Case Study #3 Reflection
As with the second case study of my thesis, this one comes belatedly as well. I would offer my apologies, but, again, combining the academic with the emotional is a feat that I’m proud to have conquered and also, one that I needed to rest from. But I’m back, baby, and pleased to announce that the third case study is now posted.
Case study #3 focuses on Matthew Salesses’ novel, The Hundred-Year Flood. Published in 2015, the book follows Tee, the protagonist, as he recovers from adventures in Prague and deals with family trauma, including his adoption. Unlike the other two case studies, I didn’t personally meet or speak with Salesses (until later!). Instead I came across his work through a deep comb of AdopteeReading (which I can’t recommend highly enough). It was with an educated guess and some luck that I found I could impose a reading of Lifton’s theory of Ghost Kingdoms on this book.
The other differentiating factor of this book is that, unlike the two previous case studies that specifically aimed to create a work based on Lifton’s theory, Salesses was not previously aware of the Ghost Kingdom theory which made playing with this work all the more fun. I was able to argue that “the textual evidence of coping mechanisms adoptees employ to process the trauma of missing information about themselves often reflect Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom theory, regardless of any explicit influence.” That’s a fancy way of saying, there’s Ghost Kingdom stuff here, but not on purpose!
I’m also pleased to announce that the featured adoptee art on the page of this chapter is a song called “Constellations” by Jenni Alpert (aka Cami), who I met at the 2023 Adoption Knowledge Affiliates conference. The song is a beautiful tribute to the experience of adoptee-kind and I’m honored that she allowed me to share this with you. Please go poke around on her website, there’s lots to discover about her many works.
I remember as I was writing this chapter that I thought that it was too bad I had such a demanding deadline because I really could have gone on and on about Matthew Salesses’ novel. It’s a fascinating read, and my copy of the book will forever bear the scars of my reading notes as I read and reread it. What I wish I had expanded on in more length is the aspect of memory as it’s portrayed here; the beginning of my chapter alludes to this, but due to time constraints and my focus on Ghost Kingdom narrative functions, I couldn’t focus solely on the disordered memory as it’s presented in the book. Another paper for another day, perhaps.
The full chapter as it’s now posted on my website, explains the concept of Tee’s container (an internal place where he hides and represses his emotions), the unnatural narrative of the ghost that literally haunts him the entire novel, and, my personal favorite, the activation of a possible world when Tee composes an alternate birth story on his typewriter. There’s a lot of gems packed into this book, is what I’m saying, and if I’d had all the time in the world, I could have written entire essays on each of these three aspects, too.
I originally came to this work because of the ghosts mentioned in the summary, but I ended up being more fascinated with Tee’s container and his typewritten story. This case study pushed me to be creative in my interpretations. Ghost Kingdom narratives in the wild were (and are still) not easy to locate because they aren’t usually named as such and I got very lucky with my first two case studies, but The Hundred-Year Flood helped me expand the definition of Ghost Kingdom beyond what Lifton had described it as and examine further the parts that made it work. Sure, Lifton says a Ghost Kingdom is a kind of psychic reality where we daydream about the biological relatives we’ve lost, but what does that look like? Wouldn’t cognition and its expression vary person to person? What if the daydream isn’t at the conscious level and is repressed? The cognition as it’s manifested in this novel is brilliant (IMHO) and led me towards a theory that was not adoption-centered, but instead an example of the workings of a fictional mind. And fiction is a function of a real mind, too, wouldn’t you say?
When I took a version of this chapter focusing only on the typewriter story to the 2023 Narrative conference, I was also happy to receive some feedback about including some discussion on embodiment (would you rather read a story saying the character was sad he didn’t have a birth story or experience his grief by watching him type up an alternate birth story for himself?) and temporality (how narrative memory moves the reader back and forth between time and space).
All of these happy discoveries have lent themselves to the growing definition of phantom worlds (sorry I keep hinting at this, you’ll hear someday, I promise!) and how such narratives function. In the case of The Hundred-Year Flood, I think you’ll be happy to find that Tee’s cognition as it’s expressed with his container and his typewritten story is beautifully expressed. And bonus, there's a real ghost. As with the other two case studies, I am quite proud of this one and hope you enjoy it, too.
