Peace and Resistance in Youth Cultures by Siobhan McEvoy-Levy

Author:Siobhan McEvoy-Levy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

The Girl on Fire and the Burning Child

A classic text of psychoanalysis, analyzed by Freud, Lacan, and others, including Cathy Caruth who I draw on here, ‘the dream of the burning child,’ is for my analysis a story that illuminates other stories by hitting on deep fears and emotional questions. The story is a dream recalled by father whose child has just died unexpectedly from a fever. Exhausted, the child’s father falls asleep in a nearby room, leaving an elderly man to watch over the child’s body. The father dreams the voice of his already dead child reproachfully telling him that he is on fire: ‘Father, don’t you see I’m burning?,’ the child calls out. Waking up, the father finds that the corpse of his child has indeed just caught fire due to a falling candle. Freud wondered why it would be that the dream happened at all. If the father unconsciously recognized from a sleep state that a fire had started, probably by a ‘glare’ from the room as the candle fell, why did he not immediately wake up to smother the flame? Why did he dream about it? Cathy Caruth puts Freud’s question in a form immediately relevant to the study of pop culture as a window into world politics: ‘In the context of a violent reality, why dream rather than wake up?’ Another way to put this, in political terms, is if violence is predicted, why not act to smother the flame?

Or, why read or write fiction (dream) or view a film rather than examine other sources of knowledge about peace (being awake)? Why use pop culture’s myths to critique injustice? These questions are about the practicalities, and even ethics, of treating literary study and pop cultural analysis as informing about such weighty, real-world matters as peacebuilding. One possibility is that some knowledge can only be accepted in an ‘unreal’ form. As Veena Das has noted some experiences ‘need to be fictionalized before they can be apprehended.’87 Some genres of knowing and being may be more able to help people process collective trauma, for example, or envision peace. As I showed in Chap. 2, research on emotions and art suggests such a link.

In the burning child dream, the father had a terrible reality to cope with in the death of his son. In Collins’ novels, the reader engages the terrible reality of children’s involvement in war, and Collins has acknowledged that the subject matter relates to her own experience as child with a deployed parent. What is interesting to me is what the popularity of the series indicates about its fans’ recent experiences of war. And this analysis is a prelude to a closer examination of how fans are using T he Hunger Games in the following chapters. In focusing on a father and son, the ‘burning child’ dream also promises insight into the figure of the parent-leader identified in Chaps. 3 and 5 and, thus, insight into liberal peacebuilding.

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