Lacan & Literature- Imaginary Objects and Social Order

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Lacan & Literature

IMAGINARY OBJECTS AND SOCIAL ORDER

Neal H. Bruss

Most

of us want to say that literature is about human ex

perience?what else could it be about? But how hard it

is to give that statement meaning. How abstract the definition

of human experience must be simply to cover the literature

that we know about. How delicate the definition must be to

respect, let alone comprehend, literature's imaginativeessence.

Anthropology's critique of ethnoeentrism makes it impossible

for us to trust models of experience that look too much like

our own habits. Our inclination to fill the blank with moral

language would not help, for how one should live does not

explain how one does live. The type of definition needed is the

analogue in human terms of Einstein's "universal elementary

laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduc

tion,"1

a theory of the origins and functions of the human

psyche, of what each person brings to her unique circumstances.

If atheory of the psyche does not seem important enough,

one

has only to remember the case of feral children,2 human infants who developed

as animals after being abandoned in the

country, to recognize that to be born homo sapiens is not to be

born a person.

Literature might turn topsychology for such a definition.

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's reading of Freud3

1In

"Principles of Research," Ideas andOpinions,

trans. Sonja Bargman

(New York, Dell, 1973), p. 221.2

See, for example,Harlan Lane, The

Wild-Boy of Aveyron (Cambridge,

Harvard University Press, 1976).3

See especially, ?crits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York,

Norton, 1977),a

major essay whichappeared

with extensive commentaryas

The Language of the Self, ed. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins,

62





Lacan & Literature

has shown that a definition may be found in traditional psycho

analysis. It has two parts: the psyche becomes

possible

when

neural development allows the human infant to distinguish

objects (including oneself), and that this psyche becomes ac

tual when the child acquires the code of language and custom

which adults use to order those objects. To state, then, that

literature is about human experience would be to state that it

deals with relations to "objects"or to the social code for

mediating them.

If the application of this definition to literature could bemade good, it would amount to a different approach to pscho

analytic literary criticism, not merely anadjustment of past

practice. Since Freud invented psychoanalytic criticism in his

study of a minor novel, Jensen's Gradivay it has essentially

been a branch of his therapeutic method?of abnormal psy

chology.4 Psychoanalytic criticism has been interested either in

how literary works express the psychopathology of their creators or how well they depict dreams, neurotic symptoms and

the other phenomenaon which psychoanalysis is based. In short,

psychoanalytic criticism treats literature as symptoms ordepic

tions of symptoms. This limiting of interest is the source of the

reductiveness that has made psychoanalytic criticism so intoler

able to many readers.5

Freudcould have been expected to have sent psychoanalytic

criticism in sonarrowly clinical a direction. He loved literature,

1968). See also Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, trans. David Macey (London,

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979); and Neal H. Bruss, "Re-Stirring the

Waters, or The Voice that Sees the World as Patients," The Massachusetts

Review, XX (Summer, 1979), 337-354.

4Delusions and Dreams in Jensen*s "Gradiva," trans. I. F. Grant Duff,

The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund

Freud, gen. ed. James Strachey (London, Hogarth, 1953-66), IX: 125-243.The

important exampleof Lacan's using literature to illustrate a technical

point in his theory is his "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,'"

which ap

pears in translation in Yale French Studies, 48(1973): 38?72. A second

example, his analysis of Hamlet, will be discussed below.5

Forexample, Mario Praz, "Poe and

Psychoanalysis,"Sewanee Review,

LXVIII (1960), 375-389.

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The Massachusetts Review

but he was primarily interested in findinga cure for an illness.

This priority shapes every stage of his career: his early ob

servation as a neurologist that troubled people displayed thesame symptoms as

aphasies, his study in Charcot's clinic of

hypnosis used as atherapeutic technique, his great case studies,

or his late attempts to defend his owntherapeutic method from

revisionism. Motifs in literature?in some literature?seemed

to give supporting evidence for his therapeutic claims, and the

possibility that literary works could substitute for the free

associations grudgingly surrendered by patients in psychothera

py promised to multiply the number of case studies in the psy

choanalytic domain. Moreover, the fact that great writers had

closely observed psychoanalytic phenomena and considered

them important enough to use in their works could only have

cheered Freud in his most embattled moments.

But however compellingwas Freud's predicament, his form

of psychoanalytic criticism makes literature that does not have

psychoanalytic features a special case of literature that does.

Many important literary works deal with abnormality. But to

read all literature in this way not only distorts it but leeches

the precision from Freud's psychopathological approach itself.

This reductiveness is not relieved by other principles of psy

choanalytic theory, for example "the psychopathology of

everyday life," or the concept of sublimation, that energies

that otherwise would go to abnormality can be channeled into

art. But Lacan's reading of Freud emphasizes that abnormality

itself is aspecial

case in the psychoanalytic theory of the psyche.

To developa

working definition of "human experience" from

Lacan's Freud might place psychoanalytic criticism on a better

footing.

The core of Lacan's approach is a restatement of the theory

of the Oedipal crisis in the context of "the mirror stage,"an

earlier developmental moment which had not found its way

into psychoanalytic criticism but which was mentioned by Freud

and developed by Melanie Klein and others of his students.6

6Melanie Klein, The

Psycho-Analysis of Children, trans. Alix Strachey

(London, Hogarth Press, 1937).See also Henri Wallon, "Comment se d?

64





Lacan & Literature

Before the mirror stage, the child lacks the cortical develop

ment to distinguish separate objects within the totality of her

experience. If there is hunger, it is not "her" hunger because

she is incapable of conceiving a "her" different from anything

else. But at the sixth month, the unity of experience is sun

dered: the child sees the world asobjects. This stage takes its

name from the first instance in which the child sees herself as

anobject, when the child sees her reflection in the mirror and

realizes, "That's me!" What is crucial for psychoanalysis is

that both the body-image in the mirror ("That") and the con

cept of self ("me") towhich the child attributes the image are

objects "created" by the child. If there is a more "true" self

than these two "objects," it is the intelligence?Lacan calls it

aplace?from which objectifications emanate. This place,

which does the objectifying, is the Freudian unconscious.

The most important fact of life at the mirror stage, and for

many years thereafter,is the child's total

dependenceon others

for her survival. After the mirror stage, the child experiences

that dependenceas the appearance and disappearance of objects

such as the mother's breast, objects of desire which are beyond

her control. But the mirror stage gives the child no mechanism

for classifying the objects she can now image, in particular,no

means of distinguishing between objects which arise from

"real" needs for survival and those which do not, including

not only images of immediate physical objects but also memo

ries and imaginings. Lacan distinguishes between these two

"orders" of experience, the Real and the Imaginary, but

stresses that at the mirror stage, they already intermix and per

meate each other. Because the major issue in the child's exis

tence at this point is her dependence, she finds herself im

prisoned by her inability to discriminate between real and

imaginary objects, let alone to control them.

The acquisition of language releases her from this prison.

The child learns the conventions by which the adults of her

v?loppe chez l'enfant la notion du corps propre,"Journal de

Psychologie

(1931), pp. 705-748.

65






community regulate objects?whichones

they regardas real,

which

imaginary objects they acknowledge,

which

they ignorealtogether. But language acquisition occurs while adults are

fighting with the child over the regulation of her instincts:

where, when and how she candefecate, eat, sleep and cry, and

how she may use her developing sexual energies. Thus, the

child acquires with language the laws and customs of adult

society, orrather, she trades her helplessness and unlimited

capacity for desire for a scheme in which some desires can be

satisfied and others cannot. The paradigm of this scheme is the

incest taboo, which Lacan reads as a rather arbitrary example

for the child of what law is?that some things (in this case,

spouses)can be had, while others (in this case, the parent)

cannot. Lacan would add that the incest taboo has a less arbi

trary, developmental force in that it frees the child from a

permanent bond with anurturing adult.

For

Lacan, then,the

acquisitionof

languageand the resolu

tion of the Oedipal complexare different aspects of the same

event. At its conclusion the child has acquireda third order of

experience, the Symbolic, whose primary function is to mediate

the Imaginary. It is the unconscious which receives the Sym

bolic, just as it is the unconscious which, from the time of the

mirror stage, produces the objects comprisinga

person'sex

perience. It is also the unconscious which bears the cost of dis

ciplining the instincts to acquire the Symbolic and become a

"human being." Although this renunciation of instinctual free

dom may be inevitable, the unconscious cannot forget what a

price it has paid. The instinctual nature of this loss in the

transition from the mirror stage through the Oedipal resolu

tion is the source of Freud's legendary insistence on the sexual

nature of the unconscious.

At the

Oedipal resolution,

the three orders

intermix,

with

the Symbolic ideally providing a "language" for the Imaginaryand the Real. The three orders persist throughout life, and

their reciprocal relations become increasingly subtle. The Imagi

nary can make newobjectifications based on information intro

duced by the Symbolic,or it can use the Symbolic to name

pri

66





Lacan & Literature

vate, idiosyncratic objects which do not exist in social life. The

interaction of the Symbolic and the Imaginarycan

complicate

the recognition of what is Real, the individual's actual history.

But normally, the Symbolic acts as a conduit to satisfaction for

the desires arising in the Imaginary. The Symbolic tells us

what types of persons we canbe, what types of desires we may

have, and how we may satisfy them. Psychopathology arises

from malfunctions in this system, for example, when the Sym

bolic is insufficient, or when it fails to correspond to the prod

ucts of the Imaginary. In such malfunctions, the therapeutic

mechanisms of psychoanalysiscan

diagnose and restructure the

relations between the three orders. Because the Symbolic is the

domain of language, psychoanalysis must trace back the symp

toms of patients to the idiosyncratic, Imaginary meanings

where, like messages in acode, the symptoms hide. Given

Lacan's emphasison the mirror stage, his reading of Freud

places special emphasis

on

decoding

the

patient's symbolizationsof Imaginary objedifications of the self. This emphasis, in

turn, involves decoding how apatient

uses other persons as

mirrors to reflect back those images of self which the patientmost desires?the transference, in Freud's terminology.

The interplay between the Imaginary and the Symbolic goesunnoticed in ordinary life unless it misfires. The Symbolic, the

social code, encourages us to confirm our obj edifications of our

selves in each other. It lets us talk about the weather to establish a social bond. As Lacan notes, the Symbolic requires that

as infants we be given names whose autobiographieswe can

write in our unconscious during the rest of our lives, using

information present in the social code before we are born.

Unless it misfires, this process is "human experience":to be

born into the Real, to experience it asImaginary objects which

are

lacked,

and to order it with a sharedSymbolic

code which

allows some of that lack to be filled.

To say that literature is about human experience, then, is to

say that it is about the interplay of Imaginary objects with a

Symbolic code in a Real context. This formulation is extremely

67






general?maximally general. Freud's approach to literary criti

cism suffered from reductiveness, but this generality poses a

problem of its own: if all literature has content, then there isno work of literature to which this approach would not

apply.

This all-inclusiveness makes the approach potentiallyvacuous.

But the approach's generality may offer the virtue of enabling

it simultaneously to encompass very different types of litera

ture, and thus of offeringan escape from personal

or cultural

biases.

The

Symbolic, Imaginaryand Real can be used to the same

ends as other interpretive tools: to arrive at a clearer under

standing of awork,

or to reconstruct the author's motivation

to write it (or, for that matter, the reader's response to it).

These areextremely unsophisticated first-order critical moves,

in which the value of any approach is measured in the balance

between how much it explains and how much it distorts. In the

case of studying the author's motivation, it is clear that not

every author was motivated by psychopathology, even as rep

resented in the terms of a very liberal psychoanalytic approach

to criticism. But if the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real make up

the categories of a correct theory of the psyche, then every

author would have to be motivated by demands from one or

more of these three orders. For example, althoughwe

might

think of motivation by the Real asresulting in the only-in-it

f or-the-money bad writing of supermarket novels, the strugglefor survival surely was a

primary inspiration for Dickens,

Twain, Johnson, and Sand, among others. Surely the motivat

ing power of the Real can be taken moreseriously when the

Real is recognizedas the first of the three orders of experi

ence. In that the Symbolic furnishes all persons with models

of self-definition and social identity, many writers can be seen

as

approachingtheir art in terms of the

identityit conferred:

for example, the Cavalier poets on one hand and contemporary

radical black writers and feminists on the other. The Symbolic

also explains that part of a writer which is totally dedicated

to beinga

writer,to

getting it right, to mastering the resources

of language, and this list minimally includes Keats, Woolf,

68





Lacan & Literature

Yeats, O'Connor, Faulkner and Proust. Finally, in that the

Imaginary creates for usobjects of desire,

some writers reveal

themselves as impelled by the search for a transcendent object,a vision of truth: motivation by the Imaginary

covers both

Pope's philosophic poetry and Coleridge's conversation poems,

both Whitman and American realism.

Because the three orders of experience intermix, most writers

will be motivated by more than one of them. In Freud's ter

minology, the motivation of a work would be overdetermined.

Several writersnamed in the previous paragraph, for example

Faulkner and Pope, might just as well have been listed under

two or three of the orders. Indeed, the most interesting liter

ary biographies might be those in which more than one order

provides the motivation. Milton simultaneouslyannounces an

Imaginary and Symbolic task, to"justify the ways of God to

man." Norman Mailer simultaneously attempts to capture the

American spirit, place himself in the lineage of Hemingway,

and pay his alimonies. Acknowledging the influence of all

three orders may even allow us to recognize when a writer

is motivated by psychopathology. Poe, for example, surely

earned both aliving and a writer's reputation from his tales

?some of which, aspsychoanalytic criticism has alleged,7 are

obsessed with capturing arepressed image of his mother, while

others clearly are not.

Touse

the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real to reveal themeaning of a work is to show how?and how well?an author

has depicted human experience. Because by definition authors

have no other source to draw from than human experience,and because the three orders define that experience, then one

could predict the following: that literature judged great because of its content would contain important insights into the

three orders, that "good" literature would providemore

limited insights, and that the rest of literature would only relyon the three orders to

provide the minimum conditions for

content.Perhaps the most

interesting critical use of the three

7See Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A

Psycho-Analytic Interfretation,trans.

John Rodker (London, Hogarth, 1971).

69






orders would be anapplication to works whose contents have

been judged significant by very different approaches. The only

qualificationis that this

approachcan

only providean

analysisof content, with no

provision for formal qualities of writing.8

That taskmost properly would fall to literary stylistics.

When, for example, the three orders areapplied toWestern

literature as understood by that approach whose primary aim

is to identify masterpieces, it reveals anincreasing historic domi

nance of the Imaginaryover the Symbolic. While such a state

ment is

surely hyperbolic,

it does have

explanatory

value. At

one end of Western literature, The Iliad is preoccupied with

two forms of crisis to which the Symbolic is vulnerable onlywhen it is at its zenith, when it has greatest authority in peo

ple's lives. At the other end, Remembrance of Things Past

depictsa Symbolic given

over to the service, rather than the

mediation, of the Imaginary. Between them, the works of

Shakespeare show what problems arise when the Symboliccan

move with equal power to fulfill individual and social needs.

Thus, Western literature progressively depicts a decline of the

Symbolic,a retreat into the Imaginary. Significantly, this

movement in Western literature is the reverse of human

maturation, which moves from the Imaginary into the Sym

bolic via the Oedipal resolution.

The Iliad depicts a moment when a social order which commanded intense loyalty became inadequate for two of its best

members and was forsaken by them. Their two crises are in

herent to the Symbolic and are so fundamental that The Iliad

could stand as apsychoanalytic document. The inadequacies

arise from the success of the Symbolic rather than from fail

ure. On the onehand, the Symbolic exists to create obtainable

objectsof

desire,which for the Greeks concerned warriors'

8This is a much more general

use of Lacan than can be found in most of

the criticism that he hasinspired.

Nor does itemphasize hermeneutics, as

have Lacan and many of his critics. See, for example, GeoffreyH. Hartmann,

ed., Psychoanalysisand the

Question of the Text (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins,

1978).

70





Lacan & Literature

prowess. But this Symbolic made noprovision for the most

excellent warrior, the one who by early adulthood had attained

every prize. Thus Achilles, whose excellence was attributedto his mother's being a god, is a

problem for the Greeks before

Agamemnon's insult. The Greek social order had nothingmore to offer him.

On the other hand, the Symbolic providesthat excellence

be recognized, and The Iliad's Greeks acknowledged excellence

by granting leadership. As such, it made power over the social

order anobject of desire. But the Greek social order made no

provisionto protect itself against

an individual whose desire

for that object?for power?would exceed his reverence for

the social order itself. Thus Agamemnon, already in power in

Mycenae,sees in the banding of the many Greek states the

formation of a social order larger than any yet known, and it

is not clear in The Iliad that any other Greek, including the

voice of history, Nestor, sees what he sees. What is more im

portant, Agamemnon sees the logical necessity of a leader forthat new social order: himself. The new "nation," frustrated

as it is at every turn, seemsincreasingly

to be no more than

the object of Agamemnon's desire, not one of those natural

social orders which can givean identity to a child born into it.

Accordingly, Agamemnon's leadership could only be rash and

freakish: the insult to Artemis at Aulis moved Agamemnon

to violate his family, a social order moreprimal than the state,

in sacrificing his daughter. His leadership of this unnatural

social order is doomed even before a second sacrilege, to a

priest of Apollo,moves him to violate the social code by tak

ing the concubine of Achilles.

Those sections of The Iliad which a modern reader would

find boring, for example the accounts of individual deaths in

battle and especially the roll of ships in Book n, show how

much Homer's Greeks cared for their Symbolic. The gorychronicle of warriors' deaths suggests that an army was not

seen as greater than the persons who constituted it. Similarly,

the roll of ships includes not merely the names and lineages

of chiefs but also descriptions of their homelands and of the

shipsful of men they brought. For example:

71






Idomeneus thespear-famed

was leader of the Kretans,

those who held Knosos and Gortyna of the great walls,

Lyktos and Miletos and silver-shining Lykastos,and Phaistos and Rhytion, all towns well established,

and others who dwelt beside them in Krete of the

hundred cities.

Of all these Idomeneus the spear-famedwas leader,

With Meriones, a match for the murderous Lord of Battles.

Following along with these were eighty black ships.9 [645?652]

Terms like "of the great walls" and "silver-shining" might

well have been metrical line-fillers, with "lovely," strong

built" and the rest. But they also show how much fondness

these Greeks felt for their homelands.

In fact, except for the cases of Agamemnon and Achilles,

The Iliad?* Greeks represent a Symbolic that works. Patroklos'

funeral games in Book xxin show how little rivalry existed

among

the

warriors,

but their social bond was strongest during

the greatest danger. In Book x when Diomedes decides to scout

the Trojans, six of the best warriors volunteer immediately

to be the single companion he asks for, and when Agamemnon

asks him to choose, his response, "how then could I forget

Odysseus the godlike. . ." [243] expresses his regard for his

friend, rather than concern for success. Odysseus returns that

regard when he and Diomedes areseriously threatened:

"Son of Tydeus, what has happened to us that we

have forgottenour

fighting strength? Come here and stand with me,

brother. There must be

shame on us, if Hektor of the glancing helm captureour vessels." [xi: 313-315]

Diomedes and Odysseus are soon wounded?and then rescued

by Menelaos and Ajax, two of the six whom Diomedes had

not chosen for the surveillance. The power of the Greek Sym

9All passages

are taken from the Richmond Lattimore translation (Chicago,

University of Chicago, 1951).

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Lacan & Literature

bolic can be seen in other situations in which warriors show

regard for their companions rather than justifiable animosity.

Achilles' refusal to fight in the Greek army does not estrange

him from his peers, as when he accepts adelegation led by

Odysseus:

"Welcome. You are my friends who have come, and I

greatly need you,

who even to this my angerare dearest of all Achaians."

[ix: 197-198]

This regard extends to those less able: although Ajaxat one

point "drove the cowards to the centre/so that a man might be

forced to fight even though unwilling" [ix: 299^-300], he was

capable later of an address that spanned their differences:

"Dear friends, you who arepre-eminent among the

Argives,

you who

are of middle estate, you who are of low account, since

all of us are not alike in battle, this iswork for all now,

and you yourselvescan see it. Now let no man let himself

be turned back upon the ships for the sound of their

blusteringbut keep forever forward calling out courage to each other."

[xii: 269-272]

Ajax's injunction to "call out courage" embodies an under

standing of the Symbolic: that a social bond givesan individual

an "estate"; that participation in this social bond is more im

portant than individual rank gained by ability; and that the

danger ahead is a mere consequence?andan affirmation?of

the identity which the social bond has given to each individual.

Because the Symbolic embodies the Law, and because

cowardice is themost

serious violation pertainingto the social

order in The Iliady it is not surprising that cowardice is usually

denounced in settings rich with social identification. In Book

ii, Thersites is beaten before the Greek army. When Paris

shirks battle in Book in, his own brother tells him, "better

you had never been born" [38]. After Hektor is killed, Paris

73






with the other surviving brothers is denounced again, by his

mother,as ". . . the liars and the dancers, champions of the

chorus, the plunderers of their own people" [xxiv: 261]. The

only coward denounced byan enemy rather than a countryman

is denounced in secret: Dolon, who was killed by the spies of

Odysseus and Diomedes after disclosing the location of the

Trojan camp in aplea for safety.

The respect which the Greeks show each other extends some

what to the enemy, as if in recognition of a universality of the

Symbolic transcending racial boundaries. Verbal denunciations

between Greeks and Trojans during battle are less evident

than "calls of courage" within each group, or for that matter,

than denunciations of gods by other gods. There is even a sub

lime moment for the Symbolic when twoenemies, Ajax and

Hektor, exchange gifts after combat, sothat,

as Hektor states:

". . .any of the Achaians or

Trojans may say of us:

cThesetwo

fought each other in heart-consuming hate, thenjoined with each other in close friendship, before

they were parted.'"

[vu: 300-302]

The conviviality inherent in awell-functioning Symbolic

order can thus be seen as essential to The Iliad. This con

viviality provides the context for its monumental depiction of

bloodshed. It also foregrounds the spitefulness of Agamemnon

and Achilles and, for that matter, the constant rancor amongthe gods

over the outcome of the war. Because the Olympians

are immune to need, they do not require aSymbolic order to

mediate need, and can quarrel endlessly. By Book vin, before

The Iliad ismore than a third completed,even Zeus has tired

of the other gods' meddling, has forbidden their further in

terference, and has turned to his private task of weighing the

portionsof mortals' deaths in the scales of fate. The con

viviality among the great warriors does not extend to the war

riors' relations to their patron gods: because these relations

center on the gods' extraordinary power to release men tempo

rarily from the Real, the mortals relate to their patrons prayer

fully,as

Hegelian slaves to their masters, rather than as peers

74





Lacan & Literature

united in a Symbolic order. Only near the end of The Iliad

does a suggestion appear of human impatience with the gods'

intervention, when Ajax recognizes that he lost the footrace

at Patroklos' funeral games because, in response to a prayer

from Odysseus, Athena caused him to slip in the dung of a

sacrificial ox.

The exception to the pattern of constrained relations be

tween gods and mortals, that between the mother and son,

Thetis and Achilles, emerges only after Achilles has disassoci

ated himself from the Greekarmy.

With Achilles' father

Peleus absent, alone and aging in his palaceat Argos, it is as

if in turning to his mother, Achilles regresses behind the

Oedipal resolution to the mirror stage. Thetis could not con

stitute a new and better Symbolic for Achilles because, as The

Iliad knows, the gods' powers exclude them from the possi

bility of a social order. Thetis' inability to create a new choice

for Achilles seals his fate: when she finally acts on his behalf,

in commissioning new armor, it only makes the immanence of

his death more obvious.

Agamemnon had resolved himself: at the opening of Book

ix, he admitted the madness of his offense to Achilles, and it

only remained for him to release Achilles' concubine, declar

ing that he had not touched her. But it would take a greater

imperative from the Symbolic than that to return Achilles to

the Greeks: the loss ofPatroklos,

thepeer

closest tohim,

who

died in his armor. Significantly, Achilles eulogized Patroklos

not in terms of his own loss but of that to the social order

itself:

". . . now let each one of you rememberunhappy

Patroklos

who wasgentle, and understood how to be kindly to all

men while he lived." [xvn: 670-672]

Achilles' optionswere well-known?he had explained them to

the Greeks who had visited him in Book ix, either to return

to Argos in obscurity or to fight at Troy, die, and become an

immortal. Thus, when he returns to battle after Patroklos'

death, it is not as the Greek's greatest warrior but as some

75






thingno

longer human. He appears wrapped in Zeus' aegis,

the precise equivalent of the divine oil with which Aphroditewould protect Hektor's corpse. He will have transcended

human form sothoroughly that in Book xxi he could battle

one of the sacred rivers of Troy.

But The Iliad concludes by using this no-longer-human

figure in its most powerful affirmation of the Symbolic,Achilles' reception of Priam, the father of the enemy he has

killed. This moment isheavily

foreshadowed. Andromache

declares when Hektor first goes to battle, "youare father to

me, and my honoured mother,/ you are my brother, and you

it is who are my young husband" vi: 428-30. In short, Hektor

isAndromache's family, that entity that transmits the Symbolic

before a child can enter the community of adults. The meeting

of Achilles and Priam is foreshadowed again by the exceptionalinstance of gods showing "human" tenderness to each other,

the reception of Thetis by Hephaistos and his wife, who tell

her, "we honor you and love you" [xvin: 386]. Later, when

Andromache learns of Hektor's death, she mourns most the

loss of the father who would have initiated their son Astyanax

into the social order:

"The day

of bereavement leaves a child with no agemates to befriend him.He bows his head before every man, his cheeks are bewept, he

goes, needy,a

boy among his father's companions,

and tugs at this manby the mantle, that man

by the tunic,

and they pity him, and onegives him a

tiny drink

from agoblet,

enoughto moisten his lips, not

enoughto

moisten hispalate.

. . ." [xxn: 489-495]

Thus The Iliad believes with Freud and Lacan that the child

is generally initiated into the Symbolic by the father, and thus

the commingling of the tears of Achilles and Priam is as pre

dictable as the deaths of Priam, Hektor and Achilles. In re

questing from Achilles the body of his son, Priam invokes

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Achilles' own father:

"Honor then the gods, Achilleus, and take pityon me

remembering your father, yet I am still more pitiful;I have gone through

what no other mortal on earth

has gone through;I put my lips to the hands of the man who has

killed my children."

So hespoke,

and stirred in the other apassion

of grievingfor his own father. He took the old man's hands

and pushed him

gently away, and the tworemembered,

as Priam sat

huddled

at the feet of Achilleus and wept close for

manslaughtering Hektor

and Achilleus wept now for his own father, now again

for Patroklos. The sounds of their mourning moved

in the house, [xxiv: 503?512]

Thus, although Achilles has gone beyond the human world,he remembers the value of what he has lost.

Just as The Iliad presents the one extreme of aSymbolic

which has almost perfectly subordinated the Imaginary,Proust's Remembrance of Things Past depicts the other ex

treme, a Symbolic givenover to serving the Imaginary rather

than mediating it. The self-absorption of the novel's characters

is so great that it is tempting to conclude that a Symbolic is

lacking, except that their pleasures are highly conventionalized

and their mannersscrupulous and attenuated. Psychologically,

it is as if the

Symbolic

in the world of the novel makes a social

fact of the absolutism of infantile desire at the mirror stage.

In the case of the novel's central character, Marcel, acquiring

language and custom leads to noself-definition,

no member

ship in acommunity of peers, but instead acts as a more effi

cient mechanism for cultivating private desire. Marcel finds

77






no adult vocation until he resolves in the last pages to write

about theobjects

in hismemory?to

make a career from his

images of desire.

Because this Symbolic is transparent before the Imaginary,

the novel often reads like apsychoanalytic

text. Long, theo

retical meditations on Marcel's experience could have been

written by Freud or Lacan. In fact, because of Marcel's bond

age to Imaginary objects, his narrative is a remarkable source

of observations about the objectifications which compose the

self and our concepts of others:10

. . . even in the most insignificant details of ourdaily life, none of

us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical

for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an ac

count-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created

by the thoughts of other people.. . .We pack the physical outline

of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed

about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose

in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the

end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks,

follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously

in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a

transparent envelope,so that each time we see the face or hear the

voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognize and to which

we listen, [i: 15]

In Freud's theory, the projection described by Marcel is noth

ing less than the transference, with the theory of symboliza

tion one of the two defining concepts of psychotherapy and

the crucial factor in the psychoanalyticcure. In this passage

Marcel agrees with Freud and Lacan that others exist for us

as the Imaginary characterizations which we unconsciously

make of them. Marcel's view differs only in that his "ideas"

are more neutral than the desires which for Freud and Lacan

givecontent to the transference. But there can be no doubt

10Remembrance of Things Past. All passages

are from the translation by

C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Andreas Mayor (New York, Random House,

1970).

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that in the novel it is from desires rather than "ideas" that

the character Marcel "constructs" the outlines of the other

characters.

Remembrance of Things Past also contains episodes which

illustrate psychoanalytic principles with embarrassing literal

ness. The crucial episode which shows that Marcel can never be

released from desire by the Symbolic he acquires has the pre

cise form of anOedipal struggle. Marcel has stayed awake one

night because, duringa dinner party, his mother had not given

him a goodnight kiss. Fighting anxiety, Marcel rushes to hismother as she leaves the dining room for bed. His mother is

angry at him for staying awake. But his father, surprisingly,

is not:

My father used constantly to refuse to let me do things which

were quite clearly allowed by the more liberal charters granted to

meby my mother and grandmother, because he paid

no heed to

'Principles,' and because in his sight there were no such things as

'Rights of Man.' . . .But then again, simply because he was devoid

of principles (in my grandmother's sense), so he could not, prop

erly speaking, be called inexorable. He looked at me for a moment

with an air of annoyance andsurprise,

and then when Mamma

had told him, not without some embarrassment, what had hap

pened, said to her: "Go along with him then; you said just now

that you didn't feel like sleep, so stay in his room for a little. I

don't need anything." [i: 28]

Thus, at the point when children normally learn that there are

Symbolic "principles" to mediate their desires, Marcel learned

nothing, gained no alternative to regarding his desires as most

Real. His life would be devoted largely to obtaining and con

trollingwomen as objects of desire, like his mother in this

episode.In

thesame

"Combray" chapter,two of them

appear.Gilberte Swann, glimpsed briefly in her garden, shows in the

next volume how fully developed in the child Marcel is the

psychology of desire and loss. The Duchess de Guermantes,

also seen only briefly, from afar, in church, is idolized by Mar

cel, but she will recognize him and admit him to her circle

79






because it thrives on such attention. Later, Marcel attempts

to obtain and control Albertine Simonet, at onepoint confining

her in his home. He puts tremendous effort into making Albertine devoted to him alone because he is obsessed by suspi

cions, largely confirmed after her death, that she sought love

without him, among women. The possibility that Albertine

had aprivate, lesbian existence vexes Marcel intensely, not

simply because it denies any illusion he may have of con

trolling and monopolizing her, but because it suggests the

existence of a social order in which his desires simply do not

matter?in which the object of desire has desires of its own.

The novel does not give the child Marcel a model of an

adult who transcended the mirror stage, but shifts from Mar

cel's infatuation with the Duchess de Guermantes to the ex

ample of Charles Swann, Gilberte's father, whose adult ex

perience of love is virtually the same as Marcel's. Swann

pursues Odette de Crecy largely because he cannot be certain

of dominating her affection?she is an unobtainable object. In

finally marrying her, he pays the greatest price he can to obtain

her,even while aware of the Imaginary nature of his desire:

... he cried out in his heart: "To think that I have wasted years

of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love

that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please

me, who was not in my style." [i: 292]

Marcel pursues Albertine with the same futility of the Imagi

nary. In fact, most of the major characters outside Marcel's

family circle aredepicted

or suddenly revealed to have spent

their lives in pursuit of Imaginary objects of love or self-love,

for example, Mme. Verdurin, Baron de Charlus and Robert

de Saint-Loup. Even a minimal figure, the daughter of the

composer Vinteuil,is known

only through

a

reportof a lesbian

encounter which reverberates for half the novel. For his part,

Marcel inherits Swann's role as mirror for the Guermantes

because of the intervention of the Real in Swann's life. As the

Duke and Duchess depart in their carriage for one of their

innumerable society dinners, Swann tells them that he cannot

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join them in Italy because he is dying of cancer. Their response

shows that Swann has no other value for the Guermantes than

as a mirror:

Placed for the first time in her life between two duties as incom

parable as getting into her carriage to go out to dinner and shew

ing pity for a man who was about to die, she could find nothingin the code of conventions that indicated the right line to follow,

and, not knowing which to choose, felt it better to make a show

of notbelieving that the latter alternative need be seriously

con

sidered, so as to follow the first, which demanded of her less effort,and thought that the best way of settling the conflict would be to

deny that any had existed, [in: 423]

The conversation changes: should the Duchess wear her red

or black shoes? The Duke is irritated by the delay:

The Duke felt no compunction at speaking thus of his wife's ail

ments and his own to a dying man, for the former interested himmore, appeared to him more

important, [in: 425]

Marcel has been callingon the Guermantes that afternoon

and stands beside Swann as the Guermantes' carriage leaves.

Years later, after long confinement in a tuberculosis sanitarium,

Marcel attends agathering of the Guermantes' circle,

now

dominated by persons of his own age. He finds Odette re

married into the aristocracy, Swann remembered as an adven

turer, and the aged Duchess considered eccentric by society.

Although the Duchess does not remember which shoes she

wore that day, Marcel does.

Perhaps because the Symbolic of Remembrance of Things

Past is so transparent, because it imposesno values of its own,

the transcendent moments of the novel are those in which

Imaginary objects assert themselves to Marcel spontaneously

through memory. While waiting in a Guermantes' library to

be admitted to that last social affair in the novel, Marcel

notices a copy of the novel which his mother read to him on

the night in which she stayed in his room. Seeing the book

inspiresa flow of memories which leads him to resolve to write

81






about the people he has known at each stage of his life. The

appearanceof the

book,like the sound of his foot

strikinga

cobblestone or the famous taste of madeleine dipped in tea,

allows the past to open before him

. . .just as the Japanese

amuse themselves by fillinga porcelain

bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which

... the momentthey

become wet, stretch themselves and bend,

take on colour and distinctiveshape,

become flowers orhouses,

or

people, permanentand

recognizable...

[i: 36]

Imaginary objects become solid toMarcel?Real?and thus at

the end of the novel he resolves to write about this world

which unfolded in his memory, or as he put it earlier,

. . . that one of all the diverse lives along whose parallel lines we

aremoved, which is the most abundant in sudden reverses of for

tune, the richest in episodes; I mean the life of the mind, [i: 141]

For Marcel to become a writer is for him to fashion a new

Symbolic for himself by putting bounds on the Imaginary.While the Symbolic functions throughout the novel only to

serve the Imaginary, after Marcel's decision the Imaginary

will serve the Symbolic by providing itwith content for litera

ture. Thus, by virtue of its ability to take shape in the mind

as "permanent and recognizable" objects, the Imaginary, rather

than a parent, will initiate Marcel into this Symbolic. While

this new Symbolic cannot give Marcel the fellowship of peersand a code of law and custom, it can

perform that first func

tion of the Symbolic neglected inMarcel's childhood: it can

free him from domination by desire.

Between The Iliad, which celebrates the Symbolic, and Re

membrance of Things Past, which subordinates the Symbolicto the Imaginary,

are many works of Shakespeare in which the

Symbolic and Imaginaryare thrown out of equilibrium. Unlike

Proust, Shakespeare does not study the Imaginary for its own

sake. Nor does his Symbolic have the power to define an en

tire range of characters' behavior and attitudes as it does for

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Homer. Instead, the two orders define problems: Shakespeare's

characterspit private

desiresagainst

the social order. A lord

allows himself to be seduced into regicide. Young love violates

the elders' vendetta. At the cost of his kingdom,a father ex

trarts apledge of love from two children. Shakespeare usually

embodies the conflict between the Imaginary and the Symbolic

diredly, in the very action of his plays, but it also emerges as

the defining qualities of characters who oppose each other, such

as Richard II asprivate desire and Bolingbroke

as the social

order. In the great tragedies, the conflict between the two

orders is often discussed openly in soliloquies that precedeor

follow action undermining the Symbolic, for example, Mac

beth enumerating Duncan's claims on him as his kinsman, sub

ject, and host, only to conclude, before killing him:

I have no spur

To prick the sides of my intent, but only

Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself

And falls on the other, [i: vii: 25-28]

Shakespeare does embody this psychology in another way: his

Sonnets create individual psyches known to the reader only by

their expressions of desire, attitudes toward social life, and

meditations on death.

Hamlet haslong

beenShakespeare's

mostready

candidate

for psychoanalysis, and Lacan has written at lengthon one of

its chief problems: why Hamlet delays so long in killingClaudius.11 Because nearly all of Lacan's writing is about psy

choanalytic theory and training, this article is invaluable for

showing how Lacan would use his theory to interpret litera

ture. Lacan claims that Hamlet needs Claudius, that for him

Claudius symbolizes personal power?in Lacan's imagistic

terminology, "the phallus"?which, unconsciously, Hamlet

defines as lacking in himself. Claudius is an Imaginary object,a detached part of Hamlet; as

longas Claudius serves Ham

11"Desire and the

Interpretationof Desire in Hamlet" trans.

James

Hulbert, in Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977): 11-52.

83






let's narcissistic desire that such anobject exist, apart from

himself,

Hamlet cannot kill him.Furthermore,

as Lacan ar

gues, Claudius substitutes in this Imaginary role for Hamlet's

father,a

figure who would not only seemsupernatural to a

child who has not resolved the Oedipal crisis but who actuallyappears to Hamlet as such on stage:

The verysource of what makes Hamlet's arm waver at

every

moment is the narcissistic connection that Freud tells us about in

his text onthe decline of the Oedipus complex: one cannot strike

the phallus because the phallus, even the real phallus, is a ghost.

[50]

Thus, Hamlet must have been particularly shaken in trying to

kill Claudius and finding him anordinary man, praying. Lacan

argues that Hamlet must know that Claudius cannot be behind

the arras seconds later, and that he kills Polonius as a sacri

fice, as a substitute offering for the Imaginary Claudius he

does not find. As Lacan explains, Hamlet can only kill Claudius

when he is about to die:

It's aquestion of the phallus, and that's why he will never be able

to strike it, until the moment when he has made the completesacrifice?without

wanting to, moreover?of all narcissistic attach

ments, i.e., when he ismortally wounded and knows it. [51]

Thus Hamlet's Image of a detached phallus is symptomatic of

an unfinished Oedipal resolution, of a person who has not

taken as a part of himself the potency which asquisition of the

Symbolic confers. Hamlet's inability to do away with Claudius

has the same source as his general indecisiveness, his inability

to find an adult identity. Young Fortinbras' constant military

operations put Hamletto

shame, exposing his failureto find

a purpose of his own. "To put it in commonsensical terms,"

Lacan states [p. 26], "Hamlet just doesn't know what he

wants." This has two meanings: that Hamlet is not aware of

his desire for anImaginary object, and that he, unlike Fortin

bras, "has never set agoal for himself." Lacan notes that

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Hamlet's meeting with Fortinbras motivates amonologue

on

human psychology which is decisive for the play, "How all

occasions do inform against me," in which Hamlet meditates

both on "his own behavior" and "the object of human actions."

When Hamlet is finally capable of killing Claudius, the priceof his own death renders the act futile. Theoretically, to have

killed Claudius might have initiated Hamlet into the Symbolic,but the duel scene ends with the Danish social order gone to

oblivion as Denmark passes to Fortinbras. Hamlet, then, is a

charaderistically Shakespearean play in which an individual's

Imaginary desire overwhelms the Symbolic. The crucial dif

ference between Hamlet and, say, Macbeth or King Lear, and

the fador which makes Hamlet sointeresting for psychoanal

ysis, is the extent to which the individual's desire is repressedout of consciousness. For Lacan, that repression

can be a source

of danger:

We were troubled at the time by the question of why, after all,no one assassinated Hitler?Hider, who is very much this objectthat is not like others, this object x whose function in the homogenization of the crowd by means of identification is demonstrated

by Freud. Doesn't this lead back to what we're discussing here?

[50-51]

Interpretation with the three orders shows that The Iliad,

Hamlet and Remembrance of Things Past end in the same

way, by putting their major characters in new relations to the

Symbolic. Achilles is drawn back while transcending the Symbolic by his meeting with Priam. Marcel gains the Symbolic.

Hamlet fails to gain the Symbolic at the only point at which

he wasprepared for it. The contrast in the ways in which these

relations occur reflects the changing circumstances in literary

history, but what ismost

striking is that the attitude of allthree works toward the Symbolic is positive, something that

can be seen in the works' attitudes toward their endings. Con

trasted as it is with Achilles' rage and the horrors of battle,the meeting with Priam is gentle and poignant. For Hamlet

to have failed is tragic,as Fortinbras suggests when he says

85






that Hamlet would have "provedmost royally." Distanced as

Marcel is from the creatures at the Guermantes'party,

and

given his life of weakness and the lack of a strong Symbolicin his world, his resolve to be a writer has a

quality of luminous

joy. At the close of these works, the Symbolic has a feelingmuch like that of the paradise which Adam and Eve lose as

they take their solitary way. To say that these works are about

human experience is to say that they affirm the Symbolic.

A critical method that presumes to explain literature in terms

of somethingas vast as "human experience" ought

toapply

to something equally vast: all of literature. It is one thing for

a critical method to yield insights such as those above for liter

ary works of the first magnitude -, it is another for the same

method to illuminate very ordinaryor alien writing, works

depicting less interestingor familiar experience. Dune?2 by

Frank Herbert, is a novel which has had a cult following for

the past decade: it deals with the conquest of agalactic empire

by the nomadic inhabitants of a desert planet led by the son of

its governor of occupation. Like science fiction, this "space

opera" intrigues readers who compare its fictive world with

their own. The inhabitants of the dune planethave a Semitic

language and culture, and we are bound to ask whether human

oids exist elsewhere in the universe with social orders and

problems like ours. Indeed, the novel's depiction of the Sym

bolic is suggestive. There are chivalric orders which train their

members to control others by the delicate manipulationin

speech of intonation and presupposition.One of these orders,

to which the hero's mother belongs, seeded the dune planetin

prehistory with amythology that predicts the hero's arrival

as liberator, and this mythology contributes substantiallyto the

natives' acceptance of the hero. Herbert clearly understands

one aspect of the Symbolic, that it furnishes a community with

a set of laws and values.

12(New York, Ace Books, 1965).

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But the Real, the experience of survival, contributes more

thanthe Symbolic

tothe novel's contents. Water is

so scarce

on the planet that the inhabitants render the liquid from

corpses and wearspecial suits which recycle their own fluids.

The currency of the planet is a narcotic obtained deftly by the

natives from vicious giantworms. The novel's interjection of

futuristic technology into anextremely hostile environment

reminds readers that subsistence is the precondition for any

form of human experience.

But these aspects of the Symbolic and the Real are only

interesting permutations of human experience,not explorations

of fundamental problems. Moreover, Dune depicts virtually

nothing of the Imaginary, the source of conflict in all three

works examined above. The Dune villain is a clich?d epitomeof evil. The emperor is effete. The hero matures into a

prophet. His mother pines for the abundant waters of her home

planet. The natives are noble savages. Everyone's desires are

completely predictable. With such blandness in the Imaginary,Dune's complexity is about the same as The Iliad's would have

been without Agamemnon and Achilles or Hamlet's would

have been if the prince could have killed Claudius the nighthe saw the ghost.

Popularnovels are easier for an

interpretive theoryto ex

plain than the literature of non-Western peoples. For much of

this literature, anethnologist is needed simply to make sense

of the narrative logic and toexplain references to ritual and

mythology. Kabir,13 afifteenth-century Muslim weaver in

Benares, is arelatively easy case. Influenced by Sufism and the

worship of the Hindu god Rama, Kabir comes from a literate

tradition whose origins in Indo-European pre-historyare the

same as our own. Nonetheless, the emotional quality and logicof his poetry, like those of much non-Western literature,

seem

alien and disconcerting:

13Poems have no titles and are cited from The Kabir Book, trans. Robert

Bly (Boston, Beacon, 1977).

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The woman who isseparated from her lover

spins at the spinning wheel.

The Bagdad of the body rises with its towers and gates.Inside it, the palace of intelligence has been built.

The wheel of ecstatic love turns around in the sky,and the spinning seat ismade of the sapphires of

work and study.

This woman weaves threads that aresubtle,

andthe

intensity of her praise makes them fine!

Kabir says: I am that woman.

I amweaving the linen of night and day.

When my Lover comes and I feel his feet,

the gift I will have for him is tears. [59]

This poem creates confusion

regarding

its

persona,

an

explicitlynamed male, "Kabir," who is described as a woman, but who

may be a conceit-within-a-conceit for something cosmic. Her

body is acity with towers, gates and a

"palace of intelligence."

Her spinning wheel, which is "the wheel of ecstatic love,"

"turns around in the sky." The cloth she weaves is "the linen

of night and day." The woman has the scope and powers of

agod, but like a

human, she lacks a lover. To read the poem

as aWesterner is to sort out the attributes: woman or cosmos 1

Seen through Lacan's theory, however, Kabir's play with the

attributes of the persona appears to be intentional,a device to

challenge his readers' cultural assumption of their ownpsychi

cal lack: that they are empty and that God is outside them,

perhaps in outer space. He writes in another poem:

Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pinemountains, and the maker of canyons and

pinemountains!

All seven oceans are inside, and hundreds of millions of stars.

The acid that tests gold is there, and the one who judges jewels

And the music from the strings no one touches, and the

source of all water.

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If you want the truth, I will tell you the truth:

Friend, listen: the God whom I love is inside. [6]

This persona rejects God-as-an-Imaginary-object in precisely

the same way that Lacan's Hamlet cannot overcome his objec

tification of Claudius. Interpretation with the three orders

shows that although Shakespeare works in the conventions of

tragedy and Kabir in a sort of explicitly didactic poetry, both

explorea

single problem: the defeat of persons by Imaginary

desires experienced as the lack of objects external to the self.

"The God whom I love is inside" in the same way that the

psychical property that Claudius represents should be "inside"

Hamlet. Both Shakespeare and Kabir deal with a crisis of the

Symbolic. Hamlet's Symbolic eludes him, while Kabir's, in

the form of traditional theology, affirms the objectification that

Kabir rejects. Because Shakespeare's Symbolic is part of our

own tradition, we are comfortable with Hamlet's problem in

a

waywe cannot be with Kabir's

holy zeal. We shouldnot

mistake discomfort based on cultural difference for inaccessi

bility: eventhough Kabir's poetry has no other subject than

this zeal, we can understand the psychological dialectic he uses

to relieve it from the inhibitions of external objects. In this

poem, for example, Kabir challenges the image of a realiza

tion after death :

Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.

Jump into experience while you are alive!

Think ... and think . . .while youare alive.

What you call "salvation" belongs to the time before death.

If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,do you think

ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic

just because the body is rotten?

that is all fantasy.What is found now is found then.

If you find nothing now,

you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.

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If you make love with the divine now, in the next life

you will have the face of satisfied desire.

So plunge into truth, find out who the Teacher is,

Believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this:When the Guest is being searched for,

it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest

that does all the work.

Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity. [24?25]

Kabir thus tells the people of his culture that the spiritual

search to which they devoted so much effort does not lie out

side of them, but that God is inside them, and that "search"

is amisleading metaphor because it implies

an"object of

search," an external object. The first step of such asearch,

then, would be to see the illusory quality of the "search" itself:

I said to thiswanting-creature

inside me:

What is this river youwant to cross?

There are no travelers on the river-road, and no road.

Do you seeanyone moving

about on that bank, orresting?

There is no river at all, and noboat, and no boatman.

There is notowrope either, and no one to

pullit.

There is noground,

nosky,

notime,

nobank,

no ford!

And there is nobody, and no mind!

Do you believe there is some place that will make the soul

less thirsty?In that great absence you will find nothing.

Be strong, then, and enter into your ownbody;

there you have a solid place for your feet.

Think about it carefully!Don't go off somewhere else!

Kabir says this: just throw away all thoughts of imaginary things,

and stand firm in that which you are. [17]

Where Kabir uses words like "fantasy"or

speaks of "throw

ing away all thoughts of imaginary things," modern readers

are moved to ask whether Kabir had a vision of Freudian psy

choanalysis six hundred years ago. But to ask such a question

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is to misunderstand psychology. For psychoanalysis, in this case,

the concepts of the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real, attempt to

give a fundamental, universal account of the human psyche.If the writing of Kabir (and, for that matter, Homer, Shake

speare and Proust) evoke the language of psychoanalysis, it is

because these writers were in touch with the same fundamental

issues in human life that Freud and Lacan only stated theo

retically.

How lucky Kabir is, that surrounded by all this joyhe sings inside his own little boat.

His poems amount to one soulmeeting

another.

These songs are about forgetting dying and loss.

They rise above both coming in and going out. [58]

Any critical method separates figure from ground in the

perceptionof literature.14 The

Symbolic, Imaginaryand Real

separate fundamental human qualities from differences of cul

tural source, genre and literary quality, and then structure

those differences back into an understanding of the work,as if

by the "deduction" that Einstein mentioned (p. 1). Thus, if

readers can first isolate ways in which a work's contents depict

the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real, they need not be fazed by

whether a work is goodor

bad, or whether it comes from a

literate orpre-literate society

or one with values different from

their own.

But interpretation by the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real

has a substantive value today that transcends the critical "ob

jectivity" it seems to offer in that it teaches us to see what is

definitely and unsentimentally human without throwing out

difference. In Culture and Commitment, Margaret Mead

argues that the single most important quality of all human

societies today is their "prefigurativeness," that past experience

is inadequate to deal with the future. Because all societies are

14For a recent discussion, see Susan Horton, Interfreting Interfreting

(Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, 1979), pp. 50?54.

91






equally threatened by nuclear warfare, and because Third

World societies are not only linked to theWest by electronic

communication but share in its most advanced technology, onepredicament now faces everyone:

For the first time, human beings throughout the world, in their

information about one another and responsesto one

another, have

become acommunity that is united by shared knowledge and

danger.. .. It is as if, all around the world, people

were con

verging on identical immigration posts, each with its identifying

sign: "You are now about to enter the post-Wo rid War II

world at Gate 1 (or Gate 23, or Gate 2003, etc.)." Whoever

they are, and wherever theirparticular point of entry may be, all

areequally immigrants

into the newera?although

some come

asrefugees

and some ascastaways.15

Equality, once anideal, becomes one more threat which a pre

figurative world is unpreparedto accept. Literature has always

been a great teacher, and with a critical approach that elucidates

human sameness and difference, it can teach us how to live

with this threat, that humans everywhere are now ourstrategic

equals. There is no doubt that we will have to read more non

Western literature to be so educated, and that we may need

anthropologists to make immediate sense of it.

The theory of the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real may helpus face the crisis of a

pre-figurative world in a second respect,

by teachingus

finallyto

understandhuman

desireas

clearlyas we

understand, say, arithmetic. Our psyche may be our

worst enemy in that it traps us into patterns of striving without

limit. Now, in apre-figurative world,

we like Achilles, have

gone beyond normal possibilities and can only choose death or

obscurity. As aspecies,

we should choose obscurity,or at least

a radical lessening of ourexpectations. If we can understand

the mechanism of desire,we can

perhaps limit its excesses.

Consciously disciplining the Imaginary and adjusting the Symbolic may be the most difficult thing that humans have ever

done, but if we cannot do it, as the world now knows, the Real

will intervene with apermanent solution to our

problem.

15Revised edition (Garden City, Doubleday, 1978), p. 70.

Documents

Lacan & Literature- Imaginary Objects and Social Order