Unmaking Love

The Contemporary Novel and the Impossibility of Union

Ashley Shelden

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231543156
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: LGBT Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The contemporary novel does more than revise our conception of love—it explodes it, queers it, and makes it unrecognizable. Rather than providing union, connection, and completion, love in contemporary fiction destroys the possibility of unity, harbors negativity, and foregrounds difference.

Comparing contemporary and modernist depictions of love to delineate critical continuities and innovations, Unmaking Love locates queerness in the novelistic strategies of Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Hanif Kureshi, Alan Hollinghurst, and Hari Kunzru. In their work, "queer love" becomes more than shorthand for sexual identity. It comes to embody thwarted expectations, disarticulated organization, and unnerving multiplicity. In queer love, social forms are deformed, affective bonds do not bind, and social structures threaten to come undone. Unmaking Love draws on psychoanalysis and gender and sexuality studies to read love's role in contemporary literature and its relation to queer negativity.

1

Lesbian Fantasy

Psychoanalysis, the Legacy of Modernist Love, and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood

In 2014, The New Yorker published a profile of Edith Windsor, plaintiff in Windsor v. United States, the Supreme Court case that made significant inroads into the legalization of gay marriage in the United States. This profile of Windsor, “The Perfect Wife,” draws out the most salient feature of the lesbian: she does not threaten the social order because she is associated with the fantasy of romantic love.¹ Ariel Levy, the profile’s author, writes, “From the Bible onward, two men having intercourse has been viewed as more disturbing to the social order than two women doing whatever it is that lesbians do. For people to embrace same-sex marriage, they needed to focus on the universal desire for romantic love and committed intimacy.”² In this chapter I focus on the way the figure of the lesbian exemplifies fantasmatic love, creating coherence and unity. As fantasy, the love of the lesbian poses no threat to society, to love itself, or, as evident, to marriage. “Lesbian fantasy” means that the lesbian loves fantasmatically, conservatively, and nonthreateningly.

The association of love and the lesbian is common in psychoanalysis. In particular, the lesbian is linked not just to fantasy but also crucially to transference. Insofar as the love of the lesbian is fantasmatic, by looking into lesbian love, we also look into the structure of fantasy that aims to produce wholeness, closure, and unity by eliminating negativity. And, most important, the representation of the lesbian as the exemplar of amorous fantasy helps to conceptualize the contemporary, queered love that is the subject of this book. In the first part of this chapter I parse the psychoanalytic theory of transference love (that is, love as such) in its relation to the figure of the lesbian. Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalytic theorists read the lesbian as an intractably conservative figure, sustaining the notion that love thrives on homogeny, coherence, and unity. In other words, lesbian love functions as the coherence-producing screen of fantasy that attempts to elide and erase negativity. Psychoanalysis repeatedly associates the lesbian with love and, I argue, establishes a transferential relationship with her in order to sustain its own sense of “self.” The seemingly inevitable linkage of the lesbian with transference becomes even more important to consider when one takes into account the intimate link between psychoanalysis and transference. To the extent that the lesbian is bound up with transference, the lesbian is also fundamentally bound up with psychoanalysis. At times, psychoanalytic theorists welcome an identification with the lesbian, at others resist it. In both cases the lesbian figures centrally in understanding the function of love in psychoanalysis.

In the second part of this chapter I inquire into the consequences of my observations on lesbian love in Djuna Barnes’s canonical (for both queer studies and modernism) novel Nightwood.³ Barnes takes up the psychoanalytic link between the lesbian and transference to reformulate it, providing a more complex understanding of the structure of transference. In her depictions of lesbian relationships, Barnes exposes two seemingly conflicting structures at the heart of transferential love: metaphor and repetition. Barnes’s depiction of the lesbian does not extricate her from the psychoanalytic understanding of the lesbian as loving, imbuing her, for instance, with the more “radical” element of desire. Rather, Barnes rewrites love, revealing queer forces of disfigurement, heterogeneity, and negativity at the heart of what seems to be the capacity for love and fantasy to redeem and unite. Barnes’s disarticulation of lesbian fantasy becomes an important innovation that sets the stage for the contemporary rewriting of love.

Finally, I turn from psychoanalysis and Barnes’s modernist account of love to contemporary rewritings of lesbian fantasy. I read elements from Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal (2008) in order to examine both the continuity and difference between Barnes’s modernist love and these contemporary accounts of lesbian relationships.⁴ In both of these texts I suggest that the concept of fantasy (inherited both from psychoanalysis and from Barnes) remains central to Smith’s and Catton’s understandings of lesbian love. What makes these contemporary rewritings of love distinctly different, however, is the way in which amorous fantasy can no longer be understood as that which can conceal or erase negativity. Indeed, these contemporary accounts of lesbian fantasy include forms of negativity as central to love.

Observations on Lesbian Love

On the subject of lesbian sexuality, psychoanalysis is not unlike a broken record, repeating over and over again the same equation: female homosexuality = love. Lacan asserts that certain women love “their partner, who is nevertheless homo to the hilt . . . as the same in the Other.”⁵ And Bruce Fink clarifies the force of this claim by reminding us that Lacan “qualifies lesbianism not as a perversion but as ‘heterosexuality’: love for the Other sex—that is, women.”⁶ Continuing this reiterative pattern, Jacques-Alain Miller almost identically reasserts, “For women it [homosexuality] is constituted in the domain of love, while for men in the domain of desire.”⁷ Psychoanalysis in this regard gives new meaning to the phrase “lesbian fantasy,” insofar as the lesbian is intimately tied up with the fantasy screen that unifies and redeems the romantic couple. The moment in the psychoanalytic corpus that speaks most explicitly to this link between lesbian love and fantasy occurs in “The Signification of the Phallus” where Lacan asserts that “male homosexuality . . . is constituted along the axis of desire, while female homosexuality, as observation shows, is oriented by a disappointment that strengthens the axis of the demand for love.”⁸

This passage is interesting not simply because it reiterates the motive to choose Edith Windsor as the ideal plaintiff to challenge gay marriage laws in the United States; it also clarifies that lesbian love raises the question of clarity. In Gender Trouble Judith Butler reads this passage with an emphasis on Lacan’s phrase “as observation shows” to suggest that there is nothing particularly obvious about the genealogy of lesbian subject formation that Lacan seems able to observe without much difficulty.⁹ The passage from “The Signification of the Phallus” does not simply index, as Butler’s analysis suggests, the analyst’s pretense to epistemological mastery when faced with homosexuality in women. Rather, that Lacan can “observe” the relationship between female homosexuality and love points to the way that love for psychoanalysis always aims to produce the illusions of transparency, fantasmatic coherence, and unity; it aims to produce, in other words, something that can be unproblematically observed. While it may be the case, as Elizabeth Grosz argues in “The Labors of Love,” that “lesbianism has been left largely unexplained by psychoanalytic theory,” it is nonetheless not quite true that “the topic of lesbianism” stands out as “a point of constitutive incoherence and confusion.”¹⁰ Indeed, psychoanalytic theorists quite successfully imagine lesbians so that the image concretizes into immutability. The representation of the lesbian seems to cohere almost too completely, not only forcefully associating the lesbian with love, but also establishing this association on the basis of repetition without difference.¹¹ Since female homosexuality is constituted as love insofar as it finds the same in the other, it seems telling that psychoanalysis cannot move beyond saying the same thing about homosexuality in women over and over again.

Thus, if homosexuality in women is dangerous, as many critics claim, it is not because it is antipatriarchal, resistant, noncompliant, or subversive. Rather, lesbian love comforts and consoles; it offers a sort of closure. And psychoanalysis is most vulnerable to the threat posed by lesbian love insofar as the lesbian has a distinctive relationship to not just love but also psychoanalysis itself. This connection becomes particularly clear when one considers the fact that love in psychoanalysis goes by another name: transference.^{1 2} Lacan suggests that without transference there would be no psychoanalysis, which Collette Soller glosses as the recognition that “psychoanalytic practice and transference are identical.”¹³ Beyond simply clarifying the constitutive function of transference for psychoanalysis, this idea has an even more fascinating implication: that psychoanalytic practice and love are identical. After all, Lacan does tell us: “Transference—is love.”¹⁴ Lacan would not be alone in taking this position. In Tales of Love Julia Kristeva also suggests that “transference love is . . . the royal road to the state of love.”¹⁵

Even as psychoanalysis may be identified with love, it remains somewhat ambivalent about this identification. After all, the point of the transference is ideally to move beyond it; by withholding the love the analysand demands, the analyst teaches her, as Freud argues in “Observations on Transference-Love,” “to overcome the pleasure principle, to give up a satisfaction which lies to hand but is not socially acceptable, in favor of a more distant one.”¹⁶ To “give up” the “satisfaction” of the transference is also, as Freud suggests here, to “overcome,” or to move beyond, the pleasure principle. By rejecting the pleasure of a consistent, reciprocal transference, the analysand eschews love for the sake of her desire. For psychoanalysis, the promise of love is that it ends, and its threat is that it might not. For this reason, Laplanche and Pontalis specify in The Language of Psychoanalysis that the transferences “do not constitute aides to cure except in so far as they are explicated and ‘destroyed’ one by one.”¹⁷ The analyst approaches these transferences “one by one” in order to demystify the “the One of universal fusion,” dissolving the dream of completion.¹⁸

In some instances, then, lesbians make good on the promise of transference love, particularly when the female homosexual is also hysterical, as Jacques-Alain Miller describes in “On Perversion”: “You have to consider female homosexuality in hysteria, which can disappear like magic when a woman enters analysis. As long as she can love the analyst as inaccessible, the longing for love which is realized in female homosexuality may immediately shift into the transference and you may witness a magical cure. Others take a very long time.”¹⁹ In the space of two sentences, the lesbian stands in for the whole of the analytic process; the hysterical female homosexual becomes the ideal analysand. She partakes of the transference, overcomes it, and moves beyond the pleasure principle toward the “magical cure.” Miller thus idealizes the ability to divest the female homosexual of her idealizations. Or, in other words, alleviating the lesbian’s love instantiates Miller’s own. It is not simply fortuitous that Miller produces this figure of the hysterical female homosexual who confirms the success of transference in analysis in the same passage that mentions “others” who “take a very long time,” others who may never be cured. These female homosexuals, one presumes, cannot so easily give up on the transference; they remain enfolded in the satisfaction of the pleasure principle; they will not give up their love. The co-presence of analytic success and analytic failure in this passage indicates that these figures are far from separate. Both figures inspire love, as Miller’s idealization of the lesbian who can give up her idealizations suggests.

Miller’s account of lesbians-in-love makes clear the fact that, for better or worse, the lesbian—through her love—is constitutively linked to psychoanalytic theory. That there are Miller’s “others” who “take a very long time” suggests that what psychoanalysis sees in the love of the female homosexual is the potential retardation of the analytic process, its being forever moored in fantasy, in the median stage of a benign, essentially conservative transference love. By doing so, psychoanalysis maintains a certain stubborn attachment to the lesbian not as the same but as other. In the very act of asserting the otherness of these women, psychoanalysis itself seems to fall in love. But how could psychoanalysis fall in love with the lesbian-as-other?

The simple answer to this question is that it cannot. Lacan clarifies that “everyone senses and sensed that the problem is how there can be love for an other.”²⁰ Indeed, for Lacan, there can be no love for an other, only love for the same. But if, by othering the figure of the lesbian, psychoanalysis can disidentify with her love, then it is free to become enamored of the image of itself as not-in-love. Illustrating this interplay of identification and amorous attachment, Lacan tells a story of a “parakeet that was in love with Picasso”: “How could one tell? From the way that the parakeet nibbled on the collar of his shirt and the flaps of his jacket. Indeed, the parakeet was in love with what is essential to man, namely, his attire. . . . The parakeet identified with Picasso.”²¹ The story of Picasso’s parakeet perfectly depicts the situation of the female homosexual as psychoanalysis sees it, emphasizing especially the absurdity of identifying with something radically different from oneself. Love requires a fantasy so persuasive that a parakeet could see the image of itself in a man, so deceptive that two “others” could see themselves as same. Not being able to recognize itself in another’s image, the lover can love only him or herself.

When faced with the otherness of the lesbian, psychoanalytic anxiety rises to a fever pitch, turning run-of-the-mill resistance into a fully-fledged aggressive negation. Psychoanalysis must distance itself from the lesbian, asserting its position as not-in-love, in order to maintain a coherent image of itself. Even as it attempts to assert distance from the paralyzing force of love, psychoanalysis is seduced by the very state—being completely immersed in passionate attachment—in which it cannot, at any cost, bear to find itself for too long. The distance established between the lesbian and psychoanalysis shores up the boundaries of the latter in its difference from the former or cultivates a sort of narcissistic self-love. Psychoanalysis, in other words, is in love with itself as the demystification of the sort of love in which the lesbian finds herself enthralled. Such psychoanalytic narcissism represses the fundamental relationship between psychoanalysis and the lesbian, represses the implication that lesbian love and psychoanalysis might well be identical. How can psychoanalysis escape from its paralyzed relation to homosexuality in women? Must psychoanalysis always relate to the lesbian narcissistically?

One sort of response to the paralysis of lesbian love from some feminist and queer scholars is to offer a critique of the psychoanalytic understanding of female homosexuality at the level of desire. According to psychoanalysis, to the extent that lesbian sexuality is situated in the domain of love, it is not properly sexuality; it does not partake of desire. Many critics have pointed to this phenomenon either to change or to reject psychoanalysis. Elizabeth Grosz, for instance, points out that in psychoanalytic theory “the lesbian relation must be regarded in desexualized terms, as a regression to the mother-infant relation or a relation of narcissistic mirroring.”²² This failure to grant sexuality where...