Affection for Winnicott and Woolf
October 14, 2022
In sequential panels on page 200, Bechdel prods her preoccupied mother: “But don’t you think that if you write minutely and rigorously enough about your own life you can, you know, transcend your particular self?” Are You My Mother? is an exercise of this very notion, a catalog of life’s minutiae and an examination of its meaning as an accumulated body. Bechdel lays bare the specifics (to the extent that reconstruction allows) of her dreams, therapy sessions, intimate relations, etc. and in so doing, develops a richer understanding and acceptance of who she is, independent of her mother. The reader then co-opts Bechdel’s minute experiences, extrapolates further, synthesizes with their own. The essence of the book is endlessly malleable. Of particular intrigue to me then, are the sequences in which Bechdel positions herself as a reader. Her twin fascinations are Winnicott and Woolf. In passages centered on these figures, she for once allows herself to imagine or speculate rather than reconstruct. She was not privy to (e.g.) Winnicott’s extramarital triste, yet she applies her same aesthetic, intellectual, and emotional rigor to approximating what it might have been like; who Winnicott was and what he might have said. I find these imagined figments to be some of the most moving. They are products of Bechdel’s love and adoration, and more poignantly, somehow relieve her, temporarily, of her recursive neurosis, her doubt. She transcends herself.
(14 October 2022)
P.S.
This one approaches something good. A little more time in the oven and we’re pretty much there. (I don’t know where this snarky teacher’s assistant persona I’ve taken on is coming from. It’s fun. It’s insulation.) A few edits to ensure the last line works as a button. This one’s somewhat relevant. Reading Winnicott and Woolf changed Bechdel’s life. A person who reads Bechdel reads them by proxy and is impacted further. It’s a curious chain. Does Winnicott transcend his ugly feelings by reaching Bechdel? Does Bechdel transcend? Does the buck stop with her reader, unless that reader goes on to craft their own artwork that carries on the lineage? That’s some worthy material. Ben Lerner conceiving of The Topeka School as a genealogy of his own voice comes to mind now. With her incorporation of Winnicott and Woolf, Bechdel accomplishes something similar. Not the last entry to end with a note on transcendence…