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U n c a n n y S u b j e c t s
Uncanny Subjects
Aging in Contemporary Narrative

A m e l i a DeF a l c o

T h e O h i o S t a t e U n i v e r s i t y P r e ss • Co l u m b us
Copyright © 2010 by The Ohio State University.
All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

DeFalco, Amelia, 1978–
Uncanny subjects : aging in contemporary narrative / Amelia DeFalco.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8142-1113-7 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8142-9211-2 (cd-rom) 1. Old
age in literature. 2. Identity (Psychology) in old age. 3. Aging in literature. 4. Aging in
motion pictures. I. Title.
PN56.04D44 2010
809.'93354—dc22
2009037117

This book is available in the following editions:

Cloth (ISBN 978-0-8142-1113-7)
CD-ROM (ISBN 978-0-8142-9211-2)

Cover illustration: John W. Ford, Forgotten Space: Pink Wall and Trees. Archival Digital
Print, A/P, 8" x 16", 2008. Gallery Representation: transit gallery, Hamilton, Ontario,
Canada.

Cover design by Melissa Ryan

Text design by Juliet Williams
Type set in Adobe Sabon
Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992.

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 For R.H.
And for Irene
With love and gratitude
Co n t e n t s

Preface ix
Prefatory Note Defining Age xvii
Acknowledgments xix

Introduction Uncanny Subjects 1

Chapter 1 Backward Glances: Narrative Identity and Late-life Review 21
Chapter 2 Troubling Versions: Dementia and Identity 53
Chapter 3 Aging, Doubles, and the Mania of Dissemblance 95
Conclusion Uncanny Aging, Uncanny Selves 125

Works Cited 139

Index 151
P r e f a c e

I n the summer of 2005 I had dinner with my grandparents at a res-

taurant near their home in Utica, New York. The restaurant was chosen
because it was my grandmother’s favorite, or more precisely, it was the
only place outside her home where she would willingly eat a meal. Our
server, a woman I’d guess to be in her fifties, was friendly, in a somewhat
overbearing way. She took a self-conscious liking to my grandmother and
repeatedly commented on her looks and demeanor to the rest of us at the
table, including my grandfather and my parents. My grandmother had lost
most of her hearing and was beginning to have trouble with her memory
as a result of Alzheimer’s. Her strategy, devised over a decade ago when
her hearing began to fail, was to smile or even laugh gently when people
spoke to her, which we had to come to recognize as her response to inqui-
ries she could not hear. “Is it just her hearing or is anything else wrong
with her?” the server asked us at one point. And then later, in reference
to my grandmother’s long gray hair, which was pinned to the back of her
head with a great number of bobby pins, “most ladies cut and dye and curl
their hair into these big poufs, her long hair is so cute, she’s just so cute.”
My grandmother continued to smile.
This encounter, which occurred around the same time I was embark-
ing on this study of aging, proved instructive. The woman’s remarks had
much to say about the difference age makes. Her comments reflect the

ix
    •   P r e f a c e

kind of pathologization and objectification that culture inflicts on old age,

a pattern of othering that can at least partly explain the antipathy felt by
many at the prospect of being categorized as “old.” Such a category, as the
server’s comments illustrate, can render one invisible or entirely absent;
although present, my grandmother was transformed into the third person.
The aging, or here aged, subject is both objectified and exiled. The wom-
an’s observations reveal her efforts to read correctly the sign of difference
that sat before her. This study seeks to restore what this kind of quotidian
interaction erases—the presence of an older subject—and, more impor-
tantly, to investigate the repercussions of occupying the tenuous cultural
position of “old.”
Though old age may be a category that awaits everyone lucky enough
to live a long life, experiences of the difference of age vary immensely as
aging interacts with other cultural categories including race, class, ethnic-
ity, and, most dramatically, gender. As feminism has made clear, gender
is largely responsible for the formation of subjectivity, and one need only
glance at any representation within popular media, whether print, tele-
vision, or digital, to quickly recognize that aging is distinctly gendered.
Casually surveying the anti-aging discourse of magazines displayed at the
supermarket checkout, billboards, “makeover” reality-TV shows, and
other so-called women’s television programming, one might be tempted
to assume that aging is primarily a “woman’s issue.” Indeed, the server’s
comments touched only my grandmother, though my grandfather, who is
actually one year older, was also at the table. Her reference to my grand-
mother’s “cuteness” highlights the role of the “the body as the dominant
signifier of old age” and the infantilizing attention paid to “unusual” old
bodies (Woodward, Discontents 10). The server’s remarks draw atten-
tion to the either/or logic that forces an old person, or, more precisely, an
old woman, into a dilemma: conceal, modify, deny your old age and you
may be seen as ridiculous, even slightly shameful; wear your age without
adjustment and you are “cute”—innocuous and childish. And yet with-

. Herbert Blau draws attention to the rejection in western culture of bodily

adornments in old age, arguing that such attention to appearance points to the exis-
tence of desire in the old, a desire that the not-yet-old wish to deny (20). As well, Kath-
leen Woodward responds to the dilemma between the modification and acceptance of
old age in her treatment of cosmetic surgery, arguing that such procedures are meant
to resolve this dilemma through invisible correction: “With cosmetic surgery, the mask
of the aging body is doubled over. The surface of the body is cut and stretched to
disguise the surface of the body. Unlike the hysterical body whose surface is inscribed
with symptoms, the objective of the surgically youthful body is to speak nothing” (Dis-
contents 162). These issues of concealment and revelation, the visible and invisible, are
 P r e f a c e   •    xi  

out the concealment of cosmetics, dyes, clothing, even surgeries, without

appropriate adjustments in activity and behavior made to hide what the
not-yet-old, the not-yet-aged, largely interpret as a process of decline and
degeneration, the old female subject is rendered benign in other ways, in
this case through infantilization.
But I must complicate such a pat gender analysis with a caveat: my
grandmother’s disability was apparent at the time—the server was warned
of her hearing loss, and my grandmother often looked wary or confused. I
argue that the intertwining of pathologization and infantilization implied
by the woman’s comments, which were undoubtedly offered in a spirit of
friendly concern, reflects attitudes toward old age and disability as much
as gender. Anyone who has spent time in a later-life care facility knows
that pathologization, infantilization, and objectification are not reserved
for older women alone. In advanced age, men are often deemed “cute”
as well. I have no doubt that aging is always inflected by other categories
of difference, but my aim is to treat aging as its own difference, which
means considering both women and men as aging subjects. As a result,
discussions of gender have fluctuating prominence throughout my analy-
sis of aging, often implied in the background, and occasionally coming
into sharp focus, as in chapter 3. My interests lie in the meanings that
arise from the often disorienting and inevitable changes of age, as well as
how such changes are revised and rewritten by gender. Gender and age are
deeply entwined, but I argue that the difference enacted by old age some-
times outweighs the concerns of gender. Meeting a retired elderly profes-
sor and department chair at a party he attended with his daughter, I was
reminded of my grandmother’s enforced invisibility. The man’s daughter
explained how she is consistently relegated to the role of interpreter when
they are together, though her father suffers no cognitive disabilities. Strang-
ers often spoke of her father in the third person when he stood or sat right
beside her. Such interactions reveal how people in contemporary western
culture repeatedly interpret the bodily signs of advanced age as indicators
of reduced agency and comprehension.
Between the generation of the retired professor and my grandmother
and my own generation is a demographic anomaly. Because of the com-
bination of increased life expectancy and lower birth rates, the aging
baby boom has produced an unusually large segment of the population
approaching retirement and later life: “In 2001, one in every eight Ameri-
cans was over the age of 65; in 2030 one in four people will be over the age
of 65” (Mooney, Knox, and Schacht 277). Throughout the western world,

integral to the exploration of images and doubling presented in chapter 3.

xii    •   P r e f a c e

educational institutions, governmental bodies, and marketers are respond-

ing to the demographic phenomenon captured in the title of Kausler and
Kausler’s encyclopedia of aging: The Graying of America (2001), now in
its second edition. Of course the United States is not the only country with
an aging population; demographic shifts are happening all over the indus-
trialized world, as Laura Katz Olson points out in her introduction to The
Graying of the World: Who Will Care for the Frail Elderly? (1). The anx-
ious question of Olson’s title tellingly constructs older subjects as a feeble,
helpless population, a looming burden. The worried title underlines a cen-
tral feature of demographic analysis and projection: fear that an excessive
number of old people will produce a destructively imbalanced society. But
aging anxieties are not limited to a fear of old age as a faceless mass of
others. The popular media effectively capitalize on the public’s angst-rid-
den awareness of aging within, a frightening otherness that consumers are
encouraged to repress at all costs. As larger and larger market segments
recognize the specter of the “frail elderly” in their own futures and reflec-
tions, an anti-aging industry (products, services, and the companies who
promote them) has become increasingly powerful, not to mention lucra-
tive. The us/them division declared in a title such as Olson’s cannot hold:
the audience it addresses, the not-yet-old, not-yet-frail, can only deny and
objectify old age for so long before its familiarity becomes undeniable and
protective categories begin to crumble.
Nonetheless, many aging subjects struggle to delay the looming
“frailty” of later life in a variety of ways. As more and more consumers
age into old age, products and services emerge from the expanding anti-
aging industry with the ostensible goal of easing the “burden” of aging.
Recently in North America and the United Kingdom, numerous education
and research facilities have developed to study the increasingly pertinent
subject of human aging. Such institutes operate in Newcastle, Sheffield,
Oxford, and at the universities of Toronto, North Carolina, and Penn-
sylvania, to name just a few. In 1996 the Buck Institute, “the first inde-
pendent research facility in the country [United States] focused solely on
aging and age-related disease,” opened its doors in Novato, California
(“About the Institute”). The year 1993 saw the inception of the American
Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, or A4M, which proclaims “anti-aging
medicine . . . as the new health care paradigm” and offers “a solution to
alleviate some of the burden of this burgeoning older population” (“What
Is Anti-Aging Medicine?”). The aims of these institutions dovetail neatly
with popular media representational practices, in which aging functions
as a dangerous villain that must be battled at every opportunity, with the
 P r e f a c e   •    xiii  

various providers of anti-aging products and services promising effective

weapons of defense. As declared on the A4M Web site, “America is being
summoned to a new call to arms” (“What Is Anti-Aging Medicine?”).
Aging and its anxieties have also gained prominence in television
programming. In reality-TV shows such as Age of Love and Ten Years
Younger (with UK and U.S. versions), age produces the central conflict. In
the former, female contestants in their twenties (“kittens”) and their for-
ties (“cougars”) compete for the attention of an eligible bachelor. In Ten
Years Younger, contestants, who include a few token males, are judged by
strangers who guess their ages, setting the figure that specialists in hair,
makeup, and (in the UK version only) cosmetic surgery attempt to decrease
by ten years. All three shows have appeared within the past few years. It
seems age has become the new, trendy difference in reality television—such
shows have long capitalized on gender, race, and class—that can effectively
triangulate familiar gender binaries, as in Age of Love. Old age has long
been a subject of fear and trepidation, even disgust, but these anxieties are
taking on a new pitch in a time of rapidly aging populations. My project is
an attempt to address the imbalance between the preoccupation with age
in popular and scientific culture and the near invisibility of age as a cat-
egory of difference in humanities scholarship.
Contemporary social contexts provide multiple narratives of aging,
in various media, that rely on numeric boundaries to mitigate the anxi-
eties surrounding aging into old age. A case in point appears in a letter
from the editor of the newly launched Canadian edition of More maga-
zine, “Canada’s magazine celebrating women over 40” (Summer 2007).
In response to a sixty-nine-year-old reader who urged the magazine not to
“forget those of us who are over 60” (Taylor), the editor explained that
“our primary focus is communicating with women in their forties and fif-
ties,” though she implored the marginalized sixty-nine-year-old to “con-
tinue to read and enjoy More” (“Editor’s Note”). The magazine aimed
at older women makes efforts to exclude the old and thereby protect its
target audience from age by association. But in spite of all such efforts to
segment aging into discrete periods, and categories, we are all growing
older every moment, and this constant movement of time will eventually
undermine any attempt to fix age identity.
The movement of aging is the movement of our lives, and this dyna-
mism aligns aging with narrative: both are a function of time, of change, of

. For historical accounts of the marginalization of the elderly, see Achenbaum,

Beauvoir, Demos, Katz, Laslett, Mangum, Small.
xiv    •   P r e f a c e

one thing happening after another. Human lives follow a certain biological
narrative trajectory that moves from birth through maturity into adult-
hood and old age toward death. As a result, subjects understand their lives
through narrative trajectories—through stories—not necessarily as they
are living moment to moment, but in reflection, reflection that becomes,
many argue, more and more likely as one ages into old age (see, for exam-
ple, Butler; Woodward, “Telling Stories”). For these reasons, I found that
my study of aging quickly became an inquiry into narrative and its relation
to the construction and comprehension of selves.
The narrativity of aging inspired me to look to storytellers to better
understand the difference of age. I discovered that literature and film have
much to contribute to the discourse of aging identity and its various anxi-
eties. I have chosen to focus on fictional accounts of aging into old age
because life writing about aging has been theorized more frequently and
fully already, but also because I was interested in authors and filmmakers
as theorists of sorts; I looked to see how they imagined aging. As I read fic-
tion and watched films, I recognized a recurring depiction of aging into old
age as a disorienting process of self-estrangement, one that often shed light
on the strange nature of temporal identity. In short, these texts exposed
a version of what Freud called the “uncanny,” which I reconfigure as the
uncanniness of aging. My own theorization of difference and identity is a
response to a perceived thematic similitude within contemporary narratives
of aging. To that end, I have focused my discussion on a small number of
texts that have, each in its own way, taught me something specific about
the implications of uncanny aging in the late twentieth and early twenty-
first centuries, about the difficulty of reconciling the conflicting versions of
identity that culture offers its subjects. My own theorizing is an attempt to
better understand the implications of these narratives.
In addressing the uncanniness of aging I am not entirely alone. My
work builds on the pioneers of critical aging studies—in particular, Simone
de Beauvoir and Kathleen Woodward, both of whom address the strange
otherness of old age. In her brief but astute characterization of old age
as the “Other within” (320), Beauvoir evokes the dialectic of repression
and recognition that makes aging so disturbing and, I argue, uncanny.
My project engages theories of aging and identity posited in theory and
fiction. Beauvoir’s description of the vertiginous effect of aging is echoed
in fictional depictions of aging into old age as an unsettling discovery of
repressed strangeness, calling to mind Freud’s account of the uncanny as
“that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old
and long familiar” (340). His essay on the subject has often functioned as
 P r e f a c e   •    xv  

a primary text in discussions of literary instability and the inscrutability of

meaning (see, for example, Cixous, Kofman, Kristeva, Lydenberg, Royle,
Wolfreys). Though Freud’s essay is a formative influence on my theoriza-
tion of uncanny identity, my analysis is not strictly psychoanalytic; those
interested in such a reading should consult Kathleen Woodward’s fine book
Aging and Its Discontents. In my own treatment of aging, Freud’s essay
functions less as a primary text than as an enabling source of provoca-
tion, its multiplicity and open-endedness inciting forays into wider-ranging
concerns. My treatment of Freud’s essay departs from recent theorization
of the uncanny, which often analyzes and even dismantles the various sec-
tions of Freud’s text (see, in particular, Cixous, Lydenberg, Royle); instead,
Freud functions as one of many interpretive voices offering insight into the
strange otherness of aging.
This study remains an unusual one in the humanities. Despite shift-
ing demographics, age remains an undertheorized site of difference in cul-
tural studies. The most recent edition of Routledge’s The Cultural Studies
Reader makes no mention of age or aging in any of its eleven sections.
There are sections devoted to “Ethnicity and Multiculturalism” and “Sex-
uality and Gender,” but for all its attention to the “The New Cultural Poli-
tics of Difference,” to borrow from the title of Cornel West’s essay in the
collection, age remains invisible. Similarly, a 448-page reader on identity
recently published by Blackwell announces the noteworthy categories of
difference in its title: Identities: Race, Class, Gender and Nationality. In
their representation of the contemporary, anthologies of cultural studies
and of critical and literary theory repeatedly overlook the structuring force
of what Woodward calls “gerontophobia” (Discontents 193) in western
culture. But this oversight is limited to the cultural studies work done by
scholars in the humanities. Age analysis flourishes in the social sciences.
This project is an attempt to build bridges of understanding between these
disciplines, and to demonstrate why such interaction might be productive.
My perspective emerges from training in literature and cinema studies, and
consequently, this project has its roots in literary discourse. Because the
field of aging studies has been largely dominated by the social sciences, my
literary approach in itself fosters a kind of interdisciplinarity. To that end, I
have tried to function as a translator between these often discrete fields of
inquiry, to produce a book for a diverse audience, for any reader invested
in the theorization of identity. In her landmark study of aging, Woodward
remarks, “We repress the subject of aging. We relegate aging to others.
We do not recognize it in ourselves” (Woodward, Discontents 193). Here
Woodward is explaining the operations and effects of western culture’s
xvi    •   P r e f a c e

gerontophobia, but I think her remarks also effectively elaborate the criti-
cal invisibility of aging in humanities scholarship. This study of aging and
identity in fiction and film is a step toward reversing the critical repres-
sion of aging, an initial gesture toward revelation and understanding that I
hope will soon open into a wider field of study.
I conclude with a final anecdote, this one from the other end of the age
continuum. My own relative youth has led many to question my motives
for studying old age. “Aging?” my sister-in-law asked in an email, find-
ing such interests unlikely, even bizarre, in someone “so young.” This is a
common response to descriptions of my work, and I think the recurrence
of this question has much to say about the difference of aging. It is not
new for scholars of literature and film to explore issues outside their own
range of experience; indeed, one of fiction’s primary pleasures is its ability
to lead its readers and spectators beyond the familiar. And though one’s
own identity must often be reckoned with when one strays into territo-
ries of identity politics different from one’s own, there is some consensus
that studying the workings of misogyny or racism in a text teaches one
about categories of gender and race, about the function of difference. Cul-
tural critics have come to recognize that everyone is implicated; we are all
subjects of gender, race, sexuality. Yet aging remains somehow different,
somehow outside the realm of theories of identity, a different difference,
one might say. Denial allows “aging” to remain the concern of the “aged,”
despite the fact that we are all unavoidably implicated in discussions of
aging. Like everyone around me, including those who ask “why aging?,”
I am constantly aging and with luck I will become old. “Why aging?”—I
think perhaps the essential question is “why not aging?” Why do so few
identity theorists enter into these discussions? What is so unsettling about
aging, and what is so “different” about old age? It is questions such as
these that this study attempts to answer.
P r e f a t o r y No t e

Defining Age

y focus in Uncanny Subjects is primarily the condition of “old”

age, or more precisely, the experience of aging into old age. Of
course “old” is a highly relative term, largely dependent on perspective—
hence the common preference for the more transparently comparative term
“older.” However, governments and institutions frequently erect boundar-
ies based on age in their designation of “seniors” and appropriate, or even
mandatory, ages for retirement: typically, the age of sixty-five has been the
border used to distinguish between the old and the not-yet-old. I am not
so rigid in my categorization. My theorization depends on the relational-
ity of aging, examining fictional subjects who, regardless of actual age, are
forced to confront their status as “old.” Though many of my observations
and arguments regarding age and aging are relevant to the overall process
of aging, much of my analysis attends to “older” subjects, since, as I argue,
this exaggerated, culturally loaded experience of becoming and being
“old” can engender a new perspective on identity. Though the transitions
from childhood to adolescence and adolescence to adulthood are clearly
aspects of aging, the transition into the category of “old” compels older
subjects to consider aging as a process of culturally determined decline.

xvii
A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

F irst, I am grateful to Linda Hutcheon, whose encouragement and

support have made this book possible. From our earliest conversations
on the subject, she propelled me forward, inspiring and provoking my
research with her astute insights. I was fortunate to a have a number of
talented readers comment on earlier versions of the manuscript. In particu-
lar, Naomi Morgenstern, Magdalene Redekop, and Catharine Stimpson
offered insightful, challenging feedback, which has been enormously help-
ful. I also wish to acknowledge The Ohio State University Press’s anon-
ymous readers whose comments assisted me in my revisions. Thanks to
Maggie Diehl, Juliet Williams, and Jennifer Shoffey Forsythe for their care-
ful assembly of words and images. Sandy Crooms at The Ohio State Uni-
versity Press has been a most reassuring guide, ferrying the project through
the various stages of publication.
I was fortunate to have expert assistance when it came to the visual
aspects of the book. Terry Odette was invaluable for his skill with image
capture technology. As well, I am thankful to John Ford for allowing me
to use his beautiful, haunting artwork on the book’s cover.
For his seemingly inexhaustible encouragement I thank my spouse and
constant reader, Robert Hemmings. As patient listener, tireless cheerleader,
and sagacious challenger, he helped make both the process and the product
feel meaningful and worthwhile. I acknowledge him with deep gratitude
and affection.
xix
xx    •   A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

My family and friends have also contributed to the personal signifi-

cance of this project. In particular, I want to thank my grandmother, Irene
Stevens, whose immense kindness and generosity continued throughout
her struggles with Alzheimer’s disease. My efforts at interpreting the dev-
astating effects of this illness are the result of my own attachment to one
of its many victims. She is sorely missed. My parents and brothers have, as
always, nourished me as I worked with good food, good conversation, and
good humor. I thank them all for bolstering my spirits when my enthusi-
asm lagged.
I wish to acknowledge the journal Canadian Literature, where a
portion of chapter 1 appeared as “‘And then—’: Narrative Identity and
Uncanny Aging in The Stone Angel,” volume 198, Autumn 2008.
I n t r odu c t i o n

Uncanny Subjects

[T]he uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what
is known of old and long familiar.
—Freud, “The Uncanny” 340

T his study addresses age as an undertheorized sign of difference in the

humanities, a difference that contemporary narrative fiction and film
can help illuminate. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries are important
times for a reconsideration of aging into old age, given what is sometimes
anxiously referred to as the “graying” of North America. The unprece-
dented rise in older populations in recent years has increased the attention
paid to aging and the elderly across a variety of disciplines, including biol-
ogy, psychology, and sociology. In the United States anti-aging has become
a multibillion-dollar industry supported by the American Academy of
Anti-Aging Medicine. Efforts to combat the signs of aging have never
been stronger, or more lucrative; a cultural obsession with youth eclipses
a growing aging population, furthering the contradictory position of the
aging subject as culturally masked and erased, sequestered into institutions
for the aged, and, at the same time, visibly present and pathologized.
Within both popular and scientific discourses, aging has largely been
construed as a process of decline moving toward death. The discipline of

. Sociologist Stephen Katz provides an insightful inquiry into the repercussions of

the advent of gerontology in Disciplining Old Age: The Formation of Gerontological


    •   I n t r odu c t i o n

aging studies is largely a response to the oppressive negativity of cultural

constructions of aging into old age, working to expose the denigration of
aging, replacing myth with insight and evidence. Included among these
critics are the theorists Stephen Katz terms “critical gerontologists,” who
take issue with the “scientificity” of gerontology, and “advocate stronger
ties to the humanities, endorse reflexive methodologies, historicize ideolog-
ical attributes of old age, promote radical political engagement, and resig-
nify the aging process as heterogeneous and indeterminate” (4). In this
way branches of aging studies have often functioned much like other early
investigations into the issue of “difference”: like critics of racial, gendered,
ethnic, and sexual difference, critics in aging studies have been invested
in exposing aging and old age as a cultural construct, interrogating com-
monsense notions of age as entirely the result of biological processes, as
dominated by decline. Aging studies works to reveal how “the aging body
is never just a body subjected to the imperatives of cellular and organic
decline, for as it moves through life it is continuously being inscribed and
reinscribed with cultural meanings” (Featherstone and Wernick 2–3). As
a result there is a great deal of criticism that is recuperative, working to
dismantle, or at least interrogate, negative stereotypes and imagery sur-
rounding old age, to think beyond the “discourse of senescence” that Katz
identifies (40).
Because preoccupation with “the body as the dominant signifier of old
age” in traditional gerontology and popular culture continues to support
the association of old age with decline and death, many critics make great
efforts to present alternative views of old age that cast doubt on the inevi-
tability of decline, or at the very least, scrutinize the term “old age” and its

Knowledge. As he makes clear, the emergence of geriatrics and gerontology in the post-
war era as means of studying old age has contributed to conflicting discourses of aging
as simultaneously normal and pathological. In these fields, old age was studied primar-
ily as a time of life overdetermined by the body and its decline. Katz suggests the more
recent development of “critical gerontology” moves away from gerontology’s strict
focus on the body and its problems to consider in detail the many contexts of aging
(historical, social, economic) (Disciplining 3–4). Even prior to the emergence of geri-
atrics and gerontology, “medical research developed what we have called a discourse
of senescence: a new organization of associated ideas and practices that captured the
aged body” (40). Practitioners regarded the aged body as a particular entity, as a
legible system of signification that communicated its inner “states of disorder” (41).
Such inner “disorder” was reflected in what was perhaps the most definitive aspect of
the aging body, and by implication of the aging person: the aged body as dying (41).
This concept continues to influence contemporary estimations of aging and old age, in
both gerontological and popular discourses, obscuring the presence of the elderly with
anticipation of their future absence.
 U n c a n n y S u b j e c t s   •      

ideological sources. The work of Margaret Morganroth Gullette has been

invaluable in exposing the damaging, pervasive myth of age as inherently
and necessarily a process of decline. The very titles of her books invoke the
anti-ageist thrust of her argument: Safe at Last in the Middle Years, Declin-
ing to Decline, and Aged by Culture. Her interdisciplinary research shows
how everything from literature to museum displays to the fashion indus-
try enforces, and reinforces, “the dominance of decline narrative, early
nostalgia, age apprehensiveness, [the] slicing [of] life into mutually hos-
tile stages,” all of which represent “crimes against the life course” (Aged
by Culture 37). Clearly, the highly negative popular discourse of aging
is in need of critical dismantling, and texts such as Gullette’s are essential
for drawing attention to the ramifications of associating aging exclusively
with disintegration. Aging studies scholarship has been invaluable in open-
ing up the field of study, but much like early feminist criticism, the work
threatens to slip into a dualistic discourse of positive versus negative rep-
resentation. There is more to culture’s construction of the aging process
than competing narratives of progress or decline. Each of these evaluative
models can easily become a limiting script that erases particularities and
ambiguity, producing or reinforcing either/or diagnoses.
The literature and films examined throughout this study dismantle this
dichotomization through their continual reliance on contradiction and
ambiguity, on simultaneity, and on inconsistency. Fiction allows age to
work as both a category of difference and a particular, personal, imagined
experience. Moreover, narrative representations have much to offer the
theorization of aging and old age, since both narrative and aging rely on,
and reflect, the passage of time. The complex interrelation of narrative
studies and aging studies informs this project.
Despite ongoing attention to aging in the social sciences, aging con-

. Much of aging studies criticism works to correct this bias. Most prominent,
perhaps, has been the work of Simon Biggs, Mike Featherstone, Margaret Morganroth
Gullette, Mike Hepworth, Stephen Katz, and Kathleen Woodward.
. Gullette’s treatment of the “recovery novel” and museum displays appear in
Aged by Culture (2004), while her discussion of the fashion industry can be found in
her article “The Other End of the Fashion Cycle: Practicing Loss, Learning Decline,”
which appears in the anthology Figuring Age (1999).
. Early feminist film theory is a good example of this critical evolution. The
sociological “positive images” criticism of the early 1970s, particularly that of Mar-
jorie Rosen and Molly Haskell, sought to neatly categorize representations of women
as positive or negative. Increased attention to medium-specificity in the late seventies,
and the growing diversity of critical voices in the eighties, quickly overshadowed the
dualistic discourse of image assessment.
    •   I n t r odu c t i o n

tinues to be what Anne Wyatt-Brown calls “a missing category in current

literary theory” (Introduction 1). The late twentieth century proved to
scholars the necessity of considerations of difference in the study of litera-
ture and film, in particular, of the formative structural distinctions between
persons that produce us as subjects, namely distinctions of race and ethnic-
ity, gender and sexuality. Yet a degree of blindness to the influence of age,
or more particularly, of old age, on subjectivity remains. Although there
are many sociological studies of aging and culture, there are few attempts
to examine the ways cultural texts, literature and film, construct multiple
narratives of aging that intersect and sometimes conflict with existing criti-
cal theories of aging. This is what I address in Uncanny Subjects.

Aging and Identity

Old age renders its subjects both invisible and unmistakable; personhood
is often cast into doubt, even imagined as entirely erased, while the body
marked by age draws the eye and comment. The collision of hyperbolic
specularity—the old person as spectacle and specimen—and cultural
invisibility is a paradox that informs much of my study of aging. Older
subjects are often rejected by the young, but this rejection is not entirely
successful, and takes the form of disavowal rather than successful other-
ing. Disavowal, in Freudian terms, is denial that requires constant effort to
maintain, resulting in a paradoxically simultaneous awareness and igno-
rance. This simultaneous belief/nonbelief in one’s own participation in
aging toward old age results in a rejection of old age that is impossible for
the aging subject to maintain.

. See, for example, the work of Simon Biggs, Mike Featherstone, Margaret Mor-
ganroth Gullette, Haim Hazan, Mike Hepworth, Stephen Katz, Sharon Kaufman, and
Andrew Wernick.
. Describing the process of disavowal that precipitates the attachment to a fetish,
Freud writes that the patient “has retained that belief, but he has also given it up. In
the conflict between the weight of the unwelcome perception and the force of his coun-
ter-wish, a compromise has been reached, as is only possible under the dominance of
the unconscious laws of thought—the primary process” (“Fetishism” 353). In Freud’s
argument this concurrent belief/nonbelief results in a process of substitution, a psycho-
logical overinvestment that he terms “fetishism.” I cite Freud because disavowal, in this
general sense, is crucial to my concept of old age in contemporary culture. The specifics
of Freud’s argument—the fetish involves a woman’s possession of a phallus and subse-
quent castration—is part of his androcentric legacy, which I seek to destabilize in my
own gender analysis.
 U n c a n n y S u b j e c t s   •      

The disavowal of old age occurs for a number of reasons, all of which
rest on the problem of temporality, that is, on the endlessly shifting condi-
tion of age. Obviously age (youth, middle age, old age) is an inherently
unstable category. In some sense it does not exist since our age identity is
always in process. As Simone de Beauvoir explains in her own study of old
age, “life is an unstable system in which balance is continually lost and
continually recovered: it is inertia that is synonymous with death. Change
is the law of life” (17), and it is this constant transformation that gives the
concept of age its chimerical quality. It is endlessly slippery, dominated by
the ephemerality of time; to speak or write of age is to speak of the pre-
sent, the constantly receding “now.” Because of this obvious fact—aging
is a process, not a state—the discourse of aging is endlessly fraught. Until
death clicks the stopwatch, one is always aging; how is one to write of old
age if one can always be older? This status of age and old age as endlessly
shifting works in tandem with the universality of age to undermine efforts
to construct age as a category of difference. The tension between universal
mutability and the desire for fixed age identities is an important feature of
my study.
For many aging becomes a process of alienation, producing a doubling
of self that I examine in chapter 3. Joseph Esposito anticipates such a pro-
cess of estrangement in his appeal to aging as “a new identity crisis” that
is “not the crisis of youthful development in which we ask “What will I be
like when I am grown up?” but a crisis in which we wonder “Will I still be
myself when I have grown old?” (2). Simone de Beauvoir explores the idea
in psychoanalytic terms, suggesting that old age is an internalization of
difference, of the difference that the old subject comes to represent for the
outside world: “Within me it is the Other—that is to say the person I am
for the outsider—who is old: and that Other is myself” (316). Such change
is deeply disturbing; indeed, de Beauvoir deems aging more frightening
than death since the latter involves a complete transition into nothingness,
while the former process promises potentially distressing transformation:

[T]he dead are nothing. This nothingness can bring about a metaphysical
vertigo, but in a way it is comforting—it raises no problems. “I shall no
longer exist.” In a disappearance of this kind I retain my identity. Think-

. Mike Featherstone writes of the declining aging body as “misrepresenting and

imprisoning the inner self” (“Post-Bodies” 227). Simon Biggs summarizes the argu-
ments of Featherstone and others by concentrating on the “mask motif” to deal with
“an antagonism between the ageing body and a youthful ‘inner’ self” (Mature 63). See
also Esposito (68–69); Woodward (Discontents 60–63).
    •   I n t r odu c t i o n

ing of myself as an old person when I am twenty or forty means thinking

of myself as someone else as another than myself. Every metamorphosis
has something frightening about it. (11, original emphasis)

The experience of self-estrangement is part of the paradox of old age and

the overriding sense that “as we age into old age, we are both more our-
selves and less ourselves” (Holland 72). This notion of simultaneous gain
and loss relies on divisions between internal and external selves that aging
into old age appears to augment. In old age tensions between bodily and
“true” selves are understood to increase to the point of fracture, giving
rise to what Kathleen Woodward has identified as the “mirror stage of old
age,” which is “the inverse of the mirror stage of infancy. What is whole
is felt to reside within, not without, the subject. The image in the mirror is
understood as uncannily prefiguring the disintegration and nursling depen-
dence of advanced age” (Discontents 67, original emphasis). To see “one’s
own aged body with a shock of recognition” (63) is to experience “the
uncanny” (63, original emphasis). The notion of older persons as inevita-
bly split subjects appears often in writing on aging, both scholarly and fic-
tional. The persistent attention paid to internal, essential, or true selves in
aging studies says much about the belief in youth-based identities, and sin-
gular, “modern” selves. This insistence on “core” youthful selves betrays
the dread of change that provokes aging subjects to reject an altered self
rather than admit to transformative identity.

The Uncanny

As Nicolas Royle confirms, the uncanny “has to do with a sense of our-

selves as double, split, at odds with ourselves” (6). In Freud’s influential
essay on the subject, the space of the uncanny is marked by the collapse of
boundaries, by the strange trespassing into the regions of the familiar, and

. Such essential selves take a variety of guises in aging studies. Mike Hepworth
and Simon Biggs employ the diction of “core selves,” which Hepworth describes as a
“sense of continuous personal identity. The division of the self into the two dimensions,
private and public, acknowledges the existence of individual self-consciousness or a
personal sense of a stable and continuous identity” (29). Sharon Kaufman describes
identity consistency in terms of “themes,” what she terms the “building blocks of
identity. Identity in old age—the ageless self—is founded on the present significance
of past experience, the current rendering of meaningful symbols and events of a life”
(26). Joseph Esposito argues in favor of an “ultimate self,” one “that remains the same
through aging” (138).
 U n c a n n y S u b j e c t s   •      

vice versa. The uncanny destabilizes. Royle finds it “impossible to con-

ceive of the uncanny without a sense of ghostliness, a sense of strange-
ness given to dissolving all assurances about the identity of a self” (16).
Here Royle is drawing on the work of Adam Bresnick, who understands
uncanniness as a frightening exposure of the instability of selfhood; the
uncanny is not “something a given subject experiences, but the experience
that momentarily undoes the factitious monological unity of the ego” (qtd.
in Royle 16). The uncanny may be provoked by a novel or a film, a paint-
ing or photograph, by the everyday (a sound, a smell, an unsettling sight
glimpsed through a streetcar window), but its action is internal, which is
why “unsettling” is such a suitable description. The uncanny undoes, if
only for a moment, one’s illusions of peaceful stability, of rootedness. To
“unsettle”—“To undo from a fixed position; to unfix, unfasten, loosen”
(OED)—this is the effect of the uncanny.
Later-life confrontations with temporality, that is, a new or intensified
awareness of the differences between past and present selves, often pro-
duces uncanny intimations of the fundamental instability of selfhood, as
Woodward has indicated. Later life, with its proliferation of personal nar-
ratives, can expose the chimerical nature of identity, rendering the subject
a contested site, at once familiar and strange, in short, uncanny. My use
of the term draws on Freud’s famous exploration of the uncanny as “that
class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long
familiar” (340). In Freud’s essay, the uncanny is the chilling resurfacing of
buried beliefs, of that which is deeply “known” but repressed.
The uncanny is an experience of doubling, one of ambivalence and con-
tradiction. It has to do with the shocking, even frightening, upset of expec-
tations. It is an unpleasant uncovering, the return of the repressed. Perhaps
one of the most widely cited definitions of the phenomenon is Schelling’s,
which Freud himself employs as a touchstone for his own investigation.
Schelling makes the uncanny an experience of unpleasant revelation of
“something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light”
(qtd. in Freud 364), an exposure that Freud locates in the psyche: “the
uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien but something which is familiar
and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it
only through the process of repression” (363–64). Here the uncanny as
collision appears again, this time transformed into the unpleasant confron-
tation of the conscious and unconscious. It is not merely the strangeness
of an event or experience that generates its uncanniness, but the degree to
which it disturbs and dredges up something submerged within the psyche.
The uncanny is at once strange and all too familiar. Schelling’s remarks
    •   I n t r odu c t i o n

paired with Freud’s references to the mind evoke the psyche in spatial
terms: the unpleasant is partially hidden in the dark recesses of the mind,
and the failure of this concealment triggers an unwanted confrontation.
There can be danger in these recesses. At its most extreme, the uncanny
return of the repressed can be a rediscovery of trauma that violently desta-
bilizes the subject. But as my overview of decline ideology and its critics
indicates, the overriding association of aging with loss has been called into
question. For some, aging into old age may indeed constitute a debilitation
akin to trauma, but I think aging and its interpretation tend to be more
ambiguous and even paradoxical. Though uncanny confrontations need
not be traumatic, they can still disrupt the subject, causing, at the very
least, an unsettling of selfhood that is disquieting.
The German word unheimlich itself draws attention to the uncanny as
an experience of reversals and negations. Freud makes much of the mul-
tiple meanings and etymology of unheimlich.10 Heimlich, a word associ-
ated with home, a place of comfort and familiarity, a collection of posi-
tive, homely associations, is upset by the addition of the prefix un, which
transforms the word into a term of estrangement. But Freud goes further
here to point out the multiplicity within the root heimlich itself: “on the
one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what
is concealed and kept out of sight” (345). Thus, the ostensibly positive
root of unheimlich is itself tinged with negative associations, with mys-
tery and secrets. Freud’s consideration of terminology gestures toward the
inevitable cohabitation of the familiar and strange, canny and uncanny:
“Heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of
ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich” (Freud
347); each term (and its referent) is forever implicated in the other.11 In

. I am reluctant to go so far as to identify aging itself as a form of trauma, as

E. Ann Kaplan does: “The trauma of aging consists in being in time and unable to get
out of it. One irrevocably must age; one must deal with the ravages of the aging body;
and one must confront the fact that death is inevitable. All of which can be experienced
as a trauma, which, though basic to human existence, is paradoxically also ‘outside
human experience’ in that no one returns from death” (“Trauma and Aging” 173).
Only because Kaplan reads aging primarily as “the increasing series of losses—of
bodily function and appearance, of mental agility, of ideologies and values one grew
up with, of friends and family” (173) is her trauma hypothesis tenable.
10. Royle conducts a similar investigation into the English term “uncanny” and its
etymological sources. Perhaps one of the most important similarities between “unheim-
lich” and “uncanny” is that both are made by negative prefixes, drawing attention to
the uncanny as a process of undoing, negation.
11. Royle’s investigation into the English variant shows a similar ambiguity: “in
 U n c a n n y S u b j e c t s   •      

this way the ambiguity of the term itself functions as a metaphor for the
phenomenon of the uncanny. In other words, the uncanny already resides
within the canny, by definition and as a personal and cultural phenome-
non. The uncanny reveals unsettling strangeness buried within the familiar,
the stranger hidden within the self.
The uncanny is tightly bound to temporality; the inability to return
to past sites and past selves often comes into conflict with our memories
of these pasts. Memories can become ghosts that haunt the present. The
uncanny can be understood as the cohabitation of tenses, memories of a
familiar past rubbing up against the strange newness of the present. Famil-
iarity depends on the interaction of experience and recollection, a concur-
rence between one’s perception of what was and what is. I experience the
uncanny when my expectations, inevitably based on memory, are upset;
when the familiar, the recognizable, is infiltrated by the strange, the unrec-
ognizable, that is, when the past and present fail to align properly. Because
no one has the option of actually living in the past, memories must always
be summoned from the vantage point of the present, initiating unavoidable
comparisons between what was and what is. Considered in these terms, it
seems inevitable that aging will provoke the uncanny: both arise out of
temporality.
Consequently old age provides fertile ground for explorations of the
uncanniness of self since the inexorability of time challenges any belief
in a consistent and stable self. Despite poststructuralist deconstructions
of the subject,12 one’s experiences of oneself typically rest on a perceived

its archaic past, ‘canny’ has already meant its opposite (‘uncanny’). . . . The similari-
ties between English (or Scottish English) and German, regarding the ways in which
‘uncanny’ (unheimlich) haunts and is haunted by what is ‘canny’ (heimlich), are them-
selves perhaps uncanny” (11). In Royle’s text uncanniness seems highly contagious, if
not ubiquitous, already lurking within the most seemingly benign experience. Much of
Royle’s analysis reveals how the discourse of the uncanny (the term itself, its theoriza-
tion by Freud and others) is itself uncanny. Indeed, many critics have pointed out the
uncanniness of Freud’s own essay and its analysis, the ways in which his observations
and interpretation appear strategically blind, yet oblivious to their own oversights.
Such critics attempt to “articulate what is conspicuously not said in Freud’s symptom-
atic essay or in those of subsequent commentators on the uncanny” (Lloyd Smith 3).
Cixous claims that, in Freud’s analysis, “Everything takes place as if the Unheimliche
went back to Freud himself in a vicious interchange between pursued and pursuer;
as if one of Freud’s repressions acted as the motor re-presenting at each moment the
analysis of the repression which Freud was analyzing: the Unheimliche is at the root of
Freud’s analysis” (526). See also Royle 7–8.
12. The study of human identity in the relational terms proposed by semiotics
resulted in the idea of persons as entirely determined by language, the subject as
10    •   I n t r odu c t i o n

“reality of selfhood,” giving rise to what John Paul Eakin calls the “face-
off between experiential accounts of the ‘I,’ on the one hand, and decon-
structive analyses of the ‘I’ as illusion on the other” (4). This central
conflict between the theoretical (absent) self and the experiential (present)
self is brought to the fore in the study of aging and identity. I maintain that
in contemporary culture, aging, particularly aging into old age, forces a
confrontation between these competing discourses of selfhood. In aging
studies the uncanny most often describes the disconcerting newness of the
old body and how the subject experiences the body’s image as strange, at
odds with the familiarity and continuity of the psyche, termed variously
the “core self,” “ultimate self,” “true self,” and so on. Confrontations with
the image, such as the “mirror stage” identified by Woodward, represent
a distinctly uncanny experience, and the ubiquity of mirror scenes in the
literature and films of old age attests to the powerful impact of the reflec-
tion on selfhood. But I believe there are other occasions for the uncanny
that arise out of old age. Connected to the difficult acknowledgment of
the other in the mirror as in fact a part of the internally “young” self is the
way that older persons can function as uncanny figures for those around
them. Behavior, expression, and personality can all be part of the tension
between simultaneous recognition and misrecognition in personal encoun-
ters with older persons. For example, somebody one has not seen for many
years may present a shockingly changed bodily surface, strangely at odds
with the familiarity of their gestures and remarks, the idiosyncratic way
with a knife and fork, a recognizable giggle, a peculiar use of diction. The
visage of another can seem startlingly “new” as a result of old age, yet at
the same time, the younger, more familiar face can be glimpsed at certain
moments. A good example of this unsettling strangeness is produced when
aged film stars are trotted out at awards shows for recognition of lifetime
achievement. The filmic images that precede the entrance of the actor are
set into sharp relief by the aged body that enters the stage.
These encounters with the uncanny involving the aged image are com-
mon and easily recognizable. But old age can also produce another oppor-
tunity for the uncanny that goes beyond the disjunction between an altered
image and a perceived “inner” consistency. Indeed, the body, despite its
alteration, can provide the only opportunity for recognition after the onset
of dementia, a condition that most frequently affects older persons. The

“empty outside the enunciation which defines it” (Barthes, Image 145). For informa-
tive overviews of these developments, see introductory chapters in Butte, Eakin (Mak-
ing Selves), Schwab, and Paul Smith.
 U n c a n n y S u b j e c t s   •    11  

radical disruption of memory caused by dementia can make the body

one of the only remaining sources of familiarity for others. Changes and
deterioration of memory result in the fragmentation or even severance of
the person’s life narrative, and by implication, his or her identity. For the
victim of dementia, even specular recognition is often not possible, and
self-estrangement can become painfully severe. Because of the dissolution
of language and narrative abilities, the subjective experience of dementia
remains largely a mystery. Fiction can attempt to express dementia-afflicted
subjectivity, though the difficulties of representing a subject estranged from
language and memory tend to restrict such efforts.13
The centrality of narrative-based ontologies, such as those put forward
by Paul Ricoeur and others (discussed below), means that the disruption
and erasure of memory are largely interpreted as an upset and disappear-
ance of selfhood, evoking once again the central paradox of old age as an
uncanny site of simultaneous presence and absence. In Strangers to Our-
selves, Julia Kristeva suggests that subjects always contain the other, that
xenophobia is actually a symptom of the rejection of the foreigner within.
According to Kristeva, in “The Uncanny” Freud introduces the concept of
the fractured self so integral to psychoanalysis and its application: “The
uncanny would thus be the royal way (but in the sense of the court, not
of the king) by means of which Freud introduced the fascinated rejection
of the other at the heart of that ‘our self,’ so poised and dense, which pre-
cisely no longer exists ever since Freud and shows itself to be a strange
land of borders and othernesses ceaselessly constructed and deconstructed”
(191). The uncanny is unavoidably entangled with conceptions of identity;
it exposes cracks in the facade of that essential self that many theorists of
aging continue to erect as a shelter from the unsettling changes of age. As
Richard Kearney points out, “Kristeva makes the intriguing point that the
ultimate stranger of strangers is the shadow of our own finitude” (Strang-
ers 76). Old age functions as a manifestation of this frightening shadow,
introducing subjects to their own strangeness.
Incorporating Kristeva’s argument, with its emphasis on the unavoid-
ability of otherness within, allows one to assert that the discovery of the
self’s strangeness is the result not of a new condition, but rather of a new

13. For example, Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version, discussed in chapter 2,

switches narrators once the title character’s dementia becomes severe enough to seri-
ously inhibit clear communication. More commonly sufferers of dementia are charac-
ters observed by the narrator, rather than actively focalizing the story; see, for example,
Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” (Hateship) and “Spelling” (Who
Do you Think).
12    •   I n t r odu c t i o n

awareness of human difference. Entitling her chapter on Freud “Might Not

Universality Be . . . Our Own Foreignness?” Kristeva suggests that because
we are all foreigners, “there are no foreigners” (Strangers to Ourselves
192), a pattern of logic that can be understood as a comment on otherness
in general, exposing the subject’s fundamental closeness to that which he
or she rejects.
The older subject, as I have argued, is disavowed, at once denied and
acknowledged. Old age makes us aware of the other within, of identity as
always different, multiple, shifting, and contradictory; it shows us how, as
Royle puts it, “difference operates at the heart of identity, how the strange
and even unthinkable is a necessary condition of what is conventional,
familiar and taken-for-granted” (24). Old age is an experience of, or more
often a confrontation with, the uncanniness that is always within us; old
age simply represents a new awareness of pre-existing strangeness, of the
“foreign body within oneself” (Royle 2).

Narrative and Aging

This foreignness within is part of the nonfixity that results from what Paul
Ricoeur identifies as “the temporal character of human experience” (Time
1: 3). Subjects experience this temporality in their own aging and in the
explanatory narratives they create. Narrative allows subjects to explain, to
create meaning in every area of existence, with works of literature and film
forming only one small subset of narrative practice. I am particularly inter-
ested in the explanatory power of narrative, and in models that stress cau-
sality. Ricoeur is emphatic in his association of narrative and explanation:
“A list of facts without any ties between them is not a narrative. . . . To
explain why something happened and to explain what happened coincide.
A narrative that fails to explain is less than a narrative. A narrative that
does explain is a pure, plain narrative” (Time 1: 148). Ricoeur’s emphasis
on the explanatory imperative of narrative points to its ontological power,
to narrative as a process of making worlds and making meaning. One cre-
ates or recognizes a narrative by identifying, elucidating, and even cre-
ating relationships between various incidents and characters. According
to Ricoeur, this is how human subjects simultaneously create and receive
time. Narrative and time are part of a hermeneutic circle: “time becomes
human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of narra-
tive; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the fea-
tures of temporal experience” (Time 3: 3). The constitutive circularity of
 U n c a n n y S u b j e c t s   •    13  

narrative and time means that any study of aging must inevitably consider
questions of narrative. Indeed, if aging can be regarded as a manifestation
of human time, narrative and aging are intrinsically, if not constitutively,
bound.
Narrative is also tightly bound to questions of identity since subjects’
ideas of themselves and others, of their “meanings” as persons, largely
stem from their interpretation of their own and others’ narratives. It is
through the narrative use of language that one comes to understand the
self. Anthony Kerby proposes a “model of the human subject that takes
acts of self-narration not only as descriptive of the self but, more impor-
tantly, as fundamental to the emergence and reality of that subject” (4,
original emphasis). In Kerby’s view, “the self is not some precultural or
presymbolic entity that we seek simply to capture in language. In other
words, I am, for myself, only insofar as I express myself” (41). Some theo-
rists of identity, such as Eakin, remain skeptical of the simple equating of
narrative and identity, arguing that a story cannot stand in for “all that we
believe we are” (Making Selves 102), asserting the importance of other fac-
tors, particularly embodiment, in the subject’s experience of him- or her-
self.14 However, a broad understanding of “narrative identity” can make
room for a variety of “selves,” even “selves” in conflict. Because narrative
is constantly proliferating, one can find a great number of versions of self
that might assuage Eakin’s fears of exclusion.
The assumption that narrative produces meaning underlies many of the
models of aging and late-life identity constructed and employed by aging
studies critics. Indeed, the burgeoning field of narrative therapy, discussed
in some detail in chapter 2, attests to the potential restorative power of
narrative. The preservation of personal narratives is often a defensive
strategy that can temper the discomfiting changes of age. But this onto-
logical function of narrative leads us to the problem of the nonnarrativized
life: without a story the life is without explanation, without meaning, and
by implication the nonnarrativized person is without selfhood. The ines-
capable emphasis placed on narrative in the production of meaning and
identity presents serious difficulties for the victim of dementia or amnesia,
whose selfhood is often seen as jeopardized by his or her reduced ability
to employ memory in the service of personal narratives. Although those
suffering from dementia may still use short-term memories to produce

14. Eakin’s own analysis of autobiography and selfhood rests on a pluralistic model
of identity based on the work of Ulric Neisser, which regards self-experience as the
result of the ecological, interpersonal, extended, private, and conceptual selves (Mak-
ing Selves 22–23).
14    •   I n t r odu c t i o n

micronarratives of the immediate past, these narrative fragments are often

radically disconnected from one another and fail to contribute to coher-
ent life stories. Memory loss, coupled with the intermingling of actual and
imaginary histories, produces a subject disoriented by a disarray of nar-
rative fragments. Dementia presents a most extreme instance of ruptured
selfhood. Aging into old age can challenge our conceptions of identity in
much subtler ways. Autobiographies, interviews, anecdotes, literature, and
film have articulated the numerous ways old age can fray the lines of con-
nection between the various sources of self-identification, exposing change
and ephemerality where subjects once experienced an illusion of security
and stability.
Narratives of old age in both fiction and film have much to teach us
about the mechanics and effects of narrative-based ontologies and their
potential straitjacketing of subjectivity. A most extreme example of the
anxiety that attends failures in storytelling is the representation in popular
culture of the horrified reaction to dementia as a gradual erasure of the
self. Consider the saccharine film The Notebook, in which Duke (James
Garner) responds to his wife Allie’s (Gena Rowlands) Alzheimer’s-induced
failure of memory with narrative. From his notebook, he reads her the
story of their life together, using this metanarrative of her life to wrest her
true, core self, the one based on narrative memory, from the fog of demen-
tia that has her in its grip. Notably, the narrative he tells is one of hetero-
normative romance, locating her identity in her choice to devote herself
to one man (that would be Duke) over another. Dementia has severed her
from her maternal and spousal roles, and her return to them, even tempo-
rarily, through narrative is coded as a triumph; during the film’s climactic
scene in which Allie achieves a momentary lucidity, she clings to Duke and
insists he “tell the children I love them.” In this film, narrative functions
as palliative care, easing Allie out of the disturbing emptiness of nonnarra-
tive living so that she can die peacefully, with narrative coherence, devoted
husband at her side.
Experiences of dementia, largely occurring in late life, raise many ques-
tions regarding identity and subjectivity, depicting in the starkest terms a
subject made strange to him- or herself. How does one interpret the rela-
tionship between the disappearance of narrative and the disappearance
of the cogent aging subject? If narrative disappears, what, if anything,
remains? Are alternative operations of narrative and identity possible, new
interpretations of narrative fragments (reminiscence) and the larger nar-
ratives that construct lives as teleologies? I assert that film and literature
can help theorize responses to such questions in their dramatization of the
 U n c a n n y S u b j e c t s   •    15  

dissolution of personal narratives and the concomitant phenomenon of the

merely present self.

Postmodern Aging?

Even within a narrative-based ontological framework, identity functions as

a process, shifting to accommodate the changes in one’s life story. Ricoeur
himself stresses this dynamism in his articulations of narrative identity,
conceding the importance, indeed the unavoidability, of multiple narra-
tives. Far from arguing for a metanarrative or fixed identity, his model rec-
ognizes the mutability that results from temporality, a mutability that still
allows for a persistent subject. Ricoeur’s concept of the ipse, or self-same-
ness, incorporates change into some kind of consistency: “self-sameness,
‘self-constancy,’ can escape the dilemma of the Same and the Other to the
extent that its identity rests on a temporal structure that conforms to the
model of dynamic identity arising from the poetic composition of a narra-
tive text. . . . Unlike the abstract identity of the Same, this narrative iden-
tity, constitutive of self-constancy, can include change, mutability, within
the cohesion of one lifetime” (Time 3: 246). This temporal, narrative iden-
tity obviates the need for the terminology of the “core,” “ultimate,” or
“true” self through its incorporation of change into its very definition.15
Theories of flexible, mediated selves, such as Ricoeur’s, assist in my inter-
rogation of the overly neat division of identity and specularity in the theo-
rization of aging and old age. Such concepts of the self-sameness achieved
through narrative incorporate constant change and instability into a vision
of identity that I believe invokes the uncanny.
More extreme theories of nonfixity have been proposed in the last
few decades by a postmodern turn that urges the discarding of antiquated
humanistic conceptions of an inner self in favor of a belief in relativism,
the proliferation of signs, performativity, and simulacra. According to such

15. The fluidity of the ipse allows for human agency and integrity since we are both
readers and writers of our narratives (Time 3: 246). As David Kaplan explains, by
incorporating temporality into identity Ricoeur suggests that “otherness is not external
to selfhood but internal to and constitutive of it” (93). Temporality means both that
one is, in some sense, other than oneself, and that narratives are always in process
and multiple. As Kaplan puts it, “[I]t is always possible both to tell another version of
what happened and to tell another story of our lives” (10), and thereby create another
version of self. This concept of an adaptable, shifting self disrupts simple distinctions
between secure interior selves and their mutable exteriors.
16    •   I n t r odu c t i o n

perspectives, Ricoeur’s ipse, or self-sameness, along with all other mod-

els of the self, reflects a fantasy of agency that belies the arbitrariness of
subjectivity as a site that has “the status of a mere grammatical pronoun”
(de Man 18). The dynamism of poststructuralism and postmodernism has
seeped into aging studies and gerontological research, with mixed results.
Though some critics have proposed postmodern models of aging, these
tend to focus on the bodily adjustments made possible by new technolo-
gies, the “bodycare techniques for masking the appearance of age” that
further complicate the position of the aging subject (Katz, “Imagining”
70).16 These critics tend to look at the relationship between consumer
culture and embodied aging, pointing out the potential, and perils, of the
body as “project” (Turner 257): “new modes of disembodiment and re-
embodiment” made possible by “developments in information technol-
ogy” may alleviate some of the pains of old age (Featherstone and Wernick
11), but the new malleability of the body may also increase pressure to
“correct” the signs of aging. As Stephen Katz argues, “the postmodern life
course engenders a simulated life-span, one that promises to enhance liv-
ing by stretching middle age into a timelessness” (“Imagining” 70). Often
such discussions perpetuate surface/depth dichotomies in an effort to pro-
tect the humanity of the aging self, acknowledging how aging results in an
increasing “inability of the body to adequately represent the inner self”
(Featherstone and Wernick 7). By and large, social gerontologists insist on
something essential beneath the ever-shifting masks of the self, something
constant and reliable, a kind of core identity that provides the subject with
a sense of continuity, a self that persists over time.17 My project, on the

16. In some models of “postmodern aging,” “ageing is considered as a series of

progressive betrayals that let an individual down and come between the self and the
multiple identities made available through consumerism” (Biggs, Mature Imagination
6–7), furthering the idea, common in aging studies, of selves and bodies at odds. For
example, in his study of aging and fiction, Mike Hepworth divides the subject into
private and public selves, discussing identity as related to, but separate from, corpore-
ality. He regards the self as a “social process with potential for change throughout the
entire life course[;] the ageing of the body does not destroy the self though it certainly
produces changes in the relationship between body and self” (34).
17. Katz, Featherstone, Biggs, Esposito, Hepworth, Holland, and Kaufman all
invoke various images of a persistent self. For example, Joseph Esposito’s philosophi-
cal study of aging divides the lifespan into two stages: “the emergence of the ultimate
self and the maintenance of the ultimate self” (101). Temporality can also be divided
to reflect a sturdy core resistant to the changes of age. In their study of the benefits of
autobiographical reflection, what they term “restorying,” Gary Kenyon and William
Randall differentiate between “Outer Time-Aging” and “Inner Time-Aging” (9–20).
 U n c a n n y S u b j e c t s   •    17  

other hand, works to construct an alternate version of postmodern aging,

putting aside models of core selves in order to interrogate the mutability of
subjectivity.
Throughout this project, I explore models of late-life conflicts of iden-
tity within the larger framework of irrepressible uncanniness, while main-
taining a skepticism toward the possibility of identity consistency. Like
Eakin, I postulate the “self” as “less an entity and more as a kind of aware-
ness in process” (Making Selves x). I argue that the dynamism and process
of identity, the multiplicity that characterizes “selves” and makes the dis-
course of “subjects” more preferable, eventually come into conflict with
the stasis written onto old age. Dynamism and identity are frozen, fixed by
a culture that scripts old age into a small number of rigid categories. In this
way age functions very much like other categories of difference, such as
gender, race, and sexuality: older subjects are largely straitjacketed by their
supposed otherness, offered simplistic, restrictive identities overly deter-
mined by their bodies. But aging produces an instability that constantly
evades identification; it defies categorization and casts doubt on the dual-
ism of self and other. Instead there is simultaneity, familiarity and strange-
ness. One of the central problems with the inner/outer identity binary is
that it denies “internal” uncanniness. I argue that the uncanniness of old
age is far more than a shocking confrontation with an unfamiliar reflec-
tion; aging, particularly aging into old age, opens our eyes to the ubiquity
of uncanniness, and most unsettlingly, to the contradiction that is constitu-
tive of selfhood. Just as Freud reveals how “heimlich” is already tainted by
its opposite, uncanniness is always already within our most familiar self.
We are, according to Kristeva, always already “strangers to ourselves,”
a foreignness that is, I argue, harder and harder to deny as we age into old
age. It is our awareness of our own otherness that Ricoeur would argue
can lead us to become moral agents, able to move beyond simple self/other
oppositions to an appreciation of “oneself as another.” As such, old age
may present the potential for heightened ethical awareness. Indeed, as
Kristeva asks, “how can we tolerate strangers if we do not know that we
are strangers to ourselves?” (269). Perhaps aging into old age can alert
us to our own strangeness in new ways, leading us toward new ethical
relations. The obliquely intersecting claims of Kristeva’s Strangers to Our-
selves and Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another inform much of my interpretation
of narratives of aging and my central insistence on old age as a new aware-
ness of a pre-existing condition.

.
18    •   I n t r odu c t i o n

Each chapter of Uncanny Subjects begins with a fragment from Freud’s

“The Uncanny,” which together serve not merely as building blocks but
as catalysts to ignite discussion and debate. The use of moments in Freud’s
essay to structure this book reflects the continuing centrality of Freud’s
ideas in critical explorations of uncanniness and of the fruitful unsteadi-
ness of his claims. Observations, images, anecdotes, and conclusions from
Freud’s essay provide provocative, often contentious forays into issues
integral to the study of aging, issues of narrative and life review, illness and
selfhood, gender and doubling. If such an organizational strategy grants
Freud the first word in theorizing the uncanniness of aging narratives, it
certainly does not give him the last.
Chapter 1 tackles the relation between identity and narrative by focus-
ing on the project of late-life review. In fictional life review narratives, such
as Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel, John Banville’s Shroud, Carol
Shields’s The Stone Diaries, and Cynthia Scott’s film The Company of
Strangers, characters look back at their lives with varying results. In these
texts, the project of looking back exposes the mutability of identity, and
the difficulty of plotting a life as a single, coherent narrative. These liter-
ary and film narratives both employ and rework the “life review” genre,
exposing the implications of temporality for self-understanding as charac-
ters confront their own uncanniness.
Chapter 2 refines the concerns of the first chapter by attending to nar-
ratives of dementia and caregiving in later life, exploring the problem of
identity once narrative abilities are disrupted, or even destroyed. In fic-
tion by Mordecai Richler, Alice Munro, and Jonathan Franzen, along with
the film Iris directed by Richard Eyre, dementia becomes a frightening
exaggeration of uncanny identity. In these texts, the interaction between
afflicted older persons and their caregivers tests the limits of witnessing
and testimonial, provoking the pivotal question: how does one ethically
listen to a sufferer who can no longer testify? In this chapter, I argue that
dementia entails a distressing, alienating glimpse of the otherness of the
other, a vision that can have serious repercussions for the witness.
Chapter 3 turns to the fraught relationship between the aging image
and subjectivity in old age, examining photographic and cinematic doubles
that appear within various narratives of old age. In stories by Alice Munro
and P. K. Page, and the films Requiem for a Dream, directed by Daniel
Aronofsky, and Opening Night, directed by John Cassavetes, visions of
doubles result in a blurring of recognition and misrecognition that chal-
lenges the subject’s sense of self. In particular, Opening Night dramatizes
the violent clash of young and old selves, following in the tradition of films
 U n c a n n y S u b j e c t s   •    19  

such as Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve, and Whatever Happened to

Baby Jane, and exposes the damage enacted by age on the specular subject
par excellence, the female movie star. These films make explicit the struc-
turing force of gender in old age that is implied in the stories and novels I
discuss.
A number of questions propel my investigation into theories of aging,
questions that narrative fiction can help us to explore. Some transforma-
tions inherent to aging are impossible to deny, but how one interprets
these changes, both in oneself and in others, has much to do with how
one recognizes and comprehends the subject and subjectivity. How does
one understand, adapt to, interpret, live with the seeming simultaneous
sameness and difference that accompanies old age? I believe aging can help
us, or sometimes force us, to recognize our occupation of a space between
singular selfhood and entirely subjected subjectivity. Aging into old age
can usher us into an uncanny awareness of our own indistinction, our con-
stantly fluctuating status, our own difference. The uncanniness of aging
into old age can teach us that the self is always other than it was, other,
even, than it is.
C h a p t e r O n e

Backward Glances
Narrative Identity and Late-life Review

Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction

of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich.
—Freud, “The Uncanny” 347

To be a person is to have a story. More than that, it is to be a story.

—Kenyon and Randall 1

T he notion that human subjects are constituted by narrative has

become something of a theoretical truism. As Kathleen Woodward puts
it, “To have a life means to possess its narrative” (Discontents 83, origi-
nal emphasis). The belief in narrative as what Frederic Jameson calls “the
central function or instance of the human mind” is pervasive and persis-
tent within both popular and academic discourses of identity (13, original
emphasis). Still, there are detractors wary of the all-encompassing claims
of the narrative identity thesis. For example, in an editorial for the journal
Narrative, James Phelan considers the risks of what he calls “narrative
imperialism,” that is, “the impulse by students of narrative to claim more
and more territory” (206). More specifically, Phelan is uneasy with the
constriction of identity that is the consequence of relying on a single story
of self: “I cannot shake the awareness that whatever narrative I construct
is only one of many possible narratives and that the relations among the
subsets of these possibilities range from entirely compatible and mutually
illuminating to entirely incompatible and mutually contradictory” (209).

21
22    •   C h a p t e r O n e

In this chapter I propose that identity need not be mononarratological; in

fact, I argue that aging forces a confrontation with the multiplicity that
Phelan posits as undermining narrative identity, a multiplicity I interpret as
intrinsic to both temporal identity and narrative. This assertion draws on
Paul Ricoeur’s vision of narrative and time as inextricably connected, the
two forming, in his terms, a hermeneutic circle in which “time becomes
human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of narrative;
narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features
of temporal experience” (Time 3: 3). In other words, human temporality
makes self-understanding the result of narrative, a causal relationship that
becomes increasingly obvious as subjects age.
Philosophers such as Richard Kearney, Alisdair MacIntyre, and Henry
Venema follow Ricoeur in asserting that narrative is our primary means
of expressing and interpreting a life. As Kearney explains, “[e]very human
existence is a life in search of a narrative . . . because each human life is
always already an implicit story” (Stories 129, original emphasis). His
philosophical position stresses the innateness of narrative identity, describ-
ing every human being as full of “lots of little narratives trying to get out”
(Stories 130). Henry Venema concurs, claiming that narrative identity pro-
vides “a poetic resolution to the problems of the dialectic of narrative and
temporal experience” (97). Our temporality is our fragility, and it is this
knowledge of the limited nature of life that not only makes our lives into
narratives but also compels us to tell our stories: “The limit experience of
death is the most sure sign of our finitude. Moreover, it is precisely because
we are beings who know that we will die that we keep on telling stories,
struggling to represent something of the unrepresentable, to hazard inter-
pretations of the puzzles and aporias that surround us” (Kearney, Strang-
ers 231, original emphasis). In other words, echoing Ricoeur’s hermeneutic
circle of narrative and time, human temporality is responsible both for
life’s incomprehensibility and for our need to attempt to explain it.
As a result, old age provokes a confrontation with the mutability of
identities based on the range of accumulated narratives. This confronta-
tion with change and newness often becomes a source of uncanniness as
the proliferation of personal narratives exposes the chimerical nature of
identity, rendering the subject a contested uncanny site, at once familiar
and strange. The space of the uncanny, according to Freud, is marked
by the collapse of boundaries, of the strange trespassing into regions of
the familiar and vice versa. Aging involves perpetual transformation that
unsettles any claims to secure identity, allowing strange newness to intrude
into a subject’s vision of a familiar self, and undermining efforts to con-
struct coherent life reviews.
 B a c k w a r d G l a n c e s   •    23  

In this chapter, I explore narrative-based identity theories alongside

several narrative texts that depict late-life review in action: Margaret
Laurence’s novel The Stone Angel, John Banville’s novel Shroud, Carol
Shields’s novel The Stone Diaries, and the film The Company of Strangers,
directed by Cynthia Scott. These literary and film narratives both work
with and rework the “life review” genre, exposing the implications of tem-
porality for self-understanding.

Narrative Identities, ‘‘Healthy Identities

The associations between later life and the evaluative backward glance
are well established in both popular and academic culture, which often
regard life as teleological, moving toward the telos of death, and the sub-
ject in old age as a collection of memories, a series of events that consti-
tute the life narrative. Indeed, according to this perspective, human beings
inevitably move along a recognizable trajectory: we are born, we grow, we
mature, we die. For medical ethicists such as John Hardwig, the biologi-
cal “facts” are clear: “We are mortal beings, and death is not only the end
result of life, but its telos—the aim or purpose for which we are headed
biologically” (Hardwig qtd. in Overall 32). Within this linear program,
once one enters the realm of late life, there is little of the route left to look
forward to, and as a result the gaze is typically directed backward, initiat-
ing a re-examination of the past. This is the vision of old age promoted by
developmental psychologist Erik Erikson, whose Life Cycle model sees a
person aging through eight stages, each of which involves a central conflict
between harmonious and disruptive elements (what he terms the syntonic
and dystonic), a conflict that must be resolved in order for one to prog-
ress to the next stage of life. The final stage, Old Age, involves a conflict
between integrity and despair. Integration entails, in Erikson’s terms, “a
sense of coherence and wholeness” (65, original emphasis). This sense is

. Erikson’s eight stages—their central conflicts and ideal resolutions—are as fol-

lows:
Stage one: Infancy. Basic trust versus mistrust resolving in hope.
Stage two: Early childhood. Autonomy versus shame resolving in will.
Stage three: Play age. Initiative versus guilt resolving in purpose.
Stage four: School age. Industry versus inferiority resolving in competence.
Stage five: Adolescence. Identity versus identity confusion resolving in fidelity.
Stage six: Young adulthood. Intimacy versus isolation resolving in love.
Stage seven: Adulthood. Generativity versus stagnation resolving in care.
Stage eight: Old age. Integrity versus despair, disgust resolving in wisdom.
24    •   C h a p t e r O n e

associated with interpretive recollection since, Erikson asserts, “[looking]

back over a long past . . . helps us understand our lives and the world we
live in” (6).
Close proximity to “the end,” real or imagined, often intensifies nar-
rative impulses, resulting in a process of “life review” that involves close
examination of life narratives. As psychoanalyst Henry Krystal explains,
“In old age, as in treatment, we come to the point where our past lies
unfolded before us, and the question is, What should be done with it?”
(78). He implies that one’s past must be manipulated to be worthwhile.
Though there may indeed be something inherently narrative about human
existence, it is only via reflection and expression that such narrativity can
be understood. This emphasis on the function of reflecting, of interpreting,
produces the subject as an agent, one actively determining the meaning of
his or her life, and implies a two-stage selfhood: simply “being” is not full
existence; a complete subject ruminates and interprets. For Porter Abbott,
survival depends on our ability “to read as well as to write our lives, per-
haps in equal measure” (“Future” 539). Narrative identity results from
retelling by linking events in a causal chain.
The centrality of narrative to selfhood is fundamental to the burgeon-
ing field of narrative therapy, which insists on the psychological benefits
of exploring, and often revising, the stories that make up a patient’s life.
“Restorying” grants the subject a high degree of agency in identity forma-
tion involving “a set of stories we tell ourselves about our past, present
and future. However, these stories are far from fixed, direct accounts of
what happens in our lives, but products of the inveterate fictionalizing of
our memory and imagination. That is, we ‘story’ our lives. Moreover, we
re-story them too. In fact, restorying goes on continually within us” (Ken-
yon and Randall 2). The practice of “restorying” is essential to what Gary
Kenyon and William Randall term their “therapoetic” perspective, which
regards life narrative analysis and manipulation as the means to personal
“healing” (1–2, original emphasis). Restorying “is a therapy for the sane.
In it, storytelling (and storylistening) is not merely a method for solving
particular problems that crop up in our lives, but has an importance and
integrity all its own, as a means to personal wholeness. In this sense, it is
a spiritual activity. Through it, we become more of who we are” (Kenyon
and Randall 2, emphasis added). Even in an ostensibly flexible model of
identity maintenance such as restorying, the fantasy remains of a solid,
unyielding core, some self prior to narrative that is able to express itself
through narrative, unsettling the notion of an entirely narrative-based sub-
ject. The rhetoric of “becoming oneself” and the diction of “wholeness”
 B a c k w a r d G l a n c e s   •    25  

and “healing” stress the corrective power of narrative manipulation; nar-

rative therapy assumes some narratives are better, or at least healthier, than
others.
A belief in the efficacy of “storying” one’s life provides the therapeutic
basis for the practice of life review. Life review has a “multifaceted role:
to aid the narrator in achieving new insight and peace of mind; to bring
closure to troubling events through viewing them from a different perspec-
tive; and to restore as far as possible neglected skills or abilities” (Gar-
land and Garland 4). A seminal article on life review by Robert Butler
appearing in the journal Psychiatry in 1963 was largely responsible for
sparking the interest in the topic that continues today. And though the
current understanding of the practice may not employ Butler’s universal-
izing rhetoric—he describes life review as a “naturally occurring, universal
mental process” (66)—an emphasis on the soothing power of analysis and
understanding remains. In their practitioners’ guide to life review, Jeff and
Christine Garland assert that “[r]eview gives direction to people’s lives as
they move towards a valued endpoint, along a well-trodden track marked
by success stories—and failures” (35). Life review falls within the category
of narrative therapy, allowing subjects to optimize their life story through
recognition, revision, and even disposal.
But, as my analysis will demonstrate, there are other ways of retrieving
and interpreting life narratives and their constitutive memories. For exam-
ple, Kathleen Woodward takes issue with life review theory, in particular
with Robert Butler’s version of the practice, which she regards as limit-
ing in its emphasis on the location, or creation, of consistent and coher-
ent life narratives (“Telling Stories” 150). Woodward argues that Butler’s
life review insists on summary and analysis, on rational order. Instead of
life review, she prefers the more open-ended process of “reminiscence,”
which “does not promise the totality of the life review. It is more fragmen-
tary and partial. Reminiscence is concerned with a certain moment, or
moments, in the past” (151). She regards reminiscence as “generative and
restorative,” less analytical and restrictive than life review (151). In these
terms, reminiscence makes room for multiplicity and mutability, the flux
of narrative identity promoted by Ricoeur and Kearney. Life review tends
to be a process of analytical revision, much like the practice of narrative
therapy, attempting to locate the life narrative that will provide the aging

. Life review often has “three stages: focusing on what has been learned about
self in relation to others; considering whether this learning is still relevant; and recog-
nising what should be retained, revising what is unclear, and discarding what is no
longer required” (Garland and Garland 3).
26    •   C h a p t e r O n e

subject with a stable, comprehensible self. Like aging studies theorists such
as Kaufman, Esposito, and Holland, psychologists Butler and Erikson
assume a singularity of identity, a constancy through the life cycle that
facilitates comfortable narrative summation in old age. However, as liter-
ary and film narratives can make clear in their fabricated “life reviews,”
such a process of coherent, enlightening summing up is difficult, if not
impossible. The Stone Angel, Shroud, The Stone Diaries, and The Com-
pany of Strangers suggest the problems, and even risks, that result from
regarding life as a singular teleology readily available for narrative trans-
position. These novels and this film suggest that life narratives are multiple
and complex, rife with ambiguities and contradictions, with interpretive
blindspots, frustrating ellipses. As the various narrators and characters of
these texts make clear, “looking back” rarely, if ever, yields a clear narra-
tive of self. Instead, the reading and writing of lives in these texts exposes
the very mutability at the heart of narrative itself, wedded as it is to ever-
changing temporality.
The therapeutic preference for certain narratives as more appropriate
for psychological healing is, of course, part of the legacy of the psycho-
analytic “talking cure,” which “meets psychological pain with narrative”
(Hemmings 109). In psychoanalysis, narrative can become an anodyne as
“healthy” stories are made to replace dysfunctional ones. Ricoeur refers
to psychoanalytic practice as a corrective foray into a patient’s narrative
identity, in which the

process of the cure . . . is to substitute for the bits and pieces of stories that
are unintelligible as well as unbearable, a coherent and acceptable story,
in which the analysand can recognize his or her self-constancy. In this
regard, psychoanalysis constitutes a particularly instructive laboratory for
a properly philosophical inquiry into the notion of a narrative identity. In
it, we can see how the story of a life comes to be constituted through a
series of rectifications applied to previous narratives. (Time 3: 247)

. A number of critics have attempted to categorize fiction “focused on the last

phase of life, the stage which prepares for death” as the generic counterpart to the
Bildungsroman (Fortunati 158). Termed variously Reifungsroman (Waxman), Altersro-
man (Westervelt), and Vollendungsroman (Rooke), the designated narratives deal with
ripening, review, completion. In narratives of this genre, “the aged person no longer
occupies a marginal position, but becomes a central character with a complex psyche,
around which the interests of the narrative are centered” (Fortunati 158).
. For more on the narrative implications of psychoanalysis, see Steven Marcus’s
“Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case History,” and Donald Spence’s Narrative Truth
and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis.
 B a c k w a r d G l a n c e s   •    27  

Though Ricoeur’s elaborations of narrative identity are essential for my

own consideration of aging, I diverge from Ricoeur in these questions of
narrative rectification. I do not deny that particular narratives may be less
painful and more inspiring than others, but I am wary of the assumption
that the analysand can be helped to easily substitute and revise bits of sto-
ries in order to produce a more comfortable narrative. Rather, I am inter-
ested, like Woodward, in narrative identity in its “bits and pieces” and
occasional incoherence. If aging is in part an accumulation (of memory, of
stories), then the older subject is likely a site of conflicting versions, nar-
rative fragments, even “unacceptable” stories. In other words, older sub-
jects, with their large volume of versions, may be particularly susceptible
to narrative instability.
Though narrative is able to provide the comfort of meaning and iden-
tity, its temporal nature means that it is always fluid, open to revision and
retelling. Interpreting the subject as reader and writer of his or her own
life means that alternate interpretations and tellings are always available.
As Ricoeur himself explains, psychoanalytic rectification notwithstanding,
narrative is “not a stable and seamless identity,” making it “the name of
the problem at least as much as it is that of a solution” (Time 3: 248, 249);
narrative identity is always in flux as it “continues to make and unmake
itself” (249). Though mutability is an unavoidable effect of temporal-
ity, narrative subjects often long for the “stable and seamless identity” of
totalizing stories, for metanarratives able to encapsulate a life. Ricoeur
charts a space of subject-formation between absolute flux and rigid sin-
gularity with the notion of the ipse, or self-sameness. As discussed in the
introduction, self-sameness incorporates the dynamism that results from
temporal human existence by locating identity in narrative: “the story of a
life continues to be refigured by all the truthful or fictive stories a subject
tells about himself or herself. This refiguration makes this life itself a cloth
woven of stories told” (Ricoeur, Time 3: 246). The productive incorpora-
tion of change and cohesion relies on recognition, on the subjects’ ability
to read and write their lives, to “recognize themselves in the stories they
tell about themselves” (Time 3: 247). Aging, understood as the human
experience of time, draws attention to the dynamism of identity that
Ricoeur promotes. But despite the ubiquity of narrative-based concepts of
identity that would seem to incorporate mutability, change can function as
a frightful specter that threatens to upset the illusion of an established and
impermeable self. The prospect of multiple versions, multiple selves intro-
duced by aging can provoke a disorienting unsteadiness as distinctions and
categories blur, as oppositions refuse to hold, as identity “develops in the
28    •   C h a p t e r O n e

direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite”—that

is, as identity moves toward uncanniness.

Dynamism and Its Discontents

Models of dynamic narrative identity are not without their critics. Many
identity theorists, particularly those involved in the study of aging, are
uneasy with mutable models of multiple identity, fearful of the relativism
and “inauthenticity” that can result from discarding singular selves with
verifiable histories. Aging studies critics continue to grapple with the “par-
adox” of aging, a double movement involving simultaneous gain and loss.
Aging’s uncanniness, its “paradoxical development in which we are both
more and less than we were before” (Schwartz 7), contributes to theories
of core identity, obscured, but not essentially altered, by the changes of age.
According to such models, the “kernel sentence” (Schwartz 7), the “ulti-
mate self” (Esposito 138), the “core self” (Hepworth 29) remains reliably
stolid amid the movement of time. Wariness toward dynamism is often
expressed as a deep skepticism toward seemingly aimless, consumerist
postmodernism. Aging studies critic Simon Biggs asserts that “postmodern
theorizing results in trajectory without teleology. It has movement without
direction and makes a virtue out of disconnection” (Mature Imagination
66). Elsewhere, Biggs is even more vehement in his rejection of mutable
narrative identity, likening it to “a sort of Stalinism for the postmodern
mind: a denial of the past as an anchor, as a source of embeddedness for
authentic identity” (“‘Blurring’ the Life Course” 218). So unsettling is the
idea of “forgetting,” or more precisely, inaccurate remembrance, that Biggs
goes to metaphorical extremes, casting the rewriting and rereading of per-
sonal narratives as totalitarian manipulation.
Anxiety concerning the potential erosion of the subject reflects a larger
critical uneasiness stemming from questioning the autonomy and stabil-
ity of the metaphysical subject—in short, stemming from the philosophi-
cal challenges of postmodern theory. When assumptions about the self’s
wholeness are replaced by the recognition of the constructedness of the
subject, there are aging studies critics who read this as the disintegration of
individuality. The “dissolution of the subject . . . [,] its dispersal into a mul-
tiplicity of voices” (Schwab 18), is countered by those who insist on some
persistent degree of human autonomy and reject what they perceive as the
utter helplessness of the entirely “subjected” and theoretical postmodern
subject. But postmodern subjectivity is not merely the murky indetermi-
 B a c k w a r d G l a n c e s   •    29  

nacy ascribed to it by its critics. A postmodern perspective provides the

potential for an open-ended version of identity, one in which the subject is
a shifting site inscribed by various discourses. The discursive subject is one
prone to revision, one “in process” rather than fixed, part of history rather
than outside of it (Hutcheon 37). There is freedom in such multiplicity.
Postmodernism makes room for protean, decentered, even contradictory
subjects, tolerating doubleness and uncertainty without insisting on whole-
ness and final resolution (Hutcheon 111). And aging has the capacity to
contribute positively to postmodern theories of identity.
The conflict between the postmodern, discursive subject and the lived
experience of subjectivity is not easily resolved, and such a task is certainly
beyond the scope of this book; but following the lead of narrative theo-
rists such as Kearney and Ricoeur, it is possible to find a productive space
of inquiry between the desire for phenomenological truth and a secure
internal self as expressed by Biggs, on the one hand, and the dismissal of
selfhood as ideological, semantic illusion on the other. Kearney echoes
Ricoeur’s reconciliatory narrative model, arguing that the narrative subject
allows “the hermeneutic middle way,” positing a “post-metaphysical self
in our postmodern culture” (Strangers 188). Kearney remains “convinced
that it is possible to continue to speak meaningfully of a narrative ipse—
self-sameness—in the framework of a hermeneutic conversation which
takes on board the postmodern assaults on the sovereign cogito without
dispensing with all notions of selfhood” (188–89). If subjectivity stems
from narration, and such a “memoried self” relies on the past for con-
structing selfhood, aging is what facilitates subjectivity; only with age can
subjects accumulate histories, memories, selves. George Butte reiterates
the possibility of Kearney’s “middle way” in his claim that “the force that
finally limits the centrifuge of the shattered cogito of postmodernism . . . is
time experienced in bodies and, more specifically, time in the form of inter-
subjective narrative” (7). With age we become increasingly aware that we
are subjects of time—we bear its traces on our bodies, which appear to
belong, often uncannily, to both the past and the present.
A belief in multiplicity, in various, even contradictory selves, makes
selfhood possible without risking a plunge into the reductive dualism of
inner and outer identity, of true cores and social masks. A mediated sub-
ject facilitates flux, contradiction, and ambivalence. In the textual analysis
that follows I examine three novels and a film that evoke narrative identity
in their dramatizations of the “life review” process. In The Stone Angel,
Shroud, The Stone Diaries, and The Company of Strangers, characters self-
consciously narrate the self, confronting, to varying degrees, what Husserl
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