Literary and Cultural Theory, 2013

This week I am having trouble getting to grips with Freud’s take on things. WHY does everything have to revert back to sex, or childhood, or parents? I found it almost funny reading about the woman who had a dream about the beetles and being shocked when she was told it was OBVIOUSLY because she is concerned about relations with her husband. I think the fact that she had seen a drowning moth just before she had been to sleep was a more plausible explanation of animal suffering in her dream. Or maybe she had recently read Kafka, and the image of the beetle had stayed with her. I think there could be hundreds of possible interpretations and Freud should have commented on these instead of referring her dream instantly to sex.

This week, my battle with “what is reality?” continues to rage in the form of my confusion with words such as “metaphor,” “concentric versus excentric,” and all manner of words dealing with self-awareness and perception.  Though some of Freud’s hypotheses were difficult to digest (though hilarious, in some respects – I never manage to read his Oedipus complex theories without giggling a little), my biggest road block this week was Lacon’s “The Instance of the Letter.”

I was happy to come into this reading with a one of the concepts that we talked about last class – the fact that the real must be produced as false in order for it to become reality.  Lacon seems to entertain the same sentiment:

“… the truth can be evoked only in that dimension of alibi in which all “realism” in creative works takes its virtue from metonymy; it is likewise linked to this other fact that we acceded to meaning only through the double twist of metaphor when we have the one and only key: the S and the s of the Saussurian algorithm are not only the same level, and man only deludes himself when he believes his true place is at their axis” (Rivkin and Ryan 457).

Does this mean that metaphor itself is a perpetual deviation from the norm?  If that’s the case, how can we even determine what is “normal” and what isn’t?  Furthermore, if what we desire is forever unattainable, can the same be true of our own personal worth – or our personal “reality?”  If that is the case, by disregarding the ‘normal’ signifieds of words, and relying instead on metonymy, what type of self-awareness can we really hope to gain, if any?  If we choose the other option and take language ‘literally,’ as Lacon suggests at the beginning of the article – are we to assume that we are always missing out the ultimate “signified” – reality itself?

Lacon says that truth is born of reality, which is born of metaphor.  “We are used to the real,” Lacon writes.  “The truth we repress.”

Maybe, then, truth lies in the abnormal.  Perhaps sometimes, to use Freud’s words – we need something uncanny to come along (in the form of something incredibly truthful) to shake up our perceptions of ‘normal’ reality… just to make us question once again what exactly is true and what is false in this world.

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This week we have been looking at Freud and coming from a psychology background what I have been taught and have come to believe is that Freud was wrong; a man obsessed with sex and who did a lot of crack. He developed many hypothesis most of which were unfalsifiable thus could never be proven right or wrong. When I read the interpretation of dreams, this only confirmed my previous ideas. There are a lot of reference to sexual desire, he talks about crack (of course in a scientific sense) and his hypothesis are very ambiguous. Especially with quotes like these:
“The ideas which are most important among the dream-thoughts will almost certainly be those which occur most often in them, since the different dream-thoughts will, as it were, radiate out from them. Nevertheless a dream can reject elements which are thus both highly stressed in themselves and reinforced from many directions, and can select for its content other elements which possess only the second of these attributes.” In other words important ideas could either be present of not be present in the dream, again how can we prove or disprove this!
But after when I read “Uncanny” there were some interesting ideas that we see in obsessive compulsive disorder. Which leads me to believe that even though Freud did not develop a coherent and reliable hypothesis he did describe many things from which many theories in psychology today have been developed. For example when he talks about repetition being uncanny he says : “Taking another class of things, it is easy to see that here, too, it is only this factor of involuntary repetition which surrounds with an uncanny atmosphere what would otherwise be innocent enough, and forces upon us the idea of something fateful and unescapable where otherwise we should have spoken of “chance” only. For instance, of course attach no importance to the event when we give up a coat and get a cloakroom ticket with the number, say, 62; or when we find that our cabin on board ship is numbered 62. But the impression is altered if two such events, each in itself indifferent, happen close together, if we come across the number 62 several times in a single day, or if we begin to notice that everything which has a number – addresses, hotel-rooms, compartments in railway-trains – always has the same one, or one which at least contains the same figures.”

This idea that what makes something noticeable (uncanny) is due to the attention we give it. I would of course remember the time when I thought of a friend and two second later I get a text message but I would not remember all the time I though of a friend and did not get a text message tight away or when I did get a msg but was not thinking of the friend. So in conclusion I think there are still many things we can derive from Freud his work is not as reliable but there must be a reason why we are so intrigued by his work,

As a new reader of Lacan’s work, I frequently felt lost trying to understand what he was saying. The vocabulary certainly has been a challenge, which is mostly due to my unfamiliarity with psychology. In all honesty, I’m not sure that I understand all the finer points of his argument enough to critique them, but what follows is my best attempt.

According to Lacan human beings experience a mirror stage in their lifetime while they are a child. From my understanding the mirror stage is identification. Indeed, when we look at ourselves in the mirror for the first time our minds begin to think about what our whole being looks like. A baby sees that they are a physical person, apart from their mother and from this stage is the formation of the “I” where the child realizes who he/she is. It seems that Lacan values these early years of development, considering his emphasis on the mirror stage, which seems to stem from a cognitive form of development. In fact, after seeing him or herself in the mirror for the first time the child learns to recognize himself in the mirror, but also learns how he is interacting with the objects around him. The child begins to unconsciously develop the Symbolic nature of the world in relation to himself. This gives the child new characteristics, which leads to a expansion of the developmental process.

What I found interesting in Lacan’s text is that the child can recognize at that young age that there are things that exist outside themselves that are connected. Moreover, I’m still struggling to make the connection between the significance of the mirror stage in the formation of the ego and the primary narcissism (the Idealistic ego that can never be attained).

I have never read the Sand-man of Hoffmann, but after reading Freud’s <<The Uncanny>>, I do want to read the novel. As what I understand, Freud explains the uncanny as a feeling when something, which is familiar and old but is hidden as a secret in our unconscious sphere, has been brought to light. He takes the novel as an example, saying that Nathaniel’s fear in his childhood towards the Sand-man who tears out children’s eyes is what produces the uncanny. This fear of losing his own eyes is actually the fear of castration, “the uncanny effect of the Sand-man is the anxiety belonging to the castration complex of childhood”(424). Actually, I don’t really understand Freud’s idea of the relation between the eyes and the genital organ, for possibly it truly exists but beyonds my consciousness, the same as the relation between the tooth and the organ.

However, I am convinced by reading that “[a] study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that anxiety about one’s eyes, the fear of going blind, is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated. The self-blinding of the mythical criminal, Oedipus, was simply a mitigated form of the punishment of castration – the only punishment that was adequate for him by the lex talions” (424), and this is when my interest of reading the original novel arose. I mean, this “scientific” o “psychologic” relation which I have been never aware of but always exists, told by Freud, makes me feel kind of excited, or curious, and therefore speculate that the original novel may contains a much bigger and more profound psychological world. Can I say this excitement could also be a kind of uncanny feeling? I’m not sure, but I have to say that in spite of being a famous neurologist and psychologist, Freud may also be a good fiction writer, and here he takes a fiction character, Nathaniel, as an example, a patient, to explains the uncanny theory. But Nathaniel’s story is created by Hoffmann. Do I really have the “I” or “I” am created by what I am told and experienced? I think my understanding and comments are too shallow but anyway Freud gives me an interesting method especially when interpreting the narrative.

When I started reading Freud, this first thing that came to my mind was Woody Allen’s earlier films, in which the main character (played by Woody Allen himself) is often plagued by some insecurity and seeks help in therapy. Then by googling Freund and Woody Allen, I found in a blog a few screenshots from his films:
From New York Stories

“I’m fifty years old, I’m a successful lawyer, and I still have unresolved issues with my mother.”

“I’ve had plenty of time to think about it: don’t get married.”
“Mom, this is not the place…”

“…and here he is when he was two.”
And from Zelig

“My brother beat me. My sister beat my brother. My father beat my sister and my brother and me. My mother beat my father and my sister and me and my brother. The neighbors beat our family. The people down the block beat the neighbors and our family.”

The reading that I found most interesting from this week’s set was Lacan’s “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’”. This is undoubtedly because I really enjoy literature and Edgar Allan Poe is one of my favourite American authors; it had been years since I read “The Purloined Letter” so I grabbed a copy of it from the library to re-fresh my memory, and what I enjoyed the most was getting to read Lacan’s seminar on it after reading it, as I had never been exposed to it before. Significantly, to me, this seminar is such an excellent example of what I am always struggling to do when writing a paper in grad school; establishing this sound link between the work of literature and whatever it is that we call theory  (when I was completing my undergraduate degree, the framework of my literature papers, both for Spanish and English courses, always consisted of my thesis, the corresponding supporting arguments, and the integration of outside secondary sources, but these were articles on the texts that themselves incorporated theory, but the application was never initiated by me; however, I do believe that while I was writing these papers, I was obviously putting together my own implied “theory”; I just didn’t always pause to think about school of thought it belonged to).

However, having read Lacan’s seminar, I feel like I have a good model of what I should at some point be able to do; it is very well-integrated with Poe’s story and Lacan carries out a thought-provoking analysis that he lays out in a manner that to me seemed reminiscent of a litigator’s argument in court; he pretty much walked us through the plot of the story and pulled out instances and examples that he essentially used as evidence to advance his arguments. I also thought that what the introduction highlighted was also very key and very interesting, especially the discussion on how the crux of the problem lies in the ambiguity of the term “letter” in Lacan’s analysis, because I believe that this notion is absolutely central to the way one reads Lacan’s work. Is a typographical character or is it an epistle? I also don’t think that that we should view it simply as a rationalization that the story is told to us as a police mystery; I believe that this is rather indicative of the overarching idea that messages belong to the fluid dimension of language and they cannot always be taken at face value. Just as Lacan explains, the dialogue between the police prefect and Dupin, being played out as between a deaf man and one who hears, demonstrates that an act of communication may “give the impression at which theorists too often stop: of allowing in its transmission but a single meaning, as though the highly significant commentary into which he who understands integrates it, could, because unperceived by him who does not understand, be considered dull” (47). I think that while obviously the type of analysis that Lacan lays out here lends itself very well to an author like Poe whose prose always contains a type of mysterious play and boundary-blurring, this is a valuable perspective to employ when reading several other types of works of literature as well.