Life wish, death wish, red fish, blue fish: "Unfathomably Deep" by Sophie Madeline Dess (BASS 2025)

This must be that thing that happens once a year in blogging through a short story anthology where I have to pause to remark on how the stories in said anthology are not intentionally lined up such that two consecutive stories interact with one another. Best American Short Stories has long maintained a tradition of listing its stories in alphabetical order according to the surname of the author. They maintained this practice this year, in spite of the change of editor. So when two stories have similar themes or subject matter, it's a coincidence. 

Sometimes, it's one hell of a coincidence, though, enough to make me wonder if the guest editor selecting the winning stories is actually such a genius that, as they read through, they were able to consider how the stories would play out through juxtaposition by considering author surnames. "Let's see, yes, Wilson's story is about as good as Baker's, but if I choose Wilson, it'll go right after Weber, and both are about a family mourning the loss of a dog..." I can't believe any editor chooses stories like that, but in all the years I've been doing this, "Unfathomably Deep" by Sophie Madeline Dess, coupled with "Abject Naturalism" by Sarah Braunstein, the story just before "Unfathomably" in the 2025 BASS, have got to the take award for "two stories most difficult to believe just happened to end up next to one another." This is because of the way both stories squeeze all the meaning they can out of the uncanniness of the female body. 

Freud just won't go away

I always wondered, from the first moment I realized there was such a thing as literary theory, why Freud was such a big part of it. In any anthology of or introduction to literary theory, psychoanalytic criticism will probably occupy a large chapter somewhere near the front (because it was, chronologically, one of the earliest influential theories in modernity). A good chunk of that chapter on psychoanalytic criticism will belong to the work of Sigmund Freud. 

When I first found myself spending a chunk of a semester learning to apply Freud to a literary text, I was surprised. Freud isn't very influential in the actual practice of psychology or psychiatry anymore. The science of the brain has advanced far enough that we can pretty easily dispense with a lot of his key concepts. For example, we don't really think that dreams are the unconscious trying to tell us something, even while repressing that message. I don't think anyone believes that women go around their whole lives wishing they had penises. Even if we aren't professionals in mental health or cognitive science, we can read his work and see a good deal more cultural assumption than rigorous science in it.

And yet...

Some of the major concepts in it have appeal, not as science, but as a way of explaining art and why certain motifs continually show up in literary works. Freud isn't relevant much anymore if you're going to a mental health professional to try and quit smoking or to deal with your anxiety, but it's hard to read some stories and not think of his categories. So as unlikely as it seems, Freud is still worth considering, not as a psychologist, but as a cultural thinker who brings psychology into the discussion of art. He's more Joseph Campbell than Michael Gazzaniga. 

I wonder whether doctors who did bloodletting or doctors who tried to fix patients based on the images from their dreams have done more harm in the world. 

Life and Death

Two concepts in Freud are the "life wish," which he called eros, because one way this wish manifests itself is in the decision to have children through sex, and the "death drive," which he called thanatos. Thanatos manifests itself in all of humanity's violent and risky behaviors. Since sex can be one of those risky things, it's pretty clear that the life wish and the death drive are kind of mixed up in one another. For a male to do his part in traditional procreation, he has to have an orgasm, which has been compared to death in many cultures and languages. 

In "Unfathomably Deep," the two drives are completely mixed up for Izzie, the first-person narrator. They're so mixed up, they almost have the same name. One is Danielle, her dead sister, and the other is Daniel, the doctor-in-training who's doing his OBGYN rotation at the place where Izzie is a hired actress playing a patient. 

But which is death and which is life? It'd be easy to say that Danielle, as the dead one, is the death drive, while Daniel, playing a doctor helping Izzie to achieve her make-believe pregnancy, is life. But when Danielle died, she was herself pregnant. And the frequent references to Medea, who killed her own children, mean that even Doctor Daniel's role in bringing forth children could be tied to death. 

When the story opens, we immediately get a very funny play on the meaning of the words of the title. Immediately below the title of the story and the epigraph from Medea, we get the opening line: "Three men were supposed to spread me open, check me out." Izzie, as a fake gynecological patient, is getting an exam of her "unfathomable depths." In Freud, the unconscious mind, deep waters, and the vagina all occupy similar psychological territory. There are a number of reasons why. The ocean is deep, the unconscious mind is deep. The womb is watery. The vagina is a depth to plumb. All are something primordial from which our existence stems. 

Izzie's psychotic break into her own unconscious comes on the bank of the river, and it is described in terms of falling into a depth: "Then, as you all know, I fell in. Not down into the water, but backward, into the steep ravine that's cracked up my brain." This psychotic break is then followed by Izzie plunging both herself and Daniel into the water, where she kills him with love.

In addition to being life, Daniel is also sort of an Adam-like person to Izzie. She is first attracted to him because he doesn't do the interview right. He reassures her when he is supposed to be clinical and unemotional. She sees him as Edenically innocent: "My god, it's gotta be so beautiful to be dumb. To be born with such a stagnant little forever face. To be born so entitled to a certain eternity. It's gotta be like nothing just to live and live and live and live!" 

Contrasted to Daniel's innocent stupidity is Rebecca...ahem...Apple, the genius. That is, the fruit of knowledge, contrasted to Daniel's Edenic and stupid innocence. What attracts Izzie, though, is the thought that she might find depth in Daniel. Or, failing to find it, to create it herself. 

Daniel is innocent and child-like and is training to help people have innocent babies, but Izzie baptizes him, against his will, into the depths of the unconscious, the "unfathomable depths" of the womb from which we come and which ultimately leads us to death. 

Look! It's all here in one painting! Life! Death! Water! Unconscious!

On the one hand, one could look at this story as just a rendering of the break of a mind traumatized by the death of a beloved sister. But it's more than that, because it takes the local trauma and mythologizes it to universal levels. "They say I'm made of myth," Izzie speaks to her listeners. At the beginning of the story, her listeners seem to be friends listening to her meet-cute about Daniel, but by the end, they seem to be more the psychiatrists treating her in a mental institution after she kills Daniel. Or has a mental episode in which she thinks she kills Daniel. Izzie means "myth" here as a lie; she's saying her listeners are skeptical. But also, she has become a myth. She's become Medea. 

A lot of people tend to wonder, when reading a Freudian explication of a story like this, whether the author intended it. I think it's quite possible, given how well-known Freud's basic ideas are, and the extent to which the story plays with them, that there was at least some conscious desire to make use of Freudian images. But also, it doesn't matter. It's an example of why Freud is still relevant: because his ideas, while not great for treating mental illness, can sometimes do a great job of giving us a language to discuss ubiquitous images and motifs that crop up in human thinking. Medea is a mother. Mothers are the source of life. Medea murders her children. Life and death are bound up together. The gift of life is always an eventual gift of death. When we overcome our death drive long enough to "dive into" the female depth and create life, we are also creating eventual death for someone else. This life may start out innocent, but eventually, it will get sucked into the business of life, which means it's on its way out of Eden before it even gets started.