Erotic Mourning and Post-Traumatic Sexual Desire (Critical Essay‪)‬

Ambivalence imperils survival's locomotion. Where the recuperative journey toward post-traumatic survival is literalized by the punctual achievement of narrative intelligibility, structural stasis or affective detours bewilder and derange peregrinations of healing. The well-documented "boom" of memoirs from the 1970s onward testifies to the parallel increase in conceptualizations of posttraumatic stress disorder and an archive of first-person survival narratives. The particular formal investment in linear progress that characterizes a typical first-person account makes the autobiographical register a provoking site for exploring how the teleological pursuit of meaning underwrites a rhetorical agenda of linguistic cohesion, psychic development, and therapeusis that, especially in stories of traumatized subjectivity, frames the reintegration of cohesive selfhood in temporal returns to psychic continuity. Psychiatrist Allan Young's research in linking evolving psychiatric categories with changing ideas of how memory functions and the pioneering work of literary theorist Cathy Caruth and psychoanalyst Dori Laub demonstrating the instrumentality of first-person narration to theories of cure has convened, through "trauma studies" and its appropriation by diverse academic fields, a fertile ground of interdisciplinary discourse and a singular heuristic for probing the interstitial relation between epistemologies of psychic development and genres of self-representation. Staging and disrupting conventional formulas of normative recovery while hyperbolically dramatizing contiguous spaces of incoherence, Dave Eggers's 2000 memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius contains an alternative logic of affectivity that locates possibilities for mourning in the ambivalent directionalities of post-traumatic sexual desire. Eggers's confessional autobiography chronicles the deaths of his parents within thirty-two days of each other, and the subsequent difficulties and adventures of raising his seven year-old brother Christopher (Toph). Narrated in melodramatic tonalities and self-mocking metafictionality (Smith and Watson, The Rumpled 5-6) that exploits strategically psychologized symptomatologies of victimhood, Eggers's stylistic extravagance foregrounds the text's ambiguous relation to structures of healing and the centrality of ambiguity in trying to heal. In the first account of affective and rhetorical ambivalence, Eggers is preparing to relocate from Chicago to California after having sold the house and buried both parents. Reflecting momentarily on the stockpile of surplus family belongings, Eggers's conflicting compulsions of attachment/detachment animate the stuttering shuttle between restorative anamnesis and purgative release: "I try not to think of the antiques--the mahogany bookshelf, scratches, or the circular end table with nicks in it, the needlepoint-covered chair with the cracked leg. I want to save everything and preserve all this but also want it all gone--can't decide what's more romantic, preservation or decay. Wouldn't it be something just to burn it all? Throw it all in the street? I know I offered to keep it, insisted on it, wanted Toph to be able to live among it all, be reminded--Maybe we could store it until we have a real house. Or sell it and start over" (122). Trafficking the transitional threshold between past and future, Eggers's incompatible impulses to "burn it all" and "live among it all" reenact the restless negotiation of post-traumatic "stuckness" (see Berlant). Confronted with trauma's irreparable conversion of the familial sanctum into a wastebasket of memorial detritus, a decaying archive of desire and meaning, Eggers' inability to "decide what's more romantic, preservation or decay" thematizes the paradoxical urge to manage emotional excess by dispensing unwanted, overflowing stuff. Mapped onto economies of waste and renewal, Eggers's desire to splurge, "burn," "throw," and "sell" the sentimental p