Abstract
Memory felled by the fever dream of a multitudinous reality comes to rest. Narrative’s split consciousness says it is the “everybody” that you are not like in all the names you give your thoughts and the one name you give yourself. Golub recreates the traditional family gathering at which fictional characters are seated who test the integrity of “us” and so of “I” in memory. Did ritualized identity trouble the very origins it proclaimed? Did these troublings reveal themselves in the form of Golub’s OCD rituals and cancer’s recurrence? The brokenness that life inflicts is here not a final undoing but a continually being undone, the redoing of being undone in different names, different voices, and different selves that are always the same self.
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Notes
- 1.
The framing of a somehow remembered, hoped for but ambiguous escape from a painful interiority recalls man-child Hedwig’s (one of a single mind’s multiple personalities in M. Night Shyamalan’s 2016 film Split) revealing to a captive girl that her hoped-for window of egress is only a child’s painted picture of a window on the wall of a window-less room in the labyrinthine prison beneath the Philadelphia Zoo.
- 2.
Johnny Rogan, Ray Davies: A Complicated Life (London: Vintage, 2016), 373.
- 3.
Philip Roth’s novel The Breast (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1994), 4, 38, 59, and 88.
- 4.
Nikolai Gogol, “The Nose” (1836).
- 5.
Roth, The Dying Animal, 44 and 77.
- 6.
- 7.
Ibid., In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Musgrave Ritual,” originally published in Strand Magazine in 1893, the location after generations of the concealed royal crown of Charles I results in the accidental entombment of the longtime Musgrave family butler Brunton who is attempting to steal it. I discuss this story in my book Infinity Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).
- 8.
They shot the college scenes for the historical romance The Way We Were (dir. Sydney Pollack, 1973) at Union, three years after I graduated. The movie showed what college was supposed to look like. Of course, in the movie Union was co-ed, which gave the star romance between Jewish Barbra Streisand’s and Gentile Robert Redford’s opposites-attract characters a place and a chance to begin. I am quoting part of the lyric to the film’s theme song written by Alan and Marilyn Bergman (music by Marvin Hamlisch).
- 9.
- 10.
Roth, The Dying Animal, 107.
- 11.
Roth attended Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, as did the David with whom I co-wrote a novel. Philip Roth, Indignation (New York: Vintage, 2009), 18. https://www.union.edu/offices/fraternity-sorority/.
- 12.
Roger Lewis, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (New York: Applause, 1997), 26, fn.
- 13.
Wieseltier, Kaddish, 47.
- 14.
- 15.
Kushner and Mamet, Five Cities of Refuge, 140.
- 16.
“Yod, hey, vav, and bey.” Ibid., 4 and 5.
- 17.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/amtrak-engineer-deadly-philly-derailment-made-human-error-article-1.2639665; http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/12/528206181/amtrak-engineer-charged-in-deadly-2015-philadelphia-train-crash; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Philadelphia_train_derailment.
- 18.
Amis, Time’s Arrow, 155.
- 19.
Englander, “The Tumblers,” in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, 27 and 28.
- 20.
American Splendor (dir. Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, 2003).
- 21.
Jacobson, Shylock Is My Name, 201.
- 22.
See Mickey’s (Woody Allen’s) imagined scene in which his doctor tells him his hearing loss in one ear is the result of terminal cancer before we get the “real-life” corrective scene in which the doctor tells Mickey there is nothing wrong with him in Hannah and Her Sisters (dir. Woody Allen, 1986). Jacobson, The Finkler Question, 148, 155, 169, 215, 244, 245, 254, and 288.
- 23.
Roth, Nemesis, 138 and 225.
- 24.
Ibid., 244, 267, 273, 275, and 280.
- 25.
“Jonathan Crane is the son of Dr. Gerald Crane, a biology teacher who, after being too afraid to save his wife from dying in a fire, began to murder people for their adrenaline glands in an effort to concoct a fear toxin he hoped would cure him of his fears. Testing an experimental version of the drug on his son Jonathan, the boy was rushed to the hospital after his father was shot dead by police, presumed by doctors to never be able to recover from his living nightmare.” http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Jonathan_Crane_(Gotham).
- 26.
Spider-Man (dir. Sam Raimi, 2002).
- 27.
Spider-Man 2 (dir. Sam Raimi, 2004). http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0316654/trivia?ref_=tt_trv_trv.
- 28.
Enacted by the Israeli Knesset (Parliament), July 5, 1950.
- 29.
Gilgul refers to reincarnation as described in Kabbalah or Jewish mysticism. Englander, “The Gilgul of Park Avenue,” in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, 109 and 110.
- 30.
Friedman, Stern, 117, 121, 124, and 125.
- 31.
Kushner and Mamet, Five Cities of Refuge, 5.
- 32.
“Lasting Elements on the Last Horizon,” a visual essay by Kevin B. Lee, an extra on the Cinema Guild DVD of the film.
- 33.
- 34.
“Interference phenomena are a well-known and crucial aspect of quantum mechanics…. There are situations, however, in which interference effects are artificially or spontaneously suppressed. The theory of decoherence is precisely the study of (spontaneous) interactions between a system and its environment that lead to such suppression of interference.” “The Role of Decoherence in Quantum Mechanics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-decoherence/.
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Golub, S. (2019). I’m Not Like Everybody Else. In: A Philosophical Autofiction. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05612-4_8
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