The fictional father. Lacanian Readings of the text

110 Pages·074.527 MB·English

by  Robert Con Davis (Ed)

I
HUM
HOUSTON PUBLIC UBRARY
Copyright© 1981 by Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following copyrighted
The Universiry of Massachusetts Press material:
Ali nghts reserved Excerpts from The Dead Father, by Donald Barthelme, copyright © 1975 by Donald
Printed in the United States of America Barthelme, reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., and by permis
I .ibrary of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data sion of International Creative Management.
Main entry under title: Excerpts from The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and Sartoris, by William
The Fictional father. Faulkner, copyright by Random House, Inc., and reprinted by their permission.
Includes index. Excerpts from The Odyssey, by Homer, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, copyright ©
1. Fathers in literature—Addresses, essays, 1961 by Robert Fitzgerald. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday and Company, Inc.
lectures. 2. American fiction—History and criticism— The selection from Doubling and IncestlRepetition and Revenge, by John T. Irwm,
Addresses, essays, lectures. 3. English fiction— originally published by The Johns Hopkins University Press; copyright by The Johns
1 listory and criticism—Addresses, essays, lectures. Hopkins University Press and used by their permission.
4. Psychoanalysis and literature—Addresses, essays, "Post-Modern Paternity: Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father," by Robert Con Davis,
lectures. 5. Lacan,Jacques, 1901- Addresses, was first published in Delta, Montpellier, France.
essays, lectures. 1. Davis, Robert Con, 1948- A shorter version of "Fathers in Faulkner," by André Bleikasten, was published in
PS374.F35F5 8i3'.009'352043i 80-2622Í Revue Française d'Etudes Américaines 8 (October 1979), under the title, "Les maitres
ISBN 0-87023-111-1 Fantômes, paternité et filiation dans les romans de Faulkner."
The following essays are printed here for the first time, courtesy of their authors:
"Fathers in Faulkner," by permission of André Bleikasten.
" 'The Captive King': The Absent Father in Melville's Text," by permission of Régis
Durand.
"Paternity and the Subject in Bleak House," by permission of Thomas A. Hanzo.
"A Clown's Inquest into Paternity: Fathers, Dead or Alive," in Ulysses and Finnegans
INDEXED1N
V & Èd
Wake," by permission of Jean-Michel Rabaté.
Acknowledgments
The contributors to this volume deserve more than the cred-
it contributors usually get, as they ali helped me with my job as editor.
John T. Irwin, for example, for some time has encouraged and sup-
ported the development of this book, for which I am very grateful.
Also, Régis Durand, in particular, did much to shape the book at its
inception, as he introduced me to the work of Jean-Michel Rabaté and
André Bleikasten, and he generously helped me to learn through his
knowledge of contemporary criticai thought in France. I thank him
heartily. I also thank Jean-Michel Rabaté and André Bleikasten for
help beyond the writing of their good essays. To Thomas A. Hanzo
I have heavy and welcome debts, indeed. From him I have learned and
continue to learn about literary criticism and literature. My debt to
him mounts constantly. The Department of English at the University
of Califórnia at Davis supported me while this book was being pre-
pared and then typed and retyped the manuscript. Also, the Office of
Research Administration at the University of Oklahoma on short
notice gave support for the final preparation of the book. I deeply
appreciate the support and trust of these two universities.
Melanie Ruth Collins I thank for her careful reading of parts of this
book and for her belief in me. To her, and to Thomas A. Hanzo, this
book is dedicated.
Robert Con Davis
Abour rhc Contriburors
THOMAS A. HANZO teaches English and American literature and
criticai theory at the University of Califórnia, Davis, where
he is the department chair. His recent publications include
essays on science fiction and fantasy.
RÉGIS DURAND teaches American literature at the Université des let-
tres et des sciences humaines de Lille III. He recently pub
lished, in France, Melville, Signes et Métaphores (Lausanne:
L'Age d'Homme, 1980).
JEAN-MICHEL RABATE teaches English and American literature at
the Université de Dijon. He has published on James Joyce
before and is currently working on the poetry of Ezra
Pound.
ANDRE BLEIKASTEN teaches American literature at the Université de
Strasbourg. He has published on modern literature, and two "ÍToCu f£wr
of his books on Faulkner have come out in the U.S.
JOHN T. IRWIN is chair of The Writing Seminars at The Johns
Hopkins University. Most recently he published American
Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics
in the American Renaissance (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1980).
ROBERT CON D AVIS teaches American literature and criticai theory
at the University of Oklahoma, Norman. He recently has
published articles on the family and the father as aspects of
narrative. S>
t)K
Contents
Criticai Introduction: The Discourse of the Father
ROBERT CON DAVIS I
1 Paternity and the Subject in Bleak House
THOMAS A. HANZO 2.7
2 "The Captive King": The Absent Father in Melville's Text
RÉGIS DURAND 48
3 A Clown's Inquest into Paternity: Fathers, Dead or Alive, in Ulysses
and Finnegans Wake JEAN-MICHEL RABATE 73
4 Fathers in Faulkner ANDRE BLEIKASTEN 115
5 The Dead Father in Faulkner JOHNT. IRWIN 147
6 Post-Modern Paternity: Donald Barthelme's The Dead
Father ROBERT CON DAVIS 169
Epilogue: The Discourse of Jacques Lacan
ROBERT CON DAVIS 183
Notes 190
Index Z05
Paternity Suit(e)
It's a wise child that knows its own father. (The Odyssey)
I and the Father are one. (John 10:30)
I said to the almond tree: "Speak to me of God."
And the almond tree blossomed.
God Speaks
Whoever seeks me finds me,
Whoever finds me knows me,
^^yhoever knows me loves me,
Whoever loves me, I love,
Whomever I love, I kill.
(Sidna Ali the Moslem, quoted in Nikos Kazantzakis'
The Fratricides)
Yea, but a man in the darke, if chaunces do wincke,
As soone he smites his father as any other man,
Because for lacke of light discerne him he ne can.
(Gammer Gurtorís Needle)
5 Thus when I shun Scylla, your father, I
fali into Charybdis, your mother.
(Merchant of Venice)
I ove cools, friendship 11 ... not out of vengeance have I accomplished ali my sins but
falis off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinics;.in countries, because something has always been close to dying in my
discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond crack'd soul, and Pve sinned only in order to lie down in darkness
'twixt son and father. (King Lear) and find, somewhere in the net of dreams, a new father, a
new home. (Lie Down in Darkness)
Thus did the Will, the emancipator, become a torturer; and
on ali that is capable of suffering it taketh revenge, because it 12 The father is a motherfucker. (The Dead Father)
cannot go backward.
This, yea this alone is revenge itself: the WilPs antipathy
to time, and its "It was."
"And this itself is justice, the law of time—that he must
devour his children": thus did madness preach.
(Thus Spake Zarathustra)
Many of the historical proverbs have a doubtful paternity.
(Letters and Social Aims, Emerson)
Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown
to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from
only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on
the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the
mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremov-
ably because founded, like the world, macro- and micro-
cosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood.
Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the
only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who
is the father of any son that any son should love him or he
any son? (Ulysses)
I had dug up the truth and the truth always kills the father,
the good and weak one or the bad and strong one, and you
are left alone with yourself and the truth, and can never ask
Dad, who didn't know anyway and who is deader than
mackerel. (AU the King's Men)
The Fictional Father
Criticai Introduction:
The Discourse of the Father
ROBERT CON DAVIS
Criticai movements, like people, develop in a partem of
youth, maturity, and decline. The good ones, also like people, often
leave healthy offspring behind and then pass away spent but well used.
Russian formalism, for example, can claim a measure of parental in-
fluence on the diverse movement that is called structuralism in litera
ture. Russian formalism contributed characteristics to its progeny,
suggestions about the differences between diachronic and synchronic
analyses, but the result is a criticai entity not identical to the parent.
What does not happen very often is the virtual rebirth of a movement
that has died. Most notably, one thinks of the reappearance of clas-
sicism in its many guises, from the early Renaissance Aristotelians
through the early twentieth century and the new humanists. But even
that example does not quite fit, as a few strong relatives always thrived
while the next generation of neo-classicists were being conceived.
More the special case is psychoanalytic criticism, with which the situ-
ation is not clear-cut either, but in which something very like a rebirth
has occurred since the late 1960S. A first generation of Freudian inter-
pretation in America continued until that time and included some of
the better criticai minds of the twentieth century, such as Edmund
Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Simon O. Lesser, Frederick Crews, and
Norman Holland, among others. This movement began to flounder at
middle century, as did Jungian criticism and "new criticism," largely
because of an inability to go beyond thematic comment and to con-
front literary structure. Then, a reborn literary Freudianism, based
initially on the suggestions of Jacques Lacan's seminar papers, started
in France in the late 1960S. Bearing little similarity to the earlier Freud-
1 RO H I K T CON DAVIS The I )iscourse of the Father
ianism, this offspring sccmed not to be an offspring at ali but a direct herent and searching appraisal both of the fictional father and of the
descendam from the parent's origin—like a child who takes character- literary criticism derived mainly from Jacques Lacan's work. The re-
istics nearly directly from its grandfather. sult is a book that defines the fictional father according to the opera-
The maturity of the new Freudian criticism in America can be tions of the symbolic father in a radical psychoanalysis.
gauged according to its usefulness as practical criticism—as interpre- The major theoretical premise underlying these six essays can be
tation. For example, Anthony Wilden published an English transla- called a psychoanalytic anthropomorphism ofthe text. I will demon-
tion and study of Jacques Lacan's Discours de Rome in 1968,1 but it strate what this statement means in a discussion of The Odyssey's nar
was not until John T. Irwin's study in 1975 of several novéis by rative structure. In short, the pronouncement says that a Freudian t Cí>vtas> \ju\,
r
William Faulkner that a new Freudian criticism was clearly alive in theory of certain laws of transformation suggests a paradigm for
2
America. Since the publication of Irwin's book, a great many have textuality—for the structural relations within a text. Since the opera-
seen that a symbolic triadic relationship—the family—stands at the tions of the psychoanalytic subject and the text are synonymous—
center of French Freud's paradigm for defining the literary text, and rather, since textuality is an inscription of the subject—many of the
that the allegorizing tendency of an older Freudian paradigm (one that same laws govern both. So, a literary narrative shows aspects of such
would say, "this character's greed is the surface of what at another unconscious processes as seduction, primai scene, and castration—the et^ é u.wa
levei is anal retentiveness") has little import for the new thought. operations of repression—and these operations (as corresponding
The Fictional Father is directed to what is likely the ideal subject of functions in narrative) constitute the fictional substance of a text, ic L «TVJO ^VuTX ||
the new criticism—the father in fiction—for central to Lacanian what the Russian formalists called the text's "literariness." At base,
tjDfW«-«><iJL_ {Lo
thought is the concept of the "symbolic father," the agency of law. In the six essays in this book require one to grapple with the "literari
the course of my work on the symbolic father, as I pursued French ness" of the father as a fictional concept in relation to three closely
Freud through Jacques Lacan, Jean Laplanche, Anika Lemaire, An linked axioms of Lacanian thought: (1) that the question of the father
thony Wilden, John T. Irwin, and many others, and after I made my in fiction, in whatever guise, is essentially one of father absence; (2)
own cautious and tentative gestures toward Lacan's influence, I re- that each manifestation of the father in a text is a refjnding of an
3 !W<kÍtL corrôô ^rtU
alized that the best theoretical criticism on the subject of the father, absent father; (3) and that the father's origin is to be found in the
while much discussed in France, was largely alien to an American trace of his absence. I will take up these cryptic pronouncements, one
•I l«k |/«VV«i}xv*. — HL
readership. Curious to see if a larger channel to French thought could at a time, in my consideration of The Odyssey in order to show one
be opened, I sought prominent French Freudians and asked if they version of how they fit together in a theory of the fictional father and
would write for an American audience. I found willing criticai emis- to clear the way for the essays that follow. While I cannot pretend to
saries in Régis Durand (on Herman Melville), André Bleikasten (on speak for the critics in this book and do not presume to explain them, I
William Faulkner), and Jean-Michel Rabaté (on James Joyce), each can show how a complex narrative manifests structural absence and
capable of explaining Lacanian Freudianism in practical criticism of the symbolic authority of the father—concepts important to ali six
well-known writers. Next, I approached Thomas A. Hanzo, who I critics—and, further, what a Lacanian theory of the father implies
knew was deeply engaged in applying Lacanian and Derridian her- about the nature of narrative.
meneutics to the fiction of Charles Dickens, and found another willing
interpreter. To the four statements of these critics, I added my essay on
II
Donald Barthelme (previously published only in France) and an il-
luminating section from John T. Irwin's study of Faulkner. These six "Through the word—already a presence made of absence—
absence itself comes to giving itself a name in that moment of origin."
essays—ali focused on a theory of the father in narrative—make a co-
(Jacques Lacan, "The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis")
lhe Discourse of the 1 atlut
4 ROIll Kl CON DAVIS
Wc can look to the beginning of The Odyssey for the staging of a who, like competitive brothers, conspire to ravage the estate and to
Lacanian scene. Here we find a "problem" to be solved in the same destroy Telémakhos as its defender. Thus, Telémakhos is a son in
sense that Vladimir Propp speaks of a narrative's problematic begin trouble whose foremost responsibility is to seek his father's help. In
ning; it is the problem for which the completed narrative will be the order to survive, he needs to assert his claim as Odysseus' true heir; yet
solution. Very early in the epic, Athena introduces the epic's central he cannot find the strength he needs to act effectively. His attempts to
dilemma—thematic and structural—when she asks Telémakhos, inquire after his father and to hasten his return are ineffectual. He
"Who is your father?" The boy, having grown up without a father, cannot recognize his father even when they do meet, although reunion
cannot at once answer her question with any certainty. Yet, the asking is an occasion to satisfy his deepest needs. And when father and son
of the question coincides with other significant occurrences, with dispatch the suitors, Telémakhos mainly assists Odysseus' efforts in-
Odysseus' release from Kalypso's island and with Penélopê's re- stead of measurably extending his own. It is especially clear in the first
kindled interest in her husband's return. In other words, a process four books that, deprived of power in the absence of his father, Telém- «
concerning paternity is set in motion. Shortly thereafter, with the help akhos is rendered immobile in the face of hostile events. A young man
of Zeus, Father of Men, Odysseus arrives in Ithaka where he reenters able to recognize his need, or lack of power, yet unable to act, he keeps
itWvk. *" kingdom with the support of Telémakhos. Then, after killing a melancholy watch at his father's empty place and yearns for the
s
Penélopê's suitors, rejoining his wife, doing obeisance to his own fa power to fill it.
ther, and making peace with the suitors' relatives, Odysseus rules once The source of his paralysis is explained in part by his reply to
again, father and king home from a ten-year adventure after the Athena's question—"Who is your father?" Seeming to address the ul-
Trojan Wars. Therefore, what begins in the epic with father absence, timate reference of the question, the boy replies to her: "I know not /
and with Telémakhos' predicament of powerlessness and frustration surely. Who has known his own engendering?" In the traditional and
5
as he watches his home besieged by his mother's suitors, moves better known translation, he replies to the question in an aphorism as
through a transforamtion that ultimately reinstates Odysseus as the old as it is familiar: "for myself I cannot reli. It's a wise child that
representative of paternal authority. knows its own father." In both versions, his emphasis is clear: he
6
highlights his own predicament in confronting his father's absence
But why, one may wonder, should there be so much initial emphasis
and claims that though he cannot know his origin absolutely, yet he
Toco (/.o MJ* in The Odyssey on the son? The first four books are devoted to
bclieves that wisdom resides in possessing the knowledge of origins ,
Telémakhos and his domestic troubles. And since the twenty-four
connected with fatherhood. Answering as he does, he establishes the
books of the epic, as Robert Fitzgerald notes, divide into six "waves of
terms of a dilemma in which one is a "wise child" by virtue of knowing eujJax, ^&\y
action" (four books each), one full portion of the epic (one sixth of the
one's father, a task that he defines as problematical. Above ali, the í'tXríTKou,
whole) shows Telémakhos struggling with the suitors. As we consider
4
logic of his answer asserts that the father's absence creates a predica
that the action of the twenty-four books will mount until Odysseus
ment wherein a son must discover wisdom within the limitations of his
acts decisively to regain his family and throne in books 21 through 24,
own efforts.
it is puzzling that considerable space is given to develop many aspects
of Telémakhos' frustration at home that do not contribute directly to The epic associates sonship, then, with restricted action. Neverthe-
the major action, Odysseus' return, because in book 5 attention shifts less, as soon as we try to contrast Telémakhos' status with Odysseus'
abruptly away from Telémakhos and toward Odysseus, never fully re- in any simple way, say, in the opposition of weak (the powerless son)
turning to the son. What is the relationship of the Telemakhiad to and powerful (the potent father), contradictions are apparent. Odys
what follows it? seus, who eventually does act to take back his home, is in most respects
as restricted in his power to act as is his son. As a leader in exile,
Telémakhos' home and land are violated by his mother's suitors