著者

宮永 隆一朗

出版者

日本アメリカ文学会

雑誌

アメリカ文学研究 (ISSN:03856100)

巻号頁・発行日

no.46, pp.33-49, 2010-03-31

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This essay examines the ideological and even libidinal investment in a child's innocence in Richard Powers's fourth novel Operation Wandering Soul (1993). Criticisms of Powers's novels have concentrated on their so-called "post-modernist" aesthetics and their political sensitivity, which might be regarded as a liberal humanist one. However, instead of following the common path of praising their politics without reserve, this essay demonstrates how his alleged humanism reflects the cultural obsession with the child's innocence in contemporary American society. Symptomatic of this cultural obsession is the recent heated debate on the "recovered memory syndrome." This epidemic discourse of the recovery of the memory of childhood sexual abuse articulates the problem of child molestation in the fixed triangulation of victimized child-monstrous pedophile-benevolent rescuer, or, "us." My argument follows James Kincaid's contention that such representation enables "us" to "produce and circulate the details of child molesting not only with impunity but with righteous fervor" (Kincaid 180). Published in the midst of the epidemic of "recovered memory" discourse, Soul incorporates and reflects this cultural enthusiasm for the innocent child. The text consists of three multi-layered narratives: the predominant realistic narrative of a relationship between the pediatrician Richard Kraft and the nurse Linda Espera; fragmentary narratives of "escaping children" interpolated into this; and the metafictional narrative of a novelist writing Kraft's narrative. Central to these narratives are repeated images of suffering children. The emphasis on their vulnerability and morality, which Kraft has failed to confront, is intended to evoke the readers' humanistic sympathy and responsibility towards them; hence the text closes by calling for the readers' intervention: "Someone donates their organs, all of them. You" (351). The text's humanist politics that have hitherto been praised, then, rely on the intense association of the images of the child with vulnerability and innocence. Such representation resonates with, and is symptomatic of, the ideological and libidinal investment in a child's innocence that has sustained the contemporary epidemic discourse of child molestation. Not surprisingly, Kraft's intimacy with the others is shadowed by the subtext of child/childhood sexual abuse. As the relationship with Kraft reminds Espera of the molestation she has suffered as a child, the emotional entanglement between them, and that between Kraft and his girl-patient Joy, is underpinned by a thorough unevenness of power; hence the line between their attachment to Kraft and the Stockholm syndrome, or the abductee's involuntary identification with the abductor, in sexual abuse is rather contingent. Moreover, Kraft's characterization itself obscures the boundary between pedophilic desire and "pure" affection towards children. Kraft is characterized by his misanthropy, which critics like Joseph Dewey have generalized as a "withdrawal" from reality. However, the fact that the rhetoric of his operation of Joy (273-4, 286) is explicitly sexualized seems to suggest that there lies behind his figure the subtext of pedophilia; in other words, that his misanthropy might be a symptom of his sexual orientation not towards adults but towards children. From the viewpoint of child/childhood sexual abuse, then, the text's ethics interconnected with its metafictional structure turns out to be problematic. The metanarrative of the novelist writing Kraft's narrative negates Kraft's "withdrawal" by relativizing him as a fictional character even within the framework of the text, in order to evoke the readers' responsibility. However, with the subtext of child sexual abuse in mind, this metafictional fabrication works to provide the readers, or "us," with dual pleasures: while bestowing a certain eroticism on the child, it allows "us" a moral, if hypocritical, pleasure in condemning the sexualization of the child. As I have observed so far, Powers's text not only incorporates the hegemonic discourse of the child's innocence in itself, it also unexpectedly exposes the way the interaction between the text and "us" the readers is founded on our own obsession with the child's innocence, or our "child-loving" ideology.