was au courant in the academy. Thank you, Patti.
And I decided to write a dissertation on 20th-century women writers and trauma, and never talk about trauma in any personal way. Not in the classroom, or at crowded grad student pubs, where most of my colleagues misheard my focus as drama. Not with my family, where we’d only once, when I was in my late teens and hospitalized after a truly inept suicide attempt, been confronted with medical professionals requesting we talk about my childhood abuse.
Let’s jump back to my title for a moment, shall we? I need a breather.
I have an elderly mother-in-law who is very dear to me, but who doesn’t love my tendency to talk about the darker side of life. Some years ago I gave her and my father-in-law, a sociology professor at York and a person who exuded kindness and care, Roz Chast’s wonderful graphic memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? It’s a must-read, if you have aging parents who don’t want to discuss their long-term plans.
In my family–former spouse, adult child–“Can’t we talk about something more pleasant” is our short-hand joke to sum up my own tendency, at nearly every occasion, to plunge into the most intimate and painful of discussions because I prefer that to silence. But I don’t always choose my timing in a manner that works for everyone. I am learning, as I am with my current Munro work, that we all have our own schedules for when we are ready for particular conversations.
What’s challenging for me at home, at work, with friends, and in the world more generally is that my somewhat hard-won ability to talk about trauma, which comes out of early interdictions not to talk about it, is not fully shared. In fact there’s now a wretched phrase, “trauma dumping”, for those of us who think silence about abuse is more harmful than speech.
Picture a trauma dump. I’m seeing “keep out” and “toxic waste” signs on a heap of refuse. But this is also, I think, Yeats’s rag and bone shop of the heart. And it’s certainly mine.
So for the coming months, I’m going to plan some delightful events and outings. I’m going to relish the snow and rain and sun, eat chocolate croissants in Vancouver, learn to make them because laminating remains a baking mystery to me, and hang out with my people.
But I’m also diving into the wreck, because (thank you, Adrienne Rich) there’s some excavation of Munro, trauma, and childhood abuse that I need to do.
I didn’t work on Munro in my dissertation, incidentally. At that time in my life, I loathed her work. I found it narrow and self-centred, while the historical novels by Joy Kogawa, Nora Okja Keller, Edwidge Danticat, and other women writers were about the world.
It’s taken me a very long time to recognize and appreciate that Munro was writing about the world, too. And part of that world is, as she insistently points out and as I’ve assessed in my own work on Munro, the story of the abuse of girls and women.
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 