Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism

Maud Ellmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317896777
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection of essays provides students of literary critical theory with an introduction to Freudian methods of interpretation, and shows how those methods have been transformed by recent developments in French psychoanalysis, particularly by the influence of Jacques Lacan. It explains how classical Freudian criticism tended to focus on the thematic content of the literary text, whereas Lacanian criticism focuses on its linguistic structure, redirecting the reader to the words themselves. Concepts and methods are defined by tracing the role played by the drama of Oedipus in the development of psychoanalytic theory and criticism. The essays cover a wide generic scope and are divided into three parts: drama, narrative and poetry. Each is accompanied by explanatory headnotes giving clear definitions of complex terms.

Part One

Drama

1 Prologue: The Psycho-Analytic Reading of Tragedy*

ANDRÉ GREEN

In The Tragic Effect, André Green offers psychoanalytic readings of several European tragedies in which the Oedipus complex assumes its ‘negative’ form of male hostility against the female: Aeschylus’s Oresteia, in which the son murders the mother; Shakespeare’s Othello, in which the husband kills the wife; and Racine’s Iphigénie à Aulis, in which the father slays the daughter. While using psychoanalysis to interpret drama, Green also uses drama to interpret psychoanalysis, and insists that each is implicated in the other. He argues that Freudian theory owes more to drama than to any other form of art because of the affinity between the theatre and the dream. The theatre, by imposing darkness and silence on the audience, simulates the state of sleep, in which the disregarded wishes of the day burst forth in the hallucinations of the dreaming mind.

Hegel argues that tragedy depends upon the contradiction between the ‘power that knows and reveals itself to consciousness, and the power that conceals itself and lies in ambush’; and Green agrees that this tension between ‘knowing and not-knowing’ constitutes the crux of tragic form.† ‘The art of the theatre is the art of the malentendu, the misheard and the misunderstood’, Green writes (below, p. 41). The theatre places the spectator in the position of the infant who, excluded from any knowledge of its origins, must seek this knowledge by interpreting its parents’ dialogue; just as the audience, excluded from the drama, must fathom its enigma by interpreting the actors’ speech. According to Green, the boundary of the stage performs the same function as the boundary established by repression in the psyche, because the images that pass before the audience correspond to those which surface in our dreams: the fleeting figures of a knowledge both debarred and inescapable.

Play is in fact neither a matter of inner psychic reality nor a matter of external reality … The place where cultural experience is located is in the potential space between the individual and the environment (originally the object).

…

I am assuming that cultural experiences are in direct continuity with play, the play of those who have not yet heard of games.

D.W. Winnicott, 1971, 96 and 100

I. A text in representation: ways from ignorance to knowledge¹

There is a mysterious bond between psycho-analysis and the theatre. When Freud cites King Oedipus, Hamlet and The Brothers Karamazov as the most awe-inspiring works of literature, he notes that all three are about parricide; less importance has been attached to the fact that two of the three are plays. One naturally wonders whether, for all the interest he showed in the other arts, the theatre did not have a special significance for Freud – a significance that outweighed his interest in the plastic arts (despite Michelangelo’s ‘Moses’ or Leonardo’s ‘St Anne’), in poetry (despite Goethe, Schiller or Heine), in the tale (despite Hoffman), in the novel (despite Dostoievsky and Jensen). Sophocles and Shakespeare are in a class of their own, especially Shakespeare; Freud recognized in him a master whose texts he analyses as if they were the discoveries of some illustrious precursor. But he seems to have had a special affection for the theatre in general.

Scene and other scene²

Why is this? Is it not that the theatre is the best embodiment of that ‘other scene’, the unconscious? It is that other scene; it is also a stage whose ‘edge’ materially presents the break, the line of separation, the frontier at which conjunction and disjunction can carry out their tasks between auditorium and stage in the service of representation –in the same way as the cessation of motility is a precondition for the deployment of the dream. The texture of dramatic representation is not the same as that of the dream, but it is very tempting to compare it with phantasy. Phantasy owes a great deal to the reworking by the secondary process of elements that belong rather to the primary processes, these primary processes being then subjected to an elaboration comparable to that of ceremonial, in the ordering of dramatic actions and movements, in the coherence of theatrical plot.³ But there are many differences between the structure of phantasy and the structure of the theatre. Phantasy is closer to a form of theatre in which a narrator describes an action occurring in a certain place, but in which, though he is not unconcerned, he does not himself take part. Phantasy is much more reminiscent of the tale, or even the novel. Its links with the ‘family romance’⁴ reinforce this comparison. In the dream, on the other hand, we find the same equality, de jure, if not de facto, that reigns between the various protagonists sharing the space of the stage. So much so that, in the dream, when the dreamer’s representation becomes overloaded, the dreamer splits it into two and sets up another character to represent, separately, one or more of his characteristics or affects. Broadly speaking, it would be more correct to say that the theatre may be situated between dream and phantasy.

Perhaps we should turn to the simplest, most obvious fact. Does not the theatre owe its peculiar power to the fact that it is an exchange of language, a succession of bare statements without benefit of commentary? Between the exchanges, between the monologues, nothing is vouchsafed about the character’s state of mind (unless he says it himself); nothing is added to these statements that refers to the physical setting, the historical situation, the social context, or the inner thoughts of the characters. There is nothing but the unglossed text of the statements.

In much the same way, the child is the witness of the daily domestic drama. For the infans that he remains long after his acquisition of language, there is nothing but the gestures, actions and statements of his parents. If there is anything else, it is up to him to find it and interpret it. The father and mother say this or that, and act in this or that way. What they really think, what the truth really is, he must discover on his own. Every theatrical work, like every work of art, is an enigma, but an enigma expressed in speech: articulated, spoken and heard, without any alien medium filling in its gaps. That is why the art of the theatre is the art of the malentendu, the misheard and the misunderstood.

The space of the stage: the spectator in the spectacle

But this structure creates a space, is conceivable only in a space, that of the stage. The theatre defines its own space, and acting in the theatre is possible only in so far as one may occupy positions in that space. The spectacle presents not so much a single, overall view to be understood, more a series of positions that it invites the spectator to take up in order that he may fully participate in what is offered him on the stage. We have to consider, as Jacques Derrida does, the question of the ‘enclosure’ of representation. Just as the dream depends on the enclosure of the dreamer, the enclosure of sleep – beyond which there is no dream, but either waking or somnambulism – the limits of the theatre are those of the stage.

The theatrical space is bounded by the enclosure formed as a result of the double reversal created by the exchanges that unfold between the spectator and the spectacle, on either side of the edge of the stage. We may try to eliminate this edge; it is only reconstituted elsewhere. This is the invisible frontier where the spectator’s gaze meets a barrier that stops it and sends it back – the first reversal – to the onlooker, that is, to himself as source of the gaze. But, since the spectacle is not meant to enclose its participants in a solipsistic solitude, nor to restrict its own effects by keeping its elements separate from each other, we must account for this in a different way. This return to the source has established a relation between source and object: the spectacle encountered by the gaze as it passes beyond the stage barrier. Nonetheless, the edge of the stage preserves its function of separating source and object. The spectator will naturally compare this with his experience of a similar encounter, where the same relation of conjunction and disjunction is set up, linking the object of the spectacle with the objects of the gaze that a different barrier, namely repression, places beyond his reach. It is as if those objects ought not to have been in full view, yet, by some incomprehensible paradox, will not allow the perceiver ever to escape them. They force him to be for ever subjected to their return, experienced in a form at once inescapable, unpredictable and fleeting. The permanence of the object seen in the spectacle is like the lure that tempts us to think that the solicitation might this time lead to the capture always denied hitherto. By arousing a hope that the secret behind the moment of disappearance of the repressed objects will be revealed, it allows the spectacle to unfold so as the better to surprise that secret.

This reversal on to oneself is always accompanied by a second reversal – the reversal into its opposite – whose meaning is more difficult to grasp. The first reversal enables us to measure, as it were, the fundamental otherness of the spectacle for the spectator. If the spectator allowed this otherness, he would either leave or go to sleep, and that would be the end of a spectacle that had never begun. But this otherness solicits him. Though unable to reject this otherness as totally alien, the gaze detaches itself to some extent from its object, otherwise the total participation of the spectator with the forces of the spectacle would merge them beneath the eye of a God bringing about from on high the coalescence of auditorium and stage. The gaze explores the stage from the point at which the spectator is himself observed by his object. The boundary between auditorium and stage is duplicated by the boundary between the stage as visible space and the invisible space off-stage. Together, these two spaces are opposed in turn to the space of the world, whose steady pressure maintains the space of the theatre between its walls.

The contradiction felt by the spectator is such that whereas the project of going to the spectacle initially created a break between the theatre and the world, the fact of being at the spectacle replaces the confrontation between the space of the theatre and that of the world (which has become invisible and so excluded from the spectator’s consciousness) by the confrontation between the visible theatrical space and the invisible theatrical space. The world is the limit of the theatre and, to some extent, its raison d’être. But the relation of otherness between the subject and the world is replaced by the otherness of the spectator in respect of the objects of the gaze – an otherness no longer based simply on a boundary (the walls of the theatre, or the barrier formed by the edge of the stage), but on another space, one hidden from the gaze. As a result, there occurs a projection of the relationship between theatrical space and the space of the world on to the theatrical space, itself split into a visible theatrical space (the space of the stage) and an invisible theatrical space (the space off-stage). This latter space calls for exploration, for it is not only the space by which illusion is created; it is also that in which the false is fabricated. The space of the stage is the space of the plot, the enigma, the secret; the space off-stage is that of manipulation, suspicion, plotting. However, this space is circumscribable, since it is confined within the walls of the great chamber that is the theatre. (Its unlimited character in the cinema – here the chamber is the camera, but the entire world may be swallowed up in it – makes it impossible to explore these means as a lure for the cinema-spectator.) Thus the limit formed by the edge of the stage is extended to the limits of the space of the stage, this space offering itself as one to be transgressed, passed beyond, through its link with the invisible space off-stage.

This transgression is invited, therefore, by that which constitutes its second limit, a radically uncrossable limit, which denies the gaze of the spectator access to the invisible space off-stage. Since we have to renounce this second transgression as impossible, all that remains possible is the broadest incorporation of the stage space connoted by the term ‘illusory’, according to which what is incorporated is the oppos...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• General Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One: Drama
• Part Two: Narrative
• Part Three: Poetry
• Notes on Authors
• Further Reading
• Index