Speaking Desires can be Dangerous

The Poetics of the Unconscious

Elizabeth Wright

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745619682
  9780745619675
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745669199
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

This new book is a lively and original study of psychoanalysis and its relations to the arts.

Part I

Psychoanalysis and Literature: Freud

1

What is a psychoanalytic reading?

Psychoanalysis can explain why language is literary all the time, why it is irrepressibly figural. Although Freud always ceded the discovery of the unconscious to the poet, even if at times somewhat anxiously, before psychoanalysis came on the scene, the critic was not conscious of what the literary text might harbour. Deconstruction, for instance, whose practitioners often make themselves independent of psychoanalytic theory, could hardly have got off the ground without a theory of the unconscious. In seeing that meaning was at once always too much and never enough, both supplementary and lacking, deconstruction battened on Freud’s repeated linguistic discovery throughout his work, namely, that desire cannot name itself except by substitution.

What, then, is there to be gained from a psychoanalytic reading? Furthermore, a much debated question, what is a psychoanalytic reading? I would like to begin with a practical example, a nonsense poem by Edward Lear:

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat.
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the Stars above
And sang to a small guitar,
‘Oh lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!’

Pussy said to the Owl, ‘You elegant fowl!
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! Too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?’
They sailed away for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-tree grows,
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.

‘Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?’ Said the Piggy, ‘I will.’
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

Going back to Freud’s underlying concern with the question of who had got to the unconscious first, the poet or the psychoanalyst, we might say that the literary critic is here not sure whether she is an analyst-owl among the analysand-cats, who have much to learn from her, or, vice versa, whether she is an analysand-cat, who has much to learn from the analystowls, the clinicians. Or, as some might argue, are the two discourses critically incompatible?

Of course, ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’ can be enjoyably read as ‘just a nonsense poem’. Composers have chosen to set it to music for its strong rhythmic qualities, including its repetitions, internal rhymes and refrain. It is also a story because it poses and resolves a problem through a transformation (nosering into wedding ring, making two into one), and its setting is a romantic scene – with a courtship, a sea journey, a far-away hill, a song to a guitar, the stars, the moon, a marriage and a celebratory feast. In addition, the poem follows the topos of a fairy tale in having animal characters, one of whom is a helping figure (‘said the Piggy, “I will”’). What could psychoanalysis possibly add to this account which might explain the lasting popularity of this apparently naively childlike poem?

Lear’s poem might also be read as a bold transgressive fantasy about two creatures from genera with two different reproductive systems (read also ‘generations’– the root of both words comes from the Indo-European root gen, meaning ‘to beget, to generate, produce’). Hence the two creatures require superior assistance, and, because it is a kind of fairy tale, they get it: they take their liquids and their solids – their honey and their money— first to the libidinal pig in the wood and then to the phallic turkey, residing on a hill, in order to gain access to the Bong-tree. For their wedding feast they dine on a hitherto impossible plenitude of food (a menu of mince instead of mice). And finally they couple in that liminal space, the seashore.

The implement the couple use for their feast is a ‘runcible spoon’. This is a nonsense term invented by Lear for a three-pronged fork hollowed out like a spoon, which has one prong with a cutting edge: hence it is an object which defies categories, wanting to be fork, knife, and spoon all at once. So it cannot fit into one genus – except in fantasy, like the union of the Owl and the Pussy-Cat. It happens that Lear’s nonsense work is particularly characterized by its confusion of categories, both in its writing and its drawing.

Non-sense poetry is a (joking) refusal to accept the boundaries of language. Psychoanalysis has a theory about such a refusal, as will be seen. A psychoanalytic reading might thus take up this confusion of boundaries and read the poem as a set of fundamental fantasies, a denial of castration in its wish to transgress familial boundaries and an attempt to answer a series of questions about the riddles of procreation and sexual difference. But are they Lear’s fantasies? There is no way we can know. What the above reading testifies to is the power of the poem to arouse such fantasies in a reader. If such a reading is rhetorically convincing to others, then one could argue that the poem’s popularity with readers of all ages testifies to its capacity to provoke primal fantasies, defined as ‘typical phantasy structures’;¹ these include intra-uterine existence (the sea), seduction (the serenade in the boat), primal scene (the coupling) and (denial of) castration (confusion of categories).

But is it after all nothing but an endearing transgressive fantasy? Some time ago I heard the poem sung as a cabaret item by a hired group at a party where there was a majority of men. The singer, a woman, put a particular emphasis on the refrain, ‘what a beautiful Pussy you are’, thereby alluding to a woman’s sexual organs. The poetic effect was that of castration, for, first, the woman was alluded to as metaphorically reduced to a cat, and, second, as metonymically further reduced to being merely a part of a cat, since her sexual organs were represented by nothing more than the cat’s fur. The ‘harmlessly’ amusing salacious emphasis unconsciously indicated the horror that lurked beneath the wish-fulfilment.

So what can be said about the nature of a psychoanalytic reading on the basis of this brief discussion? If we set aside the main literary element in ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’, ignoring the facts that its genre is that of a fable where fantastic elements are normal and that everyone reads it as a nonsense poem, then we can see the uncanniness of two animals, enemies by nature, libidinally incompatible, courting each other. Psychoanalytic theory rests on the assumption that sexuality is the crucial factor in the constitution of the subject. In its clinical practice it relies on finding structural images in the mind, pointing to the way the present is determined by the past in terms of a subject’s sexual history. The beginning, the pre-genital, is seen as the loss experienced by the subject upon its separation from the mother’s body, the genital being the provisional endpoint, never totally achieved. In Freud’s terms sexuality is ‘polymorphously perverse’, since there is always a nostalgic longing for the infantile variability of sexual satisfaction.² A psychoanalytic reading therefore primarily involves being alert to the presence of sexuality in the text. Since we are sexually identified by means of language and since we can be altered by language, we suffer the imprint of the desires of others: every statement is a redirection of someone’s desire. Thus the relation of desire and language crucially ties together the psychoanalytic and the literary.

2

The uncanny and its poetics

In order to argue for the measure of Freud’s contribution, I would like to examine the Freudian inspiration, particularly in its impact on our understanding of the relation between desire and language, which is later more fully articulated in Lacan’s formulations. A good place to begin is Freud’s elaboration of the concept of ‘the uncanny’, a key example of the irrepressibility of the unconscious. Freud’s definition of the uncanny is to be found in his celebrated essay of that name.¹ According to Freud, the uncanny is ‘undoubtedly related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror’.² He defines what characterizes the uncanny by examining the German word for it, unheimlich. He writes: ‘Unheimlich is in some way or other a species of heimlich’, and ‘heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence.’³ For heimlich means not only homely and familiar, but also hidden and secret. The un- of the unheimlich marks the return of the repressed material: the word or thing threatens us in some way by no longer fitting the desired context. Hence the uncanny has the effect of destabilizing language. Modern critical theory has moved on from the structuralist perception that words refer to each other rather than to things to the further recognition that this perception ignores the uncanny effect upon language of that to which it seeks to refer.

The uncanny and Surrealism

The concept of the uncanny has become important in postmodern aesthetics because it acts as a challenge to representation. It makes us see the world not as ready-made for description, depiction or portrayal (common terms applied to what an artist or writer does), but as in a constant process of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction. Freud could not understand why the Surrealists were so interested in psychoanalysis. In 1932 he wrote a letter to André Breton, who had accused Freud of not analysing his own dreams sufficiently, and in it he says that he is far from sure what Surrealism is about.⁴ Freud felt that one could not analyse the productions of the Surrealists because the analytic process cannot take place in public: psychoanalysis has a theory which gives an account of how and why repressed material suddenly disrupts our familiar ways of perceiving the world, but it sees this theory as grounded in clinical practice. The psychoanalytic process of so-called ‘free association’ is not to be equated with automatic writing, for instance, because, unlike what the Surrealists hoped, there is no pure truth which can emerge undisguised and uncensored from the unconscious. The freedom of free association is not to be understood as an absence of determination, but rather as overruling the voluntary selection of thoughts. What one overrules thereby is the censorship between the conscious and pre-conscious (that which is not present to consciousness). The unconscious defences reveal themselves in the material that the analysand produces in the course of analysis. This material is not a direct expression of the impulses of drive, but consists of ideas or images that have attached themselves to these impulses, what Freud calls ‘ideational representatives’. Consequently, the return of the repressed is not the return of such an impulse but the return of whatever idea or image has attached itself to it. It is only when the analyst and analysand ‘work through’ – as Freud calls it – the repeated emergence of these images and thoughts that the unconscious fantasy can be pieced together.

The popular account of Surrealism, including Breton’s own, relates it to the dream and argues that the unconscious emerges in a dreamlike manner in the techniques of collage and automatic writing. But Theodor Adorno, in an essay entitled ‘Looking back on Surrealism’,⁵ questions whether we should necessarily accept the Surrealists’ own understanding of what they are doing, since this is tantamount to explaining the strange by the familiar, by what we already understand. Adorno argues that, if Surrealism is taken to be no more than a literary and graphic illustration of Freudian or Jungian theory, it becomes just a harmless reduplication of what the theory tells us – hardly the kind of scandal that is the very life-blood of Surrealism; if we view Surrealism simply in terms of Freudian theory, we miss the peculiar power of this movement. According to Adorno, no one dreams in the Surrealist mode: to equate Surrealism with dreaming is at best a crude analogy. The images in Surrealist art split into parts, and then these parts are treated with odd respect, as if they were autonomous forms, wholes in their own right. In Surrealist art, objects are most carefully chosen and placed, in just this space, next to another object just this size. To understand what is going on one has to look at this art’s strategies, its use of collage and montage, which enables images – whether in poetry or in painting – to be juxtaposed in patterns of discontinuity. It is this which gives Surrealism its shock value, provoking that sense of ‘where have I seen this before?’, the heimlich (homely and familiar) combined with the unheimlich (hidden and secret). Adorno maintains that the affinity of Surrealism and psychoanalysis depends not on their common interest in the symbols utilized by a truth-speaking unconscious, but rather on the way in which they both focus on the images of our childhood, a past crystallized within us. The giant egg, for instance, from which a monster threatens to emerge at any moment, is big because we were so very small when we first gazed at an egg in extreme trepidation. The uncanny effect is brought about because we are confronted with a subjectivity now alien to us, having had to move on. What produces shock, in his view, is that twilight state between a schizophrenic sense of the world split into parts, either chopped up or threatening to merge, and the apparent autonomy and self-sufficiency that these parts assume. The apparent freedom from normal representation becomes threatening, leading to a kind of death, either because objects become rigid and unchanging, or because they melt, flow and dissolve. These images, Adorno argues, are fetishes, objects once invested with emotion but now estranged, left over from the past, dead substitutes for what is no longer.

It is useful, then, to discuss the uncanny effects in the visual arts from the psychoanalytic point of view. Rene Magritte’s pictures of severed breasts, legs in silk stockings, shoes with human toes, the nose, eyes and lips floating in space, are reminders of what Freud calls ‘Objekte der Partialtriebe’, later developed by Melanie Klein in her theory of the part-object. These objects of the partial drives (for example, an oral or an anal drive) are sexual drives functioning independently of any overall organization; they can be observed in the fragmented sexual activities of children and also in the sexual life of adults. We are reminded of how libido, the energy of the sexual drives, first started off by attaching itself to whatever the senses perceived as significant at the time, but which now belongs to a history of repression. This is why this kind of object is unheimlich: we are seeing our old childhood wishes that we have long since had to repress. The distortions of the object bear witness to the taboos and interdictions we had to observe, and to what these taboos have done to our past desires. But what this ignores, as discussed below, is that the uncanny can also be viewed as subversive rather than merely regressive.

One of Magritte’s paintings will serve as an example of the characteristic co-presence of heimlich and unheimlich elements in Surrealist art. At first sight his The Art of Living appears to be like a child’s picture of the sun, oddly placed, because the sun is in front of a mountain, hence more important than the mountain behind it. The sun as king-image is suddenly turned into a man or father-image by means of a small face in the middle of its large sphere, with the body underneath dressed in a suit. But the sun also looks like a head that has been severed, as if it were the fearful realization of a repressed wish. At the very moment when this wish is gaining expression, it emerges as a threat, in the fixed stare of the face. The picture thus combines the abnormality of the unheimlich with the normality of the heimlich – the dress suit and tie on the body against a brick wall at the front of the picture, towered over by the huge and lurid sun. The very title, The Art of Living suggests having to come to terms with the repression demanded by the father; the sun is so very big because the father (or the Law) once seemed, and in the unconscious still seems, so very powerful. Surrealism furnishes us, according to Adorno, with an ‘album of idiosyncrasies’, objects which say ‘no’ to desire; and, if the object strikes us as obsolete, it is because we do not wish to be reminded of the failures of desire of which it speaks.

This perceptual world which strikes us as obsolete, which we once hallucinated and thought we controll...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Psychoanalysis and Literature: Freud
• Part II Psychoanalysis and Language: Lacan
• Part III Patients and Analysts: Readers and Texts
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Page