In Aesthetic Hysteria, Ankhi Mukherjee conceptualizes hysteria as “an aesthetics of disgust” (16). Mobilizing a wide range of cultural and literary theories, she proposes the reconceptualization of theory in non-dialectical terms.

Mukherjee starts out by justifying the raison d'être of her monograph. She claims that despite the thoroughgoing criticism focusing on the hysteric, little attention has been paid so far to the “expressiveness” (xi) of hysterical performances represented in literature. Such “expressiveness” consists in various instances of acting-out on the hysteric’s part. The author investigates various discourses which feature hysterical “expressiveness”: in her reading of Victorian melodrama, she focuses on “emotional overload and the speaking body” (xii); in Dickens’s Great Expectations and its modern rewritings, she identifies acting-out as repetition compulsion; and finally, she turns to war literature in which she interprets recurring instances of stuttering as symptoms of male hysteria.

Chapter 1 (“Introduction: ‘Stuck in the Gullet of the Signifier’: Desire, Disgust, and the Aesthetics of Hysteria”) is subdivided into two major sections. The first subchapter conceptualizes hysteria and desire in Lacanian terms. Central to Mukherjee’s overall argument is the fact that “[t]he hysteric is clearly interested in something that is not fulfillment. Desire in hysteria is a desire for privation, for an unsatisfiable desire” (10). Constituted as a non-subject, the hysteric demands the master to produce knowledge, only to dismiss his/her authoritative discourse.

The second subchapter familiarizes the reader with several notions of disgust and Adorno’s theory of aesthetics. At this point, hysteric aesthetics is defined as “[t]he objectal remainder of consuming orality, an urge to vomit where an appetite for incorporation turns into an aversion toward incorporation” (16). The author draws a parallel between this particular notion of the hysteric and the hermeneutical aspect of theory, arguing that disgust represented in/by the hysteric marks out the limits of theory itself: the status of theory as a domain of knowledge is shattered and gets replaced by the heterogeneous, as “disgust speaks for the heterogeneous elements which disturb critical journeys and plunge them into heterotopias” (19).

Chapter 2 (“Too Much, Too Little: The Emotional Capital of Victorian Melodrama”) focuses on two particular Victorian melodramas: Douglas Jerrold’s Black Ey’d Susan and Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray. Both plays feature uncontrollable hysterics of both genders who contest the coercive functions of the symbolic: in these instances, the hysteric’s discourse and body stand for a “lack that cannot be dialectized or pervaded by signifiers” (27). Turning into an entity that cannot be grasped and represented by the signifying system, the hysteric performs the very dysfunction of the symbolic order. Mukherjee concludes that this non-symbolizable feature of the hysteric parallels the audience’s unquenchable and inexplicable desire to see melodramas again and again.

Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and its modern rewritings (Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations, Sue Roe’s Estella: Her Expectations and Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs) are discussed in the third chapter of the book. Considering the substantial amount of critical reflection on Dickens’s work, Mukherjee poses the following question: “If all writing is, in a Derridean sense, rewriting, then what more is there left to say?” (55). Rewriting in this sense deconstructs originality, suggesting that writing is always already a supplement of a previous discourse. In the context of literary creation, hysteria comes to function as a metaphor of narrative endlessness, the instigator of the “impossibility of exemplification or closure” (55).

Mukherjee goes on to discuss and contrast the Lacanian and the Freudian notions of repetition compulsion, which is represented as a means of mastery according Freud and as that of alienation according to Lacan. A more elaborate explication of repetition compulsion, however, is carried out in the subsequent chapter (“Broken English: Neurosis and Narration in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy”) in connection with war literature. Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy features soldiers of WWI suffering from shell shock. The author focuses on the reading of one particular symptom of the trilogy’s male hysterics, namely, stuttering. Traumatized as they are, soldiers suffering from shell shock are compelled to recount the traumatic experience that the very act of stuttering hinders from being properly narrativized. Moreover, in this chapter, Mukherjee conceptualizes the hysterical symptom of stuttering as a performative speech act, which thwarts the development of both a unified personal and national identity.

Although there is nothing revolutionary about a psychoanalytical conceptualization of the hysteric based on the relevant notions of Freud and/or Lacan (see for instance Monique David-Ménard’s Hysteria from Freud to Lacan: Body Language in Psychoanalysis or Juliet Mitchell’s Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effect of Sibling Relationships on the Human Condition), Mukherjee’s project points well beyond these theoretical confines. Not only is she concerned with hysteria as a disturbing element in literature, but she also examines the hysterical aspects of theory. The fact that she tackles a literary phenomenon as a theoretical one is undoubtedly one of Mukherjee’s most original insights. The strongest point of her argument, however, is at once its weakest one. Throughout the book, Mukherjee’s arguments are well supported and plausible. However, we do not learn whether she treats theory as an umbrella term including all kinds of theories, or whether she talks about one particular theory. Despite this minor deficiency, Aesthetic Hysteria is an excellent read for scholars and researchers of gender studies, psychoanalysis and hysteria.

Nikoletta Gergely, University of Debrecen