Must Repression Always Fail?

In art? In life?

I wrote a short piece about the Austrian novelist Marlen Haushofer’s fiction—the work available in English, anyway—for the New York Times Book Review, occasioned by the new translation of her 1957 novella Killing Stella. There’s so much more to say about Haushofer than I could fit into 1,200 words, and from the start I decided to focus almost entirely on what I take to be her central theme: repression, which she bakes into the text so completely that it’s not always (or ever) possible to say exactly what her characters are repressing.

The relationship between repression and narrative art is a longtime interest of mine as a reader and novelist, and Haushofer’s writing has long figured in my thinking on the subject. As I wrote the Times piece, I found my thoughts on the subject overflowing my word count: that overflow eventually became this email.

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For a long time I was obsessed with a letter that the novelist J.M. Coetzee wrote to the clinical psychologist Arabella Kurtz. This letter—published in The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction, and Psychotherapy, but first encountered by me in Harper’s—takes up the concept of repression, or more precisely how repression is represented in literature. In novels, Coetzee argues, secrets exist for the purpose of being uncovered; the past cannot be escaped; when people try to reinvent themselves by burying uncomfortable, shameful, or inconvenient memories, they fail. Repression fails; it’s inevitable.

Imagine a story, Coetzee writes, that tries to teach “that our lives are ours to make and remake as we wish, that the past is past, that secrets can be freely buried and forgotten.”

Can there be such a story that works as a story? Can we have a story that ends, “And his secret was forgotten and he lived happily ever after?”

Insofar as it ends in a paradox—the secret is not really buried, since the reader knows it—you cannot have such a story, at least not in its straightforward, unironic version […] But what if the true secret, the inadmissible secret, the secret about secrets, is that secrets can indeed be buried and we can indeed live happily ever after? What if our culture, perhaps even human culture in general, has created a form of narrative that is on the surface about the unburiability of secrets but seeks to bury under the surface the one secret it cannot countenance: that the past can be obliterated, that justice does not reign?

Typing up Coetzee’s questions now, I can think of some serious objections. But when I first read them, they struck right at the heart of my literary life. For several years, I had been working on a novel, trying to get at… something. Something about torture. Something about how, in the early 2000s, images of Americans and American allies subjecting people—mostly brown-skinned, Muslim men—to intimate physical and mental domination became an undeniable fixture of our national consciousness, always in the air but also constantly avoided, constantly repressed. Everyone had some fuzzy ambient knowledge of these images and of the scenes they implied, but the vast majority of people didn’t talk about them much (or at all), and in fact couldn’t have talked about them with any specificity. These images made a temporary splash when they first surfaced, but quickly got swept under the psycho-cultural rug. Now and then, we bumped into them—Oh, those? Ewww—and quickly moved on, often so reflexively that we didn’t register it happening.

I wanted to get at this aspect of early 2000s America in my novel—really get at it, not just by writing some sentences like the ones in the paragraph you’ve just read, but by somehow encoding it into the basic DNA of my novel: its form, its shape, its tone, its style. And this was why Coetzee’s letter struck me so. How would I evoke the repression I was interested in? One option, of course, was to show some characters encountering the images, then show those images slipping from the front of their minds, slipping even further back, into the zone of repression—then lurching toward the front again, pulled up by a new headline, an offhand comment, an oddly similar image—then slipping back again, again, again.

But I was intrigued by another option: to never introduce the original images. To never really identify this thing I was trying to “get at.” To focus on evoking torture’s sticky psycho-cultural residue—without making explicit where it came from. To write a post-9/11 rendition and torture novel with no scenes of rendition or torture. Without even the words 9/11 or rendition or torture. I didn’t necessarily need to give my characters, per Coetzee, a “happy ending.” I didn’t necessarily need to show repression altogether “succeeding.” But maybe, I thought, I could/should write a novel that was radically true to the nature of repression (or something like that)—by being fundamentally repressed itself (or… something like that).

This path was extremely tempting. Coetzee was right, I thought (and still think): we really can pretty much forget, or mostly forget, or forget more than we remember. The truth will out: well, no, not always. Sometimes what’s repressed stays repressed, or half-repressed. Sometimes people don’t come to understand why they did or didn’t do whatever they did or didn’t do. And it’s possible for narrative art to not just narrate this truth about life but also embody it, often with thrilling results.

During the years I spent working on my torture novel, I found myself drawn again and again to works that took this approach.

Like: Kenneth Lonergan’s film Margaret, my favorite cinematic treatment of post-9/11 America. Part of its greatness lies in how it never explicitly identifies itself as a post-9/11 movie. The characters don’t see themselves as living out especially post-9/11 storylines. Instead, there’s this curdled atmosphere hanging over everything: this desire to blame and to punish, and to avoid any real thinking about the psychic life and function of these desires. Aside from a few loaded shots of planes flying low over New York, it’s the viewer’s job to feel their way to the context. And maybe they never do: that’s a chance the storyteller takes.

Like: Marlen Haushofer’s The Loft, which is full of signs—or possible signs, loud but never conclusive—that it’s a tale of repressed Austrian awareness of Holocaust complicity. There’s a lot of smoke, a lot of ash. A woman rendered deaf by psychological forces she can’t name. A man screaming confessions that no one hears. Middle-class characters preoccupied with reading about military history on weekend afternoons. Surely—surely?—all this is pointing toward… You know… But the book never says so. As I say in my Times piece (re: Killing Stella—but the same applies to The Loft): “The sense of danger suffusing the prose is all the more potent for its murky origins. What’s more petrifying than something we sense is lurking in the closet at night, but we can’t see or name?”

There are so many great works that take this approach; I admire them immensely. Someone could write a great little book about them. Someone probably has.

In the end, though, it’s not the approach I ended up taking. It is simply not possible to miss my novel’s preoccupation with post-9/11 torture. At the same time, I think it’s easy to see that it’s also preoccupied with the question Coetzee put to Arabella Kurtz, preoccupied with how much we’re able to forget, preoccupied with the aesthetic question of how to “truly” represent different forms of forgetting. Characters lie and don’t get caught, keep secrets and don’t get forced to reveal them. The images from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are a major presence in the novel, but never described directly. People try to remember where they saw them, and when, and they can’t. Torture is a major presence in the novel, something that has altered the course of characters’ lives, but no scenes of torture are shown directly. In scenes where characters read accounts of torture, I don’t relate what they’re reading in any level of detail. It’s mostly blur, mostly residue—but I don’t obscure where it came from.

I remember wondering, as I finished the novel, if this was a form of cowardice. If I was chickening out, helping along the daily effort by which we, as Coetzee puts it, “bury under the surface the one secret [we] cannot countenance.” But in the end I didn’t lose much sleep over the question.

Lately I’ve been wondering what this novel would have ended up like if I’d been working on it this year. 2025. Where once again we’re shipping men abroad, outside of any legal process, to be tortured and held indefinitely. Where scenes of their domination are again circulating through our national image-culture—this time not thanks to leaks and investigative journalists, but because Trump regime figures post them online directly, celebrating what they’ve done.

I’m sure I don’t have the answer. In the end, I think, finishing a novel means putting aside all your lofty ideas about what novels should do and instead just throwing yourself into the nitty-gritty of making the book that you’ve ended up writing—for reasons you understand and reasons you don’t—as seaworthy as you possibly can.

History, as they say, is the part that hurts; art mostly just follows along, finding a way —and there’s always more than one—to trace the wounds. ✹

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Also: I’m once again posting short pieces about music and life — some by me, some by friends/guests — over at

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