“Freud suggested that, in normal mourning, one internalizes the dead. The dead are fully assimilated into the living, a process he called introjection. In mourning that does not proceed normally, mourning in which something has gone wrong, this benign internalization does not happen. Instead, there’s an incorporation. The dead occupy only a part of the one who has survived; they are sectioned off, hidden in a crypt, and from this place of encryption they haunt the living” (209).
Although Julius relates this to 9/11, and there also may be applications of this to the death of Julius’s father and the school girl, I felt Julius’s literary reading of Freud’s analysis of death foreshadows his rape of Moji. We have learned previously from Veena Das how how women’s bodies show pain and need languages to express those pains, as well as the relationship between mourning and life. Perhaps Moji’s mourning of the harm to her body has been lost between introjection and incorporation for many years as she encounters Julius again and is forced to find a language for her pain. For Julius, his repression mirrors a death that is sectioned off and haunts him every day, prohibiting him from connecting with others. I’m unsure whether either of them can reach Freud’s introjection despite Moji’s confrontation of Julius as they are so fundamentally harmed. Julius relating to this text also points to a lesson Cole is pushing– that we can learn more about internal processes from looking at our relations to external objects.
Your comment provides a really interesting way to consider how Julius was unable to remember Moji despite raping her all those years ago. It was confusing to me as well, this sudden revelation by Moji, and how it managed to take Julius by surprise. I wasn’t sure whether he’d just been hiding it from us the readers, prolonging his charade so that we may continue to sympathize with him until Moji seized it from him and his house of cards came tumbling down. However, the explanation you gave makes sense and I have to agree that a lot of what he’s repressed has had unconscious impacts on him and the repression of this event as well seems convenient given their state of drunkenness and is another facet of understanding why Julius is the way he is.
Hi Jane! I really love your analysis of this quote and its relation to Moji. I think these chapters involve a lot of references and foreshadowing to his rape of Moji. I did not make the connection to this quote in particular until your post, but I completely agree. Moji has been at war with herself trying to make sense of her pain and violation, while Julius has acted like it has not happened. As you quoted, “The dead occupy only a part of the one who has survived; they are sectioned off, hidden in a crypt, and from this place of encryption they haunt the living”. Julius is like the dead to Moji, occupying her as she has survived, the experience haunting her as she grows up and is around Julius.