On Not Being Able to Sleep

Psychoanalysis and the Modern World

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by Jacqueline Rose

Princeton University Press

Due/Published September 2003, 256 pages, cloth

ISBN 0691117462

In these essays, Rose delves into issues of privacy and writing, exposure and shame.

Do women writers--Christina Rossetti, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath--have a special talent for self-revelation? Or are they simply more vulnerable to the invasions of biography? What ethical questions are raised by Ted Hughes's role in Plath's writing life? What do Adrienne Rich and Natalie Angier reveal about the destiny of feminism? In its affinity with modernist writing, what can psychoanalysis tell us about the limits of knowledge--both about the most intimate components of experience and the most hallucinatory reaches of the mind? Have psychoanalytic writers today and the very institution of psychoanalysis remained faithful to the most potent and disturbing aspects of Freud's vision?

Finally Rose addresses some of the most dramatic public performances of our times--the cult of celebrity with its contrasting obsessions with Princess Diana and the child murderer Mary Bell; and South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission which, in a concluding essay, allows Rose to explore the ethical and political responsibilities of thought and speech in times of historical crisis.

Moving between our public, political, and private, unconscious worlds, On Not Being Able to Sleep, forges links between feminism, psychoanalysis, literature, and politics. The result is a book that exposes the uncomfortable borderland between our desire to speak out and be silent, between the stage of the world and of the mind.

"Jacqueline Rose has no peer among critics of her generation. The brilliance of her literary insights, the lucidity of her prose, and the subtlety of her analyses are simply breathtaking. On Not Being Able to Sleep strikes me as a rare amalgam of her thought about literary and psychoanalytic issues, accomplished with remarkable poise and unfailing interest."--Edward W. Said

Review

Moving from literary criticism and psychoanalysis to the cult of celebrity and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, Jacqueline Rose explores “the link between public and private worlds, between our collective histories and the innermost, hidden, components of lives and minds.” On Not Being Able to Sleep includes Rose’s writings from the past ten years and begins with essays on Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Christina Rosetti, Adrienne Rich, Natalie Angier, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and Mary Butts. In discussing their work, particularly that of Plath and Sexton, Rose considers confessional writing and readers’ responses to private revelations. More precisely, she explores the ethical and literary implications when shame, pain, and privacy enters the process of reading. Acknowledging the difficulty these writers sometimes face, Rose writes, “the woman writer – Plath, Sexton, Rossetti – who takes the risk of letting the reader into part of her body and mind, is likely to find what she does with her language disappearing under the weight of her offering.” For many of these writers, the ideas of Freud are never far from the text, and Rose examines affinities between psychoanalysis and modernist fiction. In the concluding section, Rose ponders the meanings of revelations in two very different contexts: celebrity culture and post-apartheid South Africa. Rose’s varied and subtle essays tackle the somewhat worn-out topic of the public/private distinction with intelligence and verve, presenting novel ways of looking at the writers and issues under discussion.

Essays include: “‘Faking it up with the truth’: Anne Sexton,” “‘Go, Girl!’: Adrienne Rich and Natalie Angier,” “Virginia Woolf and the Death of Modernism,” “‘On Not Being Able to Sleep’: Rereading The Interpretation of Dreams,” “Of Knowledge and Mothers: On the Work of Christopher Bollas,” “The Cult of Celebrity,” and “Apathy and Accountability: The Challenge of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to the Intellectual in the Modern World.”