Ten to Twelve Dead Brothers
Eugenie Brinkema
In central London, in the Wellcome Collection, in the Melanie Klein archives—which consist of 29 boxes ,1 folder, 1 o/s box, 9 microfilms, themselves sorted into sections for “Personal and Biographical,” “Case Material,” “Manuscripts,” “Notes,” “Controversy within the British Psycho-Analytical Society,” and “Family Papers”—file category PP/KLE/D.23- 27 is labeled “Notes for possible books or papers.” The first member in this group, PP/KLE.D.23, is “Notes for intended paper on memory 1958.” There, one finds a half-torn white sheet of paper titled re Memory, its suffix palimpsested into Memories by handwritten blue ink. It says, in its entirety: “Forgetting somebody is killing them in the unconscious. Therefore any painful situation or person forgotten is killed. In the Bible ‘his name shall be forgotten’ is one of the curses.” The cursive letters deep, again inked briskly by hand, hover improbably over the mechanically typed unconscious, as if the corrections of manuscripts might teach us something, as if to demonstrate how easy it is to forget a word, a name, how one continually has to reread by way of writing over, above, or through, what has already been written.
In Works of Love, Kierkegaard, like Barthes and Derrida after him, does not share a psychoanalyst’s worry over the sticky cathexis of melancholic loss. Rather, “[the loving memory] has to protect its freedom in remembering against that which would compel it to forget,” which is none other than the ongoingness of time. “It is so hopeless; it is such a thankless job,” the philosopher warns, “such a disheartening occupation to remember one who is dead! For one who is dead does not grow and thrive toward the future as does the child: one who is dead merely crumbles away more and more into certain ruin.” It is (also; therefore) the purest work of love, this thankless hopeless act of not forgetting.
In these notes for an intended paper, Klein tells the story of a female patient “C.” She has two siblings and has had a dream about the death of each one. In the first, she dreams of strangling her sister; in the second, of watching her brother drown: “He was dripping with water and absolutely white. Her sister and other people of the party wanted to reproach him for having been so long in the water, but the patient said one should not do so, it was obvious he had ‘gone to the very end.’ She felt he had been drowned and had come back from the dead.”
Our analyst goes to work. “The way in which I connected the two dreams was the death wishes against the rival brother who appeared when the patient was 18 months old, linking it with the strangling and hate of the sister which the patient had herself associated.” Death wishes against the future sibling when it was a mere swell of the mother’s stomach, death wishes against the mewling arrived thing, the resentment of that constant rival for maternal attention. (L. rivalis, Fr. rivus: a person who drinks from or utilizes the same brook as another; the motherlove stream: infinite, yet the world’s scarcest resource.) This slurry of anxiety, hatred, terror of neglect is intercut with a playmate’s joyous affection, all those shared languages and rooms, these ambivalent affects polymerizing into the patient’s guilt.
“Sibling” means blood though it also means feeling—Old English sibb: a big tent for relative, kin, relation, friendship, amity, happiness. (Sibleger, the law of kinship: a prohibited incest.) As in sibbian, to bring together, conciliate; as in sibbecoss, kiss of peace; as in sibsumnes, concord, reconciliation, onehood.
A sibling is a form: what is like but is not identical. It names a necessary affinity (a likeness) that presumes but does not guarantee an elective affinity (a liking for), a conscripted sharing of life brought together under the banner of love. So we probably could have predicted the complications. “The guilt particularly extended to her sister,” Klein continues, “because the patient remembered having worried about her when she was 11 or 12 years old because the sister was so depressed and that actually contributed to the patient being very maternal to this brother and sister, to whom the mother did not give enough time. It loaded her with an eternal obligation toward that sister’s trouble and that explained why when the trouble lessened the patient could experience the original hatred against a rival quite easily.” Only when the rival sister was healthy and well could C.’s uncomplicated hatred reemerge, brilliantly clear, indulgently unequivocal. “She has always, she remembers, even as a child been worried about her.”The simultaneity of a death wish toward C.’s sister, the sister’s illness, her vulnerability, the love and protectiveness it called out, its mimicry of motherhood on a different axis of time, its felt urgency of care—this is what “loaded her with an eternal obligation,” the obligation that makes the simultaneous death wish intolerable, the obligation that lays waste to straightforward feeling.
And what happens if the sibling’s trouble never lessens? Presumably, then, that eternal obligation goes on. Not in the nature of a load to lessen over time.
Ψ
Look, it’s not really a death wish, Freud insists. That would be a horrible thought, this little person with their sweaty curls and missing teeth, their shrieks of laughter and improbable stories about birds—how could the same child who invents lines to furrow their face, gently stroking their brother’s arm after he falls, how could they actually wish for his total annihilation?
Admittedly, it’s not great, having this other person around all the time, especially if you were here first. “Femininity,” the thirty-third lecture of the New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, makes the case well enough:
“But what the child grudges the unwanted intruder and rival is not only the suckling but all the other signs of maternal care. It feels that it has been dethroned, despoiled, prejudiced in its rights; it casts a jealous hatred upon the new baby and develops a grievance against the faithless mother. . . . We rarely form a correct idea of the strength of these jealous impulses, of the tenacity with which they persist and of the magnitude of their influence on later development. Especially as this jealousy is constantly receiving fresh nourishment in the later years of childhood and the whole shock is repeated with the birth of each new brother or sister. . . . A child’s demands for love are immoderate, they make exclusive claims and tolerate no sharing.”
Not only children. Confessions, book I, chapter 7, Augustine: “Vidi ego et expertus sum zelantem parvulum: nondum loquebatur et intuebatur pallidus amaro aspectu conlactaneum suum” [I have myself seen jealousy in a baby and know what it means. He was not old enough to talk, but, whenever he saw his foster-brother at the breast, he would grow pale with envy]. Raising this lacteous aside to the level of a concept, Lacan cites this sighting of the unweaned sibling in everything from The Family Complexes in 1938 to “Seminar XI” in 1964. For him, the “intrusion complex” will be linked to a range of terms related to specularity, including the mirror stage and the evil eye—hence the critical value of Augustine’s Vidi ego and amaro aspectu (bitter look). It is the sight of the other’s satisfaction, that rival whose form resembles but is not identical to the I that produces the furious rage.
“And what happens if the sibling’s trouble never lessens? Presumably, then, that eternal obligation goes on. Not in the nature of a load to lessen over time.”
Luce Irigaray will redescribe this problem in a beautiful formalism of number, writing in Speculum of the Other Woman that “when there is a repetition—not pure and simple, but with ‘plus one’ resulting from the operation—of a conception, of a birth, that is to say, in the enumeration of the tribe,” it devastates the child’s belief “in a monopoly on origin.” Of the mother, the father, the parents, the child imagines “a unique relation with her, with him, or with them. Yet, one, and one, and one . . . as many ones as you like—even as many one + one + one + one +. . .. —can never add up to, never give a count of, the relation at stake between children of the same mother, of the same father, of the same parents.”
Math for Irigaray, axes for others: the resolute verticality of the Oedipal diagram (parent to child; mother to son; father to daughter; above to below) runs the risk of a psychoanalysis that operates in indifference to, and at the expense of, a range of horizontal relations: brother to brother, sister to sister, brother to sister, sister to brother, those with whom we come into the world just before or just after, alongside but not immediately with—with but not easily, like but not identical to.
In the first pages of Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, the first-person pronoun occupies a frenzy of positions—self, sister, rival, killer, inflictor of pain, defender of innocence, grieving widow to her own younger brother whom she also dubs her child:
“I was afraid of myself, afraid of God. In the daylight I was less afraid, and death seemed less important. But it haunted me all the time. I wanted to kill—my elder brother, I wanted to kill him, to get the better of him for once, just once, and see him die. I wanted to do it to remove from my mother’s sight the object of her love, that son of hers, to punish her for loving him so much, so badly, and above all—as I told myself, too— to save my younger brother, my younger brother, my child, save him from the living life of that elder brother superimposed on his own, from that black veil over the light, from the law which was decreed and represented by the elder brother.”
Whether furious pronominal shape-shifting or Irigaray’s arithmetic of cruel accumulation, these grammars wishing harm toward the superfluous sibling, the despised analogy, the beloved rival but hated rival, generalize the sibling death wish. And yet, The Interpretation of Dreams qualifies that wish immediately after introducing its contours: “Perhaps some readers will now object,” Freud is quick to write,
“that the inimical impulses of children toward their brothers and sisters may perhaps be admitted, but how does the childish character arrive at such heights of wickedness as to desire the death of a rival or a stronger playmate, as though all misdeeds could be atoned for only by death? Those who speak in this fashion forget that the child’s idea of “being dead” has little but the word in common with our own. The child knows nothing of the horrors of decay, of shivering in the cold grave, of the terror of the infinite Nothing, the thought of which the adult, as all the myths of the hereafter testify, finds so intolerable. The fear of death is alien to the child; and so he plays with the horrid word, and threatens another child: “If you do that again, you will die, just like Francis died”; at which the poor mother shudders, unable perhaps to forget that the greater propotion of mortals do not survive beyond the years of childhood. Even at the age of eight, a child returning from a visit to a natural history museum may say to her mother: ‘Mamma, I do love you so; if you ever die, I am going to have you stuffed and set you up here in the room, so that I can always, always see you!’ So different from our own is the childish conception of being dead.”
My son, seven, asks if he can please have the dead cat because he has never been able to look inside an animal before. He insists that when a grandparent dies, they must not be buried until he has had a chance to cut them open and do the same. “Being dead means, for the child, who has been spared the sight of the suffering that precedes death, much the same as ‘being gone,’ and ceasing to annoy the survivors. The child does not distinguish the means by which this absence is brought about, whether by distance, or estrangement, or death. If, during the child’s prehistoric years, a nurse has been dismissed, and if his mother dies a little while later, the two experiences, as we discover by analysis, form links of a chain in his memory.”
Julius was born when Sigmund was seventeen months old. He died six months later of an intestinal infection. Freud wrote to Fliess decades later, in October 1897, “I greeted my one-year-younger brother (who died after a few months) with adverse wishes and genuine childhood jealousy; and ... his death left the germ of [self-] reproaches in me.”
It has been the women mostly who have insisted that this particular death, of this particular six-month-old, 165 years ago, stains psychoanalytic theory in ways that analysis does not address to this day. Joan Raphael-Leff: “The death of this baby (Julius) was probably the most significant emotional event in Freud’s entire life and remained encapsulated as an unprocessed wordless area of prehistoric deathly rivalry and identification.” Juliet Mitchell: “This unacknowledged dead brother can be said to have ‘possessed’ the theory of psychoanalysis, ever present in the accounts but completely unintegrated into the theory or practice.” There are more unsaids unacknowledged in the field: A year after Lacan’s birth, there appeared a brother, Raymond, who died of hepatitis two years later. Jung was born two years after his brother died after living for only five days to parents who had previously mourned two stillborn daughters, born to be the impossible replacement. Alfred Adler’s younger brother died when the future doctor was three years old: died in bed, died right next to him, died in their shared bed. &c. &c.
Foolish is the word I want to write to imagine an intellectual history that takes the measure of dead brothers, for it is the rarest sliver of only the most recent possible moment in human history and only in certain places and only for certain people that presumes that one will not be anteceded, postceded, surrounded by dead siblings, at least one, easily several. Foolish I want to write: ridiculous, of course, for what could be more ordinary, more to be expected in the course of the making of children, that the count won’t hold, that the ones who do persist will therefore necessarily be there to witness the count not hold. Foolish, too, though, I also want to write, to assimilate these distinct deaths to the general fact of death, to imagine that they did not leave their trace: the measurable diminuendo in a nursery newly down by one, closed doors and mothers gray-eyed, the small coffins, the extra visitors, muttered bitter meekened prayers. Would you even want the philosophy that was not at least a little bit altered by all this? Let us admit to the world of thought a bit of tilt under this weight.
What a phenomenal hedge, what balm Freud offers to his reader (his reader, himself): “The child knows nothing of the horrors of decay, of shivering in the cold grave, of the terror of the infinite Nothing, the thought of which the adult, as all the myths of the hereafter testify, finds so intolerable.” Freud’s brother, Julius, was named for Freud’s mother’s younger brother, and this is the brother who dies, aged twenty, one month before the infant dies. Freud’s mother was not a child. For Amalia, there was no imagining of death as merely not-to-be. She understood, as all eventually do, the listed horrors: the cold, the rot, the infinite nothingness. Freud tells us that the not-child will find this knowledge intolerable.
I am only and only ever will be interested in Freud’s mother during this period. The right hand steadying her toddler foal’s steps, the left arm bending from habit to cradle the missing infant—hips sore, breasts heavy, stomach soft, and the sternum in between left free for grief.
—We lose them, don’t we?
“It all causes probably the right amount of pain.”
We lose them in spots, brown or purple and sudden, on a small patch of fabric; we lose them at nine, on bikes, in cars, from an errant moment of galloping joy; we lose them in their forties, in their thirties, neck breaking, heart failing, on an ordinary May day, one year ago, fifteen years ago. Before they were baptized, before they could read. On the scan, at thirty-nine weeks. The ages of children when they are lost to their mother: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, what is the point of going on: it just goes on. We lose them crying out for us with their final breaths. We lose them quietly in sleep but when exactly we do not know the minute or the hour that not exactly knowing the aspect most ghastly. We lose them to their habits, their lovers, a virus, a tipping shelf, a small hard piece of melon. We lose a few to strangers, many to falls. We lose them to overheat, to our medicine, to poisons; we lose them to their own hands, to undetected arrhythmias, to war, tumors, asphyxia at birth, a seizure, a dare, to windows and measles, malaria, blankets, tree nuts, and bees. It is glassy and silent, more calm than it should be. They slip underwater. We lose them as we watch, we lose them because we were not watching. It all causes probably the right amount of pain.
Ψ
The dead brother who is an infant or a child is one thing; the dead brother who is an adult is another. This form of relation, who is like but is not identical, is not like every other form of relation, so goes the speculative adventure advanced by an Antigone who is not married (and never will be), who is not a mother (and never will be), and who insists she never would have violated the law of the state to bury her (hypothetical) husband or even her own (hypothetical) child, and who in fact chooses her dead brother over Haemon, future husband and future source of that future possible child.
Why? It is a question of repetition.
Her logic proceeds thusly: “My husband being dead, I could have another, and a child by another man if I had lost a child; but, as my mother and father are hidden in the house of Hades, no brother could ever be born again. Such was the law by which I singled you out for honour; but to Creon I seemed to be doing wrong in this and acting as a reckless criminal, my own brother.”
Antigone’s brother, that is, was at a certain moment exchangeable: when her parents were alive, still in the business of making new children, new rivals. But at some future point of time—the parents’ deaths standing in for the larger death of bloodline reproduction—there will and can be no new brothers. Polyneices is thus irreplaceable. Accordingly, unique debts are owed. Exceeding the vertical reaches of the frame, an enormous pointillated field resembling red and brown Ben-Day dots forms the black-hole/white-wall face of a young man. Salvador Dalí’s 1963 Portrait of My Dead Brother pulses in and out of representation, in and out of vitality: “the cherries represent the molecules, the dark cherries create the visage of my dead brother, the sun-lighted cherries the image of Salvador living.” Black bird wings create the hair, tiny outlined figures spill from the chin. A double picture, then, toggling between figuration and abstraction, but really a double double picture: of two Salvadors Dalí, the true son and the painter, his mere mimeograph.
“I experienced death before living life. . . . My brother died . . . three years before I was born. His death plunged my father and my mother into the depths of despair. . . . And in my mother’s belly, I already felt their [my parents’] anguish. My fetus swam in a hellish placenta. I felt deep inside the persistence of this presence—a kind of theft of affection. . . . This dead brother, whose ghost welcomed me . . . it is not by chance that he was named Salvador, like my father and like me. . . . I learned to live by filling up the gap of affection which was not really given to me.”
He inherits his parents’ suffering. I understand something of this leaping work of loss. When my brother dies I deflect possessives and describe it as: my parents buried their son who died one week after turning forty- three. My mother lost her son. My father lost his son. For two years now, when I speak of myself it is only to say: I had to watch my parents bury their child.
A few years before his suicide, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s brother cuts his image out from family photographs, excisions she converts to supplements in her book of material elegies, Ghost of, writing into and around these missing aspects. Where Dalí’s dead brother explodes outward into bits of color that overtake the ground and sky, spitting out light, spitting out the overwhelming reach of the dead brother, Nguyen fashions frames in a poetic libration, shaping her brother’s missing silhouette into a new form with words, loaning it custody, keeping watch over it as a particular missing shape.
The curious valuation of the figure of the brother over the figure of the husband or child is one of several perverted kinship diagrams in Sophocles’s play. As Judith Butler has it, “Antigone has already departed from kinship, herself the daughter of an incestuous bond, herself devoted to an impossible and death-bent incestuous love of her brother.” But as Klein’s patient C. demonstrates, there are many ways to depart from kinship: to take the depressed sister as one’s progeny, to playact motherhood for the broken sibling. (Duras: “My younger brother, my child.”) Antigone will love her brother to the furthest reaches of the law, to her own untimely self-brought grave. Klein’s patient will love her sister to the furthest reaches of an ambivalence that cannot reconcile rivalry and care, to her never-ending guilt.
“But here is my point: time does not work the same for us all.”
Polyneices recalls, like a citation in a text, the dead parents—he reinvigorates that loss, its irrevocability, a loss that all await with some resigned certainty. Joan Didion describes the deaths of her parents as producing “sadness, loneliness (the loneliness of the abandoned child of whatever age), regret for time gone by, for things unsaid. . . . I had been expecting (fearing, dreading, anticipating) those deaths all my life.” Polyneices, as the lateral temporal relation to Antigone, however—who loses, recall, his own life, to Eteocles, his own brother—is a death that time itself cannot expect, anticipate, or admit (what a lateral temporal relation is: our range of time being not of a radically different order—what it is to be like but not identical). When Polyneices dies, Antigone’s parents being dead, no new brother ever able to be born, something is irretrievably, irreversibly foreclosed. But here is my point: time does not work the same for us all. Even if Antigone’s mother had not yet departed for the house of Hades, even if she were still taking her daily walks, finishing the knitting, improbably in her seventh decade picking up sudoku, there still comes a point in the vespers of life where for her too, and forevermore, no son could ever be born again, no new brother could be made. In acting on behalf of the irreplaceability of this dead young man, Antigone usurps not only the particular law of Creon—loaded with eternal obligation, she acts on particular behalf of her mother. On behalf of her mother’s body and its finite relation to the time of possible things.
I have never been able to forget learning, when I was still young enough to find it poetic, that Sophocles—it is reported, or at least repeated—died by choking on a grape held in his mouth while trying to recite lines from his own Antigone without taking a single breath.
Her infant son, “his soft little tongue, always whitened in the center from milk, nudges out of his mouth in gentle anticipation, a turtle bobbing out of its shell.” Maggie Nelson watches him, she writes in The Argonauts. “I want to pause here, maybe forever, and hail the brief moment before I have to jump into action, before I must become the one who eliminates the inappropriate object, or, if I’m too late, who must harvest it from his mouth. You, reader, are alive today, reading this, because someone once adequately policed your mouth exploring.”
It is, of course, often, usually, the mother eternally hawkeyed for the bead, the coin, the cap, but one can as well imagine a patient sister trained on the risks of fingers out of sight, watching for signs of panic behind the eyes, the cheeks too full, the room tone that disappears when the body doesn’t take the expected next breath. One can, of course, as well, however, imagine the sister who hands over the grape.
Ψ
Catullus 101 is the better-known one, the ten-line elegy delivered in the Troad at the grave, addressing itself to the silent ashes of the poet’s brother, ending with the famous in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale: Forever brother, hail and farewell.
Catullus 101 is the one whose separate Latinate atoms structure Anne Carson’s Nox, her artbook epitaph for her dead brother Michael, the poem whose individual words are considered in the verso of each leaf in etymologies, definitions, commentaries, while the recto contains drawings, journal entries, fragments, family photographs, and meditations on the futility, fragility, and failure of the entire enterprise. [Recto]: “I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds. But death makes us stingy. There is nothing more to be expended on that, we think, he’s dead. Love cannot alter it. Words cannot add to it. No matter how I try to evoke the starry lad he was, it remains a plain, odd history. So I began to think about history.” [Recto]: “Catullus wrote poem 101 for his brother. . . . Nothing at all is known of the brother except his death. . . . I never arrived at the translation I would have liked to do of poem 101. But over the years of working at it, I came to think of translating as a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for the light switch. I guess it never ends. A brother never ends. I prowl him. He does not end.”
Dead brothers disturb the word. They disorder line and page, meter and type. Writing won’t get it quite right, though it will set to it. This is the labor of Robert Hass’s “August Notebook: A Death,” which begins
“1 . RIVER BICYCLE PEONY
I woke up thinking abouy
my brothr’s body.
that q That was my first bit of early
morning typing
so the first dignity, it turns out,
is to get the spelling right.
I woke up thinking about my
brother’s body.
Apparently it’s at the medical
examiner’s morgue.
I found myself wondering
whether he was naked”
[Recto] contains Carson’s never-ending translation of 101:
“Many the peoples many the oceans
I crossed—
I arrive at these poor, brother,
burials
so I could give you the last gift
owed to death
and talk (why?) with mute ash.
Now that Fortune tore you from
me, you
oh poor (wrongly) brother
(wrongly) taken from me,
now still anyway this—what a
distant mood of parents
handed down as the sad gift for
burials—
accept! soaked with tears of a
brother
and into forever, brother, farewell
and farewell.”
“Dead brothers disturb the word. They disorder line and page, meter and type. Writing won’t get it quite right, though it will set to it.”
But I confess, for all the intensity of this hailing and farewell, I am more partial to Catullus 65, which is sort of an elegy for the dead brother, but is also an epistle and also a frame text, mere setup for the subsequent poem—I like this infinite prelude. It also, in being basically an excuse for missing a deadline, has always struck me as almost distractingly modern. Constructed as a letter of apology to Hortensius Hortalus, it opens by insisting that the poet is so worn out and worn down, so sheerly exhausted by grief (Etsi me assiduo confectum cura dolore) that he will not be able to submit the promised material on time, that he cannot write the poetry that is due, “nor is my soul’s mind able to bring forth the sweet fruit of the Muses (so much does it waver amidst ills).” The opening lines describe a sharp and total withdrawal: cura (grief, trouble, sorrow, but also care) severs (sevocat) Catullus from aesthetic reverie. The poem then apostrophizes an address to the dead brother structured around the extremest adverbs of frequency—“Never shall I speak to thee, never hear thee tell of thy life, never shall I see thee again,” this never giving way to always, “surely I will always love you, always will I sing elegies made gloomy by your death.” Language admits no room for transformation, for change: we are in the terrain of absolutes. The first two-thirds of the poem, then, constitute a kind of brutal inferential argument: If grief has worn me down such that I can no longer write, and if grief is on the order of the always and forever, then I shall never, quite simply, get going again.
And then it makes a sudden swerve:
“—Yet amidst sorrows so deep, O Ortalus, I send you these verses recast from Battiades, lest by chance you should think that your words have slipped from my mind, entrusted to the wandering winds, as it was with that apple, sent as furtive love-token by the wooer, which leapt out from the virgin’s chaste bosom; for the hapless girl forgot she had placed it beneath her soft robe—when she starts at her mother’s approach, out it is shaken: and down it rolls headlong to the ground, while a tell-tale flush bears witness to the girl’s distress.”
Never and always are thereby supplanted with a small bit of writing, what amounts to one extended image (“as it was with that apple, sent as furtive love-token”) announcing the future delivery of the promised translations, which will comprise other poems, which will never take place within this one. Remembering to write requires a forgetting, but a provisional one, the time of the length of one simile. Catullus too is loaded with eternal obligations, but at least one of them is also to art.
If the last line of Catullus 101 honors supremely but relinquishes absolutely (farewell!), Catullus 65 does something more ambivalent: the dead brother is a life-troubling distraction, he is the delay of work, the blockage of inspiration, he needs to be neglected for new writing to happen, for deadlines to be met, but nor is he released by the poem: for a simile itself is what is like but is not identical to, and the poem thereby fashions a sibling in language to hold the brother, to have him nearby but also to delay him, to construct a place for the dead to wait while the young girl occupies herself with the drama of her approaching mother, the apple’s accidental unveiling, the lovers she imagines she will someday have, her secrets, her worries, the purple blush that stains her cheeks: her small act of forgetting: life tumbling away from her.