Promises, Promises

Promises, Promises summary: Through a series of essays based around book reviews, puns, jokes, close readings and case studies, Phillips both posits a similitude between psychoanalysis and literature, and also complicates that conjunction.

Passage for close-reading: “Anyone, in other words, who prefers not to, once, very definitely, preferred to—and it got them into trouble. And it is this trouble that we always end up talking about, and they often don't” (295).

This passage serves as the literal last words of the essay, “On Eating, and Preferring Not To,” which itself appears quite late in Phillips' text. The essay as a whole has been musing on the connections between appetite and desire, and between the text, the case study, and the meal, through the apparatus of reading, side-by-side, Melville's tale “Bartleby the Scrivener” and the truncated tale of Chloe, Phillips' own anorexic patient. Chloe, in the narrative Phillips grants her, never quite gets her appetite back, but, in her only enlightening session, incites Phillips to think about what it means for him to have or lack an appetite, or for anyone to have one at all. In the paragraphs immediately preceding this passage, Phillips guesses that the anorexic's distorted appetite arises out of a wish to maintain a stridently pure hunger, the result of a trauma that forces the person, belatedly, “to restore the viability of appetite” (294). In the same sense that a traumatic occurrence might be unconsciously transformed into an expression of sexual fantasy, Phillips posits that an eating disorder is a similar form of self-cure in which the trauma has been “appetized” rather than sexualized. From this clinical setting, the last sentences of the last paragraph veer back towards Bartleby and the essay's opening, echoing the story's famously repeated line as well as, in the very seeming banality of its prose, complicates the relation between analyst and analysand, between desire and trouble, between text and food.

Although the essay revolves around the ways in which Bartleby might be read as a metaphorically anorexic subject through his apparently desirous refusal, the specificity of the connection between refusing food and refusing words remains to be filled in. Rather than putting the two stories in conversation, Phillips' essay revolves around parallel close readings of each, suggesting the reader construct the logical leap that seems to take for granted that Bartleby's lack of appetite is akin to Chloe's, with only the existence of each participant's leaden silence and the food metaphors surrounding Bartleby as evidence. If Chloe's problem, for her analyst and her parents, although not apparently for her, was a failure to eat, then Bartleby's parallel problem is an anorexic failure to write. Or rather, a binging cycle of writing followed by long abstinence and eventual hospitalization. In either case, the value of the comparison lies not in the thing rejected, but in the rejection itself and perhaps even more so in the recalcitrance and resilience with which that rejection is voiced. Despite the genteel conditional of “I would prefer not to,” or the patient quietude with which Chloe puts up with Phillips' attempts to cure her, each refuses to submit their bodies to processes that would, at least potentially, detract from the purity of desire. Although both food and text are prime candidates for consumption and ideally introjection, Chloe and Bartleby are united in the intensity of their appetite which values deferral over possession.

If the meaning of the essay as a whole is constructed in the gap of the unelaborated connection between Bartleby and Chloe, the sentence itself is similarly constructed around the importance of division. The first sentence in the passage in question is broken up by a plethora of commas into a series of tiny, fragmented phrases, of thoughts broken into bite-size pieces. Within the first half of the first sentence, no phrase is over four words long, with the subject consisting only of a pronoun, and another phrase consisting only of the adverb “once.” After this appetizer, the sentence shoots off in another direction, rhythmically and temporally, by the division of a dash. The dash is an insouciant, mobile mark of punctuation, symbol of casual, quickly shifting, evanescent thoughts. This dash suggests a choppy flow that comes to a full stop, a slicing-up of text into bite-size pieces in order to more readily consume it that then pulls up sharply with a full stop at the threat or memory of trouble. After the dash, the first sentence resolves itself into an independent clause, albeit a colloquial and child-like one, connected to the fragmented main clause by a simple coordinating conjunction. The second sentence is then constructed on the same pattern of conjunction followed by independent clause, carrying over the word “trouble” as a remainder from the sentence before, and repeating the structure once again in the final clause of the sentence, and the essay. This repetitive, progressive system of clauses in the second sentence, along with the slowly increasing word length of the first, makes the two sentences together feel like a therapy, a slowly developing system of successive approximations of bite-sized clauses building up to the “proper meal” of the full sentence.

If this is a therapy, it remains to be asked who is being treated. If the subjects of the essay have been first Bartleby and then Chloe, the subject of this sentence shifts drifts towards generality. As a pronoun, “anyone” is both general and specific, in that the “one” suggests a particular and identifiable subject, while the “any” suggests an indefinite number of individuals who could fill that role. Here, the “anyone” implies that this is a process that affects or could affect all of us equally. The sentence above the ones in question tell us that people with eating disorders “appetize” trauma, parenthetically noting, as if it were unremarkable, that “all of us, to some extent” fit this category. We are all potential anorexics, but also, potentially, the opposite of anorexics in that we, like the analyst, are not hungry enough. The pronouns, then, shift into undecidability. Who is the “we” and who the “they”? It seems that the inclusive “we” would be psychoanalysts, or more widely, those whose appetites for reading and writing are unimpaired, who prefer to and don't get in trouble for it, while the exclusive “they” are the patients, the Chloes and Bartlebys, who flatly refuse more textual or alimentary stimulation. Yet the paragraph ahead says that analysts, and those who might identify more broadly with the therapeutic
“we” are not hungry enough, so that there arises a passionate, even saintly purity of the desire of these conscientious objectors. How would we become hungry enough, if not by going over to the side of those who prefer not to, and thereby finish the collapse of the distinction between pronouns of us and them?