rereading

finding closure after a breakup

William Orpen, Reading On The Seashore, 1930

Surprise—the recognition of what one ‘never suspected’—is precisely what the paranoid seeks to eliminate.

— D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police

A consequence of being an English major is that I am constantly finding narratives to understand other people. This is especially true if I develop romantic feelings for them. And if they disappoint me in some way, then it is almost guaranteed I will psychoanalyze them.

“Paranoid reading,” as explained by the critical theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, attempts to interpret phenomena in order to anticipate what’s to come and avoid surprises, especially bad ones. Much of literary criticism anchors on paranoid reading, on what the philosopher Paul Ricœur coined the “hermeneutics of suspicion.”

To avoid surprises, the paranoid reader interprets behavior through this frame of suspicion. Paranoid reading is both reflexive and mimetic. In other words, it takes a thief to know one. “A paranoid friend,” Sedgwick writes, “who believes I am reading her mind, knows this from reading mine.” If I believe my boyfriend is cheating, I must have some knowledge of what it’s like to be a cheater, otherwise how could I spot the telltale signs? Regardless of whether this knowledge was obtained firsthand or secondhand, the implication is that some amount of guilt is inherent in the paranoid mind. 

We tend to stigmatize paranoia, to dismiss the thoughts it produces as hysterical, but paranoia does have its gifts. It’s good at pattern recognition and synthesizing disparate information to create meaning. It’s excellent at spotting red flags. As Sedgwick points out, paranoia “knows some things well and others poorly.”

Paranoid reading is what’s called a strong affect theory, meaning it attempts to account for a wide range of phenomena. The more remote the phenomena it gathers under a single formulation, the stronger it becomes. The ultimate paranoid reader is Freud. (It doesn’t get more paranoid than explaining every thought and action as one of repressed sexual desire toward one’s mother or father.) As a strong theory, paranoia loves drawing sweeping conclusions.

Although Sedgwick is mainly concerned with paranoia’s anticipatory qualities, I am interested in its rearview mirror. After a breakup, our paranoid brain takes over. It begins to re-write the narrative of the entire relationship in order to explain its terrible outcome. If you are the one being broken up with, you might even think that your partner never truly loved you, that you were deceived or delusional the entire time. This agonizing self-doubt is the paranoid brain trying to reverse-engineer events so that it can say, “Ha, I should’ve seen that coming.” Remember, it hates surprises.

For a while, I had two competing narratives in my head about my last relationship. I couldn’t decide which was true, and it felt important to know in order to gain closure. 

1. He broke up with me because he’s afraid of X, and therefore, must not really love me, and everything we shared over the last several years was an illusion.

2. He really does love me, and therefore, he should make an effort to overcome his fears and commit to being together.

Being more clearheaded than I was at the time, you can probably spot the false dichotomy. My operating assumption was that if you truly love someone, you are willing to overcome all obstacles to be with them. My soul was moved by the gravity of this expectation (see previous post), and I could see no other way to interpret what happened. It was only through coaching that I was able to unpack these narratives and recognize that neither was right, that both contained a bit of truth and a bit of falsity.

1. He broke up with me because he’s afraid of X (true), and therefore, must not really love me, and everything we shared over the last several years was an illusion (false).

2. He really does love me (true), and therefore, he should make an effort to overcome his fears and commit to being together (false).

In contrast to paranoia, “reparative reading,” termed by Sedgwick, is a weak theory. It only attempts to account for near phenomena, and in doing so, is little more than a description of events. By describing the facts of the relationship—accepting those I knew to be true and rejecting the paranoid interpretations of those facts (“therefore…”)—I was able to construct a more accurate story: He really does love me and has fears about X.

Paranoia is a necessary skill for survival. We are all, to varying degrees, paranoid readers. But our paranoid brain can go into overdrive, especially after a devastating event. Reparative reading is a useful tool to unpack and understand trauma so that you can pull yourself out of paranoia’s vicious cycle. The simplest way to do this is to describe events as cleanly as possible and avoid drawing conclusions from them. Let the facts speak the truth.

From Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: 

Because there can be terrible surprises, however, there can also be good ones. Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates. Because the reader has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did.

Rejecting the negative affect theory of paranoid reading, Sedgwick invites us to approach a work of art through a reparative frame of mind in order to appreciate its redemptive, renewing, and healing potential. Where paranoid reading extrapolates from the present to predict the future (and reconstructs the past to explain the present), a reparative mindset is able to separate the future from the present. Paranoia is a narrowing of possibilities; reparative reading is an expansion. It operates on hope.

In the aftermath of a breakup, it’s profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, and ethically crucial to experience hope. Hope is born from recognizing that the future could be different from the present, and rather than seeing the past fatalistically, it allows for the possibility that it could’ve turned out differently if certain conditions were true. The contemplative space between what was and what could have been allows for healing, and the space between what is and what can be is the space for growth.