Anna Vitale's New Commentaries Series at Jacket2 Explores Authorship & Suicidal Fantasy

Anna Vitale graces us with a new Commentaries series at Jacket2, around the topic "Suicidal Fantasy and the Life of the Author." Vitale explains the premise: "In this series, I explore parts of texts, songs, films, and more where questions about authorship emerge in concert with suicidal fantasy. What do suicidal fantasies have to say to us about the life of the author? And what kind of political role do these suicidal fantasies imagine?" Her first column considers Sylvia Plath's first sentence of The Bell Jar: "Esther Greenwood, Plath’s narrator, tells us 'I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.' Esther’s inability to know — to know what she was doing and whether her life was worth it — is contextualized by the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg."

Later, Vitale makes connections to Jacqueline Rose's thoughts around fantasy. An excerpt:

Esther finds herself with two choices. She must be either completely separate or in total union with the Rosenbergs. “It had nothing to do with me,” she says, “but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.” This is a way of dominating. Esther feels alive imagining her death. This is what I think of as an obtuse suicidal fantasy. It suggests that the author, a budding Esther or Plath, finds herself in the midst of a dangerously stark binary: complete authority on the one hand and total vulnerability on the other. 

Like all fantasy, suicidal fantasy engages the unconscious, the stubbornly unseen aspects of our desire and history. Jacqueline Rose maintains, “Like blood, fantasy is thicker than water, all too solid [...].” Rose also makes clear that fantasy can shut us down. “If [fantasy] can be grounds for license and pleasure [...], it can just as well surface as fierce blockading protectiveness, walls up all around our inner and outer, psychic and historical, selves.”

Read on at Jacket2.