Panel: Paternity, Memory, and the Boundaries of Biology, Culture, and
History
Copanelists: G. Thomas Couser and Roger Porter
Adoptee and psychologist Betty Jean Lifton, in her book about the consequences of relinquishment and adoption on the individual and the family, spends a chapter describing “The Mark of Oedipus”: genetic sexual attraction. She understands from her clients, she informs us, that family members experiencing reunion often feel they must have sex with their newly discovered biological relatives. Lifton, and those who follow her in discussing this phenomenon, believe that genetic sexual attraction arises from the “need for connection,” the discovery of “lost parts of themselves” that sexual intercourse will bring back into the fold (232).
But the adoptees and their biological kin describe what they feel in a subtly different way: for them, sexual relations do not simply confirm the boundaries of the self, they obliterate them. Virtually all of Lifton’s clients use the language this one does: “‘I want to consume you,’ he said, ‘Just suck you in . . . my need to consume you goes beyond sex.’ The mother understood what he was saying. ‘It was like we wanted to suck each other into our beings,’ she said. ‘I wanted to engulf him, to pull him back into my womb, and never let him go again’” (229). From the point of view of those experiencing it, genetic sexual attraction comes from the desire to destroy separation and undo relinquishment utterly, even the relinquishment of engendering and birth themselves.
Though it has not yet been treated as adoption life writing, this is precisely the paradox Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss frames. Its central image is the kiss Harrison’s biological father gives her at their reunion twenty years after he abandons her to a kinship adoption, a kiss that violates borders and prefigures the consumption that will both destroy and construct the category “father.” My essay will argue that, by noticing adoption in The Kiss, we discover that, like much other adoption life writing, it queries the central assumptions of majority (biological) family construction. Like the Oedipus cycle as Marianne Novy describes it in Reading Adoption, The Kiss asks not only “Who am I?” but “What is a father?” (40). I will argue that it deploys the sexual transgression of biological relatives to limn the physical line shaping identities, and specifically, that which defines the biological father. In crossing that line, in puncturing the integument of identity categories, it not only asks, as Lifton does, “Is it incest?” (226), but ultimately, as Novy does, of Oedipus’s narrative: “What does [father]hood mean?”(39).
Emily Hipchen is one of the editors of a/b: Autobiography Studies, and the author of the memoir Coming Apart Together: Fragments from an Adoption (Literate Chigger Press, 2005). Her essays, short stories, and poems have appeared or won prizes at Northwest Review, Open Windows, New Letters, The Georgetown Review, Baltimore Review, Arts and Letters, and elsewhere. She teaches courses in autobiography, the literature of adoption, and creative nonfiction at The University of West Georgia, and will be a Fulbright Scholar in India this winter.