A Note on Lacan's Syntax

In his essay, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious" (excerpted in my Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition), Lacan explores the ways in which the signifier takes its meaning solely as it relates to other signifiers. It does not make reference to the real (like Saussure, Lacan brackets the referent), nor does it identify directly with the signified (which Lacan considers off limits to the language center of the individual). As to how the signifier takes on meaning in utterance, Lacan says:

“...the signifier, by its very nature, always anticipates meaning by unfolding its dimension before it.[...] 'I shall never...', 'All the same it is...', 'And yet there may be...'. Such sentences are not without meaning, a meaning all the more oppressive in that it is content to make us wait for it.[...] From which we can say that it is in the chain of the signifier that the meaning 'insists' but that none of its elements 'consists' in the signification of which it is at the moment capable.” (1175)

Lacan's concept of the way that meaning unfolds has implications for our understanding of syntactical power. It suggests the power that we locate in Jamesian style. James's sentences often seem endlessly to postpone the completion of meaning that we long for. Indeed, often the entire structure of his stories is based on a continual unfolding and revealing. (This is the signifying chain on the level of narrative structure). The mysterious, oppressive atmosphere of so many of his stories might be traced to this quality of the signifier. The same quality of linguistic uncertainty is employed by Poe and other writers of mystery and detective fiction: they 'work' only insofar as they postpone final meaning at least until the end of the story. (James often seems to refuse it even then.)

The same set of tools which are employed by James and Poe in the interest of suspense, mystery, or negative tension are used by Steve Martin in the interest of comedy. In his memoir, Born Standing Up, Martin discusses his theory of comedy. To paraphrase, he recalls a realization that most comedy worked on the principle of a punchline, so that even those routines without an explicit punchline followed a pattern of build up and release. What concerned Martin was the fact that this often led to automatic laughter, a laughter which resulted from the release of tension. This seemed too contrived to be real, and in the interest of subverting the tendency, he developed his comedy routines so that they forever gave the impression of being on the cusp of a punchline. In this way, his routine was forever building toward a moment of release which never materialized. Audiences were not 'handed' there moments of release prepackaged in punchlines, and so were forced to carve out their own moments. The laughter that resulted, while at first more piecemeal and fraught with tension, seemed for Martin to be truer. People were not just laughing because that's what they were supposed to do. Indeed, they were laughing because they had to, because there was no other option for them to release the continually built-up tension of the comedic moment.

Freud, Bakhin, and the Human Dream

The following represents a one-page tutorial I prepared for the graduate-level section of my Contemporary Literary Theory Course. I have reproduced it here as means of keeping the blog in continued conversation with itself. The issues addressed represent continuations of previous discussions, and also suggest topics which may find future voice in the blog.

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The Structuralist theory of Frye and Levi-Strauss suggests that novelistic form is a cultural displacement of mythic forms which modernity compels us to censor and repress (98-99, 126). However, as McKeon proposes, the novel might also be fruitfully seen, through the lens of Freud’s dream-work schema, not as the displaced object itself (that found in the dream-content), but as a type of long-form dream interpretation. To look at the novel in this way suggests that whatever displacement has happened (either for Freud’s individual dreamer or for the society as a whole) has done so before maturity (i.e., modernity, adulthood) arrives on the scene. We might take myth to represent a sort of dream-stage of humanity, in which the individual elements of our collective human dream-wish have been condensed and displaced--and significantly overdetermined--in the archetypes of the myth-mind. Modernity, then, can be conceived as mankind’s collective awakening and subsequent (ongoing) attempt at a “talking cure”: the various artistic and social forms (including the novel) represent our various attempts at a macro-level dream interpretation.

For the child Freud describes in “Family Romances,” fantasies allow the appropriate and necessary “freeing of [the] individual” which must occur as he grows up (156). These fantasies take some seemingly distorted forms, but Freud points to the fact that they “still preserve, under a slight disguise, the child’s original affection for his parents” (158). By conceiving of himself as a changeling, the actual son of an Emperor and Empress, for example, the child projects into fantasy the ideal qualities he once placed within the parents themselves, but which have since become disillusioned in the child’s more mature and intelligent critique of his parents. A child who emerges successfully (into ‘normality’ as Freud conceives it) is one who can eventually reposition himself as an individual in relationship to the individuals represented by his parents (cf. Hegel).

So also, as Bakhtin points out, does the novel represent a human tendency to dislodge tradition, to “destroy this boundary” between the “valorized” (328) temporal space of myth and the “openendedness” of “still-evolving contemporary reality” (323). For his conviction that “[t]he epic past...lacks any relativity, that is, any gradual, purely temporal progressions that might connect it with the present,” we might find an analogy both in the mindset of Freud’s child as well as in the content of the dream as received by the dreamer upon waking (323).

The parents of the small child in Freud’s “Family Romance” represent “the only authority and the source of all belief,” and are thus initially valorized and idealized in his mind. It is by a process of relativization – one that, similar to the relativizing force presented by Bakhtin, occurs through a process of increased intelligence and external comparison – that the child comes to be disillusioned of the valorized parents and thereby achieves his individuality.

Freud’s dream-content likewise lacks temporal continuity. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud explores the difficulty presented by attempts to narrate dream-content as a series of causes and effects, of beginnings and endings – in short, in terms of the same logical relationships modernity associates with ‘development’ – concluding that “dreams have no means at their disposal for representing these logical relations,” but rather “reproduce logical connection by simultaneity in time” (NATC, 2nd Edition, p. 821-22). That Freud leaves the task of (re)establishing these connections to the “interpretive process” is significant to Bakhtin’s understanding of “novelization,” which concerns itself directly with abolishing the “distance” associated with an atemporal worldview in the interest of understanding “contemporary reality” (328).

Further Questions:

1. How does the destruction of distance explored by Bakhtin in the first section of our reading (“Epic and Novel…”) inform or play-out in his discussion of Novelistic Discourse?
2. Bakhtin gives us a model of the novel “on the border between the completed, dominant literary language and the extraliterary languages that know heteroglossia” (337). How might this model inform our reading of James and Jamesian style?