Speaking Desires can be Dangerous

For Edmond

Speaking Desires can be Dangerous

The Poetics of the Unconscious

Elizabeth Wright

Polity Press

Copyright Elizabeth Wright 1999

The right of Elizabeth Wright to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1999 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd

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Contents

Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1

Part I Psychoanalysis and Literature: Freud 11

1 What is a psychoanalytic reading? 13 2 The uncanny and its poetics 18 3 The vagaries of fantasy: Alfred Kubins

The Other Side 31 4 Maladies of the soul: the poetics of Julia Kristeva 41

Part II Psychoanalysis and Language: Lacan 59

5 What is a discourse? 61 6 The indirections of desire: Hamlet 77 7 Inscribing the body politic: Robert Coovers

Spanking the Maid 86 8 What does Woman want?: The Double Life of

Vronique 104

vi Contents

Part III Patients and Analysts: Readers and Texts 115

9 What is a clinical case? 117 10 The rhetoric of clinical discourse: Dialogue with

Sammy 132 11 The rhetoric of clinical management: Bion and

Minuchin 140 12 Out of tune: Elfriede Jelineks The Piano Teacher 154

Conclusion 165

Notes 169 Bibliography 186 Index 193

Acknowledgements

My grateful thanks go to the following who have contributed in many ways to my clinical understanding of psychoanalysis: Bernard Barnett, Michael Kennedy, Ian Simpson, Luis Roderiguez de la Sierra, Darian Leader, Vivien Bar and Katrin Stroh. I owe a considerable debt to Wayne Barron for generous time spent in detailed discussion and explication of Lacan. I would also like to thank Kenneth Reinhard, Juliet MacCannell, Danielle Bergeron, Renata Salecil, Slavoj iek, Russell Grigg, and my colleagues at Girton for their friendship and support. My greatest debt goes to Edmond Wright, who has participated closely in every stage of the book, from engaging with its structure and argument from a consistent philosophical position to every kind of essential practical help and assistance.

My thanks also go to the following: the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research for clinical and theoretical knowledge; the staff of Cambridge University Library and Girton College Library for their friendly help in my researches; and the Cambridge University Travel Fund and Girton College for generous financial assistance towards my research expenses.

John Thompson of Polity Press has encouraged the book at all stages from its conception to its final production. The team at Polity Press has given me every possible help, and I should particularly like to thank Julia Harsant for her unfailing friendliness and efficiency, the desk editor, Sue Leigh and the copy editor, Ruth Thackeray, for their generous care and attention.

viii Acknowledgements

The publishers wish to thank Gillon Aitken Associates for permission to reprint material from Spanking the Maid by Robert Coover 1982 Robert Coover. They would also like to thank The Grove Press Inc. for permission to reprint material from Spanking the Maid by Robert Coover.

Introduction

One of Sigmund Freuds abiding concerns when analysing literature and the arts was the question of who had priority in the discovery of the unconscious, the poet or the psychoanalyst, that is, Freud himself. To touch on a long-standing controversy between literature and psychoanalysis: who understands the unconscious best, the poet or the clinician? Or, to put it another way, do the aesthetic and the clinical have to speak in entirely different languages or does the poetic enter both?

Just as with the advent of modern literary theory it was found that there are more things in literary texts than are dreamt of in Freudian philosophy,1 so there are also many things in literary texts that the critic had not been conscious of before the advent of psychoanalysis. What is more, when some of Freuds writings were themselves read literally, taken at their word, scanned for their slippages and gaps,2 it became apparent that psychoanalytic texts were no more immune from a literary reading than any other text. The assumption of the authority of psychoanalysis over literature was first properly challenged in an influential volume inaugurating a dialectical exchange between psychoanalysis and literature, where psychoanalysis points to the unconscious of literature and literature to the unconscious of psychoanalysis.3 If the unconscious has a poetics that invades texts of whatever kind, there can be no secure position inside or outside a text that sustains a reliable meaning.

2 Introduction

Some thirty years ago an innovative critic, Wayne C. Booth, did much to enliven and reform a literary criticism that was somewhat moribund even though it had called itself New.4

In his The Rhetoric of Fiction 5 he set out to demonstrate that there was more to rhetoric than rules and regulations and more to literature than canon-formation. Focusing on the conscious and unconscious communicative strategies available to the author what h e (in those days) does to persuade the reader to accept his proffered fictional world Booth favours the textual illusion of a writer who reliably transmits his norms and values through the creation of an implied author: although the real author, like a mother, may come and go, he projects a reliable double into the text (a father?), who, free from any quirkiness, upholds the norms and values the author would like to believe in. If this now sounds a little quaint, it still has considerable practical use in making a first acquaintance with a text, since it has an eye for stable ironic structures.

However, theoretically, Booths idea of a rhetoric of fiction implies that the dubious distinction between literary/poetic language and scientific/ordinary language can be upheld. But literary theory is really a theory about how all language works and is itself subject to the laws of language: to investigate literature is always, in one way or another, to investigate language. And language is inescapably figural, as the title of this book, Speaking Desires can be Dangerous, illustrates. It has the same grammatical ambiguity as Noam Chomskys notorious sentence, Flying planes can be dangerous, with which he was showing how the same sequence of words can have different deep structures. The subject of the sentence, Flying planes, can be either a gerund (verbal noun) phrase or a noun modified by a gerundive (verbal adjective). He was thereby demonstrating that surface features are no guide to structure.6 The ambiguity is nicely illustrated by the title of Ian McEwans novel Enduring Love (1997). Two meanings are similarly derivable from my title: meaning 1 (the gerund), to speak our desires is dangerous (since our words do not arrive at the desires we thought we had); meaning 2 (the gerundive), the de-sires that are speaking are dangerous (since they speak of what

Introduction 3

we do not want to know anything about). My title thus performs what it says, that desire works in the very structure of language. Hence rhetoric has a fictive element. Its effects are enigmatic and incalculable because of the very contingency of what human action has to operate upon in the world. Rhetoric represents a continuing attempt to adjust the order of language to an ever-recalcitrant matter.

Psychoanalytic literary theory has a distinctive contribution to make in this area. From the beginning Freud moved between the discourse of the scientist and that of the artist, the novelist and the poet, availing himself freely of their themes and poetic figures. Both he and his followers paid attention to literature and the arts, taking them to employ the same processes that psychoanalysis uncovered in the workings of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis has a particular theory about why language is literary all the time, a particular way of accounting for the irrepressible figurality of language as it betrays the operations of desire and fantasy: the fact that language is inescapably figural makes equally for the stuff of literature, criticism and psychoanalysis. The issue of poetics is therefore much wider than that of psychoanalysis itself and is reachable wit