Literary Theory

Series I: Handout #18

“Do I remind you of Kinsey?”

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981): French, medical/psychiatric background, builds on Freud’s ideas, along with those of Saussure and Levi-Strauss; associated with Surrealist movement, especially Salvador Dali; connected with Althusser, Derrida, Cixous, and other structuralists and poststucturalists.

Basics: Psychology, like literature, is about language; the unconscious mind is structured like a language (hear Levi-Strauss?); language is about contrasts between words (hear Saussure?); the link between signifier and signified is always slipping (if the slip is complete, language loses touch with reality); Freud’s notion of condensation in dreams = metaphor for Lacan (“the ship ploughed the waves” combines ship and plow); Freud’s notion of displacement = metonymy for Lacan (substitution of one thing for another, “sail” for ship); reverses the old idea that we are our consciousness (Descartes’ cogito) for “I am where I think not”—the unconscious is the true self. Further, the self, the unconscious, is a linguistic construct based on pre-existing structures.

Literary relevance: 1. characters are names to which we assign traits; 2. the same is true for realist representation, which assigns arbitrary meanings to a “real world”; 3. literary texts enact Lacanian psychological struggles.

"The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I" (1949): There are three orders of the mind: the "Imaginary," the "Symbolic," and the "Real." They all are involved in the formation of subjectivity or the "self' or "I." The Real are the things one does not think about; as soon as it is thought about, it ceases to be real because thought changes it. The Imaginary is first developed when an infant recognizes his/her image in a mirror, causing him/her to develop an aesthetic recognition of individual autonomy, which is a "imagined" wholeness, something "over there" in the mirror but not "real" (which can never be directly known). The "Symbolic" realm of language/art negotiates between the imagined self and the real (body); it describes the structures of the relation. We are largely constituted by language: consider the way bathroom doors split us into two sexes--when gender is a good deal more complicated than that.

Wait, what is “The Mirror-Stage of Development” again?: At 6-18 months a child recognizes his or her separate identity by looking in a mirror: the child and the mother are not the same body. Prior to this the child lives in a state called “The Imaginary,” the non-logical, associative state; after this, it enters the “Symbolic” stage, which begins socialization and the prohibitions represented by the father—order, logic; these two states (poetry and prose?) constantly intrude upon each other (“magical realism,” consider “Usher” or “Tell-Tale Heart,” Moulin Rouge or Trainspotting). How do these struggles get resolved?

"The Signification of the Phallus" (1958): The "Self' is essentially masculine because it involves being removed from the mother, establishing a separate body which is identified with the father. The symbolic (language/art) is masculine and detached from bodily reality; desire is what remains inexpressible in language. The self is essentially the Other, and self is a mediated through an external projection. Some part of us is cut off/castrated this way. If we could overcome this loss, sexual difference would disappear--because the mother (who is castrated by the symbolic) would not be deformed as the "not-all." The phallus in fact does not exist; it is an outcome of the structure itself--the name of a missing thing, the empty signifier. Woman, for Lacan, is a fantasy of complementarity. Men and women are positions in a structure not real bodies. For a feminist, to seize the phallus is to deny the world-dividing logic of the self and the other, the masculine and the feminine, the all and the not-all.

Q. How can we use this? What are some of the implications of Lacan’s ideas? Why would feminists seize them?