Prozac Americans: Depression, Identity, and Selfhood - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2000 by Abigail Cheever

Identities can represent only stereotypical attributes; in Father Smith's terms, they are "deprived of meaning something real." Yet unlike other signifiers, which connote a series of ethnic types divorced from any specific embodiments of that ethnicity, the word Jew still manages to represent "something real"--specific persons as opposed to cultural types. This notion of language partakes of a Christian tradition that understands the word to have been given by God and made flesh through Christ's embodiment. In Father Smith's garbled account, if Christ represents the perfect alignment of signified (person) with signifier (the word God), the continued capacity of the Jewish person to be embodied in the word Jew (as evidenced by the word association test) represents proof of God's existence and thus of a higher moral order. Furthermore, as the last remaining signifier that manages to represent persons-to represent, in a sense, substance itself as opposed to an abstracted "class, category, or theory" (129)--the w ord Jew and the individuals to which it transparently refers, "the original chosen people of God," are proof of God's continued relevance: "'they are a sign of God's presence which cannot be evacuated"' (123). Accordingly, Father Smith argues, to destroy the Jew would be to destroy the remaining proof of God. He thus asserts that "'the holocaust was a consequence of the sign that could not be evacuated'" (126)--could not, that is, be reduced to a mere cultural stereotype and thus required the infinitely more drastic means of the Final Solution. By extension, for Father Smith the capacity of the Jews to survive the Holocaust suggests that they possess an exemplary status among persons: they are the authentic self itself, undiluted by cultural identity or ethnic connotation.

Ultimately, then, it is to the status of the Jew that the individual should strive. Of the three states of being that the novel presents--the person-as-depressive (Tom's patients before heavy sodium), the person-as-identity (the African Americans taking Na-24), and the person-as-authentic-self (the Jews)-only the last embodies "something real." The moral order validated by the Jews' continued "sign of God's presence" mandates the search for authentic existence above all else. To possess merely an identity suggests not only complacency but also an ethical crime. Yet the person-as-depressive is not as far off in his quest for authenticity as one might think. As Tom claims, each patient "has the means of obtaining.., the patient's truest unique self' (16-17). If the existentialist believes, in David E. Cooper's phrase, that "the true self . . . is not just an inner self somehow occluded by a false, superficial one, but a self you should strive to become," that "the self-estranged person is not distanced from a self he actually possesses but from a goal which he should be pursuing" (96), then Percy's commitment to depression-as-vehicle makes perfect sense. Unlike Styron, who understands depression as a barrier to selfhood best eradicated through any possible means, Percy imagines depression to operate as an invitation to process: the means whereby the self summons the individual and individuals "can come to themselves, without chemicals" (17). Answering that summons is the reason for Binx Bolling's search in Percy's novel The Moviegoer, and constitutes "what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life" (13).