Introduction: Sons: Anxiety, Copies of Lack, and Self-reflection

In narratives of the family romance, less has be written about the romance of the son with the father. After all, aren’t sons out to conquer and kill off their fathers, literally or metaphorically? Such a reduction is challenged by a diverse array of modern and contemporary narratives across cultural and ethnic boundaries. In this chapter, I will analyze how Indigenous, African American, white American, Irish, British, French, and Russian narratives in prose and film relate to sociological and psychoanalytic concepts of the filial identity and relations, including affects and ethics, particularly to the father and mother. The narratives are sorted into three groups: (i) those emphasizing a son’s identification with his father; (ii) those emphasizing a son’s difference from his father; (iii) and finally those doing both, or presenting these relations more ambiguously.

Some of these narratives reveal a deep fascination with the father, as well as mother, as a resource for the developing son. Further, the son’s relationship with his father helps to fashion his own masculinity, and his relationship to male power in society as he comes of age. With perhaps the partial exception of the Inuit society portrayed in Atanarjuat, the narratives across social, cultural, and geopolitical borders examine patriarchal worlds, in which men tend to have the advantage in law and relationships. This gendered advantage is sometimes undercut by intersectional identities of class, sexual orientation and gender, and race. The narratives studied here include Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Zvyagintsev’s The Return, Jenkins’s Moonlight, Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat, McCarthy’s The Road, Beckett’s Molloy, Daldry’s Billy Elliot, Sciamma’s Tomboy, Joyce’s Ulysses and Portrait, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Eyre’s Smoke Signals, and Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show.

In this study of masculinities, we can see how the promise of power, as embedded in patriarchal societies, might steer the formation of the son. At the same time, we see how the son’s development is deeply affected by his father’s presence and affective ways of relating to his child. The filial affects in question in this chapter are particularly those of shame, love, hate, and anxiety.

Anxiety and masculinity are repeatedly linked in these narratives. While this study explores modern and contemporary narratives, we can recognize this same linkage of anxiety and masculinity in other periods, often when it might seem that patriarchal authority is questioned (but still firmly in place). Mark Breitenberg (1996) shows how early modern England’s dominant masculinity is infused with anxiety. He writes,

Anxiety and masculinity: the terms must be wed if only for the obvious reason that any social system whose premise is the unequal distribution of power and authority always and only sustains itself in constant defense of the privileges of some of its members and by the constraint of others; even though historically and culturally specific patriarchal models function with considerable variety, they are by definition forms of social organization that produce distress and disequilibrium. From this premise, it follows that those individuals whose identities are formed by an assumption of their own privilege must also have incorporated varying degrees of anxiety about the preservation or potential loss of that privilege. (Anxious Masculinity, 3)

In my study, not all male characters have equal privileges; given their varying difference of ethnicity, class, age, and sexual orientation, and the historical socio-economic moment they live in, certainly many distinctly lack privilege. For example, as Maurice Wallace makes clear in his study of African American masculinity over centuries, Black men in America have dealt with the paradoxical stress of being too visible and too invisible. However, nonetheless, one of the operations of culture is to facilitate myths or smooth over incongruencies, and patriarchal structures and relations are often naturalized in this way. For the less privileged male subject, there remains a gap then between his actual condition and his symbolic one as a “man.” For fathers and families raising sons into this supposed place of privilege, there comes a disavowal (“even though I know he won’t truly be all-powerful, I will anyway let him think that that might be so”). Lacan, in his year-long seminar on anxiety (Angoisse, 1962–1963), connects the subject’s anxiety to the object a. This is where ethics meets affect. The subject’s constitution in his relation to the Other is “centred around the function of anxiety” (Lacan, Anxiety, p. 325). The subject’s anxiety is developed from a lack of knowing how he is an object of desire for the Other; Lacan finds this most workable at the scopic level:

I am linked to the human Other by something which is my quality of being his semblable and the result is that what remains of the anguishing I don’t know what object I am, is, fundamentally, misrecognition. There is a misrecognition of what the a is in the economy of human desire and this is why … the level of scopic desire … is the level at which the structure of desire is the most fully developed in its fundamental alienation. It is also, paradoxically, the level at which the object a is most fully masked and at which, by virtue of this fact, the subject is most assured in relation to anxiety. (325)

Lacan’s understanding of anxiety relates to the formation of the subject in infancy and further on as the infant starts to separate from the breast and then other related caregiving supports. In this, Lacan shifts the emphasis of Freud’s more socially oriented concept of anxiety: “a particular state of expecting the danger or preparing for it, even though it may be an unknown one” (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 281). In “The Unconscious,” Freud distinguishes anxiety from fear: “Anxiety [Angst] has an unmistakable relation to expectation: it is anxiety about something. It has a quality of indefiniteness and lack of object. In precise speech we use the word ‘fear’ [Furcht] rather than ‘anxiety’ [Angst] if it has found an object” (“The Unconscious,” p. 184).

The masculine subject as a child starts to relate to his father, who is always already both there and absent: in many family traditions, the father is at least intermittently absent, coming and going to work, to seek food and perform other acts of survival for the family, and to perform actions in the public sphere or great community. The son’s relationship to his father is often developed along these experiences of lack and absence, or indeterminacy; combined with the father’s sense of distance, it is possible to think of the relationship between son and father as marked by a degree of anxiety; masculinity can become imbued with anxious feelings.

In this chapter, the selected narratives of the son foreground the parental relationship along with plots of the paternal copy (or semblable) or the son as different; the idea of the masculine self includes idealization of agency. More broadly, across many cultures, stories are told that feature paternal characters embodying the provider and stoic warden. Meanwhile, their real-life counterparts fall short of this difficult ideal and experience anxiety; the way emotions are gendered in mainstream cultural representations tend to reinforce presuppositions of unfeeling or controlling fathers and emotive, empathic mothers. Men’s lacing up of feelings has been termed “restrictive emotionality (Levant 1995; Jansz 2000).Footnote 1 Related to masculine anxiety we find affects of fear, guilt, shame, sensations of powerlessness and lack of mastery, and love.

In the selected novels and films for this study, I suggest that the authors and filmmakers create a critically inflected space for inquiry of emotions and ethics pertaining to fathers and sons, including the ethics of how they negotiate power and lack, and the anxious disparity among men and women, as well as among men, producing defensiveness in men of privilege and anger and alienation in men less privileged. The affects of shame and guilt are closely connected. Guilt can arise after the subject commits acts disadvantaging others; shame’s origins are found in having an unwanted identity (Ferguson and Eyre). In their review of wide-ranging (albeit, primarily Western) contemporary studies of guilt and shame, researchers find little difference among male and female participants, despite the stereotyping that girls and women should be more empathetic and respectful of others’ feelings and rights than boys and men.

I will consider such questions: what happens to the sons’ desires to gain power, influence, and create when they are thwarted or blocked? What happens to alternative male identities, such as the queer or trans son or the Indigenous or Black son, when the paths to self-realization are blocked? From a sociological standpoint, in most European and North American cultures, there is a presupposition that boys somehow must attain a public identity, a social one, to carry out life in the community (Britton and Baxter 1999). By contrast, as we will see, the selected narratives often shift the emphasis of the becoming of a masculine self from the public to a more private or interpersonal domain. Some public and private roles, such as that of the writer, artist, or hunter, serve also as metaphors. The son’s relationship with his parents is used as metonym and metaphor. I will seek to underline unconscious and self-conscious moments in the text that point to ethical relationships that define the son and his masculinity, in an insistence that even though we might often think of the male subject as the master of his narrative, in actual fact there is a more fraught and complication process of male becoming, which these stories try to convey.

The son is not necessarily formed by his father alone or at all. I will examine a number of son-mother relationships, too, that look to the romance between son and mother as well as more complicated relations, such hatred, revenge, the phallic mother, the single parent (male or female); such works include Oryx and Crake; Moonlight; Tomboy. Further, sons are defined by their siblings, when they have them. In several narratives (Atanarjuat; Smoke Signals; The Return; The Last Picture Show; Oryx and Crake; Billy Elliot; Tomboy), sibling relations, actual or symbolic, and the becoming of a male human subject in relation to his brother or sister are made central and decisive in the emerging adult man. Notably, these narratives include family structures beyond the narrow framework of the nuclear family; here we find single-parent, divorced, blended, communal, extended, and symbolic families.

What will the son inherit? In most societies, children inherit some traits, customs, practices, skills, knowledge, and property from their parents and other elders. In European and North American societies, the male child has often been privileged over female siblings. At stake in these twentieth-century and contemporary narratives is the question of a masculine economy, with men largely controlling or responsible for the circulation of goods and wealth. How will sons fit into this economy? As understudies? Or as revolutionaries? In these narratives, the young male character is often conflicted with ambivalence about his place in the world and his economic responsibility. Since the advent of the Bildungsroman, the reconciliation between the private young man’s selfish desires and his accommodation into the larger public social order becomes a defining question in the modern novel. Filial narratives, given their coming-of-age arc and their ties to social orders, are to some degree always Bildungsromanen. With the practice of filial inheritance come wealth and an order that is predestined through birth. This concept is at odds with a more progressive liberal meritocracy, in which one earns one’s place through performance. We notice the increasing anxious preoccupation of successful performance of gender roles in the modern age with the growth of the capitalist system, mechanization, hierarchies of labor, and seemingly invisible forces of white supremacy in North America that restrict Native Americans’ and African Americans’ and other minorities’ access to land and resources.

Further complicating the modern and contemporary economic field are the workings of capital, debt, and credit. The idea of bankruptcy relates to the father and the son: the panic of emptiness, futility, and lack of justice or right informs bankruptcy. In these narratives, we will observe male economies and anxieties around them—how Cixous’s idea of the male Selfsame economy is perceived, and how it might be even more complicated by further narrative explorations.

In an economy of love or desire, as explored in these narratives, I consider affects associated with masculinities (pride, strength, anger, approval, disapproval) as well as emotions not so commonly connoting manliness, such as love, caring, sensitivity, sadness, hurt, anxiety, fear. The son desires not just the mother (as in the Oedipal relation) but also at times worships and desires fusion with the father. Beyond this relationship is the son’s perception of the father’s empathy or lack thereof; the son perceives the father’s reflection of the father and of the son. My analyses will examine the sons’ affects and shared feeling and empathy with others, especially the parents.

The selected authors and filmmakers are concerned with the son’s struggle with the challenge of the paternal character, and make this situation a critical turning point in the plot or character development: will the son emulate his father or differ from him? Will his father remain alive to see his son struggle or flourish, or will his father cease to stand by his stand, succumbing to death by age or accident? The son’s narrative suggests the possible copy of the copy; but often the father is shown as a fake origin or a mirror of lack, without a full promise of power, strength, and self-reliance as conditioned in socially condoned concepts of masculinity. Modern writers and filmmakers imagine the making of a son and his relationship to masculinity in the modern era, with risk society (Ulrich Beck). As Beck points out, post-WWII societies are constructed on a basic conflict between work and family:

The contractual nature of relationships contrasts with the collective communality of marriage and the family. Individual competition and mobility, which are required for the realm of production, run up against the contrary demand in the family: sacrifice for the other and absorption in the collective communal project of the family. In the shape of familial reproduction and market-dependent production, then, two epochs with contrary organizational principles and value systems—modernity and modern counter-modernity—are welded together in the industrial society, two epochs that complement, condition, and contradict each other. (Beck, Risk Society, 107)

In this strange welded set of conflicting relations, the features of gender, class, ethnicity that are considered assigned from birth are already outside of decision. The woman in the marriage will do the unpaid work as an unspoken presupposition, even with the supposed expansion of women’s rights. As Beck notes,

In principle, one’s fate is already present in the cradle even in industrial society: lifelong housework or making a living in conformity with the labor market. These feudal “gender fates” are attenuated, canceled, aggravated or concealed by the love which is also devoted to them. Love is blind. Since love can appear as an escape from its self-created distress, no matter how great that might be, the inequality which it represents cannot be real. It is real, however, and that makes love seem stale and cold.

What appears and is lamented as “terror of intimacy” are—in terms of social theory and social history—the contradictions of a modernity bisected by the plan of industrial society, which has always withheld the indivisible principles of modernity—individual freedom and equality beyond the barriers of birth—from one gender by birth and ascribed them to the other. Industrial society … is always only half industrial and half feudal. (107)

Beck’s recognition of “terror of intimacy” should be mapped more clearly onto the fictions of dominant masculinities. Building on Beck’s discussion and Breitenberg’s study regarding anxious masculinity, I suggest that boys and men in performing their social identity sense conflicts that their privilege causes by disadvantaging others; thus, men’s emotions of shame and guilt, and suppression of these, are developed in patriarchal societies.

The conflicting affects of love and aversion from feeling and contact, these are the ambivalent gifts possible from the father to the son. Fathers are responsible for the making of the son, through care, or non-care, absence or presence. The selected narratives for this chapter question the reproduction of masculinity in their local social and cultural terms. Even works that attempt to create a separate sphere away from white settler patriarchy such as Atarnarjuat and Moonlight, nonetheless acknowledge the forces of white encroachment of power struggles. The images and activities used in the film Atanarjuat to recreate the look and aura of a precolonial time are taken from a mixture of oral narratives passed down from Inuit elders as well as from print accounts of early European explorers’ contact with the Inuit in the Arctic. In Moonlight, Jenkins insists on an all-Black cast. However, whiteness is implied in the all-Black neighborhood’s economic desperation: its reliance on the drug trade as economic income; the inequality of access to housing, loans, and jobs that create an underclass of disadvantaged African Americans; the lack of community and government support for the single Black working-class mother. Such portrayals of social settings and the way gender is embedded in them relate to Cixoux’s Empire of the Selfsame. The masculine economy functions as a cycle of debt, loss, and repayment; it recycles anxiety, guilt, and shame. For example, Juan, the symbolic father of Chiron in Moonlight, is visibly ashamed at his deep involvement in the drug trade and how that trade destroys the mother of the boy Juan loves. Despite the son’s clear understanding and condemnation of Juan’s guilt, Chiron in his early adult years surrenders to a fatalism that lures him to copy the beloved father, his semblable, by working the drug trade. Narratives like Moonlight dramatically capture the contradictions of masculinity in its handing down of anxiety, mirage-like strength, and shame.Footnote 2

Here in this chapter, we can observe a son’s narrative that anxiously engages in and breaks from fatherly patterns of being. These narratives question the degree to which the male subject as son can achieve ownership as defined by Oliver as a central feature of virility, and if so, on what terms? I note that Oliver’s designation of ownership relates to middle-class white heteronormative European and white North American manhood. How can the male Indigenous subject, who has a more relative relationship to ownership, given the belief that their food comes from the earth, which cannot be owned. How can the African American male subject be considered virile if he is excluded from systems of ownership? Or what of the working-class male subject, a traditional figure of masculinity in his emphasis on his physical strength and endurance: as the coal-miner does not own his labor nor the products, how can he claim any identity through ownership? In the son’s narrative, his ability to reproduce the masculinity of the father is called into question. Some artists show various impediments to a completion of the Selfsame cycle outlined by Cixous.

In these circulations of ownership, we can see how patriarchal rules and standards get passed on to the next male generation. But what if there is little property or nothing to pass down? Or what if the “ownership” is ephemeral or does not fit the new son? For example, in Smoke Signals, Victor inherits his father’s pick-up truck with its incumbent signs of masculinity (both settler and native, and its relation to mobility and independence). When Victor and Thomas journey home in the truck, they have increased flexibility in their travel compared to the contained situation on the bus on their outbound journey during which they must even give up their seats to white male bigots. Ownership is undermined, and also reconfigured when the boys sing in “49” style (the more informal singing and drumming occurring before and after powwows) in the back of the bus, thus transforming the bus’s white space into an Indigenous one of contestation.Footnote 3

Smoke Signals transcends the idea of male ownership in certain ways. Yet Victor clings to the remnants of the father’s truck and his ashes; by bringing Arnold’s ashes back to the reservation, he returns a tribe member to his tribe for belonging. During the boys’ drive home in the dark, they narrowly avoid a crash with a car already wrecked on the highway. A young white woman is badly hurt. Victor sets to running for help. His marathon is shown heroically as something only he can do, without the father’s truck, and is related to a deeper identity of being Indigenous. In his run, his mind imagines his father and a wise teaching of the power of the world within a sphere, within faith. At the end of Victor’s run, he sees his father as though in a dream helping him to his feet. Thus, even though he races for help without his father’s truck, a vehicle associated partly with his father’s faulty masculinity, Victor’s run brings him into contact with an empowering nurturing father who encourages. The scene breaks the cycle of the Selfsame economy of the paternal; it further breaks stereotyped scripts of the white savior (here, the villain is the mean white driver who tries to pin the blame for the car accident on Victor) and the cowboy and Indian story (here, the sheriff, who has a picture of John Wayne hanging on his office wall, ends up taking the side of the Indians). Shortly after the heroic rescue, when the boys arrive back on the reservation, Victor decides to share half of his father’s ashes with Thomas. The sharing of the father makes him into something greater than the father of lack that Arnold was. And the act releases the boys from fraternal conflict and competition and into a hetero-affectionate space of reconciliation and acceptance.

Billy Elliot also shows narrative ways to break with the damaging cycles of the Selfsame of the British masculine economy and validate filial and paternal feelings of love despite difference.Footnote 4 Billy does not want to inherit his grandfather’s boxing gloves and the masculine tradition in their family to work as miners and excel as boxers, a combative sport segregated until recently to men only. Billy’s change from male boxing boots to the ballet slippers shows early on in the film how he will not “own” masculinity in the old school way prescribed by his family’s men and (male) village community. At the same time that Billy finds a way into a completely new and creative profession and discipline of ballet, condoned by the Royal Ballet School and a male head master of the school, his father Jackie and older brother Tony as miners heroically struggle in an extended strike that brings the family to the brink of survival, leading the father to burn the mother’s piano in order to heat the house—a whittling away of male ownership down to the last prized possessions of artistic creativity aligned with the feminine sphere. The narrative does not try to make simplistic causation.Footnote 5 Once Billy is admitted to the ballet school, the strike ends with it turns out that after all the grueling hardship the miners have gained nothing. Daldry bluntly summarizes eloquently how working-class male bodies are mechanically consumed by Thatcher’s intransigent capitalist model: the masculine economy of production is a zero end game, as shown in a shot of Jackie and the other miners submissively encaged in their elevator taking them down into the mine. The implication for Billy: he has escaped all that, managing to be the singular male artist to stellar heights, as his beautiful, stunning leap across stage at the film’s closure connotes. While the audience, unified with the father’s started loving gaze, admires the beautiful swan son as other, we also know how rare the male ballet dancer is. We celebrate Billy’s masculinity as a dancer as a cutting-edge achievement, yet how realizable is it for the average man? There is also a troubling economic circuit here: Billy is successful as a professional lead dancer in an acclaimed production. His dance is validated because he is able to earn his keep. If the film had shown us a struggling young man trying to make ends meet at the end of the film while continuing dancing, we would have had a more realistic, less heroic picture of male dancers. The father’s sacrifice might not have been worth it as much. The hetero-affection of the impassioned father’s gaze that reflects the son’s radical difference is the most empowering part of the film’s ending.

In these narratives and others, from the son’s perspective, in becoming a man, he must determine how to enact his maleness; he will model himself to some degree on his father or paternal figures, even if to rebel against them. Implied or made explicit in the filial narrative, there is both a challenge to become male and a sense of already having masculinity. Yet, through the oedipal complex and other anxieties about lacks, the son will not always have an easy passage into adulthood. While the male position may seem enviable in theory, in practice it is not a position of power for many, as evidenced by a wide array of male portrayals in films and literature. The son becomes a man through identification and counter-identification, through closeness and separation, through an Oedipal stage and a mirror stage. Will he be a copy of his father or make a mark of difference? What will he produce? Will the son enact a creation, make some new and different from the father?

As Britton and Baxter (1999) have shown, the narrative of the reflexive self (seemingly non-gender specific) is actually a masculine narrative. In narratives of the reflexive self in psychological studies, men have more options for self-realization; their self is related to a broader public context because of public discourses open to them. This trend continues through the modern and contemporary ages. Britton and Baxter observe,

men and women tell different stories, which reflect not only differences in their life experiences but also different understandings of self. The stories they tell are linked to the availability of public discourses to interpret experience at any given time. … [C]ertain discourses of late modernity, which focus on the isolated individualised self, are better able to represent men’s experience than women’s, because women’s understanding of selfhood is self-in-relation to others. We have highlighted, therefore, the specifically masculine nature of the `reflexive self’, in contrast to the gender-neutral treatment of this concept in the literature. (192)

Britton and Baxter point out how grounded narratives are in their historical and material contexts. Their focus is on the period of late modernity when we collectively think of the self as “reflexively organized project in which the moral ideal is that of being authentic or true to oneself”” (215). Yet, this is not a genderless subject, as Taylor and others would imply:

At any one time there are limits to the ways experience can be interpreted and presented to others (Foucault 1972). In late modernity narratives of the individualised self come to the fore (Taylor 1989; Giddens 1991; Beck 1992). … The idea of the self as a reflexive project implies the continuous monitoring of one’s self and activities in daily life; furthermore, individuals construct narratives through which they develop self-identity. A reflexively ordered narrative of self identity provides the means of giving coherence to the finite lifespan, given changed external circumstances. (Giddens 1991: 215)

Whereas in traditional society individuals lived their lives according to custom and tradition, in late modernity the individual biography must be forged out of a range of possibilities: In the charged reflexive settings of high modernity, living on “automatic pilot” becomes more and more difficult to do. (Giddens 1991: 125). Thus, biographies become individualised, with a concomitantly greater role for individual decision in shaping them (Beck 1992). (Britton and Baxter 1999, 182)

The growing son, meanwhile, is at a crossroads in terms of agency and self-reflexive self-construction. How can he be “true” to himself if he should also be “true” to his father and what he represents? The complement to the self-reflexive self is the one that can imagine oneself otherwise.

In many social contexts, the son is expected to mirror or align with the father; yet, while the father is still present, the son must be deferent to authority. This scenario creates an emotional collision of sameness and difference/deference, which we see highlighted in many of the filial narratives selected for discussion here. For example, in Smoke Signals, young Victor is confronted with this paradox when his drunken father Arnold overwhelms him, “Come dance with your old man. … Who’s your favorite Indian?” to which he is expecting himself or the mother to be named while also doubting it, as the question implies. Victor’s silence and then insistent rejection, “Nobody!,” express the angry disappointed anxiety of the Indigenous boy who cannot look up to a heroic father; his father is playing the careless Indian fool lost in alcohol, abjection, and aimlessness. The self-reflexive Victor wants to fashion another self, yet he knows not yet what that can be.

As Stephanie Shields (2000) points out, emotional responses are conditioned by gender expectation. In citing Stoppard and Gruchy’s 1993 study, Shields explains how “women believe themselves to have to respond positively to circumstances and will be judged badly if they do not,” whereas men “expect no negative consequences for failure to express positive emotion” (13). Stemming from this research, I note that boys are often expected to make particular responses with emotional inflection. In the Smoke Signals example, Victor does not make the compliant “happy” response to reflect back a fiction of the “favorite Indian”; he suffers negative consequences for this defiance. In theory, filial relationships are predicated on the creation and maintenance of gender imbalances and masculine normativity; gender inequity and reciprocity between emotions and gender can be noted in race, class, and other signifiers of diversity. In many of these relationships, for the filial subject, emotions such as anxiety, guilt and shame are conditioned by paternal expectations and paternal failure to live up to idealized discourses of manhood. More than half of the narrative of Billy Elliot uses the foundational premise of the son’s implied worry of shame and disapproval of straying from masculine activities and being discovered as a dancer. When first his father and then later his older brother Tony discover Billy’s dancing, their histrionic, homophobic reactions are made the central point of the drama. Emotional interactions help to support and define power imbalances.

Beyond the Mirror Stage: Desire for the Father as Mirror, Protection, Love, Competition

While in early childhood, the child experiences what Lacan has termed as the “mirror stage,” a transitional stage when the child apprehends his illusory wholeness in the mirror or mirror stand-in (such as the gaze of the parent or caretaker); in this transition, he enters into the Symbolic register, meaning he enters into language and the world attached to language—the world of laws, the Name of the Father, and more generally the symbolic order. The child’s misrecognition of himself as whole in his mirrored reflection gives a sense of satisfaction, wholeness, and mastery, which also relates to a disavowal of castration. This stage, while initiated in early childhood, continues through childhood in variations.

I argue that the father, while seeming to mirror masculine wholeness, in fact mirrors his own lack. By lack, I mean a lack beyond the basic lack common to all human subjects as Lacan explained with his barred Subject. In the father’s case, his mirroring of lack is a particular kind of masculinity: implied castration and lack of power and ethical foundation at the core; the father also will mirror his various anxieties and inabilities, not just an illusion of mastery. At certain stages of his development, the son looks for reflections of himself in his father; at times, he also mirrors aspects of his father. Being similar to one’s father, whether in appearance or actions, speaks of admiration for the father’s example or desire to take the father’s place by resembling him (a desire for power and love). The difference between the desire for the father’s love and the desire to resemble him to overcome him is sometimes difficult to discern. The son’s love for the father can become confused with aggression and violence. The son, while seeing the father as one responsible for taking care of him, also can combine that recognition with blaming the father (and other care givers) with his or his community’s fears, losses, and pains and as a result, resent or wish to attack or reject the father for that purpose (and not just for the more commonly recognized competitive feelings over the mother).

The origins of human violence may be found in infancy. As Nancy Chodorow (2002) explains, psychoanalysis has considered the implications of aggression. She cites Juliet Mitchell’s research that shows how infants experience threats and dangers (such as lack of attunement, separation, parental anxiety, environmental dangers, hunger and other physiological distresses) as though intended (“The Enemy Outside” 241, her discussion of Mitchell, “Aggression”). By “intended,” she means the infant assumes that the discomfort has been intended by an external agent. Chodorow (2002) continues, “The belief that one’s suffering is intended by another is found also prevalently by adults. As a result, suffering becomes unconsciously hooked up with feelings of being attacked, endangered, and threatened by another, and defensive retaliatory aggressive feelings ensue” (241).

Men’s violence and aggression can be traced to childhood development; if a child is abused, this further complicates his internalization of violent and aggressive behavior. In addition to childhood origins, boys develop toward adult identities that often suggest some overt or subtle justified or authorized violence or power. Chodorow (2002) notes: “Almost definitionally, contemporary violence seems to organize itself around identity” (244). Not all masculine public identities are open to all men. Class, race, sexual orientation, age, and able-bodiedness present differences among men; these aspects are central to men’s identity, although where he makes up the majority of the population a white heterosexual cisgender able-bodied middle-class man will tend to be less wholly conscious of the factors that give him particular privileges. Chodorow (2002) notes how Erikson “makes good case for the centrality of ethnicity to many people’s identity and sense of self, though when he describes disrupted, spoiled, or subjected identities (Native American, African American, immigrant), these do not in his case accounts lead to rage and aggression but rather to depression and despair” (244). Thus, not all male-identified people resort to blaming tactics and aggressive responses. However, we will see in some narratives, sons of diverse ethnicities do at times resort to violence, acting on rage and aggression.

If we think of sons as the starting ground for future men, we can note unconscious fantasies that express themselves in a more conscious way through shared fantasies and ideologies. Fantasies for the son include becoming one with the father or conquering and slaying the father. What seems to result in violence are fantasies and situations that bring about humiliation and shame (Chodorow 248). However, in the modern world narratives of sons, we will see a wider range of fantasies of the father, ones that reflect the sons’ actual relationships with paternal figures and other caregivers such as the mother. These narratives explore a wide range of emotional responses, which include humiliation and shame, but also love, desire, fear, and sadness.

This chapter also considers how sons develop alongside siblings. A variety of world narratives explore how siblings either support or thwart each other as they move toward adulthood. The sibling narratives suggest how masculinity becomes embedded in local social systems. Social contract theories are derived from fraternal pacts. Carole Pateman, in “The Fraternal Social Contract,” points out how the social contract really has origins in “a repressed story of the genesis of patriarchal political right which men exercise over women” (33). Pateman explains how, in social theory, fraternity is seen as a “crucial bond integrating individual and community” (35).

In the world narratives of sons involving siblings, a potential pact among brothers or siblings can lead to a way of organizing adult male life. We can see traces of the social contract in an Inuit narrative that takes place prior to settler colonialism; however, it’s important to note some crucial differences in the film’s resolution away from a Western masculinist conception of the social contract. Atanarjuat ends with a pair of elder shamanic siblings, a sister and brother, confronting a shaman and restoring harmony to their group. The film’s multi-layered resolution shows (i) the surviving sibling Atanarjuat conquer his rival Oki; (ii) the sibling elders Panikpak and Qulitalik (her brother) exorcise the evil spirit of the shaman and send into exile Oki and his sibling Puja and cronies; (iii) Atanarjuat blends with the community, deferring to the authority and wisdom of the sibling elders, notably a balanced gendered alliance of sister and brother. By contrast, at the end of Smoke Signals, the two symbolically fraternal young men Victor and Thomas decide to share the ashes of Victor’s dead father Arnold and to seek a yet-to-be-defined way forward that will involve reconciliation and forgiveness. The father cannot be banished as such, as he already went into self-exile while alive, and now that he has died, his legacy must be evaluated. The film suggests an important fraternal pact of sharing that will nonetheless differ from the white settlers’ version of the social contract, which cloaks a kind of prioritization of men under a guise of equality. Both young men are shown, for example, as reconnecting with their elder female guides in life, when they return from their journey. In both of these Indigenous narratives, a new communal way of life will need to unfold.

In some modern narratives, the sons’ new narrative is hinted at but not wholly revealed in a state of desired becoming. In Joyce’s Ulysses, both adult sons, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, are in mourning for their parents. The sons have not fulfilled their parents’ wishes. Even though Bloom operates outwardly as an integrated member of Dublin society, thus carrying out his parents’ desire for assimilation, he conversely does not fill latent wishes of what the dutiful “true” Jewish son really should do (observe Judaism and let assimilation take less or no priority). Bloom’s fantasy vision of his deceased son Rudy—if the child had lived—is a fantasy of a recovered authentic Jewish past. Meanwhile, Stephen has not been the faithful Catholic, as his mother would wish, nor does he correct his father’s prodigal behavior establishing himself as the dutiful son who will provide for his siblings.

Both filial characters, Bloom and Stephen, move forward uncertainly toward a desired alternative identity that partly mirrors ideals of the father, while not mirroring the father himself: Bloom’s fantasies of a beautiful house, gentleman’s status, civic leadership relate to modern self-reflexive identities idealized by the outsider. Stephen’s fantasy to be a self-wrought artist is in some ways close to realization, but always pending. Joyce does not show him as a full-fledged artist, but one still in the making. In terms of mirrors, Stephen sees himself reflected in his father’s delinquent behavior and in corporeal terms, in his tenor voice. Yet, when he catches sight of his own image in the mirror at the brothel in the Circe midnight chapter of Ulysses, he sees not his father Simon, but his literary father Shakespeare as his reflection: the image functions as a sign of desire to emulate the father and to take his place, but also to be the object of the father’s gaze. Uncomfortably for Stephen, as much as he idealizes Shakespeare, he is also aware that his linguistic domain is English, not Irish. Thus, the Shakespeare in the mirror creates a postcolonial relationship with its desiring subject.

Joyce is one of the early masters of free indirect style in literary narrative, and he uses it to great effect with the filial figures of Bloom and Stephen, expressing a desiring interiority based on a partial logic of self-construction for (masculine) identity, in defiance of older traditionally Irish and British colonial ordained or given values, along with varying affective, unconscious and irrational mental patterns. Joyce’s free indirect style gives partial access to Stephen’s and Bloom’s subjectivity. In Circe, their fantasies are made exterior and somewhat overlapping in a kind of hallucinogenic dramaturgic format; much of their preoccupation is with their uncomfortable role of grandson or son. Ithaca, the penultimate chapter of Ulysses, finally discloses information that fills in the blanks about Bloom’s lost father: Rudolph’s suicide at a hotel is clarified through his suicide letter, and the novel’s various allusions to the upcoming anniversary of this death gain greater pathos. We understand the irrationality of the son’s guilt, as he could not have prevented his father’s death. Rudolph as died from depression and loneliness after the death of his wife; in his letter, he explains his sense of futility (“it is no use Leopold to be …” 595). The negativity of the father is further appreciated as he himself has denied his Jewish cultural and religious origins in order to bow to pressures of integration (in a society, as we see during Bloom’s day, that suggests violence against outsiders). Rudolph, from changing his last name from Virag to Bloom and converting to Protestantism, has evidently done much to create a son who is self-sufficient, educated, and relatively integrated in Irish society. Yet Rudolph’s sacrifices and denial of identity—father as lack—inform the melancholy experienced by Bloom. The son’s sadness is not just owing to his wife Molly’s adultery, but also to his sense of failure to satisfy a more traditional trajectory of Jewish manhood that his own father had already withdrawn from, but which his grandfather Lipoti maintained.

Bloom idealizes his Jewish heritage and religion as a source of deep wisdom and spiritual power, even though at the same time he acknowledges that to embrace that path would be to give up modernity and its promise of self-construction. Joyce’s narratives of the sons question the promises of modernity for the masculine person. Both characters might idealize the social contract, Bloom the optimist more than Stephen the pessimist, and both reject the reactionary Irish nationalism developing all around them. They can see that they still will lack privilege in the social contract. They have a troubled “ownership” of the masculinity passed down to them. Both resist the overly patriarchal, entrenched masculine identities of fellow Dubliners. But Bloom is still partial to the romantic lure of class worship: perpetually the outsider, Bloom admires Stephen for his status as a young gentleman and his elite education.

Among this chapter’s selected world narratives of sons, several suggest a new masculine self, different from the father. The narratives with the most conscious ethics moving forward are Smoke Signals (Thomas and Victor), Moonlight, and Invisible Man. These narratives all point toward a hopeful future, even though they do not show the sons completely transformed; rather, they are positioned at the end so as to no longer emulate paternal figures of their past. Thomas and Victor will consider forgiveness of Arnold, but neither will follow his examples of self-loathing and destructiveness. In Moonlight, Chiron is positioned to turn away from the comforting cloak of masculinity bestowed by the toughly armored Juan and the role of drug dealer. As Chiron appears to start a sensitive, vulnerable sexual relationship with Kevin, he is poised to discontinue the example of hypermasculinity as a defense against attack. The unnamed character-narrator of Invisible Man, in his time underground, has renounced the various male role models, Black and white, offered to him through the narrative’s trajectory. These role models have reworked an illusory game of invitation to emulation and wholeness.Footnote 6

The narratives with more ambivalent ethics include Ulysses (Bloom and Stephen), Tomboy, and Molloy (both Molloy and young Jacques). The sons here partly resemble their fathers, but also seem to re-direct toward another set of values or goals. In all of these narratives, the plot revolves around identity development and definition through sameness or difference and the possibility and limitations of self-reflexive construction.

There is a group of narratives with a son who clearly differs from his father. The narrative and the relationship indicate an ethical demise. These works include Oryx and Crake, The Road, The Return, and Sonny in The Last Picture Show. The plot and symbolism of the death of the father (and at times mother) relate deeply to the masculine subject. His identity and entry into adulthood are determined by a kind of separation from the father, whether the father literally dies or separates and stands visibly or invisibly on the sidelines of the son’s narrative. In most of these narratives, the sons no longer have their fathers. The narratives emphasize the outcomes of the sons over that of the fathers. Only a few narratives conclude with a paired vision of living father and son characters: Billy Elliot (Jackie and Billy and Tony) and Molloy (young Jacques and his father Moran).

As I consider narratives involving a crucial death of the father (Ulysses [Rudolph]; Smoke Signals; Atanarjuat; The Return; Moonlight; Invisible Man; Oryx and Crake; The Road), I will interpret how the son’s desire and father’s fantasy are constructed with the dynamics of a mirror. Could the erasure of the father from the son’s life involve a fantasy of the child’s escape from responsibility (consider Leslie Fiedler’s thesis of the American male protagonist as a man “on the run,” escaping civilization and its pressures, and thus implying a desire to remain a child and avoid the drudgery of adulthood; Love and Death in the American Novel).

The rest of this chapter divides into three segments: “Same Copy: New Narrative of the Sons: Desiring Reflection,” “Filial Difference: Rejection of the Copy: Narratives of Paternal and Maternal Death,” and “Filial Narratives of Ambivalence.”

I will provide here a brief overview of these segments before going into more extended interpretations.

In “Same Copy: New Narrative of the Sons: Desiring Reflection,” I examine the son as the same or copy of the father (Oryx and Crake; The Return; Moonlight). These three narratives also feature the death of the father as a decisive plot point. Oryx and Crake, a male creation fantasy turned dystopia of abuse of male power, causes the deaths of the fathers of Crake and Jimmy, along with the other upholders of the Law of the Father (all the rules and regulations of their privileged life). The sons carry out the fathers’ prioritizing of science and the economy over ethics and well-being. The Return explores two brothers’ desire for the father and their negotiation with the law of the father; the father’s accidental death creates a metaphor for coming of age, when young men are supposed to separate from their fathers and forge their own ways alone, yet haunted by memories and desire for the paternal copy and return. Moonlight also explores the son’s desire for a father; Chiron finds a surrogate father in Juan. The Law of the Father must be redone, however, as Chiron’s copy of Juan will not allow him to realize himself as a gay man, nor free himself from an insidious version of the Empire of the Selfsame in which Chiron repeats the fatal pattern of the male African American drug dealer.

In “Filial Difference: Rejection of the Copy: Narratives of Paternal and Maternal Death,” the selected narratives emphasize sons who differ from fathers. In Atanarjuat, the two brothers develop particular features, different from their father. Atanarjuat is the “fast runner,” for example. Their own father’s death is not acknowledged in the story, leaving an unexplained blank. Toward the conclusion, Atanarjuat is coached by Qulitalik, a former camp member and brother of Panikpak; Qulitalik teaches him how to confront the spirit of the evil shaman in the body of Oki. Atanarjuat wins his duel. Later in the final showdown with the shaman, it is the two elder siblings, Panikpak and Qulitalik, who vanquish the spirit. Atanarjuat as the brave virtuous son remains watching quietly from the sidelines. Oki, the disobedient son, is banished from the camp. Thus, the narratives for the sons branch from transgression (Oki—he commits murder and rape) to coherence with the camp. The entire camp’s troubles begin because Sauri invites the shaman in, who then conquers and kills the camp leader, Sauri’s father. The entire narrative is based on the son Sauri’s betrayal of the father and the taboo fulfillment of the wish to kill the father. Other narratives that emphasize the son’s difference from the father and opposition include McCarthy’s The Road, Beckett’s Molloy, Eyre’s Smoke Signals, Daldry’s Billy Elliot, and Sciamma’s Tomboy.

In the last section, “Filial Narratives of Ambivalence,” the narratives show sons as both the same as and different from the father; the identity of the son is more ambiguously blended. These narratives include Joyce’s Ulysses and Ellison’s Invisible Man.

Same Copy: New Narratives of the Sons: Desiring Reflection

In Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake, there unfolds the story of a dystopian misuse of bioethics when Crake, Jimmy’s friend, becomes a bioengineer at RejoovenEsense and creates a gentle polyandrous species of humanoids called Crakers. Crake creates a world crisis by eliminating much of the population with a plan to replace it with the gentle Crakers who will restart the world without the deleterious effects brought on by humans. The male fantasy of making his own race of obedient little people relates to Kelly Oliver’s point about the male subject performing virility as ownership. The bioengineering part of the narrative suggests how humans take over natural creation; Crake’s design, while meant to save the world, also puts himself first as the owner and further empowers him as he creates a virus that wipes out most of the population. The entire plan hangs from the thread of Crake’s life; with only Jimmy/Snowman surviving, Crake has set into motion a half-realized plan. Crake as creative son is both creator and destroyer. Jimmy/Snowman, as the copywriter, tells the story and is left to survive the consequences. The fathers of both Jimmy and Crake have been bioengineers and belonged to the elite, sequestered class that shelters itself from all the abuses it has allowed multinationals to play out on the environment and global workforce. These fathers create a fearful future in their sons who consume video games, pornography, and science without the depth of empathy, community agreement, and sacrifice. Within the copy of the father is the idea of superseding him: Atwood shows how that ownership and passing down of male inheritance by pursuing its irrational logic of growth and improvement to the nth degree. The boys grow up in an environment that already expects them to become scientists and contribute to the same manipulation and exploitation of nature; their public narratives are cast almost before them. Through Jimmy’s laziness, he does not have the rigorous singlemindedness to become a bioengineer; but his role in communications also suggests the masculinity of becoming, of choosing a self or identity to become. The sons’ creation gone awry is really the continuation of the same.

Jimmy’s mother Sharon, who has worked as a scientist in Organinc with Jimmy’s father, eventually rebels against the abuses of science and globalization, leaves the family to become an underground activist. Atwood creates in Sharon a mother who decides to make a sacrifice for the environment, rather than for her son. Jimmy resorts to a name Snowman to make himself into the anomaly, the remnant of an imaginary world.

Jimmy and Crake’s relation to desire is explored through the Asian female character Oryx whose captivating eyes have seduced both boys when they discovered her through child pornography. Atwood opens up the back story of the victimized Third-World woman and how she both becomes a bigger commodity in Crake’s new world plan as well as a possible way out. Privilege is part of the repressed, as the unconscious: before he meets her, Jimmy is drawn to the images of Oryx, but he doesn’t know why. The privilege of his whiteness goes unstated; implicit in Atwood’s feminist narrative is the degradation Oryx experiences because of the color of her skin and the devalorization of women in her society. She is sold to help support her village; the sex-worker economy into which she enters is one to serve paying men. The narrative is structured as an awakening, with Jimmy in his new unfamiliar world with the Crakers, and dealing with an unruly semi-natural environment. In his extreme new environment, he recognizes the abuses he and his society have enacted. The voice of Oryx lives on in his imagination, still an expression of his unconscious and conscious desires.

Atwood’s narrative opens up the domain of the phallic Selfsame: this empire that begets itself. With the arrival of the disaster and an altered world that now has an environment that challenges human life, Snowman is faced with sheer challenges of basic physical survival while also watching over the Crakers as they both tend to worship him and evolve into beings resembling the god-worshipping early humans. The masculinist logic of self-realization and construction of human life are shown up for its shallowness and egocentricity.

Survival is also central to the Russian film The Return, another narrative in which the sons end up mirroring their father. In an exaggerated fishing expedition, the father (unnamed) takes his sons Andrei and Vanya through a series of damning challenges. While the boys hover between accepting their father and loathing him, we see how the father also alternates between trying to teach his boys survival lessons and ignoring them to take care of himself. The father’s frequent power plays relate a kind of unease and anxiety about his role as a father and example. He seems to know a set playbook that the boys must learn. Vanya’s fear of heights, established in the first tower scene in which he refuses to dare to jump from a high tower into a lake, is continued through the film and related to the challenge of copying his father. In the second tower scene, Andrei and his father climb a rickety look-out tower on land while Vanya waits anxiously below, unable to follow the “men” who take in a panorama. But the men’s visual dominance is questioned by the end of the scene, when a sudden rainstorm overtakes them from out of nowhere. Zviagintsev questions how much the boys (and father) can choose their narrative; the brothers at times copy their father, and other times reject him for his unfairness and didactic ways. When the father dies in the final tower scene, the scene serves as a metaphor for a masculine coming of age, when new young men will carry the memory and burden of the father and use his lessons to get through the journey of life. The boys’ journey home will open into an impossible return to the mother.

The third narrative, Moonlight, also highlights how a son copies the father. Here, Chiron does not know his biological father. When Juan, a local drug dealer, decides to shelter Chiron, he offers himself as an alternative man to mirror off of. Juan teaches Chiron about self-respect and survival, showing him how to swim by starting with floating on his back. These basic lessons become the foundation for Chiron’s hesitant growth into his character as a gay Black man, an identity he tries to keep concealed in his reactionary, homophobic neighborhood that overemphasizes heteronormativity. Blackness equated with straightness, to an extreme degree, creates so much pressure for adherence that many people seem to crack under the pressure. Paula, Chiron’s mother, as a working single mother and crack addict, is shown as the young woman who can scarcely cope. For Chiron, there is no motherly love to bathe in; separation has been enforced on him, with virtually no human affection to cling on to until Juan and his girlfriend Teresa befriend him. The narrative refuses a heroic path; Juan as drug dealer is partly responsible for Paula’s addiction, and is thus responsible for Chiron’s lack of family love and connection. The film shows how Chiron sees only certain male narratives available to him: the path of violence (his retaliation against Terrell, the school bully) and delinquency, copying the drug-dealing habits of Juan, down to his mannerisms and dress style. As a disadvantaged young Black man, he cannot imagine a life outside his neighborhood’s boundaries, so that when he is free of his first neighborhood, he is still not free. By hiding in the persona of Juan, as a heavily muscled, guarded, silent, capable man, Black/Chiron protects himself to a degree. But his apparently strong independence and isolation are merely illusions. The film shifts when his prior love interest, Kevin, who has also served time, points to how life can open up new possibilities through work, discovering one’s talents, and making choices, not succumbing to what seem like inevitable negative narratives. Chiron excuses his drug dealing by stating, “It is what it is,” which is an overly limited way of describing himself, as Kevin sharply points out. While the film’s ending expresses Black homosexual fear and desire, it expresses it through fear of coming out, desire for connection, and romantic longing, as seen in the lingering gazes between the two young men across the diner while the song that reawakened desire in Kevin plays on the jukebox: Barbara Lewis’s “Hello, Stranger.”

Dominant masculinity and hypermasculinity operate with a notion regarding weakness related to maternity and femininity. The male child’s relationship to his mother is based first on reliance; she fills the helpless infant’s needs and creates lack any time she is absent. The male paternal figure (or alternative figure to the primary caregiver) offers triangulation, separation, independence. Can he also create lack? Arguably yes. In The Return, the father has been absent for twelve years. His oldest son Andrei only slightly remembers him. When the father returns, he comes back like an unexplained promise; yet he offers authority and rigor, not warmth or connection. The sons cannot share experiences with him; in their emotional responses, they meet a wall or a tough, stoic exterior in their father. Two scenes particularly emphasize the paternal gaze and lack. On the island, the moment when the father digs up a mysterious black box, the boys enter the scene and never encounter the father nor the box. The secret of manhood, fatherhood, or the father’s own childhood is guarded to the end. The separation of manhood from boyhood is conveyed in the framing of either the father alone or the boys approaching, with never the two parties meeting or coinciding in the frame, despite the movement implying a convergence. The boys discover a photograph carried in the car’s sun visor showing the boys with their mother during a black-and-white photo shoot at a time close to the point of the father’s departure (Figs. 3.1 and 3.2). The presence of the photo in the car suggests the father’s care and remembrance of his family. He dies before the boys can really know his mystery. In Moonlight, Chiron’s biological father is absent with no explanation; the single mother Paula does not try to fill it. The film presents a constant lack for Chiron in his achingly lonely childhood devoid of affection and emotional support. He has intense moments of relief from this isolation, such as when Juan teaches him to swim, a transcendent scene reminiscent of a baptism (Fig. 3.3), and when he and Kevin as teenagers share a sexual moment on the beach. In both cases, the men responding with love and care break from the homophobic tendency to withhold tender affective contact. In the swimming lesson scene, Juan’s gentle expression provides an alternative masculine mirror for Chiron; Chiron is both a beloved object of the male gaze and he returns that identity to Juan. Nonetheless, these are brief moments of promise, while Chiron suffers through tremendous lack otherwise.

Fig. 3.1
A screen capture from the movie, The Return. One of the two sons is holding a photograph of the mother holding the younger brother Vanya, while the older brother Ivan, is on a motorbike.

The Return: sons Andrei and Vanya encounter the old photograph of their younger selves with the twice lost father: the father is missing in this shot, functioning as lack

Full size image
Fig. 3.2
A screen capture from the movie, The Return. The father is looking at and holding a baby, the younger brother, Vanya.

The Return’s final take is a snapshot of the father looking bemused at his baby son Vanya

Full size image
Fig. 3.3
A screen capture from the movie, Moonlight. Mahershala Ali's Juan holds Chiron and teaches him to swim at the beach.

Moonlight: Juan provides a fatherly mirror of love for the young Chiron; later, we see the adult Chiron as a copy of Juan, whose identity as a tough drug dealer is idealized as a replacement for Chiron’s gay identity

Full size image

The ethical responsibility of disaster scenarios falls more weightily on the male subjects. This has been the case in the early formation of the dystopian genre, as discussed by Brian Baker in his chapter on postwar hegemonic masculinity, “Cold Warriors”. He analyzes American popular media in the 1950s and 1960s, but the import of his discussion can be extended to a broader modern period of dystopian narratives on world crises and science, starting with works by H. G. Wells (such as The Time Machine [1895] which also sees destruction of the earth and abuse of class systems) and the groundbreaking Russian novel We (1920–1921) by Yevgenii Zamiatin. In keeping with the dystopian genre, men are responsible for the public sphere. In Oryx and Crake, masculine lack experienced by the two boys is made obvious by their submission to the closed male economy of the Selfsame. Jimmy and Crake are aware that they are groomed to continue their fathers’ legacies of scientific experiment and manipulation of the environment. Jimmy attempts to rebel by underachieving and studying writing while Crake goes full on into bioengineering, fulfilling and exceeding the challenges of his program; ironically, Jimmy’s writing talent will serve to deliver messages of optimism about Crake’s manipulations, thus controlling the discourse. Atwood ensures that we see these dual forces, bioengineering and dominant discourses as particularly male endeavors; in her near-future setting, bioengineering and its horrors update the 1950s concept of the military-industrial complex dominating the world.Footnote 7 In that decade of the Cold War, the power systems beyond democracy come to be more critically analyzed in non-fiction and fictional works. For example, C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite (1956) argues that the United States produces and perpetuates “power and control systems of the military, corporate giants, and the ‘political directorate’ (which are not elected representatives)” (Baker 17); many 1950s and 1960s dystopian narratives use this dysfunctional power system as a basic premise to explore anxiously future disaster scenarios that highlight military masculinity and other representations of manhood that connote an anxiety about lack.

In all three narratives (Moonlight; Oryx and Crake; The Return), despite the sons mirroring their fathers, the inadequacy of these identifications is also emphasized. They do not go far enough, are illusory, and feed back into the negative economic circuit of the Selfsame. To choose to follow the father might be to choose the death drive. To choose destruction or self-destruction over creation. Thus, for example, in the final part of Moonlight, the adult Chiron allows himself a pivotal moment to move away from mirroring Juan (being “hard”), the path of destruction, and a white narrative of Black-on-Black degradation and alienation.Footnote 8 In The Return, the boys can take the remnants of the dead father with them, but the father himself creates a big lack. First, he is absent for twelve years, then, he comes back briefly, and finally, he becomes permanently absent.

All three narratives show a boy’s entry into manhood with a male foil or paired subjectivity. In the case of the brothers Andrei and Vanya of The Return, they have themselves in the model of fraternal rivalry and friendship as well as fleetingly their father. Chiron, with no siblings, has his childhood friend Kevin, who at first encourages him to be tough and play the game of appearances and later urges him to strike his own path, and not accept a given narrative of Black negativity. In Oryx and Crake, Jimmy awkwardly follows Crake, a symbolically fraternal counterpart, into an ambitious future that aims to overturn the Empire of the Selfsame of late capitalism and technology. But Jimmy’s reluctance to play out Crake’s plan fully shows again how narratives exceed the self-reflexive control of the male self and his desire.

Atwood, Jenkins, and Zviagintsev assign guilt not just to paternity, but also to maternity: in various ways, their three narratives locate a certain kind of guilt to the mother. In Oryx and Crake, the mother Sharon is both guilty as a bad mother who has abandoned the family; yet, she is also cast as good in that she fights the Empire of the Selfsame, which would ultimately help others. In Moonlight, Paula is the guilty mother as addict, caused by her subaltern position that made her vulnerable to the sale of crack and the economic forces and racism that shape her situation. Her addiction, shown as a disease, and not merely victimhood, is so consuming that there is little left of her to function as a mother. Her addiction is shown as incompatible with motherhood; the strongest affects she shares with her young son is a screaming scene in which her screams are silent while an innocent Chiron returns her gaze of anger and rejection. She seeks her son’s forgiveness at the end. The Return assigns a degree of guilt to the mother. On the one hand, she has stoically and ably raised her sons with the help of her mother. On the other hand, when her husband reappears, she allows him to dominate the scene. By serving as the single mother, she has been guilty of not being male enough for her children.

All three of these narratives of the son involve the death of the father as though it is a necessary, desired, or inevitable occurrence. In Oryx and Crake, Crake and Jimmy get their skills from their scientist parents; the boys especially inherit their fathers’ mentality of progress or bust. Their science skills are put toward capitalist creation. Atwood shows the simplistic irrationality and unsustainability of the economic growth model that is linked to dominant masculinity. Likewise, Crake’s heavy-handed solution to the empire’s problems is a kind of imperial conquest. Instead of a master race, he designs a calmer, docile race that will be gentler with the earth. Crake briefly achieves this dream in part by wiping out the fathers. In The Return, the two brothers have desired the return of the father; after twelve years, he might never return. Then for one week they have him back until he dies accidentally during an emotional and violent showdown with both sons. The film reflects the boys’ desire to have the father, be close to him, win his approval, and rebel against him. Shortly before the father’s accidental fatal fall from the tower, Vanya, the youngest, interrupts the father beating Andrei and yells at him:

Vanya::

Touch him, and I’ll kill you.

Father::

Kill me?

Vanya::

… Stay back. I could love you if you were different, but you’re terrible! I hate you! Stop torturing us! You’re nobody! You got it? Nobody!

Father::

You’re wrong, son.

Vanya::

No, no, no, no ….

The father’s death exaggerates the symbolism of the boys’ passage into adulthood; to be men, they must even leave behind the desire for the father. Vanya’s rebellion against the unloving, severe father touches upon the core emptiness of this figure of threatening power: “You’re nobody.”

In Moonlight, the father figure Juan also contains an emptiness at the core. In an extradiegetic scene between the film’s Part 1 and Part 2, Juan dies; at the beginning of Part 2, when we see a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old Chiron, the funeral for Juan has occurred and we can infer that Chiron has been struggling to move forward with his life without this supportive man. Yet, Juan both has supported Chiron emotionally and supplied drugs for his mother’s addiction, which seems to spiral out of control. The death of Juan opens a void. After Chiron is beaten by the bully Terrell, his thugs and a manipulated Kevin, Chiron decides to retaliate rather than to press charges. This act of violence relates to the hypermasculine law of the hood, and exceeds it, as it is done in the classroom rather than in a more underhanded way typical of Terrell. Chiron seems to make a decision not just to attack but be arrested and descend into criminality; once there, he finds a new man, like Juan, to set him up in drug dealing. From there he can follow a romantic but fatalistic path of imitating Juan. Juan did much in his life to cover up his own pain. And emulating Juan in this way will be a dead end for Chiron. Juan might be said to die twice in this film: first, as himself, and second in the guise of Chiron/Black, who emulates Juan like a badge of honor. Chiron as the “son” goes through phases of denial of his queer identity, not feeling he can choose an identity, self-loathing which is soothed by wearing the hypermasculine façade of Juan, and finally self-acceptance as he and Kevin are poised at the end to start a new relationship as queer African American adult men.

The mother as other in these narratives are emphasized in terms of their separation from their sons: Sharon leaves Jimmy to become part of the underground resistance; the mother of The Return has steadily been there to care for her sons and will be welcoming them on their return as young men, but she will not be able to know the misadventures of masculine identity during their trip with their father. In Moonlight, Paula has separated from her son early on through her crack addiction; she provides only partially for her son, and involves him in her conflict. He stands in the way of her enjoyment. While the child might provide jouissance for the mother, in these narratives the son is not enjoyed; he is managed, and in Paula’s case, as a burden. The narratives show maternal ambivalence of identification with her male child. Paula as the most homophobic of these mothers has noticed that her son is bullied for being queer. A maternal narrative, a desire for a pre-Oedipal state, is not offered here. But the sons’ desire for the father and mirroring the father is shown as detrimental to the sons. The films end with new paths needing to be forged beyond the paternal path. The authors leave the story with the son on the edge of different creative discovery. The emotions marking the endings include hopefulness, hesitation, ambivalence; shame and anxiety are not evident.

Filial Difference: Rejection of the Copy: Narratives of Paternal and Maternal Death and Birth of the Son

In several narratives highlighting filial development (Atanarjuat, Smoke Signals, McCarthy’s The Road, Beckett’s Molloy [2006b] and Malone Dies [2006a], Billy Elliott, and Tomboy), the son decides not to copy the father. This conscious decision forms a crucial part of the plot and characterization, not just the conclusion (as we noted in Part I). Is the son turning away from heteronormative masculine models and the inadequacy inherent in the father’s presentation of self to the son? Or in some cases, such as Billy Elliot and Tomboy, is the son finding in his father a kind of triangulation that allows him to become other? In these latter narratives, we might consider how the mother’s role is erased or downplayed so as to allow the father a larger characterization as the caregiver. In this discussion, I draw on Indigenous, European (British; French) and American stories and cultures to consider the diversity of the son as different.

Psychoanalysis seeks to create a modern subjectivity through a renegotiation of the past. To some degree, Indigenous filmmaking also attempts to renegotiate with the past; it also considers a modern subjectivity. Such is the case of the landmark Inuit film Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner, that features sons’ competitions and differences from the father; the film explores the struggle of individualism, as marked by the problematic hypermasculinity of Oki, with the communal needs of the Inuit group. Celia Brickman, in Race in Psychoanalysis: Aboriginal Populations in the Mind, points how psychoanalysis sees the unconscious as a place of lack as well as related to the concept of the “primitive mind.” Dreams are considered ways to survive psychologically. Brickman explores Freud’s claim of our human foundation taboo, the taboo against killing the father; this taboo gets elaborated in a related one of killing the totem animal. Brickman notes how Freud emphasizes men in this taboo story:

As in Totem and Taboo, the narrative features fathers and sons; the experience of women is referred to only in the single enigmatic remark that it is “obvious to everyone” that the neuroses of “the second generation”—that is, of the sons rather than of the fathers (anxiety hysteria, conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis)—“can only be acquired by men (as sons); whereas dementia praecox, paranoia, and melancholia can just as well be produced by women.” (Brickman, 83)

The Eurocentric simplification that the autonomous individual is particular to the West while non-Europeans lack such individualism flies in the face of evidence of the sense of individuality among non-European societies and cultures (Brickman, 107). Atanarjuat works against a colonizing gaze, while also allowing diverse subjectivities of the film’s characters, men and women, to come to the fore, without also losing sight of the group’s dependence on community for survival and spirituality. Atanarjuat makes exterior to some degree the sense of an unconscious through the intrusion of the strange shaman at the beginning of the story; this outsider, a manifestation of dangerous colonial foreign interest as well as overly individualistic and predatory masculinity, kills the father in the opening scene before an entire community as witness; the young Panikpak takes in this violent unjust disaster and its unethical result, the son Sauri’s rise to leadership. The group will suffer the shaman’s evil influence for years before finally several members rise up to oust him.

This narrative imagines a precolonial gaze, creating visual moments that observe imperfect attempts at masculine mastery and connections that relate one person’s subjectivity to another’s. In a complementary vein, Reheja has identified a “sovereignty gaze” at work in Atanarjuat. I note that Kunuk cannot completely elide the curious gaze of the outsider, and in fact, he tries to make it the partial subject. Beyond masculine mastery and the colonial gaze, Kunuk frames moments of shared empathy, such as the pairing of the brothers Atanarjuat (the fast runner) and Amaqjuaq (the strong one), the pairing of Atanarjuat and Atuat; the intergenerational pairing of Atuat with Panikpak. The film’s final scene foregrounds the siblings Panikpak and Qulitalik, female and male, battling the shamanic force. Panikpak’s announcements of the banishing of the wrongdoers, who include her own relatives, restore peace and harmony to the community at great cost. The film’s title is somewhat misleading, as the complex narrative is not so focused on a singular hero. The community is shown as diverse, with disparate individuals, thus defying a Western notion of non-European people being more communal and thus primitive. Indeed, in a feminist gesture, Kunuk allows the elder Panikpak the most individuality in the narrative, seconded by Atanarjuat and Atuat. The entire narrative has an ethical inquiry: up to what point will the community allow some individuals to be selfishly destructive at the cost to the rest? Kunuk includes the community’s respect for the spirits and the notion of overstepping. The group affects emerge as fear, anxiety, jealousy, desire, stoicism, shame, and love. In various pairings of characters, particular affects come to the fore. For example, the extreme rivalry and underlying anxiety over lack appear in the duel between Oki and Atanarjuat. Later, when Atuat speaks with the aging Panikpak, the women develop their own alliance. The masculine practices of violent attack (as when Oki and his friends attempt to murder the brothers with spears in a surprise ambush; and when Atanarjuat lures his assailants into a trap and threatens them with a knife to end the violence) and swift racing (such as when Atanarjuat famously escapes his pursuers by running naked over the ice, outlasting them) are shown to be only partially effective. The film’s ostensive hero, Atanarjuat, is a defensive figure; his stance is first that of the unruly other who upsets the group’s arranged marriage system by claiming Atuat. After he is made into a fugitive, both spiritually and actually, he studies with a male mentor, Qulitalik to learn how to combat the evil shaman residing in Oki.

Kunuk makes use of a mystical flashback to tell of the arrival of a strange shaman Tungajuaq (Tuurngajuaq) visiting the camp; he has been invited by Suari. During a spiritual duel with the visitor, the camp leader Kumaglak dies. The visitor removes the walrus necklace from Kumaglak. He puts the necklace around the neck of Kumaglak’s son Sauri, who thus becomes camp leader. As Shari Huhndorf points out, in effect, “Sauri murders his father, camp leader, in order to take his position and displace his chosen successor, Tulimaq” (824; if Tulimaq had been made camp leader, his sons Amaqjuaq and Atanarjuat might have been his successors). Thus, Sauri bypasses the law to empower himself: the son’s rebellion to create his own power. Panikpak’s eventual status as wise elder is subtly foreshadowed in the shot showing the movement of the round necklace, as it momentarily passes before her watching face on its way to Sauri (Fig. 3.4). The disruption of the camp’s law is called out immediately: “His own father!” Yet, Sauri decides to keep the necklace and ill-gained leadership, setting up years of chaos. As a father, he sets an example of an unfair law, and at the same time he is a harsh critic of his son Oki. He is later murdered by Oki. So the violence connoting an individualized law of the father and the law of the camp continues.

Fig. 3.4
A screen capture from the movie, Atanarjuat. It is of the moment where the walrus necklace, that the shaman is taking to give to the son, frames Panipak.

Atanarjuat: the son’s violent overthrow of the father: the unjust son; at this crucial moment, director Kunuk disrupts the gaze of mastery (of father and son) by showing the necklace over Panipak’s face

Full size image

Masculinity in the camp is set up as two oppositions: those who play fair and those who don’t. The two brothers, Atanarjuat (“the fast runner”) and Amaqjuaq (“the strong one”) try to have a life. Their father, Tulimaq, faces continuous bad luck in hunting, and his family has to rely on handouts from Panikpak; the shame of having to receive this support is apparent, although culturally such an ethical gesture of sharing when resources are low would have been supported. The fact that her act generates shame also shows Sauri’s hypermasculinity ruining the group’s balance and well-being.

The plot also explores the conflicts between individual desires and the needs and well-being of the collective. Here, ambiguity is key: even though Atanarjuat is positioned as the romantic hero, he goes against custom by choosing Atuat as his wife, even though he knows she has already been promised to Oki. Normally, Oki would be the clearly wronged party. But because he is shown to be unfair, mean, and petty, continuously exuding an air of discontent and jealousy, he easily becomes the antagonist. The romantic ideal of individual love is scrutinized against the custom of the camp to honor arranged marriages. Thus, the story also contains a kind of rebellion against the law of the father in Atuat’s and Atanarjuat’s love choice—seen clearly as a choice of desire.

The film throughout contemplates the disharmony between the spiritual and human realms, starting with the visit of the mysterious shaman Tuurngarjuaq and his encounter with the camp’s shaman Kumaglak. Midway in the film, during Oki’s awful and cowardly assault on the sleeping brothers Amaqjuaq and Atanarjuat, for a moment, the latter is aided by the ghost of Oki’s grandfather, the murdered Kumaglak. Atanarjuat is given a precious moment to escape, running. Michael Robert Evans shows this as the important visual intervention of the spiritual world, making the unseen seen and heard:

[J]ust as Uqi is about to stab through the tent wall to kill Atanarjuat a voice distracts the killers. The script describes the scene: Bloodthirsty and desperate, the attackers stab frantically at any shape. Uqi sights Atanarjuat and moves in slowly for the kill. A ghostly VOICE calls out an urgent warning …

VOICE (OS) Atanarjuat angajuata aqpakpasii! Atanarjuat’s brother is running after you!

The attackers freeze. Uqi whirls around behind him. His murdering face is bestial, feral, his eyes a bloody red. Uqi’s POV: he finds himself face to face with his long-dead grandfather, the murdered Kumaglak. Totally real. The ghost points its finger.

KUMAGLAK’S GHOST: Uqi!

Uqi throws his spear through the figure, which then disappears. He stares dumbfounded. Behind him, from under the far corner of the collapsed tent, Atanarjuat scrambles out. Completely naked, he jumps to his feet and takes off running as fast as he can without looking back. Uqi whips his head back around to see Atanarjuat escaping. […] (Evans 20–21)

As Evans points out, the intervention of the spiritual world is crucial to save not just the supposed hero but also the entire community. He explains, Kumaglak’s “shamanistic powers were not enough to protect him from Tuurngarjuaq, but he is able to return to the earthly realm long enough to thwart Uqi’s plan to kill Atanarjuat. The distraction he introduces allows Atanarjuat to escape and begin his torturous dash across the ice. The original shamanistic battle, between Kumaglak and Tuurngarjuaq, has now been taken up again” (Evans, 21). This intervention is carried out by a male spirit, as Oki’s unhealthy selfish grasping for power is clearly disastrous. The shamans at the end of the film finalize the spiritual intervention to restore harmony through the difficult exile of the wrongdoers. After years of Sauri’s, Oki’s and Puja’s evil in the community, including murders of Amaqjuaq and Sauri and rape of Atuat, Atanarjuat combines forces with the shaman siblings Qulitalik and Panikpak. Atanarjuat builds an igloo with an ice floor and orders Oki and his thugs to end the violence; originally in the legend, he killed his rivals; in the film, Kunuk and screenwriter Angilirq decide to omit this harsh retribution, seen as not cohering with a more contemporary Inuit outlook. After this scene, there is a further night scene of the elders, united brother and sister Qulitalik and Panikpak, who summon the shaman to banish him forever. All the spiritual power is brought to the fore. Qulitalik confronts the haunting shaman with the powerful spirit of the walrus and magic soil. Panikpak shakes the walrus tooth necklace. The shaman is finally destroyed and vanishes. Panikpak tells the group it is time for forgiveness: Oki and Puja and their friends are forgiven for their evil deeds, but are exiled from Igloolik forever. Older versions of this legend end with a revenge killing, whereas in the film, Atanarjuat stops short of shedding blood. Filmmakers Kunuk and Cohn in revising the legend felt this was a “message more fitting for our times. Killing people doesn’t solve anything” (qtd. in Evans, The Fast Runner, 59). However, the film doesn’t entirely exude forgiveness and pacifism: the sibling shamans must marshal all their energies and risk their lives to destroy the evil spirt. Afterward, Oki and Puja are banished, and most likely facing death upon leaving the camp.

The narrative blends Inuit legend with some aspects of Christian sin and forgiveness.Footnote 9 It also includes the idea of a dangerous invasion of outside forces or desires, or harmony being brought out of balance. The walrus necklace and magic soil, held by Panikpak, intimates a female force; the surrounding necklace conveys power to the leader. With the destruction of the spirit of the shaman and the banishing of the guilty, the story ends with the chance for a new beginning, yet to unfold. No one is named the new leader, and this will evidently be decided some time in the future. Kumaglaq, the young son of Atanarjuat and Atuat, has been named after the former camp leader. One day he might become the new camp leader.

The narrative sets up a sustained struggle with the father: the imposition of leadership from outside and the appeal to base passions of power. These preoccupations align with psychic perceptions of reality that rely on the father as a starting point. As Loewald writes, “For Freud ‘the concept of reality is bound up with the father’” (Loewald 1951: 7). Etchegoyen furthers this thought: “The father appears mainly as a powerful figure to be fought or to whom we must submit” (21). Atanarjuat foregrounds challenges to paternal leadership, involving not just human powers but spiritual ones. This battle of masculinities is framed as ethical: the unbalanced egoistic greedy male leadership versus the leadership serving the community. Fathers are seen as imperfect and their authority is questioned; even the good father, the camp leader at the start Kumaglak is shown to be capable of being conquered when he is caught unprepared to meet the power of the mysterious shaman. Sauri is a rebellious son, through violence against the father, not by special merit nor community agreement. He in turn mirrors negativity and a weak code of honor for his son Oki, who is alternately portrayed as weak and evil. The other father (whose father was killed), Tulimaq, cannot succeed in fishing and hunting, and must take charity. Seen as weak and ineffectual, and also cursed, this father cannot change matters for his family. He is so minor a figure that we do not see how his life unfolds after this moment of failing as provider for his sons early on. Qulitalik, the shaman brother of Panikpak, cannot hunt sufficiently and decides to leave. He later functions as a surrogate father to Atanarjuat and helps this son return and finally restore order and harmony to the camp. Huhndorf sees the film’s retelling of the legend as combining “a colonial allegory as well as a narrative about identity reconstruction in the wake of this catastrophe. The evil that descends on the community in the opening scenes and results in a change in leadership provides a stark parallel with colonial policies that similarly disrupted social relations and traditional practices” (824). What we can note in these narratives of domination is the prevalence of the male characters as playing out these conflicts. This is not to say that there are not female and even feminist narratives involved. In fact, leaving the final word with Panikpak distinctly signals the need for combined leadership of men and women and a departure from the male models of lack and egoistic striving displayed in the motives for male leadership.

To displace the male gaze that would imply moments of male mastery, Atanarjuat often frames masculine struggles as struggles featuring lack, and involving emotions of anxiety, fear, shame, and anger. To this extent, the looking relations promoted in the film align with what Sarah Kozloff has called the “cinema of engagement”: “for example, moving us to empathy—even empathetic anger—rather than distancing us or making us feel superiority; manifesting a level gaze; analyzing structures of power” (Kozloff, 1). Hearne wonders, “How can film history and film criticism centred in western constructions of family romance address films such as Atanarjuat/The Fast Runner (Zacharias Kunuk 2000), in which Inuit kinship networks, including spiritual ties based on reincarnation, determine both film production and content?” (“Telling and Retelling,” 308–309). I argue that Atanarjuat already does address both Eurocentric constructions of family along with Inuit ones. Even though the film is set 500 years ago, clearly in a precolonial era, Kunuk’s team create the script by involving their contemporary community, including elders, to devise a narrative that reflected more recent values as well (such as not condoning the taking of human life): it reevaluates and opens up the Eurocentric notion of the family romance and also recognizing complex relations of love, desire, jealousy, need, and lack in the Inuit community.

For Atanarjuat, the intended first viewers are the Inuit, and the images, reminiscent at times of still portrait photography, are designed to get at a complex lived reality before the catastrophe of colonization. Viewers experience the retelling of the legend as a culture to be revived, yet not wholesale. The story is greater than its parts, speaking to how beliefs and even engagement with the spirits are handed down through active participation for survival of the community. These qualities relinquish the individualism and pride connected to Eurocentric masculinity. Replacing the male gaze with a cinema of engagement, we might note how Kunuk refashions the idea of the pose in early photography documenting First Nations peoples. Atanarjuat is full of long takes and relatively slow-moving action or portrait-style shots that slow down the viewer, akin to creating still photography for the cinema. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes writes about the significance of the pose in photography as constituting the self. Hearne explores his discussion further: “Barthes writes that the self is constituted in photography ‘in the process of “posing”’, and the converse, that ‘what founds the nature of Photography is the pose’. For Barthes, the long poses required by early photography are a metaphor for the ‘body in its passage to immobility’ as ‘photography transformed subject into object, and even … into a museum object’” (Hearne 310). Moreover, the museum-like pose signals a kind of “helplessness,” “a pose also characteristic of the ‘vanishing Indian’ trope that so deeply inflected narratives and images early in the twentieth century” (Hearne 310), a time when the brutality of colonization had “pacified” First Nations peoples but did not erase them (despite the publicized myths). Gerald Vizenor explores deeply how this early photography of the unstable Indigenous person tended to create haunting effects of absence and presences, solidifying heroic tropes of the “stoic Indian.” Vizenor claims that photography and other “simulations” are available for other purposes, both within Native communities and in the context of the history of the “portraiture of dominance”: “The eyes that meet in the aperture are the assurance of narratives and a sense of native presence” (Fugitive Poses, 156). In the case of Atanarjuat, that aims to imagine a precolonial past, the struggle among men suggests ones that happen regardless of time period: the conflicts of needs and wants, the way men and women handle leadership roles. By contrast, in Euro-American narratives of the 1900s, as Hearne notes, there was often a reduction of the Indigenous story to the “heroic warrior figure and a ‘Sorcerer’ who practices ineffective magic. This negative view of the shaman or healer figure reflects turn-of-the century race theory, based on biological determinism, which combined ideas about progressive developmental stages of humanity with an assertion of Anglo-Saxon racial supremacy” (Hearne 312).Footnote 10 Atanarjuat works as a powerful antidote to such reductionism. There is reinvention of warrior figures and shaman: the magic here is not ineffective, and the legend is developed in consultation with Inuit elders, not by southern viewers’ ease of viewing. Thus, Atanarjuat serves as a potent narrative to offer Inuit viewers insight into their past and reinvention of their present, challenging them with diverse conflicting images of imperfect masculinity, particularly as foregrounded in the struggles of fathers and sons, and inclusive of Inuit spirituality, reconsidered for the contemporary age.

Smoke Signals

The next narrative, Smoke Signals, also contests Euro-American readings of the Indigenous man, with a more contemporary setting and contemplation of the clash of reservation culture with the rest of America. The death of the father is also a grounding plot point for the development of the stories of the sons, who reject the model of their father, Arnold, a modern, hybrid Indigenous character and complicated figure of strength and weakness, particularly self-loathing. The film merges a partial first-person/collective “we” of the Coeur d’Alene tribe, and the sons Victor and Thomas. Thomas is Arnold’s symbolic son; he appreciates the good in Arnold and treasures his moments of guidance, support, and humor, although he seeks an Indigenous identity far deeper than what Arnold can provide. Thomas mirrors his grandmother partially in his long braids and modest gestures; his suit appears to be an anomaly among his casually clad peers, suggestive of a desire for white acceptance beyond the reservation and likely innocence about what living up to a white man’s narrative would entail. The father becomes a legend in Thomas’s storytelling, which in turn is an important practice to reinvent the community; the script balances Thomas’s forays into storytelling between the comic and heroically subversive.

The angry, sporty, free-haired Victor contrasts with his geeky symbolic brother. The script plays on stereotypes of Indigenous boys, but also of boys more generally in their drive to secure an identity. Victor’s narrative is more about sameness and difference: he does not seek to copy his father, yet he does in terms of his anger, competitiveness (basketball), and long hair. When Victor’s father dies and Victor dramatically cuts his hair in mourning for his father, he is equating himself temporarily with his powerless, shamed father. But it will not be a position he holds for long. Through his heroic run in the night for help for the white people in a car accident, Victor has a vision of his father helping him get up.

The film suggests an imaginary space for the father as strong helper. As a positive, nurturing memory Arnold lives on in Victor’s and Thomas’s minds. The sons do not wish to follow a path of self-loathing, alcoholism, and confused rebellion, but they have yet to define for themselves how they will be as young Indigenous men. The boys both consider forgiveness of a flawed but often well-intentioned and inspired spirited father, his spirit part of his rebellion against settler culture. The ashes at the end are spread by Victor accompanied by a voice over of Thomas’s soliloquy questioning how we will forgive all our fathers for their many flaws, abuses, and weaknesses. He implies that we need to give up the unreasonable demand for fathers to be superheroes. But the question remains how to forge ahead as different men. It will mean accepting degrees of lack and powerlessness.

The Road meditates on the death of the father and of the mother in part by considering them as parents in opposition in their ethics toward their son. The main emphasis of the narrative is on the father’s troubled efforts to do good in an extreme survival situation of apocalypse. The young son (unnamed) is cared for by his father in a terrifying near-future world dominated by violent, desperate men, some resorting to cannibalism. While the father sets up a dichotomy of “good guys” versus “bad guys,” with he and his son belonging to the good guys who will never cannibalize others, the truth of their identities come up against a grim reality of consuming others and a general lack of mercy for the weak. They discover humans, men and women, naked and enclosed, kept as future meat for the human beings who keep them. The depravity of the scene is clear, but underneath is a logic of the pre-apocalyptic scene in which men, too, have dominated, abusing their power. The system simply appeared more civilized by superficial gestures and social niceties. The mother, already foreseeing the horror of the violence that will be possible once the social structure crumbles, has already committed suicide. What ethics will remain in the face of starvation and dire need? The father has a vague plan to kill his son if he is no longer able to look after him, a plan never shared until it is implied in their last conversation. The son combats this desperate dichotomization of good and bad guys upheld by his father by recognizing the possibility of others at points at which the father would be inclined to abandon the other. Further, the father struggles with the idea that he is not giving his son the right preparation for this new unknown world. He reflects how “[h]e could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he” (154). Toward the novel’s end, when the father is dying, he knows he cannot kill his son to spare him misery. He must take a chance to see if his boy will be lucky and have a chance at survival, and he does, by finding a new man who is a father and adopts him into his family. McCarthy, uses a free indirect discourse to relay the father’s subjectivity; after the father’s death, we are granted only a limited view to the son’s interiority. At the time of the father’s death, father and son have one of the most crucial conversations:

Is it real? The fire?

Yes it is.

Where is it? I dont know where it is.

Yes you do. It’s inside you. It was always there I can see it.

Just take me with you. Please.

I cant.

Please, Papa.

I cant. I cant hold my son dead in my arms. I thought I could but I cant.

You said you wouldnt ever leave me.

I know. I’m sorry. You have my whole heart. You always did. You’re the best guy. You always were. If I’m not here you can still talk to me. You can talk to me and I’ll talk to you. You’ll see.

Will I hear you?

Yes. You will. You have to make it like talk that you imagine. And you’ll hear me. You have to practice. (278–79)

The father tries to give his child a gift of dialogue for the future. During this conversation, they also recall a little boy they have seen some time earlier: “Goodness will find the little boy” (279).

A few weeks prior to this difficult denouement highlighting the premature separation of father and son, they come up against a male thief who has left with all their belongings, and thus means of survival. The father whirls into action to reclaim their things and finds a hapless lone man with their cart. In their confrontation, the father forces the thief to undress and abandons him on the road, essentially leaving him to die. His son begs for mercy, but the difficulty remains that if the man is shown mercy, he might rob them again or murder them with his knife. When the son points out that the thief is “so scared,” the father replies, “I’m scared […] Do you understand? I’m scared.” This is the father’s first admission of fear in a novel loaded with horrifying moments. In this triangle, the anxiety of maintaining the good is stressed. The narrator states,

The boy didnt answer. He just sat there with his head bowed, sobbing.

You’re not the one who has to worry about everything.

The boy said something but he couldnt understand him. What? he said.

He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one. (259)

This passage highlights the shared affects of fear and sadness, linked to shame. The father prevents the son from being one of the “good guys.” The survival situation has forced them to be bad guys. The law of the father does not function: the thief only obeys when threatened with death, the father mistakenly assumes he is the only one to “worry about everything,” while the son has already absorbed this responsibility.

Similar to Atanarjuat and Smoke Signals, the resolution of The Road leaves the son’s path undecided; a small suggestion of promise hovers in the conclusion, after the harrowing misadventures with the father. What would be the narratives left to the son? The conversation with his dad suggests how he has made a version of his father interior to him. Is this more the son’s desire or the father’s desire for fusion or oneness? McCarthy adds to the novel’s concluding oceanic feeling of wonder a pre-oedipal feature. Briefly, McCarthy introduces a female character, the partner of the man who rescues the boy and welcomes him to stay with them and their two children. She tries to teach the boy about God, even relating the boy’s dead father’s voice to God.

McCarthy elides human gender identity altogether in the final paragraph of the novel. Here a more ethereal poetic narrative voice focuses on a time long ago (“Once there were …”) the mountain streams and the brook trout, which have “maps and mazes” on their bodies (vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming), the one human sign appearing in otherwise non-human parts of the earth. The fish serve as metaphors for sexuality and reproduction and the water for revival and purification; in a narrative relentlessly emphasizing the earth’s destruction and lack of ability to regenerate life, McCarthy offers in conclusion both hope and despair, for this is likely the internalized voice of the father relating a time long ago to his boy: the signs of renewable life related to intricate maps on the trouts’ bodies suggest a secret that could be deciphered if we humans were respectful and humble enough. The maps and mazes pertain to “a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery” (287). The ecstatic yet mournful conclusion of the novel offers mysteries.

The father’s boyhood is compared with his son’s via the image of the trout. In the first part of the novel, when the father and son make their way west, they pass through a resort town, possibly in Colorado, and head south. In the woods, they come across “fireblackened boulders like the shapes of bears on the starkly wooded slopes. He [the father] stood on a stone bridge where the waters slurried into a pool and turned slowly in a gray foam. Where once he’d watched trout swaying in the current, tracking their perfect shadows on the stones beneath” (30).

This earlier passage compares with the final one, showing the biography of the man’s youth when he had the freedom to wonder at nature’s marvels, the mysteries of the trout in the streams, now lifeless and gray. When the father recalls how the surviving humans die out on the roads, he considers, “The last instance of a thing takes the class with hit. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all” (28). The narrator resumes the narrative toward the end to insert the boy’s different perspective of “ever,” a term that arises several times throughout the novel. The boy refuses “finality.” When the boy and father visit the father’s boyhood house, a modest dwelling, he indulges in remembering his own childhood, Christmas stockings, homework by lamplight with his sisters if a storm took the electricity out, a cot to dream in: but when he pushes open his closet, his “childhood things” are not there; simply the exposed sky, as “[g]ray as his heart,” as the roof above has gone. His son cannot share in these indulgences and boyhood wonder; he only experiences fear of possible ambush.

The father’s responsibility includes caring for the son’s death. To spare his son an awful death by cannibals or torturers, the father has contemplated at various moments having to kill him quickly first. He realizes, too, that such a decision might come too late, before he could act on it. To act as the final judge in his son’s life is oppressive; as his wife commented, perhaps he is only using his son to stay alive himself. He returns to the question of whether his motive for staying alive is out of empathy for his son or out of selfishness for his own survival, unable to solve this riddle. The other father who rescues the son comments on how wrong they have been to stay on the road to travel; they should have been off the road all along. The road as a metaphor, at first a seemingly neutral and helpful zone, comes to represent the masculine violence of the Selfsame: how men have perverted life for a reductive power grab. Off road, the son’s new chapter can begin, providing the book’s conclusion.

In speculative fiction, such as in Atwood’s novel, it is the tyrannical scientist son, the genius, who tries to command life and bend it to its will, mastering its secrets, and setting time back to start a new evolution of humans that might be less destructive. In McCarthy’s novel, science is almost of no avail. The father extends his and his son’s lives by applying knowledge of modern medicine and older techniques of navigation. Possibly, the earth has been partially destroyed by a nuclear or other disaster, science gone wrong. The men’s world questions what can become of men left to themselves when resources are scarce. A dead end. The man and his son encounter various male figures, many terrifying, until the final conclusion. After the father’s death, the off-road father appears and takes the boy into his family. Both novels, despite their fictionality, emphasize a kind of reality effect of ethics and affect, the “what if” of a world gone wrong, according to happenings and situations we already know of now.

Fear appears to be an affect paired with empathy in masculine responses to the other; the speculative fiction such as Oryx and Crake, White Noise, Atanarjuat, and The Road, facing the other becomes challenging; it is far easier to extend empathy to known people in one’s community. Christopher White finds that McCarthy sets up a narratorial opposition between father and son, while allowing the reader far more insight into the father’s subjectivity than the son’s. The son’s beautiful empathy is both admirable and hard to emulate: “Throughout the novel, the boy feels a spontaneous “shared affect between self and other,” which psychologists define as the “experiential core of empathy” (Pfeifer and Dapretto 184). While the father, reasonably, treats every encounter as a possible threat, the boy is able to imagine and feel, as if they were his own, the fear, suffering, and loneliness of others they encounter on the road” (White [2015] 532). White goes on to explain how The Road deploys narrative and other aesthetic techniques to offer a “powerfully immersive, empathic experience in its readers” (533). He notes in the cannibalism scene, the gendered mirroring of the male protagonists and the victims:

The moment of empathy with the other, the bearded captive, pointedly male subject, speaks to the helplessness and victimization of the male subject. While there are women and men, the male subject with his “please” is emphasized, mirroring the disempowered father and son, who are in search of food. They are not expecting to come face to face with humans used as food. As this touches on one of our culture’s deepest taboos, not to cannibalize, and its racialized issue of white civilization: here we have not just the collapse of civilization but also its counterpart. Capitalism has already been a kind of cannibalism, as the progress as built off the lives of disenfranchised others. To be faced with the naked, literally naked, reality, is shameful both for the other and the subject. The shift in narrational point of view that occurs here is likely to increase the reader’s experiential immersion insofar as the proleptic remarks serve to heighten our sense of suspense. (541)

Gendered particulars of these emotions of fear, helplessness, shame, and desperation are at the core of the novel’s apocalypse; the ending notable provides relief away from such emotions. The father acts as the son’s guide to the world; they encounter the father’s childhood home and camp sites, which have been emptied of their formerly rich learning moments. The son’s response to visiting of the father’s former home is one of fear and anxiety in case anyone is to come. More crucially, they come face to face with the human victims of cannibals. Father and son are unable to free the victims without sacrificing themselves in the process. They thus face the inhumanity of others plus their own. The driving question in the novel, “will you murder in order to stay alive?” extends to the taboo of cannibalism, a deeper barbarity—not only to kill, but to live off the meat of the dead one.

In Frank Kermode’s Sense of an Ending, he explores the modern apocalypse. Kermode argues that “eschatological anxiety” is not new to our age; looking back to Mesopotamia and other early civilizations, one can find similar human preoccupations with the end of life. That anxiety is paired with viewing our age as one of transition; we are in a perpetual state of transition (100–102). The ending of The Road seeks a transition with the death of the father: with the son, the narrative circles into in a recycling, and an ecstatic inquiry into maps and trout, suggestive of a move backward into prehuman history. In such apocalyptic narratives, the whole assumption of paternal authority and heroic structure are called into question. Yet, the novel insists on a perpetual dialogue with an internalized father, hinting at an ethics of desire.

The Road ends with the son internalizing the father’s voice; the voice becomes suggestive of mystery of the knowledge of life. In Beckett’s novel Molloy, he more centrally relates hearing a guiding voice to the filial subject; the deaths of the father and mother are called “the familiar mysteries.” In other works by Beckett, the sons’ narratives are foregrounded; the father, having died, is not retrievable. Jeffers has noted “Beckett’s continuous return in his work to the site of the place left vacant by the absent father” (169).Footnote 11 If we turn the focus to take in more fully the role of the son in relation to mother and father, we see more than trauma. Kristeva sees Beckett in his French works as seeking “an authentic non-paternal language” (Marie 1103); the language of the son.

The novel Molloy, with its two-part narrative, shows a kind maternal version with Molloy and a paternal version with Moran. Molloy as son in Part I is shown as creative, producing his text despite many difficulties for a mysterious master who collects his pages. The act of writing is tied to masculine identity; but the vocation of writing is less patriarchal. He seems to be compelled to write as opposed to displaying self-mastery. He downplays the act of creation: “Dire c’est inventer. Faux comme du juste. On n’invente rien, on croit inventer, s’échapper, on ne fait que balbutier sa leçon” (Molloy, p. 41). Dina Georgis observes, “an aesthetic text is more capable of exposing the affective “truths” of loss and trauma on the subject. That is because the process of aesthetic creation is in and of itself a process that helps repair or rewrite the self” (49). While Georgis is referring to aesthetic acts of creation, her comments seem particularly appropriate for Molloy’s kind of writing. His creativity in writing—his flows and fragments, his inclusions of affects and the everyday, his divergence from classical, declarative sentences or other approved styles—indicates a self-in-becoming, a kind of reflective male self that has few discourses available to him. Georgis also suggests “the aesthetic,” because of its openness to explorations of affects and lacks, “is a method of unconscious knowledge.” In some of his writing, Molloy suggests himself as gender fluid or even transsexual (using his own terms to suggest this). His penis is ironically acknowledged: “my so-called virile member” (51). In his report of sex with Ruth or Edith, he states, “Don’t be tormenting yourself, Molloy, man or woman, what does it matter? But I cannot help asking myself the following question. Could a woman have stopped me as I swept towards mother? Probably. Better still, was such an encounter possible, I mean between me and a woman? Now men, I have rubbed up against a few men in my time, but women?” (51).

In Molloy, Molloy as the aged son seeks the ancient mother, incompletely; the first part of the novel might be called the maternal narrative for the filial protagonist. Early on, Molloy reflects on ruins as related to selfhood. In Beckett’s English translation of Molloy, he highlights “voice” in this narrative, whereas in the French he used “dicter” (dictate) rather than “voix”:

And the thing in ruins. … It is not the kind of place where you go, but where you find yourself, sometimes, not knowing how, and which you cannot leave at will, and where you find yourself without any pleasure, but with more perhaps than in those places you can escape from, by making an effort, places full of mystery, full of the familiar mysteries. I listen and the voice is of a world collapsing endlessly, a frozen world, under a faint untroubled sky, enough to see by, yes, and frozen too. (Beckett, Molloy, 35, my emphasis)

[Et la chose en ruine … Mais ce lieu n’est pas de ceux où l’on va, mais de ceux où l’on se trouve, quelquefois, sans savoir comment, et qu’on ne quitte pas comme on veut, et où l’on se trouve san plaisir aucun, mais avec moins de déplaisir peut-être qu’aux endroits dont on peut s’éloigner, en se donnant du mal, endroits mystérieux, meublés des mystères connus. … J’écoute et m’entends dicter un monde figé en perte d’équilibre, sous un jour faible et calme sans plus, suffisant pour y voir, vous comprenez, et figé lui aussi.] (Beckett, Molloy, 52, my emphasis)Footnote 12

The place where Molloy claims to find his self is found through a voice that is from himself and from, or tells of, a frozen world and frozen sky. The idea of (masculine) self-construction and deconstruction (“ruins”) is linked to coldness and immobility. The ending of Part I emphasizes a disembodied voice guiding Molly, stranded in the ditch beside the forest, still aiming to reach his mother. The voice tells him “that help was coming”: “Don’t fret, Molloy, we’re coming” (85).

The second half of the novel constitutes the paternal narrative. The gaping lack of a mother is intensified by the father-son dyad of Moran and young Jacques. Young Jacques tries to please his father Moran and also intends to separate from him. When Jacques abandons Moran in the wilderness, the son’s desire for the death of the father is implied by the fact that he leaves Moran with no means of survival. In Molloy and Malone Dies, Becket deploys distinctly male, aged character-narrators, Molloy and Malone, to relate narratives of becoming and unraveling. Molloy from the start writes from a position of desire toward recuperating the mother, not the father; he admits that his aged mother confused him with his father, calling him Dan (related to “da,” Irish paternal papa). But Molloy tries to reject being Dan. Beckett suggests the desire for recuperation of the mother is the desire for a pre-Oedipal language, a renunciation of the paternal symbolic.

On the flipside, Moran, one of Beckett’s few paternal characters, weightily forces his son Jacques to comply with his demands; Moran distastefully notes whenever Jacques mirrors him and also is upset when his son differs from him. Jacques’s mother is not identified. In part two the story of young Jacques is one of the sons dominated by the father until the son finally rebels and deserts his father. This desertion, while seemingly permanent at first, is reframed as imaginary at the end of the narrative, when Moran sets of the fictionality of his narrative report: it was raining, it was not raining. Jacques is sleeping soundly in bed. Part One ends with the son in a ditch, unable to move on, still in search of his mother, while in Part Two there is a dream of the son, safely sleeping in bed.

Beckett’s male characters often feature a disappointing or middling son: an ineffectual, unproductive yet educated and aged son. The son expresses excess or burden or disappointment. In Molloy, the protagonist, as aged gentleman, anxiously oversees his mother’s domain. Instead of living an Oedipal dream of taking the father’s place, Molloy occupies the mother’s spot, suggestive of the abject but also of creativity:

I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now. … For example my mother’s death. Was she already dead when I came? Or did she only die later? I mean enough to bury. … In any case I have her room. I sleep in her bed. I piss and shit in her pot. I have taken her place. I must resemble her more and more. All I need now is a son. Perhaps I have one somewhere. But I think not. (3)

Molloy’s stories combine with his memories of his mother, including a dejected conception of himself as excremental newborn: “Unfortunately it is not of them I have to speak, but of her who brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse if my memory is correct. First taste of shit” (12). The mother and son fold into their sameness, a visual resemblance that paradoxically resists a sense of belonging. He states, “My mother never refused to see me, that is she never refused to receive me … We were so old, she and I, … like a couple of old cronies, sexless, unrelated, with the same memories, the same rancours, the same expectations. She never called me son, fortunately, I couldn’t have borne it, but Dan, I don’t know why, my name is not Dan. Dan was my father’s name perhaps, yes, perhaps she took me for my father. I took her for my mother and she took me for my father. … I called her Mag …. And at the same time I satisfied a deep and doubtless unacknowledged need, the need to have a Ma, that is a mother, and proclaim it, audibly.” (13)

Molloy’s dejection about being born is counterbalanced by his forgiving his mother for having him. His parentage seems to flow from his mother; when he remembers his name “Molloy” to tell a police officer, he is asked whether this is his mother’s name, and he is left perplexed. Molloy as maternal subject seeks creation in writing, even though it is not a source of knowledge: “What I need now is stories, it took me a long time to know that, and I’m not sure of it” (9). Beckett resists at every turn providing his male character with a certain sense of self. The restlessness and auto-correction apparent in this character becomes refracted in his second major character and subject of the second half of the novel, Moran, who represents responsibility, ego, anxiety, narcissism.

The son works as a mirror to reflect impressions of his father as failed. Moran is perfectly aware of this situation: “My son had a way of saying papa, when he wanted to hurt me, that was very special. Now listen to me, I said. His face took on an expression of anguished attention” (98). The son is a source of shame: Moran states, “My son could only embarrass me” (119).

In Julia Kristeva’s “The Father, Love and Banishment,” she argues that Beckett presents a quest for a non-paternal language. But it is hard to ignore the paternal language directed toward the son in the figure of Moran. Beatrice Marie in “Beckett’s Fathers” considers how in the short story “First Love” the protagonist recoils from his paternal role with his partner Anne and “eventually returns to the banishment-world of paternal death alone” (1104). However, in Molloy, we note how even though the son Jacques rejects his father harshly, he is eventually reunited at the end of the narrative. This may be only Moran’s imagination of a desired return of the son, but he nonetheless performs a double act of presence at the novel’s end by taking up his writing and re-inscribing his son in his life. The final poetic paternal language here is a language of the son, the one who seeks and creates. Marie claims, “Beckett does not try, like Joyce, to give feminine desire a voice. He simply marks its (for now) empty place in a discourse whose paternal function is exposed as illusion” (1108). I disagree with this reduction, however. Beckett does discover certain forces in the paternal function that compel us to make decisions; paternity in a way covers up its own failure, normally. But here Beckett lets the father fail, and yet leave his mark, through the wanderings and musings of Moran. The father shapes the son, and emerges as a son himself.

In the study of affects, there can be a confusion or ambiguity between the subject and the other. Where does one leave off and the other start? The interactive aspects of affect seem to reverberate in materiality, not simply the brain or cognitive functions. As Flatley points out in discussing Benjamin, the moments that we care the most may be “when we feel the value of something or someone ‘outside ourselves’” (18).

The discovery of the possibilities for the male self outside oneself and outside masculine standards is poignantly explored in the film Billy Elliot, particularly through various moments deploying a mirror as Billy becomes a dancer. As the body serves as the work of art for a dancer, Billy’s very corporality becomes the thing outside himself. And at various times in the film, he is captured in that dual form as self and other, whether it is the first time he enters the dance class while still in his boxing gear or at the end of the film when he is revealed in partitioned close-ups as the tremendous, mystifying swan character of Bourne’s Swan Lake.

The entire film is haunted by the gloom of the recent premature death by cancer of Billy’s mother. Her absence heightens the incompleteness of much of the miners’ masculinity. In Billy Elliot, the implied traditional narrative of the miner’s son who should become a miner one day is disavowed by the son’s narrative of artistic awakening. Unlike the artist Stephen Dedalus, young Billy Elliot does not mirror his father, except perhaps in loyalty and determination. He professes to not “want a childhood,” but rather wants to dance (professionally). The allusions to Swan Lake as a fairy tale of human metamorphosis offers a dream of ballet aspiration and alternative masculinity.

The father Jackie Elliot offers the traditional male coal-miner model for his older son Tony, but Billy is choosing a different path as a dancer, which has no local male model for emulation. The coal-miner is typified by his rugged physical strength and endurance, but it also works a metaphor of the male oppressed; when the miners go back to work, they descend in the mining shaft’s caged elevator like servants, whereas the first and final images of Billy as young boy and adult dancer are of him soaring and airborne. To become a dancer, he must transform himself without knowing entirely what he will change into. The desire to dance can be related to a desire for the return of the mother and also to enjoy the freedom of art and creation. Billy experiences anxiety while he hides his dancer identity. He is moderately concerned about what dancing means about his sexual orientation, but at the same time, he is presented as almost asexual, or desiring to postpone sexual discovery of himself.

Once the stigma and hypermasculine hysteria of his father and older brother diminish, room is made for the son to develop his new persona. It is only revealed in the final sequence of scenes, years later, once Billy has become not just an adult dancer, but the male lead in a professional ballet company. The mysterious and triumphant presentation of Billy as an otherworldly swan man confirms that he is the lead star dancer, and has thus established a career and can earn money to support himself. Contemporary viewers would recognize how Billy is starring in an avant garde work of ballet, a reinvention of a beloved standard. When his father and brother watch him, they enjoy his art in part because it is an art of independence.

While the film critically juxtaposes how to embody a dancer versus a miner, both professions involve discipline of the body and sacrifice. The son seeks to diverge from his family’s traditional work, but not out of rebellion but for sheer passion for dancing. His actual dancing is the way to convince his father and brother. In addition to the boy’s self-perception via the mirror and the maternal yet strict gaze of Mrs. Wilkerson, Billy’s dance teacher, the transformation of Billy is only possible through the mirror of his father’s accepting gaze. Jackie’s look ultimately functions as a kind of mirror of admiration that provides wholeness and approval of difference. The father’s look is so significant to the son’s final metamorphosis as star male dancer in which alternative masculinity is underlined that it is the shot that ends the film; at this point, the father is one of many spectators in the audience, yet his singularity is emphasized through the close-up of his surprised look of love and wonderment.

Such moments of foregrounding the need for an approving gaze for the son are partly achieved through cinematic suture. Stephen Heath writes of the cinematic suture as a process “which binds the spectator as subject to cinematic spacing through ‘its framings, its cuts, its intermittences’” (Heath, p. 91). The father at first was a problematic spectator to be avoided while we the viewer serve from the first moments of the film as the unseen omnipresent spectator in Billy’s life, catching his various moments unguarded, such as privately practicing his pirouettes in the bathroom or dancing up a deserted lane toward a police barricade of sheet metal. But once the crucial scenes of revelation of Billy as a dancer to his father have occurred, the father’s gaze becomes more aligned with ours. Thus the father’s gaze comes to be sutured onto our gaze, whereas at the outset, it is set in opposition to us, particularly if we feel ourselves to be sympathetic supporters of Billy’s alternative quest. Heath notes how suture is the part of cinema that is repeatable; its iterability involves “possibility of repetition with a difference as the ground and internal limit of intentionality” (Heath p. 91). The reconstruction of the father’s gaze by using the empathy of the viewer’s gaze suggests ways to remake fatherhood into a positive force in the son’s life. By contrast, other films such as The Return emphasize a father’s unyielding gaze; it is never wholly sutured to the viewer’s look. Most viewers will feel alienated from the father’s overbearing, overly didactic and harsh responses to his sons.

Like Billy Elliot, the film Tomboy by director Céline Sciamma does not need to resort to the melodrama of death of the father in order for the son to enact an alternative masculine identity. Tomboy builds on masculine and transgender differences. There is little suggestion of the child’s mirroring of their mother nor father.

No Copy, No Death: Alternative Mirrors

The narrative of the transmale child Laure/Mikael is largely related visually from his point of view, although there is no interior subjectivity, such as voice over or revealing dialogue. Here Laure/Mikael has the support of his father and mirrors him in various ways, following certain heteronormative male scripts. But he is not like his father in that he has not been assigned masculinity at birth; he might transition, and his father is partly there to help him in this transitioning. The camera, however, avoids suturing the father’s gaze, opting for the child’s point of view. Even though the father does not represent a stern nom du père, Laure’s examples seem to come more from his immediate peer group, as is often the case with preadolescents. The outcome however is incomplete as he is temporarily denied a full transitioning and is left to occupy the unwanted space of his female persona or identity. As a son, he finds acceptance from his father until weightier challenges of the mother and school impose themselves.

Billy Elliot and Tomboy make multifaceted use of mirrors that suture acts of self-identification and changes of identity with the spectator’s view, diverging from a view of paternal reckoning. The films build in a number of mirror shots to develop increasingly complex notions of masculine becoming, self-mastery, and male identity. In Billy Elliot, the mirrors work as a kind of companion in his lone efforts and as a professional tool. The mirror fills in a lack left by his dead mother; that lack is also partly filled by his new ballet teacher Mrs. Wilkinson. The mirror offers a sense of wholeness even in situations that Billy may not feel whole as he strives toward a new unknown. The narrative lacks a male dancer to imitate, thus Billy must forge his way forward uncertainly. His free-style audition piece is full of nods to traditional masculine motifs such as male highland dancing, soccer jumps, kicks and headers, and martial strutting. The only more balletic aspect of his dance is the long string of pirouettes which has functioned as a dance challenge to meet and serves as a metaphor for the kind of twirling progress he must make toward his goal of becoming a dancer.

In Tomboy, Mikael uses the mirror in solitude to develop his boyish behavior and expressions. The final extension of the mirror is when he creates a prosthetic penis out of playdoh to use with a boy’s swimsuit during his gang’s outing to the lake. Sciamma ensures the viewer’s point of view merges with Mikael’s as he poses proudly in front of a full-length mirror in his swimsuit with his prosthesis. In these moments, the father’s and mother’s potentially disapproving views are absent. Thus, the spectator partakes empathetically in the contemplation of transitioning gender and fulfilling a deeply felt inner need. In later scenes, when the mother reveals her child’s female sexual identity, mirrors are not included in this way. The spectator’s point of view does not align with the parents’ stance nor with the other children and their violent rejection of Mikael. The dress that the mother enforces on her child to reassert her feminine identity suggests a ready-made mirror of femininity. Mikael eventually discards this garment silently, also rejecting the gender rigidity. In the final scenes of the film, we see him back in his boyish shorts and shirt. When he meets Lise outside for their final conversation, they recommence getting to know each other. Lise has been offered as an alternative point of view, and now that she knows that Mikael wishes to identify as a boy, the final shot-reverse shot implies an inclusion of an empathetic viewer ready to contemplate a variety of open-ended possibilities for these preadolescents. The film also allows the vantage point of Laure/Mikael to dominate, even though they do not often articulate verbally desires, thus frustrating a generalized pattern in cinema-goers to discover some truth. Here, the film ends without any particular truth being reached; the protagonist re-starts the narrative and is still seeking to fashion it aesthetically and socially in a way that they can feel comfortable with. The director avoids overly easy conclusions of the protagonist resigning from a drive to identify as male or non-binary. The violence Laure/Mikael has faced toward the end by their peer group hints at the aggressive opposition that may lie ahead. But at least the stage as has been set for certain possibilities for Mikael to more intentionally go forward with a transgender identity or not. The film activates our ethical criticism of the mother’s prohibition. Even though we might judge the mother’s outing of her child’s sexual assignation a harsh overreaction, the advantage now is that Laure/Mikael can approach styling themselves with a more thoughtful kind of openness. The secretiveness that oppresses much of the film while Laure/Mikael and the spectator are privy to the multi-dimensions of transsexual identity is relinquished. Sciamma notably concludes her film with Laure reconnecting with their cis-gender friend Lisa, stating their name as “Laure,” with a teasing self-ironic smile that opens the door to new interpretations of selfhood and their relationship with Lisa. The narrative allows a hopeful open-endedness and emphasis on self creation and discovery beyond cis-gender standards.

As Dina Georgis writes about transsexuality and aestheticism, it is important to think about transsexuality “capaciously” “beyond the minoritizing logics of gendered identities” (48).

She extends the “definition of transsexuality as not only a way to identify people who transition from one gender/sex category to another, but also to understand the psychic capacity from which the variabilities of gender are possible in the first place” (48). Aesthetic texts can help negotiate the feelings and ethics involved in “rewriting” one’s sexuality. She comments how transsexuality can be thought of as a “psychic place from which gender is both achieved and imaginatively rewritten in transition. As a method of inquiry, transsexuality offers a way to make insights into how the unconscious shapes gendered subjectivity and also helps us see that transition is an aesthetic achievement” (48–49).

Filial Narratives of Ambivalence

In this final section on filial narratives, we can consider how writers and filmmakers offer masculine sameness and difference or present these identities ambiguously with parents serving partially as mirrors. I recognize how subaltern sons, working-class sons, and sons of color have varied public discourses open to them for self-realization. These narratives highlight the problematic and conflictual model of the subaltern father or father of color. This means, for example, that Indigenous boys must negotiate how to use white narratives of becoming versus Indigenous ones; the latter would draw particularly on a local tribe, but Smoke Signals suggests drawing on a broader community of Native Americans beyond the Coeur d’Alene people. African American and other non-white boys face similar divides.

Earlier in the twentieth century, modernist literature started to emphasize the idea of the isolated individualized self, highlighting affective interactions and psychological meditations. Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man captivated readers with an empowering creative view of the (masculine) self-generating self who casts aside the more traditional and constricting paths open to an educated boy from a struggling middle-class Irish Catholic family in colonial Ireland, such as the Catholic priesthood or teaching. Joyce’s modernist successor, Samuel Beckett, developed a more fraught vision of the disempowered male subject, yet nonetheless creative and generating. Beckett’s novels such as Molloy and Malone Dies juxtapose the creating/degenerating filial self with mirrors of the father and mother.

In Ulysses, the filial characters include Bloom, Stephen, Rudy; in the first two figures, free indirect discourse provides some subjectivity. In Ulysses, Rudolph, Bloom’s deceased father is an exhausted site to which Bloom nonetheless returns to year after year in remembrance of Rudolph’s shameful death by suicide. The mystery of his suicide is revealed to the reader in the penultimate chapter in Rudolph’s suicide letter to his son, as he admits loneliness and exhaustion as making him unable to carry on. The suicide note both absolves Bloom from guilt and yet enmeshes him in it. In his lifetime, Rudolph tried to assimilate into the tightknit Irish society, lost his Jewishness, an essential part of his identity which Bloom tries to retrieve again and again, incompletely and halfheartedly. Through the novel, the father is associated with a beloved holy past and innocence of Bloom’s early boyhood. That past will not function in the adult Bloom’s modern atheist age; as a non-believer, Bloom will never regain access wholly to this past. Holy Jewish practices are furthermore difficult in light of the antisemitism of Irish. For Stephen, his father is also an empty site: a site of a generous gift (education and voice and inspiration last name Dedalus, the ancient Greek inventor of myth) which has exhausted itself except for the father’s pride and fear of ruining his son and the adult son’s creative paralysis and procrastination. As formative for Stephen is the death of his mother: her guilt-inducing admonitions from beyond the grave also stand as a specter of prohibition for artistic creativity.

In contemporary film, we see a careful insistence on the possibility of self-determination allotted to boys, even disenfranchised ones. The boys’ emotional acts of self-reflection are complex in the ethical choices of being involved. In Moonlight, young Chiron is fashioning a self out of fragments of options: a drug-dealing father figure (Juan) who nonetheless cares for him, teaches him to swim and to practice self-respect; meanwhile, Kevin’s friendship opens the door to Chiron’s understanding of his homosexuality as well as a broader idea of self-respect (when they meet as adult men). The hypermasculine discourses emphasized in Chiron’s subaltern Liberty City neighborhood limit his choices of discovering himself. His few moments of speech focus heavily on his fear of being, of revealing himself and his feelings. The film sets up shot-reverse-shots of the young Little looking at his angry addicted mother who shouts at him; as an adult, he has nightmares of this exchange. After Chiron has suffered a brutal attack by the bully Terrell, he ostensibly channels some of his mother’s homophobic loathing in his retaliation on Terrell. Also by conscious choice, once Chiron is incarcerated, he accepts for himself a stereotypical narrative of Black boys getting into trouble and staying in trouble. Kevin gives the impression that that cycle can be changed through intentionality, not giving into the easy lure of the street.Footnote 13

Similar to Mikael in Tomboy, the emerging gay Black boy Chiron rarely verbally expresses his subjectivity: yet both films pursue these characters’ subjectivities and how they shift and get recreated through acts of self-assertion. Chiron’s few short speeches often focus on his position of hesitation and sadness. Barry Jenkins’s camera primarily frames Chiron’s point of view, but gives only limited access only to the young person’s subjective interiority. The repeated tracking shots from behind his head suggest a mixture of surveillance, self-consciousness, empathy, inscrutability, loneliness, and a lack of opportunity to express himself thoughtfully. Many of Chiron’s dialogues are guarded, to protect himself from discovery. His real father is unknown. When Chiron and Juan discover each other, it is as though each has found a mirror. Juan sees fragments of himself in the boy. And young Chiron and later adult “Black” emulate Juan at least in some regards: exuding independence, strength, guardedness.

In the final third of the film, Jenkins offers the solution of renewed dialogue and caring contact to break the habitual negative patterns Black has invested in. Early in this part, the camera reveals a couple of scenes establishing Black’s pattern of male loneliness and guardedness, as though that is what he is destined to endure; he has transformed himself into a near copy of Juan in his looks, attire, and mannerisms, and in his decision to be involved in the drug trade, which ruined his life and his mother’s. The crucial change is initiated from outside this masculine fortress: a call from Kevin seeking to renew ties. Black’s adult relationship with Kevin suggests that away from this negative path, without necessarily sacrificing the good things he gleaned from Juan. But he must retire the negative fatalism to move forward; this would not just involve leaving the drug trade, but also finally accepting himself as a gay Black man. In the final shots of the film, Kevin and Black both reveal their vulnerabilities and move toward a new intimate relationship of sexual equals, as suggested in the film’s penultimate sensual yet hesitant two-shot of the men side by side in the semi-darkness.

Britton and Baxter (1999) note how, in general, men have more narratives of self-realization open to them. However, I note that, in the case of marginalized low-income gay and bisexual Black men like Black and Kevin, it seems many of the available discourses open to them are limited and negative. When Chiron is very young, just after Juan has taught him to swim, Juan reveals him: “At some point you gotta decide for yourself who you gonna be. Can’t let nobody make that decision for you.” The shot pans gently to include Chiron’s intently listening face. Ironically, the advice loops back to Juan’s occupation as drug dealer when Chiron decides to follow in his footsteps. Despite Juan encouraging Chiron to choose his path, the only one Chiron can imagine is Juan’s job, even with all the pain and negativity he knows it causes. When Kevin and Black find each other again as adult men, they experience a point of discovery that suggests they can realize their selfhood in relation to the other; this determining of the male self in relation to the other is different from the more generalized experience of man as isolated and individualized. In fact, Black’s prolonged isolation demonstrates the unsuitability of copying the paternal figure of Juan; while Juan has been a caring person toward Chiron, his care did not extend to Paula nor the rest of the community.

While Moonlight presents a lyrical and at times harrowing meditation on Black masculinities, Ralph Ellison’s mid-century masterpiece Invisible Man pulses as a satire that also carries the deep sincerity of a confessional. The unnamed filial character-narrator scarcely describes his biological father, who is present but unremarkable. Rather, the novel follows the narrator’s filial connections with several diverse men as symbolic fathers: there is the narrator’s grandfather, Dr. Bledsoe, the white Mr. Norton, and Trueblood. The narrator looks more intensively to his grandfather than his father for guidance and inspiration: there is an idea of obedience/disobedience, and double conscious balancing act for the young Black man who seeks his way in the world. Meanwhile, Dr. Bledsoe, the narrator’s Black college president, serves as a castrating father figure, almost destroying the narrator. Other paternal figures in the novel (e.g., Mr. Norton; Brother Jack; Ras the Exhorter) each mentor the narrator only to cut him down, leading to his self-exile. But he plans to reemerge and do something new at the end: the novel’s resolution offers creative hope.

In Invisible Man, copying paternal images and models does not help. Outwardly, the various influential men appear inspiring and promise power. But the various masculine examples turn out to be empty of their idealism; in the “original”—the white and Black father—Ellison positions lack of authentic. Only parts of Black inspiration will promise change. As Invisible Man is driven by a single first-person narrator, we gain insight into his split subjectivity via the repeated betrayals he experiences, his feelings of shame, anger, distrust, and finally creative hope. The narrative, with its apocalyptic denouement, suggests a collective death of symbolic fathers, thus crushing the idea of the reflexively creating oneself based on the paternal image.

The narrator’s grandfather is a figure to trust and be wary of, as his knowledge dates back to slavery, the Reconstruction Era, and the Jim Crow resurgence. The narrator looks more to his grandfather for guidance and inspiration than to his father. The grandfather, on his deathbed, offers advice to the narrator’s father (which the narrator hears):

Son, after I’m gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open. (16)

These words cause the narrator’s parents great “anxiety,” more so than the old man’s actual death; they try to have their son forget this speech. We can note the affective impact of the speech to perform a Black humility for whiteness while subversively using obedience to overcome white supremacy; the anxiety spreads among the parents in part because they had not been aware of the grandfather’s sense that his conduct was treacherous to fellow African Americans, his acknowledgment of his Black complicity in white supremacy. The narrator states,

It [the grandfather’s advice] had a tremendous effect on me, however. I could never be sure of what he meant. … Whenever things went well for me I remembered my grandfather and felt guilty and uncomfortable. It was as though I was carrying out his advice in spite of myself. And to make it worse, everyone loved me for it. I was praised by the most lily-white men of the town. … And what puzzled me was that old man had defined it [submissive black conduct] as treachery. (16–17)

In the narrator’s filial coming-of-age trajectory, Ellison develops an affective tension of guilt and anxiety between obedience/disobedience, whiteness/Blackness, and the double-consciousness balancing act for the young Black man who seeks his way in the world. The young man’s decision of how to be in the world is predicated on Black men’s submission. The grandfather, a former enslaved man, is the connection to white supremacy that has not truly ended with the abolition of slavery. His model of Black male submissiveness is a layer to the more generalized symbolic of the nom du père which cannot be entirely reconciled. The novel continuously contemplates Black submissiveness and leadership, and how these draw off diverse examples of masculinities.

Ellison presents competing and entangled powers of the symbolic Black and white male leaders and separate and overlapping aspects of the Black and white communities. Dr. Bledsoe has been the colleague of the late founder of the historically Black college, an idealized godlike figure, and outwardly carries on the ideals of the Black pride in a separate Black education. Beneath Bledsoe’s seeming idealism is a hard-edged man who will only allow only some in his network to advance. When the naïve narrator discovers that Bledsoe has written “letters of recommendation” that actually sully the narrator’s reputation, a Black betrayal is laid open. How can this revered father figure abandon and condemn his own student, a symbolic son? The narrator resists emulating this gesture, but the affective pain and anger upon discovering this treachery, from a white ally, young Emerson, conveys the toll such treacheries take on the African American man in formation. The narrator’s intense anger at Bledsoe also spills into laughter at the ridiculous situation he is in, related to an old school yard chant:

“Boo boo boo boooo, Poor Robin clean” …. But who was Robin and for what had he been hurt and humiliated?Footnote 14

Suddenly I lay shaking with anger. … Who was I anyway? …

I laughed and felt numb and weak, knowing that soon the pain would come and that no matter what happened to me I’d never be the same. I felt numb and I was laughing. When I stopped, gasping for breath, I decided that I would go back and kill Bledsoe. Yes, I thought, I owe it to the race and to myself. I’ll kill him. (194)

This episode highlights the symbolic son’s desire to be rid of a symbolic father: but note that the Oedipal terms have shifted. In the Freudian case, the son’s desire is for the mother. But here the narrator wishes to punish the father (Bledsoe) for his betrayal of a Black “son” and his alliance with white power. Through this chapter about Bledsoe’s treachery and the narrator’s impassioned response, Ellison both satirizes and sincerely explores how certain Black men in leadership like Bledsoe, the non-idealist sell-outs to white power, have been allowed by whites to be token players in the larger American masculinist economy. For the story of the son, this is only one phase in a series of unveilings to show the lack of the father and the impossibility of the son to follow the father’s examples.

Ellison weaves a network of paternal alliances across color and inter-relational emotions of duty and shame; this network questions simplistic dichotomies of racial identity. Mr. Norton, the rich white patron and one of the original founders of the narrator’s historically Black college, desires to invest in it to see some kind of reflection of himself in the work. In an early chapter, at the local brothel and gambling house, The Golden Day, an African American veteran asks Norton,

“Tell me, … Why have you been interested in the school, Mr. Norton?”

“Out of a sense of my destined role,” Mr. Norton said shakily. “I felt, and I still feel, that your people are in some important manner tied to my destiny.”

“What do you mean, destiny?” the vet said.

“Why, the success of my work, of course.”

“I see. And would you recognize it if you saw it?” (94)

Norton’s words show how he sees himself as a kind of white father figure to African Americans; his concepts of “destiny” and “success” (implied philanthropic success) mystify and blur the racist underpinnings of his involvement. Years later, when the narrator by chance meets an aged Norton on the platform of the New York City subway, Norton is unable to recall this Black man (577–78) with whom he spent an extraordinary day at the college, the neighboring log cabins occupied by impoverished Black sharecroppers, and the Golden Day, even though on that day Norton insistently called the narrator “his fate” to his face and asked him to write him to tell him what he had become as a man (42–44).

Ellison imagines a flawed white fatherhood—through Mr. Norton or later through Jack, a modern, more politicized Marxist version of Norton, who nonetheless expects blind obedience and gratitude from his Black speaker—as a kind of false mirror. As the narrator realizes, he, the Black son is the one who has “made” a white man like Norton: the Black filial figure is the source of the white American father. When the narrator meets Norton on the subway platform, the old man doesn’t recognize the young Black man who had chauffeured him through the college town. Bewildered, he asks,

“Why should I know you?”

“Because I’m your destiny.”

“My destiny, did you say.” He gave me a puzzled stare, backing away. “Young man, are you well? Which train did you say I should take?”

“I didn’t say, I said, shaking my head. “Now, aren’t you ashamed?”

“Ashamed? ASHAMED!” he said indignantly.

I laughed, suddenly taken by the idea. “Because, Mr. Norton, if you don’t know where you are, you probably don’t know who you are. So you came to me out of shame. You are ashamed, now aren’t you?” […]

“But I’m your destiny, I made you. Why shouldn’t I know you?” (578)

At the novel’s beginning, the narrator was uncomfortable with Norton’s “pleasant” use of “fate,” whereas this same term for the narrator’s grandfather has had “nothing pleasant about it” (40); indeed, the narrator remarks, “No one I knew spoke about it [fate] as pleasant—not even Woodridge, who made us read Greek plays” (40).

The novel’s conclusion links the grandfather’s teaching with a broader spectrum of human affects all emanating from the questioning first-person self. The narrator ponders,

Perhaps that (“I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love”) makes me a little bit as human as my grandfather. Once I thought my grandfather incapable of thoughts about humanity, but I was wrong. Why should an old slave use a phrase as, “This and this or this has made me more human,” as I did in my arena speech? Hell, he never had any doubts about his humanity—that was left to his “free” offspring. He accepted his humanity just as he accepted the principle. (580)

Ellison’s use of the grandfather’s example as an earnest non-satirical alternative to the white-Black patriarchal alliance emphasizes the male individual feeling subject as he relates to others. Dr. Bledsoe, as we have seen, is a more satirical character of Black accommodation. There is one other satirized Black father who produces shame in the narrator. In Chap. 2, we encounter Jim Trueblood, the African American farmer living as an impoverished sharecropper in a log cabin a mile from the historically Black college; by positioning Trueblood and his story at the beginning of the novel, Ellison deepens the ethical inquiry into the fraught relations between Blacks and whites since enslavement by examining sexuality and Trueblood as a “primal father” (Houston Baker, 832). As Cornel West has observed, Black sexuality is the taboo subject in American society and discourse. In Chap. 2, we discover that Trueblood has committed incest with his teenaged daughter Matty Lou. She and Trueblood’s wife Kate are both pregnant with his children. In the scandal of their incest, the Black community shuns him, while the white community gives him more money than he has ever seen before. Norton, who is stunned by these revelations, suffers a deep shock, but also manages to hand Trueblood a one-hundred-dollar bill, more money than most crop share farmers might make in a lifetime. Historians have recognized how Reconstruction-era and Jim Crow-era sharecropping for Black workers became enslavement by another name. Thus, the patron Norton discovers the poverty of African American sharecropping, which brings about conditions of perpetuation of old power systems. The father Trueblood, through incest, perpetuates white standards of enslaved reproduction; he produces new workers. The morality of the family is not deep enough for him to uphold his role as a father who will resist the desire of incest. As Houston Baker comments, “the entire Trueblood episode can be read as a pejorative commentary on the castrating effects of white philanthropy. Trueblood’s dream narrative is parodic because it reveals the crippling assumptions (the castrating import) of the philanthropic model” (832).

While my exploration has observed how Ellison develops the filial narrative through a labyrinth of various paternal models, Baker acknowledges how “the black male phallus [serves] as a dominant symbol in much of the ritual interaction of Invisible Man” (832). The narrator repeatedly recoils in shame and anxiety while Trueblood tells his story and dream. The emotions the narrator feels while listening against his will to the incest story include shame and anguish: “How can he tell this to white men, I thought, when he knows they’ll say that all Negroes do such things? I looked at the floor, a red mist of anguish before my eyes” (58, my emphasis). At the end of the paternal tale, the narrator explains, “As I listened I had been so torn between humiliation and fascination that to lessen my sense of shame I had kept my attention riveted upon his intense face” (68, my emphasis).

Yet, as Baker points out, as extreme as Trueblood’s situation seems to be, Trueblood is also recognized as a “hard worker” who “provides for his family”; “[hi]is family may, in a very real sense, be construed as the entire clan, or tribe, of Afro-America” (Baker, 835). This man is the opposite of who the narrator aspires to be, in part as it relates to shame regarding Black masculinity. Yet, the conclusion of the novel brings about the narrator’s own nightmare of castration and how it relates to the affects of envy and fear in white society. Baker interprets this nightmare of castration by Jack, Old Emerson, Norton, Ras and others:

the invisible man sees his own bloody testes, like those of the castrated Uranus of Greek myth, floating above the waters underneath a bridge’s high arc. In the dream, he tells his inquisitors that his testes dripping blood on the black waters are not only his “generations wasting upon the water” but also the “sun” and the “moon”-and, indeed, the very “world”-of his own human existence (558). The black phallus—in its creative, ambulant, generative power, even when castrated—is like the cosmos itself, a self-sustaining and self-renewing source of life, provoking both envy and fear in Anglo-American society. (Baker, 834)

For the filial narrative of castration by a collective of Black and white fathers, a punishment done so that the narrator would be “free of his illusions” (Ellison, 569), the dream insists on the filial desire for a sustained idealized meaning of Black masculinity because of the nom du père.

For Freud, the threat of castration means for the son, the way to renounce desire for the mother and to identify again with the father. In Invisible Man, after the dream of castration, there is no re-identification with the father. Ellison imagines how diverse fathers, Black and white, mirror each other, copies of each other, desiring each other, in a negative male economy that can be related to Cixous’s economy of the Selfsame. That pattern, however, is broken with the disruptive filial narrative—in the Invisible Man’s dream/nightmare and in the novel’s resolution to reject colorlessness. While much of the novel shows the narrator desiring to serve as a copy of idealized paternal figures, to find himself in them, the desire is shown to be deadly. Bledsoe, for example, almost destroys the narrator early on. In the conclusion, Ellison shows the narrator’s plans to reemerge from his hiding spot and do something creative.

In these ambivalent filial narratives, from the filial point of view, paternal mirroring turns out to be empty, after promising fullness. In response, the narratives explore sons’ mixed feelings from losses, betrayals or being duped; anger and distrust; anxiety and shame. These feelings are linked to the paternal, and thus inflecting masculinity with loss and trauma. The sons’ path forward after the father must diverge from the paternal. Thus, these narratives at times open toward an idealized alterity, although the sons themselves know not yet what this might be in the need to write the self.