Freud Modern Ulysses And Unrealities Essay Example
Freud Modern Ulysses And Unrealities Essay Example

Freud Modern Ulysses And Unrealities Essay Example

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Freud, Saussure and Lacan: Interpreting dreams of a mad king, significations of a modern Ulysses and unrealities in a story of passion The equation ‘Freud + Saussure = Lacan’ is a student-friendly basis for streamlining the complex theories of these three major modern thinkers towards a common and purposeful analytical illustration of psychoanalytic and linguistic fundamentals.

In today’s world of interdisciplinary studies, it is also included in literary studies to help students of literature explore relevant aspects of texts that they read.But how does each component of the quoted relationship relate to literary theory? How may the knowledge of each be employed to enhance the literature student’s grasp over his/her reading? This essay seeks to explore the connections between psychoanalysis, linguistics and literature in relation to the Freud-Saussure-Lacan triad. In doing so, the relev

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ant theories of each will be considered by turn and explicated by applying them to the analysis of selected portions from certain well-known texts.I Sigmund Freud “At the very least, Freud would recognize that he is a writer of novels, since he compares his analytic constructs to the delusions of his patients and declares ‘deep-rooted prejudices’ to be the guiding and dominating force behind the most abstract speculations of philosophy and science.

Science, offering only ‘provisional validity’, is, in his view, simply a mythology…the pleasure which would be added to, or would replace, aesthetic pleasure would be the pleasure of knowledge.To a common pleasure in the fantastical, Freud adds the intellectual pleasure which stems from the resolution of the enigma which, for him, is the work of art; the pleasure which comes from grasping, detail by detail, the connections between a seemingly

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arbitrary ‘creation’ and the daily reality or past history of the artist. ” Freud’s theories in general and his techniques for interpreting dreams in particular have a lot of relevance to the study of literature. Any dream, ccording to Freudian theory, is comprised of a manifest content (that which the dreamer sees in his dream) and latent thoughts (the actual psychological drivers that create the dream). The latent thoughts are translated to their manifest form by what Freud calls the primary processes.

During sleep, the unconscious, contrary to waking life, often manages to surpass and overcome the control of the conscious. During these times the primary processes of our psyche convert our repressed thoughts (that are otherwise under the strict control of human consciousness) into dreams.This conversion is termed by Freud as the dream work. And the process by which the psychoanalyst works out the way back from the manifest dream content to the latent dream thoughts is what composes the dream analysis. Some of the primary processes are: - •Translation – The latent thoughts and the manifest content of dreams are simply two descriptions of the same material. In fact Freud describes a dream to be a kind of picture-puzzle.

The content is nothing but the thoughts given a different expression: - The dream-thoughts and the dream-content are presented to us like two versions of the same subject-matter in two different languages. Or, more properly, the dream-content seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, whose characters and syntactic laws it is our business to discover by comparing the original and the translation. The dream-thoughts are immediately comprehensible, as soon

as we have learnt them.The dream-content, on the other hand, is expressed as it were in a pictographic script, the characters of which have to be transposed individually into the language of the dream-thoughts.

If we attempted to read these characters according to their pictorial value instead of according to their symbolic relation, we should clearly be led into error. ”(PFL4, 381-382) As a useful parallel, the literature student needs to keep in mind the potentially misleading gap between the written word and its apparently plausible interpretation. Over-determination – The relationship between dream-thought and dream-content is not of a point-to-point nature. Several thoughts might converge into a single component of the content and vice versa: - “Not only are the elements of a dream determined by the dream-thoughts many times over, but the individual dream-thoughts are represented in the dream by several elements. Associative paths lead from one element of the dream to several dream-thoughts, and from one dream-thought to several elements of the dream.

Thus a dream is not constructed by each individual dream-thought, or group of dream-thoughts, finding (in abbreviated form) separate representation in the content of the dream…a dream is constructed, rather, by the whole mass of dream-thoughts being submitted to a sort of manipulative process in which those elements which have the most numerous and strongest supports acquire the right of entry into the dream-content…” (PFL4, 389) Literature students, involved in applications of literary theory, should be aware of analytical excesses. Condensation – The process of convergence of several dream thoughts upon a single manifest content. Literature students must try not to miss the various associations of any given context. •Displacement –

The complete distortion of dream thoughts into almost unrelated dream contents.

These are the most difficult for the psychoanalyst to grasp. The literature student, in his analysis, has to avoid fallible distortions that might result from self-interpretation. •Representation by the opposite – Freud explains that: - …reversal, or turning a thing into its opposite, is one of the means of representation most favoured by the dream-work…For that reason, if a dream obstinately declines to reveal its meaning, it is always worth while to see the effect of reversing some particular elements in its manifest content, after which the whole situation becomes immediately clear. ” (PFL4, 440) Literary works of irony function in an analogous fashion to such turnabouts. An understanding of Freud’s psychoanalytic methods of dream investigation assists the literary mind in treating the text as if it were a dreaming mind.

The text hides. The text has a real content (that might or might not be apparent to the reader) and a manifest content (that the reader studies as printed words). In a manner similar to the psychoanalyst, the literary critic attempts to bridge the gap between the written matter and its possible implications (that might not be directly stated in the text but nonetheless exist and can be sussed out). The writer is the dreaming mind characterised by a continuous interplay of the conscious and the unconscious (the literature student is aware of the game-plays in narrative techniques).Narration, after all, is an act of dissimulation and the writer is often a fine dissembler.

The text is the patient (the manifestation of the dreaming mind) continually situated in the flux of recalling more than its

words contain. And the reader/critic is Freud, the psychoanalyst, examining the patient, the text. The Mad King “…Look on her, look, her lips, Look there, look there! ” [Dies. ] (Lear, V iii, 310-311) The above lines from King Lear leave the reader/audience indeterminate regarding Cordelia’s death.

And this is where the reader-psychoanalyst starts asking the question ‘Was Lear really mad? ’ At the end of the play the dying Lear no longer appears mad and is very different from the Lear that we met in III ii or in IV vi. In IV vi when Lear enters, fantastically dressed with wild flowers, his speeches are incoherent and nonsensical. But when Shakespeare is the dreaming mind then one can never really be sure (one notices also that Freudian analyses are more like hypotheses and often self-admittedly incomplete).So, symbolically speaking, when Lear imagines (imagination, like a dream, is after all an interplay of the conscious and unconscious) a mouse (that he challenges) and a piece of toasted cheese, the reader cannot help but realise that it is Lear who is undergoing the mental process of seeing himself as a mouse (and not an all-powerful king) thereby enacting the inexpressible psychological conflict of self-challenge. Such Shakespearean perplexities can be unravelled with knowledge of the primary dream processes like translation and over-determination.When Lear hallucinates, his confused mind (Shakespeare’s language is an index of the character’s psyche) translates and over-determines reality.

The king’s angst distorts his comprehension and his troubled conscience tries to displace his internal agony by means of symbolic and fantastic condensation. The Freudian approach no longer allows the reader to regard Lear’s madness in simplistic and conventional

terms. In fact, this element of doubt is clarified in the same scene when a little later Lear utters the following oft-quoted lines: - …I am even The natural fool of Fortune. ” (Lear, IV vi, 192-193) These are not the words of a madman.

They are perfectly coherent and philosophically intense. The dream work reversed, the dream analysis makes us aware of a latent manifestation that now turns out to be hidden in the patient (the text) but knowingly (which is more likely in the case of Shakespeare) or unknowingly was a product of the dreaming mind (the writer). This awareness can be subjected to the normal psychoanalytical treatment involving free association.Once we start to realise the complex unconventionality of Lear’s madness, we accept the possibility of an intentional and calculated program behind such lunacy: - “…You think I’ll weep; No, I’ll not weep: I have full cause of weeping, [Storm heard at a distance.

] but this heart Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws Or ere I’ll weep. O Fool! I shall go mad. ” (Lear, II iv, 284-288)) In the face of rejection from his daughters Goneril and Regan, the king realises that he has run out of options.He perhaps also realises (even at such an early point in the play) the full implications of his previous actions (especially the banishment of Cordelia). But being a person not yet ready to face the consequences of his doings (the end of tragedy), he plans on resorting to hiding behind a mask of madness.

He is in his senses and quite unlike a lunatic recognises what is happening to his mind when he

says: - “My wits begin to turn. ” (Lear, III ii, 67) Still not ready to give up something that he knows he has already lost, still playing mind-games to tide over circumstances, still a victim to self-deception, Lear hopes to fool Fortune.And so the play becomes the story of an old (and therefore expectedly experienced and wise) man who realises his tragedy but refuses it, only to find himself in a situation where the one who tried to play the fool (Lear) ended up being fooled (somewhat by himself). A conscious Freudian analysis has revealed the structured unconscious and the play of psychological primary processes in the mind of Lear. Admittedly (in the Freudian style), this hypothetical enquiry is incomplete and may be extended further with the help of Freud’s theories regarding jokes, puns and the oedipal complex.II Ferdinand de Saussure Human experience is often defined in terms of considerations like space, time, intuition and understanding.

These concepts are usually assumed to be fixed and universal. But they are actually non-fixed. And this is where the Pre-structuralists step in. Pre-structuralist theory is based on an intimate connection between material objects and language. Such theory displaced accepted categories of exploration and perception by increasing emphasis on the significance, implications and consequences of language.

Structuralists like Saussure developed further upon this shift of emphasis to language. Saussure treated language purely formally and theoretically making of it, a system of signs called langue, which makes possible speech or parole: - “Here, in the distinction between the linguistic system and its actual manifestations, we have reached the crucial opposition between langue and parole. La langue is the system of

a language, the language as a system of forms, whereas parole is actual speech, the speech acts which are made possible by the language.La langue is what the individual assimilates when he learns a language, a set of forms or ‘hoard deposited by the practice of speech in speakers who belong to the same community, a grammatical system which, to all intents and purposes, exists in the mind of each speaker’… ‘It is the social product whose existence permits the individual to exercise his linguistic faculty’…Parole, on the other hand, is the ‘executive side of language’ and for Saussure involves both ‘the combinations by which the speaker uses the code of the linguistic system in order to express his own thoughts’ and ‘the psycho-physical mechanisms which permit him to externalize these combinations’…In the act of parole the speaker selects and combines elements of the linguistic system and gives these forms a concrete phonic and psychological manifestation, as sounds and meanings. ” A sign consists of a signifier and a signified: - “I call the combination of a concept and a sound-image a sign, but in current usage the term generally designates only a sound-image, a word, for example…I propose to retain the word sign [signe] to designate the whole and to replace concept and sound-image respectively by signified [signifie] and signifier [significant]…” The signifier is a sound, image or any kind of graphic equivalent.

The signified is the concept associated with the signifier.Simply speaking, sign (the basic structural unit of language) = word (the sound/the signifier) + concept (the meaning/the signified). “The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Since I mean by

sign the whole that results from the associating of the signifier and the signified, I can simply say: the linguistic sign is arbitrary.

” (Saussure, 67) However, the relationship between a word and its corresponding concept is arbitrary in terms of its origin but not in terms of its usage. The word ‘ball’ means what we know it to mean, only because it has conventionally come to mean so. Had it been otherwise right from the onset of language-formation then any other word might as well have come to mean what we understand by the word ‘ball’ today.Saussure complicated this further. He said that the relationship between the sign (signifier + signified) and the referent (what the sign refers to – the actual material object) is arbitrary too.

Another important property of Saussure’s structural linguistics is that each sign, in a system of signs that composes the language, derives its meaning by means of its difference from every other sign. The word ‘ball’, (which is otherwise a mere sequence of letters b-a-l-l and has no meaning by itself or in the speaker’s objective), signifies the concept of the round object only because it signifies nothing else and because no other signifier signifies the concept known as ‘ball’.Thus for the Structuralists, meaning changed from being something private to being the outcome of a shared system of signs and therefore became something more generally universal. Also, according to Saussure, language, in a way, precedes thought. Thus the speaker, instead of being the producer of the system, is rather the product of the system. Thus language makes possible thought and its expression by providing a structure that enables

us to conceptualise experience.

Finally, the relation between words and things, according to the Structuralists, are characterised by mere unnatural, practised and traditionally accepted relationships and reality is only a linguistic construct. Such a theory thus introduces a confusing gap between the real and our experience of it.We are given a choice between reality being a linguistic build and language being real. The literature student can no longer presume the notion of a straightforward textual meaning (poetically speaking, between the conception and the creation falls the shadow). The meaning of a text is independent of the psychological condition of the reader and is rather defined by the linguistic structure that constitutes it. At this stage of iconoclasm, sufficient ground had been created for the Post-structuralists to drive the nail home.

According to Post-structuralist theory, concepts/signifiers are after all words referring not to material objects but to other words that also signify the same concept.Jacques Derrida’s concept of ‘differance’ states that if the meaning of a word depends on its difference from other words then a concept cannot be contained in a sign and is rather a continually shifting interaction of differences from word to word. In other words meaning is non-fixed and there is no pin-pointing it. Thus meaning is relative, depends on context and involves a surplus (final or absolute meaning is a myth). Thus it follows that if the corresponding meaning is not contained in the word used to denote it, and if the speaker (as the product of the linguistic system) can realise the self only by means of words, then the speaker is never wholly present in the phenomenon of speaking

with the help of a sign-system (language). It is through language that one experiences the world.

But since words are in a never-ending ever-slipping continuum, the one who tries to secure meaning while expressing, explaining and comprehending oneself with the very same words is as much non-fixed and ever-deferred as the words themselves. Language speaks, not we. So we are absent to ourselves. Pre-structuralism The signifier/word ‘ball’ stands for/represents/means the signified/object Structuralism The signifier/word ‘b-a-l-l’ is a sequence/arrangement of letters that signifies the signified/concept/idea Post-structuralism The signifier/word ‘b-a-l-l’ signifies the signifiers/words ‘s-o-l-i-d o-r h-o-l-l-o-w s-p-h-e-r-e e-s-p-e-c-i-a-l-l-y o-n-e u-s-e-d i-n g-a-m-e-s’ ignifies the signifiers/words ‘s-o-l-i-d o-r h-o-l-l-o-w g-l-o-b-e e-s-p-e-c-i-a-l-l-y o-n-e u-s-e-d i-n g-a-m-e-s’ signifies the signifiers/words ‘s-o-l-i-d o-r h-o-l-l-o-w b-o-d-y, w-i-t-h i-t-s w-h-o-l-e c-i-r-c-u-m-f-e-r-e-n-c-e e-q-u-i-d-i-s-t-a-n-t f-r-o-m i-t-s c-e-n-t-r-e, e-s-p-e-c-i-a-l-l-y o-n-e u-s-e-d i-n g-a-m-e-s’ signifies the signifiers/words ‘s-o-l-i-d o-r h-o-l-l-o-w b-o-d-y, h-a-v-i-n-g a-l-l p-o-i-n-t-s o-n i-t-s s-u-r-f-a-c-e a-t t-h-e s-a-m-e d-i-s-t-a-n-c-e f-r-o-m a p-o-i-n-t w-i-t-h-i-n i-t, e-s-p-e-c-i-a-l-l-y o-n-e u-s-e-d i-n g-a-m-e-s’ signifies the signifiers/words….. The Modern Ulysses The driving force behind varied narrative forms is the fact of our flexible conceptual relationship to the world around us.

This is made amply evident by the attitude of storytelling in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Prior to the modernist’s world of continuous experimentation, truth was a concept characterised by absoluteness. Anything unexplainable was taken to be temporarily indeterminate due to the inadequacy of necessary information. This has always been the behavioural nature of science and in all fields of human existence – politics, religion and art - Joyce saw the same absolutist version of truth and reality being advertised and bartered by the powerful and influential for private vested interests.

But this sensitive

writer was acutely aware of something beyond the dogmatic, something beyond the accepted.A first reading of the novel presents for the reader, mental-sequences in words (similar to chains of signification) that, though they do not connect coherently in the reading mind, somehow seem to construct a kind of associative process for the narrators. This shows that the apparently predominant attempt of the narrative voices is to pose objectivity while making it obvious that the narrators are queerly influenced, in spite of their best efforts, by their sense of personal subjective truth. But at the end of every unresolved chapter (that passes onto a new crisis in the following chapter) the lasting impression is that of an instinctive longing for variegated experience.The reader who till now might have been under the illusory complacence of a cosy and confident objectivity, also begins to realise that in spite of all the claims of impartiality, the narrators were doing an incomplete job – there are more things to be understood. A deconstructive reading of Ulysses reveals that the narrator’s pose is after all programmed.

This is where Joyce excels in his art as he accommodates his reader into the process that his central protagonists undergo while being transformed from conditioned believers in systemic canons to highly individualistic philosophers who believe in the uncertainties of truth and reality. A Structuralist perspective shows how Joyce takes his novel through a subjectivity – objectivity – relativity movement by means of an experimental narration, which was later to become a modernist trendsetter.Recalling the attitude of relativity underlying narrative purposes, the end of the novel helps readers realise that perceptions of the world outside

are relative to positions of individuals in it. Definitive locations in space and time and logocentric notions based on mere facts of presence are shown to be partial and inadequate. Truth ceases to be anything singularly universal and finally answerable.

This is in direct correspondence to the Post-structuralist notion of meaning being a transitory concept. The issue was never one of right or wrong and now truth and understanding are what the reader distils from the text. In this innovative stream of consciousness novel the same occurrences are narrated from multiple perspectives by various observers: - But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under everchanging forms. ” Such streams of ramified narratives may be understood as fictional depictions of the never-ending Post-structuralist chain of signification.

The reader is provided with varied impressions of singular happenings either at different locations and times or at a unified construct of experience. The narration, in confirmation with the conception of a relativistic world, keeps shifting as it were from character to character and reality is observed by means of different psychical states of multiple observers. Joyce’s words actually dramatise the idea of concept being characterised by a process of persistent slippage.The idiom of the narrative no longer belongs necessarily to the narrators who depict a character only to the extent that the character wants. Thus when John Eglinton asks Stephen: - “Do you believe your own theory? ” (Ulysses, 274), Stephen promptly says: - “No.

.. ” (Ulysses, 274) So, just when the reader finds himself/herself convinced by the young man’s arguments, Stephen’s contradictory response dislodges any sense of identification in favour of a desirable alienation.

Joyce plays both sides efficiently and the impression created is a variety of relative textures. His style functions by creating, with the help of the langue, the effects of parole in the written form.

In the fashion of the structural linguists, he is extremely experimental in introducing this kind of dissonance into stylistic decorum and the reader is definitely faced with veils/layers of language making for delayed comprehensibility: - “He came a step a sinkapace forward on neatsleather creaking and a step backward a sinkapace on the solemn floor. ” (Ulysses, 235) But the delay is not a loss. It is ultimately an artistic gain since it demands a high degree of involvement on the part of the reader: - “But, because loss is his gain, he passes on towards eternity in undiminished personality, untaught by the wisdom he has written or by the laws he has revealed. ” (Ulysses, 252)The writer cleverly plays around with the resulting complications that the reader believes are being elaborated. So what Joyce effectively manages to achieve is a separation of matter and manner based on his experimental arbitrariness. And one might suppose that in doing so he was, in a manner similar to the Structuralists and Post-structuralists, simply toying with the notion of linearity.

But what is more significant is that his seductive style has attained the nearest approximation to date to the discontinuous chaos of our inner lives. Thus that, which on initial inspection appears to be disorganised babble turns out to be an intentional control of style that negotiates a continuous interchange of design between the internal and external.The manifold arrangement of narration, on the one hand

entails characters to their own independent identities, while on the other, it allows the finally faithful narrator to distance or approximate the reader to the character. In other words, style that can be a necessary evil, for Joycean Structuralists is fortunately entertaining. Impersonation and fictional mockery are given a new dimension by virtue of the plausibility of relative surfaces. Meaning is apparently non-fixed and there is no meaning in meaning itself but in the continuous process of meaning making.

III Jacques Lacan “Literature has responded to Lacan in a much more comprehensive manner than it did to the early uses of Freud for literature. For one thing, Lacan reverses the priorities, not reading literature in the light of Freud, but Freud as literature.While Lacan’s influence has been greatest perhaps on those kinds of literary criticism already open to going beyond the narrow confines of literary purity, it is also the case that relatively formalist critics…have found in Lacan a rich set of terms for formulating and formalising textual analyses. At the other extreme, studies oriented towards the ‘social’ rather than the ‘literary’ or ‘psychological’, even among Marxists…find Lacanian terminology increasingly adaptable to and heuristic for their analyses, particularly in the study of ideology…Even when critical distancing is expressed in his regard, nothing like either the wholesale adoption or rejection of Freud for criticism appears in the fate of Lacan and literature.Much more effective as a plague than Freud ever was, Lacan is everywhere and nowhere, like a contagion.

” Lacan, the ‘Freud + Saussure’ showman analysed the significance of language and its functions in the works of Freud, thereby wedding together psychoanalysis and linguistics. According

to Lacan, Freud’s works are composed of basically linguistic observations in which his case studies seem to be sceptically aware of the unity of symptoms and language. So ‘words = symptoms’ and vice versa is a simple way of expressing this situation. “Whether it sees itself as an instrument of healing, of training, or of exploration in depth, psychoanalysis has only a single medium: the patient’s speech.

”This will be easy to understand if one keeps in mind Freud’s method of free association, which is a logically attempted pseudo-reversal of the symptomatic structure – the repressed inter-substituting flow of words and concepts. Tapped at any intermediate stage, the fluid chain of words (described by Saussure), that is an alternative version of the symptom itself, may be utilised to deal effectively with the psychopathologic symptom. The diffuse nature of meaning emphasised by the structural linguists led Lacan to accept the conclusion that the word hides or at least continuously attempts to do so. This is closely related to the fact of mental repression in Freudian dream theory.

In his discussion of the ‘mirror stage’ Lacan describes the entry of the individual into his reality as an entry into a misconceived reality by means of language. Linguistically informing the child that his/her mirror image is the real he/she is an elementary, original and natural falsification of fact. The image is an illusion (a representation just as language is a representation) and not real. So the individual’s conception of reality is diabolic from the very start and it is with such a defective notion that the individual grows up to experience and define reality. And all this happens because

of a conventionally accepted system of signification into which the individual is initially projected and ultimately dissolved.

We realise, understand and construct the space around us through language.We realise, understand and construct our notions of ourselves through language. But language, in preceding us, fools us into a belief of sufficiency whereas actually it is inadequate by virtue of its indeterminate and therefore ultimately inconsequential nature. So nothing is real.

We are not real. Reality itself is not what we know to be real: - “Lacan’s originality is to have wished to furnish proof that the signifier acts separately from its signification and without the subject being aware of it. As a constituent element of the unconscious, the figure, the literal character of the signifier, makes its effects felt in consciousness without the mind having anything at all to do with it. It’ thinks in a place where it is impossible to say ‘I am’…we have here an interpretation of linguistics which it is impossible to detach from the human context in which is inscribed and which consequently cannot be denied by the classic paths of scientific criticism…Lacan puts opposite the terms signifier and signified respectively, language as a system, and speech or the spoken chain…signifier and signified are two networks of relations which do not overlap.

The first network, that of the signifier, is the synchronic structure of the material of language in which each element takes on its exact usage by being different from the others…The second network, that of the signified, is a diachronic whole of discourse.It reacts historically upon the first network, just as speech influences language, but in reverse order, with

the signifying network commanding the advent of speech through its laws of structure. A dominant characteristic of speech – signification – is born of taking the set of terms together and of the multiple interplay between signifier and signified” In trying to envisage what we realise to be conception, Lacan unites linguistics and psychology. Unlike Freud to whom the unconscious was chaotic, Lacan conceived of the unconscious as structured (no matter how unrealised it was). The debate can be concluded by thinking of the unconscious as an alternate-conscious (the literature student knows of the ego and the alter ego).

This is analogous to the idea that language attempts to provide an alternative for reality and according to Lacan incomprehensibility is the key to grasp the unconscious. “What leads Lacan somewhat away from a purely scientific approach to language, as opposed to the science of handling the unconscious, is a philosophical conception of the phenomenon of inter-human ‘understanding’, and of man’s ‘impossible’ grasping of Truth, the truth about himself, scientific truth. ” (Lemaire, 40) What is provocative is the fact that if reality is falsified by the conscious that represses, then it might just be that the repressed unconscious contains knowledge of the real reality.And if we can reveal the hitherto veiled unconscious then we will be climactically confronted with the true reality. Is that desirable? Often, uncertainty relating to the desirable makes the undesirable more agreeable in comparison. The Story of Passion “I wrote The Passion in 1986…My own cities were invented; cities of language, cities of connection, words as gang-ways and bridges to the cities of the interior…I wanted to write a separate world, not

as an escape, as a mirror, a secret looking glass that would sharpen and multiply the possibilities of the actual world.

Hold it up and your own face is there, disguised in time and place, disguised into another chance? ” : -Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion is an effective example for elaborating the theories of Lacan. According to Lacanian theory form is never complete. Incompleteness in form, allows one to continually become something else, though this is not to say that one is univocally nothing. This `indefiniteness' of identity is something Winterson explores in The Passion. Identity is an important motif in the novel in which an androgynous narrator renders gender outwardly fluid and reality fleeting. The characters of the cross dressing Villanelle and Henri address the problems regarding identity crises in a questionable reality.

Any single definition of identity becomes impossible and the concepts of a unified self are rendered arbitrary.The occurrence of multiple identities in a singular entity is demonstrated throughout the text. Ostensibly this might seem paradoxical, but it is the arbitrary nature of identity as a signifier, a signifier for the unsignifiable, that is unsatisfactory. There is very little difference between the language and styles of the speakers. When the narration first changes from Henri to Villanelle, the reader cannot detect the switch immediately.

This apparent use of an un-gendered narrator is somewhat misleading and confusion is deemed as the point of reality. The linguistic structuring of the complex narrative enables deep psychological insight within the minds of the different characters.The volatile fashion in which the writer employs language to question and realise the real world resonates with Lacan’s hypothesis of an

effervescent reality conceived and represented through indeterminate mediators known as words. Winterson's characters inhabit a partially real, partially fantastic world. Much of The Passion resembles a real account infused with myth. The traditional relationship of fantasy and reality is severely challenged by intertwining dates and battles with fantastical tales of a race of web-footed people in a city of mazes.

The literature student should note that the concept of reality as a fantasy is what Lacan speaks about too.The relationship of reality and fiction is one that dominates the text. This fact operates at two conflicting levels. On the one hand, reality is constituted of actual events that have taken place; on the other, fiction is composed by these events being retold as a story. In a sense, all fiction is a lie.

It is the telling of a story and the retelling of reality. In reality, as in The Passion, fiction is always narrated and untenable. It is never available in a pure form but always as a representation and as Winterson reminds the reader, we have to trust her narrators. And this is where the Lacanian doubts regarding reality strengthen our grasp on a difficult text.The fact that Winterson employs two narrators demonstrates the ambivalence of her conceived reality.

Like Lacan and the structural linguists, Winterson agrees that there is no unified, single reality but an infinite number of realities. Reality is viewed as a narrative construction of stories. Villanelle's opening description of Venice reinforces this idea, with the maze-like city as a metaphor for reality. The notion of `finding' and `missing' the `way' (Passion, 49) questions the existence of a correct way

at all.

This analogy seems to suggest that there is no predestined correct course and like the route-ways of Venice, reality is fluid and dynamic. There are no pre-ordained boundaries or paths that must be taken.If the true events of reality are that `same place' we strive to attain, then our fictional attempts to recreate them `never go by the same route' (Passion, 49). “Language says: “You will go such and such a way, and when you see such and such, you will turn off in such and such a direction.

”” But the random nature of signs renders language (a sign system) as uncertain as the working out of directions within the mazes of Venice. This is what the Lacanian literature student must be acutely aware of. The traditional view of reality images it as something that can be located definitely. But for Winterson, as well as for Lacan, reality is like the fictive Venice in the novel, a mercurial concept, where all things are as possible as they are impossible.

There is no absolute reality; it is as it were a recreation of experience. The relationship of reality to the unreal is circular. The real is as ever constructed in relation to an unreal which is in turn a development out of that real. The real is something that is lost as soon as it occurs and any view formed of this ‘real’ is always done from a relative perspective.

Henri reflects on the transient nature of any single segment of time: - “It's hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here

and that there are no second chances at a single moment. ” (Passion, 19) Here again the emphasis is on all events existing in the present: - ‘…every moment you steal from the present is a moment you have lost forever. There’s only now.

’” (Passion, 29). The dominant world views of any era shapes the literature produced in it. In The Passion, Winterson seeks to undermine the dominant views of her time. Society determines normality and reality whereas Winterson attempts to reverse the reader's preconceptions. Again the emphasis is on the fluidity of the text and meaning is never allowed to be fixed. Just as the author moulds meaning, so does the reader, in a Lacanian sense, become: - “…an actively mediating presence…” (Passion, 19) The text is without a stable meaning, it is not an entity in itself but a `thing' or an `event' that happens to the reader.

The text is not an immovable object standing in isolation from its irrelevant creators and consumers. It is an active formulation with its signification evolving from the manifold interaction between the signifier and the signified. Every reading of The Passion is different and meaning is only produced as it is read. It does not pre-exist as an isolated unit of meaning.

It is dynamic and both Winterson, as its author, and anyone who reads the text, play a part in making its meaning. The implication of this argument is that any reader's reaction to a text exists not only in terms of linguistic experience but also in relation to the reader's personal experience.That is to say, when we read The Passion, we produce meaning not

just from the words on the page but also from our own experiences. This is in direct correspondence with the equation Freud (psychology) + Saussure (language) = Lacan (the combination). Many similarities can be drawn between the two notions of `meaning' and `reality'. Just as the student of literature produces meaning from the fusion of the text with experiences, so reality, for the same student, is produced by the combination of fictional texts and practical experience of living in a society, a society that has been shaped by living.

Both reality and meaning are abstract notions. Just as reality exists in no absolute state, so is textual meaning multivalent.The literature student can finally breathe free. The demonstrative procedure adopted in this essay serves to emphasise a significant commonality in the speculations of Freud, Saussure and Lacan. The endeavours of all three were motivated by a constant questioning of ‘the real’ and of the means used to conceive of and represent it.

As elaborated by the afore-mentioned examples, their efforts have had tremendous influence and effects on the theories of literary analysis. In the Einsteinian universe of relativity where they have practically and pragmatically enacted the concept that: - “The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. (Paradise Lost: Book I, 254-255) , the only answer to the question - ‘Is reality eternally present? ’, seems to be the consolation that it is at least ours. Bibliography 1. Badcock, Christopher, Essential Freud, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992) 2. Culler, Jonathan, Saussure, (Sussex: The Harester Press Limited, 1976) 3.

Derrida, Jacques, Acts of Literature, ed.

by Attridge, Derek (London: Routledge, 1992) 4. Derrida, Jacques, Dissemination, trans. by Barbara Johnson (London: The Athlone Press, 1981) 5.

Freud, Sigmund, The Penguin Freud Library, Volume 4: The Interpretation of Dreams, (London: Penguin Books Limited, 1991) 6. Freud and the Humanities, ed. y Horden, Peregrine (London: Duckworth, 1985) 7. Joyce, James, Ulysses (London: Penguin Books Limited, 1992) 8. Kofman, Sarah, Freud and Fiction, trans.

by Sarah Wykes (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991) 9. Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits: A Selection, translated from the French by Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977) 10. Lacan, Jacques, The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. by Anthony Wilden (London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1981) 11. Lemaire, Anika, Jacques Lacan, trans.

by David Macey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1977) 12. John Milton: The Complete Poems, ed. by Leonard, John (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1998) 13.MacCannell, Juliet Flower, Figuring Lacan: Criticism and the Cultural Unconscious (London: Croom Helm Ltd, 1986) 14.

Saussure, Ferdinand de, Course in General Linguistics, ed. by Bally, Charles and Albert Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Reidlinger, trans. by Wade Baskin (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1974) 15. Shakespeare, William, King Lear (London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1972) 16. Smith, Joseph H.

, Arguing with Lacan: Ego, Psychology and Language (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1991) 17. Stafford-Clark, David, What Freud Really Said (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1967) 18. Winterson, Jeanette, The Passion (London: Vintage, 1987).

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