"THE MOST INSEPARABLE OF COMPANIONS":

LACAN(-IZING) FREUD(-IANIZED) POE

by

YONJAE JUNG

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Thesis Adviser: Dr. Gary Lee Stonum

Department of English

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

May, 2000
 UMI Number. 9981837

Copyright 2000 by
Jung. Yonjae

All rights reserved.

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Copyright © 2000 by Yonjae Jung
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 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY
SCHOOLOFGRADUATESTUD~

We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of

candidate for the _..lLf]_J1.-""-t'-__________

:D degree *.

~- f .~
~~ committee)
(signed)

(date)
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*We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any
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This dissertation is dedicated to my loving wife, Misun

Hong, who always looks at me from the place from which I see

her; to my beautiful daughter, Minju, whose joyful and

carefree existence is the source of ineffable jouissance for

my family; to my parents, Mansoo and poongki, who have

offered me encouragement and guidance throughout my life;

and to my brother, Yonku, and to my wonderful sisters,

Jinmee and Eugine, who have tirelessly supported my efforts;

and, finally, to my FATHER in heaven who always calls me by

my name. PTL!
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER ONE:

POE, FREUD, AND LACAN 12

CHAPTER TWO:

THE "IMAGINARY" WILSON 42

CHAPTER THREE:

THE "SYMBOLIC" FATHER .... . . ... .. ......... . . . . . . . .... 87

CHAPTER FOUR:

THE IMP(-OSSIBLE) OF THE PERVERSE "REAL" 133

CONCLUSION . . .. .. . . ....... . . . . . . . .... . .... . . . . . .... . . 188

BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196

v
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many teachers have helped and encouraged me with this

dissertation. lowe much gratitude to Dr. R. Bruce Bickley,

Dr. Anne Rowe, Dr. Linda Saladin, and Dr. Karen Laughlin,

all of the Department of English at Florida State

University. I would like to thank my C.W.R.U committee

professors, Suzanne Ferguson and Judith Oster, who patiently

read my drafts and offered insightful suggestions and

criticisms throughout the development of this work. I wish

also to thank Christine Cano, of the Department of Modern

Languages (French), for her helpful comments and for reading

the manuscript.

My greatest debt is to Professor Gary Lee Stonum, the

chair of my dissertation committee and well-known author of

Faulkner's Career: An Int:ernal Lit:erary Hist:ory and The

Dickinson Sublime, without whose incredible critical and

philosophical advice and guide I could never have completed

this project. Professor Stonum's continued encouragement

and emotional support have helped me through the difficult

course of graduate studies. 7hank you.

vi
 "The Most Inseparable of Companions":
Lacan(-izing) Freud(-ianized) Poe

Abstract

by

YONJAE JUNG

This study attempts to elicit a rich cross-fertilization

between Poe's literary text and Lacan's psychoanalytic

theory. In my main chapters, I intend to recontextualize

Lacan's clinical theories into a literary one and then

employ it as a method of reading Poe's short stories. At

the same time, my Lacanian reading will reveal that Poe's

literary texts can illuminate and illustrate Lacan's

influential theory of the registers. My first chapter,

"Poe, Freud, and Lacan," is a preliminary chapter laying out

an overview of the long and intricate relationship between

Poe and psychoanalytic literary criticism. This chapter

provides helpful historical and theoretical contexts for my

Lacanian-inspired psychoanalytic reading of Poe's work in

the following chapters. In the second chapter, "The

'Imaginary' Wilson," I will argue that the perplexing, sado-

masochistic relationship between the two Wilsons in Poe's

"William Wilson" can be better understood in the light of

vii
the Lacanian theory of the Imaginary and its accompanying

ideas, such as the mirror stage, doubling, narcissism,

captation, aggressivity, and identification. At the same

time, my reading will demonstrate that Poe's tale can help

us elucidate the mechanism of Lacanian foreclosure and the

significant function of the destructive aggressivity

inherent in every narcissistic mode of Imaginary

identification.

My chapter three, "The 'Symbolic' Father," explores in

detail the Oedipal undercurrents in Poe's "The Tell-Tale

Heart." Since the source of the narrator's extreme

aggressivity towards the old man comes not from the

individual person but rather from the phallic signifier (the

"Evil Eye"), I will examine the role of the old man in terms

of Lacan's concept of the Symbolic (Dead) Father. My

chapter four, "The Imp(-ossible) of the Perverse 'Real',"

approaches the concept of the Real through some of Poe's

well-known short stories: "The Man of the Crowd," "The

Masque of the Red Death," "The Black Cat," "The Imp of the

Perverse," "Berenice," and "Ligeia." Poe's texts will

provide helpful literary examples that can explicate some of

the most characteristic dimensions of the problematic Real.

Likewise, the Lacanian Real will help us understand certain

puzzling elements of the tales.

viii
 I HTRODUCT ION

A [future] college of psycho-analysis . . . would include

branches of knowledge which are remote from medicine and
which the doctor does not come across in his practice: the
history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of
religion, and the science of literature. Unless he is well
at home in these subjects, an analyst can make nothing of a
large amount of his material.
Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis

But it seems to me that these [Freud's] terms can only

become clear if one establishes their equivalence to the
language of contemporary anthropology, or even to the latest
problems in philosophy [and linguistics], fields in which
psychoanalysis could well regain its health.
Lacan, Ecrits

Reading is transformational. • But this transformation

cannot be executed however one wishes. It requires
protocols of reading. Derrida, Positions

Since the 1960s, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan

has been a focal point of critical discussion. His radical

reconceptualization of Freudian psychoanalysis in the light

of structuralist and post-structuralist theories of language

has had a considerable impact both inside and outside

psychoanalytic circles, influencing developments in various

academic and cultural disciplines such as feminism, Marxism,

philosophy, film studies, dramatic theory, and literary

criticism. However, despite the escalating interest in

1
 2

Lacan's work in recent years, there are very few books in

English that provide a clear and systematic explanation of

his theory. While some introductory books on Lacan offer

valuable insights into his work, they tend to mystify the

hero and his theory, often yielding to the formidable and

intentional difficulty of his text. It is quite true that

the extreme complexity of Lacan's discourse, both spoken and

written, makes no promise of an illusory transparency. As

Anika Lemaire has put it:

Lacan claims • • • not to have put forward

"theories." His "utterances" or "writings,"
seeds scattered among the thorns of traditional
philosophy and psychology, in no way lend
themselves to anything resembling a closure . .
For Lacan, then, any attempt to unify his
scattered statements into a whole runs the
risk of making erroneous interpolations. (114)

Lacan is quite deliberately vague and ambiguous. In Logics

of Failed Revolr: French Theory Afrer May '68 (1995), Peter

Starr also observes that "the primary function of Lacan's

infamous graphs and algorithms, his rigorously polyvalent

concepts (the Other, the objer a, the real), and his

allusive, aphoristic style was to produce misunderstandings

-- in French, des malenrendus" (37). Lacan himself insists

that "my Ecrit:s are unsuitable for a thesis, particularly an

academic thesis: they are antithetical by nature: one either

takes what they formulate or one leaves them. ,,1 In Lacan' s

view, his master Freud's innovative and revolutionary work

 3

has been greatly distorted and oversimplified by his

followers. Lacan's notoriously difficult style is carefully

developed to resist reductive over-systematization and to

reflect the workings of the unconscious. 2 Lacan's

discourse, which is full of lapses, jokes, puns, irony,

metaphors, and contradictions, mimics the interventions of

the Freudian unconscious in our everyday utterances. In

Lacan and Language (1982), John P. Muller and William J.

Richardson offer an apt description of Lacan's style:

[T]he elusive-allusive-illusive manner, the

encrustation with rhetorical tropes, the
kaleidoscopic erudition, the deliberate
ambiguity, the auditory echoes, the oblique
irony, the disdain of logical sequence, the
prankish playfulness and sardonic (sometimes
scathing) humor -- all of these forms of
preciousness that Lacan affects are essentially
a concrete demonstration in verbal locution of
the perverse ways of the unconscious as he
experiences it. (3)

Thus, Lacan's theory remains stubbornly resistant to

systematic conception. Imitating Lacan's own dense and

difficult writing style, most Lacanian followers argue that

clear exposition would do an injustice to the spirit of his

whole work. They generally despise any attempt at a clear

schematization of Lacan's ideas, defining it as "anti-

Lacanian": any demand for clarity and elucidation is not

only irrelevant but a betrayal of Lacan's subversive

insight.
 4

The attempt to present a coherent account of Lacan's

theory is therefore a risky undertaking that goes directly

against the dominant trend in Lacanian criticism.

Nevertheless, I believe a lucid and comprehensible

explanation of Lacan's major ideas is possible. Despite the

notorious resistance to ready systematization and

comprehension, Lacan's teaching and writings are quite clear

about the foundational concepts, which were introduced

during the first period of his teaching (1953-1964).3 As we

can find in Lacan's Ecrits: A Selection and in his early

three seminars (Seminar I, II, and III) in the 1950s, most

of his significant theoretical and clinical concepts are

quite straightforwardly developed, and can be grasped

without too much difficulty. In opposition to the

"mystifying" tendency prevalent in Anglo-American Lacanian

scholarship, I will instead demonstrate in the course of my

dissertation that many of Lacan's difficult concepts are not

inaccessible.

My central purpose in this dissertation, however, is

not to provide a comprehensive introduction to the works of

Lacan. In this study, I attempt to elicit a rich cross-

fertilization between Poe's literary text and Lacan's

psychoanalytic theory. As has often been noted by many

critics and scholars, Poe's stories are unmistakably

 5

psychological in implication. Thus, not surprisingly, Poe's

tales have been characterized as "psychological

explorations" and discussed in the light of the traditional

Freudian or Freudian-influenced psychoanalysis. I contend

that the most rewarding approach to Poe's fiction today is

through Lacan. In my main chapters, I intend to

recontextualize Lacan's clinical theories into a literary

one and then employ it as a method of reading Poe's short

stories. At the same time, my Lacanian reading will reveal

that Poe's literary texts can illuminate and illustrate

Lacan's influential theory of the registers. Although Lacan

already used the terms "Imaginary," "Symbolic," and "Real"

from early on in his writings (1932-1940s), it was not until

1953 that he spoke of these as three interacting "orders" or

"registers" in psychological experience. Since Lacan

describes all psychological phenomena according to these

three orders, it is no exaggeration to say that the whole

Lacanian enterprise is based on this tripartite

classification system. However, despite its theoretical

importance, Lacan's register theory has been largely ignored

by American literary critics who overemphasize his early

mirror stage theory. It is true that Lacan's significant

concept of the mirror stage is generally considered to be

his first official theoretical contribution to the

 6

psychoanalytic circle and constitutes a constant point of

reference throughout his entire work. But, the overemphasis

on the mirror stage can invite a serious misreading of

Lacan: it misleads us into seeing the Imaginary register as

the most dominant Lacanian construct and into dismissing

other crucial Lacanian concepts as mere extensions and

elaborations of his earlier mirror stage theory.

My first chapter, "Poe, Freud, and Lacan," is a

preliminary chapter laying out an overview of the long and

intricate relationship between Poe and psychoanalytic

literary criticism. This chapter will be focused on the two

most representative psychoanalytic works on Poe: Marie

Bonaparte's The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-

Analyt:ic Interpret:at:ion and Lacan' s "Seminar on 'The

Purloined Letter.'" An intense critical examination of

Bonaparte's classic Freudian reading and Lacan's post-

structural interpretation of the Dupin story will provide

helpful historical and theoretical contexts for my Lacanian-

inspired psychoanalytic reading of Poe's work in the

following main chapters. In the second chapter, "The

'Imaginary' Wilson," I will argue that the perplexing, sado-

masochistic relationship between the two Wilsons in Poe's

"William Wilson" can be better understood in the light of

the Lacanian theory of the Imaginary and its accompanying

 7

ideas, such as the mirror stage, doubling, mirroring,

narcissism, captation, aggressivity, and identification. I

will also claim the superiority of Lacanian foreclosure over

the Freudian superego as an account of the story. At the

same time, my reading will demonstrate that Poe's "William

Wilson" can help us elucidate the mechanism of the Lacanian

foreclosure and the significant function of the destructive

aggressivity inherent in every narcissistic mode of

Imaginary identification.

My chapter three, "The 'Symbolic' Father," explores in

detail the Oedipal undercurrents in Poe's "The Tell-Tale

Heart," and argues that the tale is the story about a young

man who "acts out" the Oedipal murder only to be castrated

in retaliation by the agents of the Symbolic order. Since

the source of the narrator's extreme aggressivity towards

the old man comes not from the individual person but rather

from the castrating "Evil" eye, from the phallic signifier

representing the oppressive Law of the Symbolic, I will

examine the role of the old man in the Poe story in terms of

Lacan's linguistic, non-biological concept of the Symbolic

(Dead) Father, which is crucially different from the real,

biological father. My chapter four, "The Imp(-ossible) of

the Perverse 'Real,'" is mainly concerned with the long-

neglected Lacanian Real. While the Imaginary and the

 8

Symbolic are relatively easy to grasp, the order of the Real

is the most elusive and mysterious of the three. In this

chapter, I attempt to approach the concept of the

problematic Real through some of Poe's well-known short

stories: "The Man of the Crowd," "The Masque of the Red

Death," "The Black Cat," "The Imp of the Perverse," "William

Wilson," "Berenice," and "Ligeia." Poe's texts will provide

helpful literary examples that can explicate and illustrate

some of the most characteristic dimensions of the order of

the Real. Likewise, the Lacanian concept of the Real will

help us to understand certain puzzling elements of the

tales.

This study is, of course, emphatically not

"psychobiography." Yet, this study is also different from

other critics' Lacanian psychoanalytic readings of

literature. In recent years, some Lacanian-influenced

literary critics have used Lacan's psychoanalytic principles

to interpret specific literary texts: for example, Makiko

Minow-Pinkney's virginia Woolf and the Problem of the

Subject (1987), James Mellard's Using Lacan: Reading Fiction

(1991), Garry M. Leonard's Reading 'Dubliners' Again: A

Lacanian Perspective (1993), and Ben Stoltzfus's Lacan and

Literature: Purloined Pretexts (1996), among many others.

Despite their admirable efforts, however, some of these

 9

critics' interpretations of Lacanian notions are more opaque

than Lacan himself.· They have often misunderstood and

misrepresented certain crucial Lacanian concepts, either

dismissing or neglecting the important clinical and

philosophical sides of Lacan. In contrast to such previous

Lacanian readings which tend to rely on secondary sources on

Lacan rather than on his actual writings, I will try to

reproduce Lacan's own text wherever possible. Since it is

virtually impossible to understand Lacan without a thorough

familiarity with Freud, I will also extensively quote and

refer to relevant writings of Freud that often underlie even

the most idiosyncratic concepts of Lacan. Although I define

and discuss most Lacanian terms at those points where I am

interpreting Poe's specific work, it is not my intention to

go into detail about the controversial theoretical debates

and frequent contradictions in Lacanian theory which have

developed over the span of five decades.

 10

ROTES

1. Jacques Lacan, in his preface to Anika Lemaire's Jacques

Lacan (London: Routledge, 1977), p. vii.

2. In her 1979 article "Introduction to Jacques Lacan's

Lecture: The Neurotic's Individual Myth," Martha Noel Evans
claims that Lacan's style has rejected "the Cartesian
handling of the French language with its emphasis on
analytic and scientific clarity at the expense of complexity
of perception" (387). Evans goes on to say:
By choosing to expound his ideas in a style which
mocks the scientific demand for clear, serial, and
falsifiable logic, he has fallen paradoxically
into three distinguishable if converging
traditional French cultural stances: the
rebellious and persecuted enfanr rerrible, beloved
of the French intelligentsia; the reformist son
restoring a patrimony, in this case the true
doctrines of Freud, against their defilers; and
third, the messianic prophet who confidently
foresees his own triumph as he becomes understood.
(387)

3. Lacan's teaching may be divided into three phases that

reflect his major conceptual shifts and that are usually
marked by changes in his affiliations with psychoanalytic
organizations: 1) 1953-1963, 2) 1963-1974, and 3) 1974-1981.
In the first period of his teaching in the 1950s, Lacan
reformulated and elaborated his reading of Freud that had
begun in 1932, with his doctoral thesis in medicine,
Paranoid Psychosis and irs Relation to Personaliry. In the
1960s and the early 1970s, the second period of his
teaching, Lacan explained his most idiosyncratic concepts at
the Ecole normale superieure. In the third period, Lacan
developed his theory of a mathematical topology based on the
figure of the Borromean knot and reworked his category of
the Real.

4. For example, in Lacan and Literature: Purloined Prerexrs

(1996), Ben Stoltzfus argues oddly that the order of the
Real is "the discourse of the Other" (152). But, Stoltzfus
does not provide us with any theoretical discussion of how
the Lacanian Real which resists signification absolutely can
be defined in terms of linguistic discourse. Moreover, in
Lacan's formulation, the Other (Autre) with a capital "0"
often refers to the unconscious or language, and belongs to
 11

the Symbolic order; in Using Lacan: Reading Ficrion (1991),

James Hellard remarks that "in Lacan's thought, the Real is
not regarded as a register or an order quite on the same
plane as either the Imaginary or the Symbolic" (156). But,
in the early 1970s, Lacan illustrates his register theory by
means of the topology of the Borromean knot, emphasizing the
non-hierarchical, structural interdependence of the three
orders of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real; and in
Reading 'Dubliners' Again: A Lacanian perspecrive (1993),
Garry H. Leonard defines Lacan's Imaginary register as "a
period of time in which individuals mistake their mirror
images for themselves, that is, as proof that they are
unified and autonomous beings" (188). Although Leonard
confines the Imaginary order to a specific moment, Lacan's
theory of the registers does not subscribe to a linear,
chronological model of human development.
 CIlAPft:R on
POI:, FREUD, ARD LACAIf

If Poe has become so meaningful to contemporary French

criticism, it is because his texts respond admirably to the
new questions addressed to literature from the whole gamut
of French contemporary thought. What is perhaps difficult
to realize, here in America, is that in the list of writers
and critics who write about Poe, we find practically all the
major names: Poulet, Bachelard, Ricardou, Todorov, Genette,
Barthes, Lacan, and Derrida.
-- Claude Richard, "Destin, Design, Dasein"

[The "founders of discursivity"] are unique in that they are

not just the authors of their own work. They have produced
something else: the possibilities and the rules for the
formation of other texts. In this sense, they are very
different from a novelist who is nothing more than the
author of his own text. Freud is not just the author of The
Inrerprerarion of Dreams or Jokes and rheir Relarion ro rhe
Unconscious. • [He has] established an endless
possibility of discourse.
Foucault, "What is an Author?"

Lacan's importance does not lie specifically in any new

dogma his "school" may propose, but in his outstanding
demonstration that rhere is more rhan one way to implicate
psychoanalysis in literature.
-- Felman, Jacques Lacan and the
Adventure of Insighr

Poe and psychoanalysis have a long intimate

association. A whole critical tradition has tended to

see Poe's work as a privileged space of psychoanalysis.

While other approaches emerge and disappear with changing

critical trends, psychoanalysis has sustained its relevance

12
 13

to Poe studies. From the earliest beginning of

psychoanalysis, Poe has become one of the most popular

subjects for biographically-oriented psychological

criticism: Poe's appeal to psychoanalytic critics can be

explained in terms of his melodramatic life story (which is

partly made up by himself and partly created by his

detractors) and of his markedly strange tales (which often

feature mysterious murders, mental aberrations, returns from

the dead, Imps of the perverse, and beautiful dying women).

This kind of biographical criticism characterizes the first

hundred years of Poe scholarship and tends to be the

dominant mode of classical psychoanalytic criticism which

becomes "pathography" or "psychobiography" in the early

twentieth century.l Before we explore in detail the likely

cross-fertilization or "interimplication,,2 between Poe's

fiction and Lacanian psychoanalysis, it might be well to

review in this chapter the two most representative

psychoanalytic works on Poe -- Marie Bonaparte's The Life

and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analyt;ic

Interpretat;ion (1949) and Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined

Letter'''(1972). This introductory chapter will provide

helpful historical and theoretical contexts for my Lacanian-

inspired psychoanalytic reading of Poe's work in the

following main chapters.

 14

The most influential Freudian psychoanalytic tradition

in Poe criticism begins with Marie Bonaparte's monumental

The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A PsychO-Analyric

Inrerprerarion, published in Paris in 1933 and translated

into English in 1949. Although her book is not the first

psychological study on Poe, Bonaparte's work was, and still

is, the first to bring the entire body of Poe's writings

under Freudian investigation. Bonaparte's book is probably

the best-known example of classical "id-psychology," a

school of psychoanalytic criticism which has become known as

"psychobiography" or "applied psychoanalysis." Bonaparte's

examination of the relationship between the author's

personal history and textual symbolism is largely divided

into four parts: "Life and Poems," "Tales of the Mother,"

"Tales of the Father," and "Poe and the Human Soul." In the

first part of her book, Bonaparte gives much attention to

the details of Poe's life in order to establish a direct

connection between the individual pathology and the

symptomatic text. l After devoting two hundred pages to an

account of Poe's life, Bonaparte gives another five hundred

pages to studies of the stories, seeking to discover and

diagnose Poe's pathology hidden in his writings. In

carrying out her task, Bonaparte uses the methods and models
 15

of Freud's dream analysis as the basic theoretical tool for

her psycho-biographical reading of Poe.

Before looking at Bonaparte's interpretation of Poe's

oeuvre, it will be useful here to retrace briefly Freud's

relevant major concepts. In his seminal work The

Incerprecacion of Dreams (1900), Freud defines the dream as

lOa (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed or repressed)

wish. ,,6 The dreamer's wishes have to assume a disguise in

order to evade the censor and achieve their aim

successfully. Freud's interpretation of a dream proceeds

from a comparison of "manifest" and "latent" content,

denoting the content of the dream as remembered and

recounted by the patient its "manifest" content, and the

forbidden material (or "dream-thoughts") that has given rise

to the dream its "latent" content. Freud describes the

manifest content as a "transformation" of the latent

content. Such transformation is effected by what he refers

to as the "dream-work." The dreamer's or patient's dream-

work hides and distorts the latent content through the four

principal mechanisms of condensation, displacement,

consideration of representability, and secondary revision.

For Freud, the goal of psychoanalytic interpretation is to

discover the latent content by reversing and retracing the

dream-work. In his Incroduccory Leccures on Psycho-Analysis

 16

(1916-7), Freud writes:

[T]he work which transforms the latent dream

into the manifest one is called the dream-work.
The work which proceeds in the contrary
direction, which endeavors to arrive at the
latent dream from the manifest one, is our work
of interpretation. This work of interpretation
seeks to undo the dream work. (SE 15: 170)

In developing his psychoanalytic theory, Freud has

often related art to the dream. In Freud's view, creative

works of art, like the dream, are a symbolic manifestation

and a vicarious gratification of unconscious wishes and

fantasies. Thus, Freud maintains that the artist is

essentially a neurotic who has strong instinctual needs that

cannot be satisfied: "an artist is once more in rudiments an

introvert, not far removed from neurosis. He is oppressed

by excessively powerful instinctual needs. He desires to

win honour, power, wealth, fame and the love of women; but

he lacks the means for achieving these satisfactions. ,,5 The

artist therefore turns away from reality to satisfy the

needs in fantasy. For Freud, the artist is a person who

possesses the "mysterious power" to disguise his fantasies

and render them acceptable to others. Freud, from the

earliest days of psychoanalysis to the end of his career,

frequently turned to the lives and works of various authors

and artists for the theoretical example and elucidation of

his clinical observations: Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Ibsen,

 17

Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Heine, Homer, Goethe,

Balzac, WilheLm Jensen, and E. T. A. Hoffman. In most

cases, Freud is less concerned with the aesthetics of the

work of art than with the psychopathology of creative

artists and the psychology of creativity. In his 1914 paper

"On the History of the PsychO-Analytic Movement", Freud

states that psychoanalysis moves "from the investigation of

dreams to the analysis of works of imagination and

ultimately to the analysis of their creators -- writers and

artists themselves" (SE 14: 36). Strictly following Freud's

central tenets, Bonaparte declares her analytic principle at

the outset:

Works of art or literature profoundly reveal

their creator's psychology and, as Freud has
shown, their construction resembles that of our
dreams. The same mechanisms which, in dreams
or nightmares, govern the manner in which our
strongest, though most carefully concealed
desires are elaborated, desires which often are
the most repugnant to consciousness, also
govern the elaboration of the work of art. (209)

Bonaparte believes that such mechanisms as symbolization,

condensation, displacement, consideration of

representability, and consideration of intelligibility found

in dreams can also be found in Poe's literary productions.

Bonaparte takes Poe's tales as the manifest content of a

dream, and argues that her psychoanalytic interpretation of

them can recover the latent, unconscious content, with

 18

reference to external biographical sources.

For Bonaparte, Poe's pathology is clear in his stories,

which tend to follow narratives of either necrophilic love

for the mother or hatred for the father. Along with Joseph

Wood Krutch, Bonaparte argues that Poe's life and work can

be read in terms of the traumas he suffered in childhood.

According to Bonaparte, Poe was condemned to an "eternal

fidelity" through a fixation on his dead mother Elizabeth

Arnold. 6 In the second section of her book, "Tales of the

Mother," Bonaparte traces how Poe's psychopathic obsession

with the dead mother was transferred onto various fictional

characters: "Berenice, Morella, Ligeia, Madeline, are as

morbid, as evanescent as advanced consumptives, while their

sylph-like motions seem, already, to exhale an odour of

decay. Nevertheless, this simple displacement served to keep

Poe ignorant, as for almost a century his readers, that

these ailing sylphs were but forms of Elizabeth Arnold"

(642-3). In Bonaparte's view, almost every heroine in Poe's

writings was shaped in the image of his mother, who haunts

his unconscious memory since her death. This explains why

all his female characters are invariably etherial and

consumptive, and why so many of them have the same fate as

his mother. Thus, Bonaparte sees Poe's tales as acts of

morbid repetition, as compulsive and unconscious

 19

elaborations of the same setting and theme -- the moment of

the mother's death in Poe's childhood.' In the third

section of her book entitled "Tales of the Father,"

Bonaparte sees the male figures in the stories as the return

of the repressed Oedipal father. According to her, "The

Hop-Frog" and "The Cask of Amontillado" are tales of revenge

against the father. The old man in "The Tell-Tale Heart" is

likewise interpreted as a figure for Poe's hated foster-

father, John Allan. The Oedipal father is also represented

in "The Masque of the Red Death" and "Never Bet the Devil

Your Head" as the avenger who returns to punish Poe's

imaginary parricide and incestuous desire.

Under Bonaparte's analysis, Poe's text is treated as

analogous to the dream. Following Freud, she assumes that

the purpose of the work of literature is essentially the

same as the purpose of the dream: the secret gratification

of an infantile and forbidden wish. This leads inevitably

to the psychoanalysis of the author. Bonaparte, drawing

upon Freud's 1908 paper "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,"

writes that "Freud shows how daydreams and creative writing

resemble each other, since the latter gratifies the artist's

deepest infantile, archaic and unconscious wishes in

imaginary and, more or less, disguised form" (639). Thus,

she continues, it is the psychoanalytic critic's task to

 20

"determine the extent to which the author's personality,

split into psychic elements seeking to embody themselves in

different characters, permits the author to re-embody

himself in each of the characters observed" (639). The

primary object of Bonaparte's study is not the literary work

of art; the goal of her reading is to acquire knowledge of

the psychology of its creator. It is the unconscious of the

author that is thus made the center of her psychoanalytic

inquiry.

It is certainly true that Bonaparte's book has been

of prime importance to a number of Poe scholars: the renewed

interest in Poe in the latter part of twentieth century,

both in France and in America, is in some part due to her

work, which has been translated into English, German, and

Italian. For its fidelity to classical Freudian theory and

its rigorous application of Freudian principles to literary

texts, Bonaparte's book remains as an important standard in

the area of psychoanalytic biography and criticism.

Moreover, Bonaparte's arguments are ingenious, consistent,

and persuasive, and they often provide startling insights

into the complex relation between unconscious desire and

literary figuration. While the influence of Bonaparte's

book has been widespread, her analysis is often harshly

criticized on a number of grounds. To begin with,

 21

Bonaparte's reading, like Rufus Griswold's "Memoir," which

equates Poe with his depraved fictional characters, is based

on an overlooking of the fundamental differences between the

author and his artistic creations. Bonaparte

unquestioningly presupposes a direct correlation between the

author's traumatic childhood and the aberrant, symptomatic

behavior of his fictional characters. For Bonaparte, Poe is

without doubt a "repressed sado-masochist and necrophilist"

and his work is simply the product of neurosis (299).

Like much early Poe criticism, Bonaparte's study is

also characterized by a tendency to confuse hypothesis with

fact. For instance, she explains Poe's supposed sexual

impotence in terms of his use of opium. Poe's resorting to

opium, which "do[es] not importune the penis," is related to

his "inner prohibition which banned erection," to his

"necrophilist psyche," and to the sexless content of his

stories (397). Bonaparte accepts dubious diagnostic

suppositions as biographical facts, and uses them to

interpret the literary text. Moreover, in the case of her

interpretation of "Mystery of Marie Roget," Bonaparte

completely disregards and distorts the textual fact in order

to support her argument. Although Poe said in his footnote

that the story was based on the actual murder of Mary

Cecelia Rogers, which had occurred in New York in July 1841,

 22

Bonaparte claims instead that the tale was inspired by

virginia's hemorrhages.-

Although Freud is interested in pathographical studies,

he is nevertheless well aware of their limitations. In his

foreword to Bonaparte's book, Freud himself points out that

"investigations such as this do not claim to explain

creati ve genius" (xi). 9 Bonaparte's psychobiographical

reading which overlooks the text is hardly literary

criticism. Poe could have been present as a three-year-old

when his actress mother died, and could have been

traumatized as he watched her body being wasted by disease.

But even if this did happen, Bonaparte's interpretation is

heavily based upon an event which took place outside of the

text. The text itself is ignored in favor of a search for

the psychological cause of the author's symptomatic

writings, and her speculative clinical diagnosis is

substituted for criticism.~

II

psychoanalytic critics writing on Poe before 1970

continue to perform conventional Freudian readings. Like

Bonaparte, most psychoanalytically-oriented Poe critics are

interested primarily in the way in which the writer's

unconscious is manifested in his work. l1 We can define

classical psychoanalytic criticism as an author-centered

 23

psychobiographical criticism, which is often accused of a

relentless pursuit of Oedipal or sexual symbolism in

literary texts and of a crude application of Freud's

psychoanalytic theory. While traditional psychobiography is

not an outdated mode of investigation (it is published even

today), it has been roundly criticized by literary critics

influenced by post-structuralism. Since the late 1960s, a

radical banishment of author has been advocated by post-

structuralists and deconstructionists. In his early

influential work Of Grammatology (1967), Derrida argues that

critical reading should be grounded in "producing" the text,

rather than "doubling" or reproducing its author's

intentions (158).12 In his Blindness and Insight (1983),

Paul de Man also maintains that "considerations of the

actual and historical existence of writers are a waste of

time from a critical viewpoint" (35). Like Derrida who

asserts that "there is nothing outside the text" ("il n'y a

pas de hors-texte") , Roland Barthes boldly proclaims that

the author is dead in his seminal essays, "The Death of the

Author" (1968) and "From Work to Text" (1971). From Wimsatt

and Beardsley's critique of the "intentional fallacy" and

Barthes's obituary of the author, to the more cautious, more

historical investigation of Foucault, this branch of

literary theory and practice has grown increasingly

 24

suspicious of authorial centering. Post-structuralist

critics place great emphasis upon the text, its plurality,

and its operations, rather than on the author. Deeply

influenced by this "de-authorization" in literary criticism,

these critics generally regard psychobiography as narrow,

reductive, irrelevant, and vulgar. In spite of its

popularity and achievements, many scholars and critics see

the relevance of this kind of psychoanalytic approach to

Poe's writings as quite "limited" and "rigid."

In the seventies, however, Lacan's "Seminar on 'The

Purloined Letter,'" first published in French in 1956 and

translated into English in 1972, revived among many critics

the sense of a special relevance of psychoanalytic criticism

to Poe studies. The French psychoanalyst is believed to

initiate a new phase for a psychoanalytic criticism that

would no longer be concerned with "reductive" readings of

literary texts as symptoms or case histories of their

authors' neuroses. Lacan, in his 1977 paper "Desire and the

Interpretation of Desire in Hamler," explicitly dismisses

psychobiographical criticism as "hogwash" (20). Broadly

speaking, Lacan's project is to reread Freud's major

writings from the perspective of (Post-)structuralist

theory, placing central emphasis on the function of language

in psychoanalysis. As has often been recognized, Freud's

 25

psychoanalytic terminology is largely derived from the

biology, economics, and thermodynamic physics of the late

nineteenth century. Although Freud and Saussure were exact

contemporaries, Freud was unaware of the nascent field of

modern linguistics which would become the pilot science of

structuralism. l l As Lacan simply puts it, structural

linguistics appeared too late for Freud to make use of it:

"'Geneva 1910' and 'Petrograd 1920' suffice to explain why

Freud lacked this particular tool" ("Subversion of the

Subject" 298).

While Freud's major sources of scientific models upon

which to base his psychoanalytic theories were limited to

nineteenth-century biology and physics, Lacan, as Muller and

Richardson point out, has another scientific tool "for

understanding the psyche: the science of linguistics -- a

science that explores the structures discernible in the one

phenomenon that is coextensive with man himself, i.e., human

language" (Lacan and Language 10). Inspired by Levi-

Strauss, Lacan applies structural linguistics to Freudian

psychoanalysis to provide it with a scientific rigor and

framework. Hence, Lacanian psychoanalysis has often been

regarded as "structural psychoanalysis," and it attempts to

make psychoanalysis s~rve the study of the text and rhetoric

rather than the author's un,o:onscious desires and symptomatic

 26

behaviors. Rejecting the traditional notion of the author

as the final guarantor of the unconscious meaning of the

text, this textualized psychoanalytic criticism offers a

psychoanalytic alternative to the previous exclusively

biographical approach and tends to eliminate almost all

reference to the biographical or extra-textual dimension.

In his "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter, '" Lacan uses

Poe's story as a text for exemplifying his theory of the

constitutive nature of the Symbolic order in relation to the

subject. In Lacan's reading, the basic structure of Poe's

story is founded on the compulsive repetition of a

triangular situation involving each time three agents: the

first scene, what he calls the "primal scene," in the royal

boudoir of the exalted personage, with the king, the queen,

and the minister; the second scene, the alleged repetition

of this primal scene in the minister's apartment, with the

police, the minister, and Dupin. Lacan traces the effect of

the letter: stolen from the Queen; hidden by the Minister;

retrieved by Dupin. Lacan presents the letter which passes

through various hands as a metaphor for the Signifier that

circulates among various subjects, assigning a peculiar

position to whoever is possessed by it, and argues that

displacement of the signifier "determines" subjects in their

actions:
 27

[W]hat Freud discovered and rediscovers with a

perpetually increasing sense of shock . • • is
that the displacement of the signifier
determines the subjects in their acts, in their
destiny, in their refusals, in their blindness,
in their end and in their fate, their innate
gifts and social acquisitions notwithstanding,
without regard for character or sex, and that,
willingly or not, everything that might be
considered the stuff of psychology, kit and
caboodle, will follow the path of the
signifier. u

For Lacan, the purloined letter functions as a "pure

signifier" because it is completely disconnected from its

signified. We know nothing of the letter's message; the

content of the letter is never revealed in the story. What

is important to Lacan is not the letter's meaning, but its

materiality which involves all subjects in the permutations

of the signifying chain. Lacan states: "[T]he tale leaves

us in virtually total ignorance of the sender, no less than

of the contents, of the letter. But all this tells us

nothing of the message it conveys. Love letter or

conspiratorial letter, letter of betrayal or letter of

mission, letter of summons or letter of distress" (Purloined

Poe 41-2). Contrasting Bonaparte's work on POe to Lacan's,

Felman elaborates the difference between them in terms of

the meaning of the letter:

If the purloined letter can be said to be a

sign of the unconscious, for Marie Bonaparte
the analyst's task is to uncover the letter's
content, which she believes . . • to be hidden
 28

somewhere in the real, in some secret

biographical depth. For Lacan • • • the
analyst's task is not to read the letter's
hidden referential content, but • • • to
analyze the paradoxically invisible symbolic
evidence of its displacement, its structural
insistence, in a signifying chain.
(Jacques Lacan 44)

As opposed to Bonaparte's diagnostic reading of a sick Poe,

Lacan does not treat the literary text as a symptom of Poe's

illness. 15 In the Lacanian reading, Poe's text serves as an

allegory of the workings of the signifier in the

constitution of human subjectivity.

Lacan's seminar on "The Purloined Letter" has become

one of the most quoted and debated psychoanalytic studies of

literature and has provoked a reaction from the French

philosopher Jacques Derrida. In his "The Purveyor of Truth"

(1975), Derrida attacks Lacan's reading of Poe with the

charge of "phallogocentric transcendentalism." Despite

Lacan's protestations of anti-transcendentalism, Derrida

argues that the Lacanian phallus operates as a

transcendental signifier, as an ideal guarantor of meaning.

In Derrida's view, the Lacanian phallus reintroduces the

traditional Western metaphysical belief in truth and

presence. Stuart Schneiderman, in his article "Fictions"

contained in Lacan and the Subject of Language (1991),

provides a helpful summary of Derrida's extensive critiques

of Lacan: "the overvaluation of the Oedipus complex, the

 29

overestimation of the phallus, overintellectualizing, being

too interested in philosophy, failing to take into account

the pre-oedipal fears of corporal fragmentation, failing to

give place and Lmportance to the ego" (154). Even though

all of Derrida's criticisms of Lacan may be valid, it is

hard to deny that Lacan has been the major influence in the

emergence of a new version of the psychoanalytic approach to

literature.

The controversy between Lacan and Derrida has inspired

other famous theorists and Poe specialists to engage in the

intense debate and has elevated Poe to prominence among

contemporary literary critics. Lacanian psychoanalysis has

proved its relevance in the reading of Poe's text, and the

continued relevance of psychoanalytic study of Poe is most

evident in the recent publication of The Purlo~ned Poe:

Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalyt~c Reading (1988), edited by

John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, a substantial

volume collecting some of the most interesting and

influential essays on the debate. While traditional

psychoanalytic critics have been preoccupied with Poe's

pathological trends in his life and work, these recent

critics are mainly interested in Poe's "undecidable" texts

which tend to resist fixed truth and knowledge. As Jack G.

Voller has pointed out, Poe was "never concerned to offer or

 30

even seek an answer"; his work is primarily concerned with

II a world of uncertainty" (The Supernatural Sublime 224).

Indeed, most of Poe's fictional characters live in a strange

world which endlessly blurs and breaks down the familiar

boundaries between dream and reality, self and other, life

and death, sanity and insanity, rational and irrational,

conscious and unconscious, and natural and supernatural. In

this Poe-esque uncanny world, meaning is always radically

indeterminate. Many of Poe's protagonists ask themselves

repeatedly, "What was it?" They are struggling to name,

define, describe, and analyze something that cannot be

adequately represented. As Lacan might say, there is only

"an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier"

(liThe Agency of the Letter" 154) -- meaning is always

slipping away and can never be pinned down.

Poe's texts, which are often concerned with the

impossibility or failure of representation, constantly

undermine the traditional Cartesian notion of rational,

autonomous human subjectivity: Poe's texts are full of

unstable, alienated subjects who are never allowed to know

or understand their experience and existence with assurance.

That Poe's text disrupts the illusion of autonomous

subjectivity accords well with Lacan's subversive concept of

decentered subjectivity. Therefore, it is not surprising

 31

that Poe should have become an object of specific interest

to contemporary post-structural psychoanalytic critics.

Lacanian textual psychoanalysis, which departs from

classical Freudian psychobiography in its central focus on

the text and which problematizes the Cartesian view of the

unified, self-conscious subject, can provide valuable

insights into Poe's richly psychological texts.

III

In this chapter, I have summarized Lacan's reading of

Poe's Dupin story in comparison to Bonaparte's typical

Freudian interpretation in order to understand Lacan's

originality and innovation better. Lacanian textual

psychoanalysis, without doubt, has paved the way for a whole

new psychoanalytic reading practice, rehabilitating

psychoanalysis as a serious mode of literary criticism. As

Elizabeth wright remarks:

The traditional Freudian psychoanalytic

approaches to literature . . . have centered on
the analysis of the personal psyche, whether
this was the author's, the character's, the
reader's, or a combination of these. The new
psychoanalytic structural approach centers on
the workings of the text as psyche, based on
the theory that the unconscious is structured
like a language. (114)

My reading of Poe's work in the following chapters of the

dissertation is fundamentally Lacanian. However, I will not

follow Lacan's seminar on "The Purloined Letter" as an

 32

exemplary interpretive model. As Jacques-Alain Miller

emphasizes, Lacan is first and foremost a psychoanalyst, not

a literary critic: "What did Levi-Strauss, Barthes,

Foucault, and Oerrida do for a living? They taught and they

wrote. They gave classes. They were intellectuals. They

were teachers. They were university people. What did Lacan

do during his lifetime? There is one answer. He saw

patients.,,16 Lacan is certainly not interested in Poe the

writer but in his tale as a text for exemplifying his

psychoanalytic theories. As Oerrida observes, Lacan's

reading, to some extent, simply appropriates a literary text

for the illustration of his theory. Poe's text exists for

the purpose of manifesting a Lacanian psychoanalytic truth,

namely, "it is the symbolic order which is constitutive for

the subject" (Purloined Poe 29). Thus, for Oerrida, Lacan's

seminar on Poe's "Purloined Letter" is not far removed from

a form of applied psychoanalytic criticism represented by

Bonaparte's earlier Freudian reading of Poe:

From the beginning we recognize the classical

landscape of applied psychoanalysis. It is
applied in this case to literature. • • •
Poe's text is summoned up as an example. It is
an example for the sake of 'illustrating'
through a dialectical process a law and a truth
which form the proper object of the Seminar.
Literary writing occupies an illustrative
position. ("The Purveyor of Truth" 45)

Although Oerrida's evaluation of the contribution of Lacan

 33

to the psychoanalytic study of literature differs

considerably from that of the Lacanian critics,17 what is at

stake in Lacan's reading is obviously not Poe, nor his

fiction. In Derrida's view, Lacan misreads the story by

willfully ignoring the important presence and function of

the narrator, or what Derrida calls "the fourth side."

Lacan's repeated discovery of triangular structures in the

story is made possible only through the total exclusion of

the narrator. Derrida argues that "the violence of the

Seminar's framing, the cutting off of the narrated figure

from a fourth side to leave merely triangles evades a

certain perhaps Oedipal, difficulty which makes itself felt

in the scene of writing" ("The Purveyor of Truth" 54).

Since Lacan's interpretation of Poe is less concerned with a

literary analysis than with a highly theoretical

psychoanalytic analysis, Derrida's indictment of Lacan for

ignoring the story's literary context is quite convincing.

Lacan's reading, as Barbara Johnson has pointed out, is

mainly preoccupied with "the ac't of analysis of 'the ac't of

analysis" (457).

Therefore, we can hardly call Lacan's reading of "The

Purloined Letter" a literary interpretation. While Lacan's

method of interpretation differs radically from Bonaparte's,

neither Bonaparte's study nor Lacan's seminar provides a

 34

literary interpretation of Poe. Lacan fails to "frame" the

story properly by neglecting its literary context. In the

following chapters, I will try to consider the

"literariness" of Poe's text through a solid, thematic close

reading of each text in question. Although the emphasis

will lie primarily on the text itself, my Lacanian reading

of Poe will not exclude relevant historical and biographical

materials that can help us to understand Poe's specific work

-- I will discuss the helpful extra-textual materials in my

endnotes. I I
 35

ROTI:S

1. Relying on the often inaccurate biographical information,

early critics and psychologists seek to find out the
pathological cause of Poe's aberrant personality and
diseased fantasies. They variously diagnose Poe's symptoms
as impotent, syphilitic, epileptic, necrophiliac, and manic-
depressive. For example, In Edgar A. Poe: A Psychopat;hic
St;udy (1923), John W. Robertson interprets Poe's tragic life
in terms of a "bad heredity." According to Robertson, Poe
inherited a nervous temperament and dipsomania. Disagreeing
with the French critic Emile Lauvriere who equates Poe's
dipsomania with insanity, Robertson argues that "dipsomania
is not a term synonymous with insanity; neither by heredity
nor directly does it bear a closer relation to mental
diseases than do the other neuroses. . . . Dipsomania has,
as a predisposing factor, not insanity, but a direct
alcoholic inheritance" (154). For Robertson, Poe was
without doubt an innocent victim of dipsomania. In Genius
and Disast;er: St;udies in Drugs and Genius (1925), Jeanette
Marks uses Poe's stories as proof of a mental condition
brought on by the use of drugs. For instance, Marks claims
that "every paragraph of The Fall of t;he Bouse of Usher
writes itself down as drug work, not alone in its study of
the morbid in character, but also in other ways. Take, for
example, the somatic distress due to opium, the tortured
sensitiveness to light, to odors and to sound. All this
preoccupation with disease is characteristic of narcotized
mind" (21). Marks attributes Poe's insanity to the brain
degeneration brought about by opiate abuse.
Joseph Wood Krutch's Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius
(1926) develops an early influential definition of Poe's
pathological condition: a sexual disorder. Krutch
speculates that Poe suffered from sexual impotence connected
to the traumatic loss of his mother: "Poe could not love in
the normal fashion and the reason lay, or at least seemed to
him to lie, in the death of some woman upon whom his desire
has irrecoverably fixed itself" (62). Poe hence created an
abnormal fictional world in order to compensate for his
incapacity to have normal sexual relations brought about by
a fixation on the dead mother. Krutch writes that "perhaps
the key to his morbidity may be found in a negative
characteristic of his writings . . . their complete
sexlessness" (84). Like other earliest psychoanalysts,
Krutch's interpretation is predicated on the assumption of a
continuity between Poe and his work:
If we compare the typical stories already
 36

described with the story of Poe's own life it

is impossible not to be struck with the
parallel which they afford. The typical hero,
oppressed with a strange melancholy and seeking
relief in fantastic studies and speculation, is
plainly Poe himself. The heroines with the
unearthly beauty and the unearthly purity which
seem to set them apart from the women of flesh
and blood are . • • the ideal of morbidly
sexless beauty. (85)

Ironically, although the title of Krutch's book is a study

in genius, it is nothing other than a study in authorial
madness. For Krutch, there can be no doubt that Poe's work
is totally a product of his neurotic morbidity. In Krutch's
reading or diagnosis, Poe's writing is irrevocably reduced
to "an abnormal condition of the nerves" (234). With regard
to Poe's tales of ratiocination, Krutch's explanation is
that his fascination with logic and reasoning was an attempt
to stop himself going insane: "As the realization that he
was as a matter of fact the victim of irrational and
uncontrollable emotions gradually forced itself upon him, he
countered this realization with the pretense that he was, on
the contrary, abnormally clear in his mental processes . . .
Poe invented the detective story in order that he might
not go mad" (118).

2. Influenced by Lacanian psychoanalytic practice, Shoshana

Felman advocates a different kind of psychoanalytic approach
to literature in her introductory essay ("To Open the
Question") to the influential volume Literature and
Psychoanalysis (1977). As Felman points out, "it is usually
felt that psychoanalysis has much or all to teach us about
literature, whereas literature has little or nothing to
teach us about psychoanalysis" (7). Felman questions and
problematizes the classic power relationship which assumes
the authority of psychoanalysis over literature, by
unmasking "the apparently neutral connective word, the
misleadingly innocent, colorless, meaningless copulative
conjunction: and, in the title: 'Literature and
Psychoanalysis'" (5). According to her, the relation of the
two discourses in the past has been like Hegel's master-
slave relation in which psychoanalysis has been the
mastering system of knowledge, literature the passive
object. However, Felman is not concerned with reversing the
usual priority of psychoanalytic discourse over literary,
but rather with deconstructing the whole relationship. What
 37

she proposes is a "real exchange" or "a real dialogue"

between literature and psychoanalysis, "as between two
different bodies of language and between two different modes
of knowledge" (6).
Felman argues convincingly that the traditional notion
of "application" has to give way to one of "implication."
Instead of merely applying to the literary text a superior
critical knowledge, the interpreter should explore the ways
in which the two "implicate" each other: "the interpreter's
role would here be, not to apply to the text an acquired
science, a preconceived knowledge, but to act as a go-
between, to generate implications between literature and
psychoanalysis -- to explore, bring to light and articulate
the various (indirect) ways in which the two domains do
indeed implicate each other, each one finding itself
enlightened, informed, but also affected, displaced, by the
other" (9). Felman's reassessment of the relationship
between literature and psychoanalysis, her emphasis on
"interimplication," has been extraordinarily significant,
exerting a great influence on psychoanalytic literary
criticism in the 1980s and 1990s.

3. Poe was born in Boston in 1809; his father, David Poe,

deserted the family two years later, and his actress mother
Elizabeth Arnold died of consumption a year after that. Poe
was brought up by foster-parents, and he was neither legally
adopted nor left any money by his foster-father John Allan.
The young Poe fell out with his adoptive father when the
latter had to pay Poe's gambling debts. He married his
cousin Virginia when he was twenty-six and she was half his
age. virginia died of tuberculosis ten years later, and Poe
himself died at the age of forty, after a life of poverty,
drinking, debts, and drugs.

4. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams in The

Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. and trans. by James
Strachey et ale (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), vol. 4,
p. 160. Hereafter this source is noted parenthetically in my
paper as "SE," followed by volume and page numbers.

5. Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, SE 16:

376.

6. Bonaparte writes: "Ever since he was three, in fact, Poe

had been doomed by fate to live in constant mourning. A
fixation on a dead mother was to bar him forever from
 38

earthly love, and make him shun health and vitality in his
loved ones. • . • Thus, through his eternal fidelity to the
dead mother, Poe, to all intents, became necrophilist. But
. . . Poe's necrophilia had undergone drastic repression.
Had it been unrepressed, Poe would no doubt have been a
criminal" (83).

7. Bonaparte goes on to suggest that even material things

like objects, buildings, and landscapes are displaced forms
of the mourned mother: rooms, horses, chimneys, ships,
islands, the moon, the earth, and the ocean. For example,
in her analysis of The Fall of rhe Bouse of Usher, Bonaparte
argues that both Madeline and the Usher mansion("Lady
Madeline's double") are mother symbols to "Poe-Usher":
"There, the 'Live-in-Death' Mother is represented not only
by Madeline's human form but as a building; a house whose
walls, whose atmosphere, breathe putrefaction. To effect
this gross displacement, Poe employs one of man's universal
symbols; that which represents a woman as a building" (249,
643) •

8. Bonaparte writes: "[M]arie Roget . • . clearly reveals

characteristics of Virginia. . • • Again, we find that
Marie's corpse even shows signs of the hemoptyses of
virginia for, when the body is taken from the Seine, the
face is seen to be 'suffused with dark blood, some of which
issued from the mouth'" (450).

9. In his 1970 article "Psychoanalysis and Edgar Allan Poe,"

the French Poe scholar, Roger Forclaz, also argues that "it
is obviously impossible to account for the creative activity
of an artist solely by reference to sexuality and the
Oedipus complex. . . . Marie Bonaparte is unable, in fact,
to explain the nature of genius and the mechanism of
creative activity" (188).

10. In The Unspoken Morive (1973), Morton Kaplan and Robert

Kloss put it succinctly: "Despite the multitude of valid and
valuable insights Mme. Bonaparte provides, despite her
excellent chapter on the psychic mechanisms governing the
elaboration of literary works, despite her success in the
monumental task of integrating the life and the works, she
has still produced, not a literary explication, but rather a
clinically detailed case study of a highly-neurotic man who
happened to be a writer" (193). In Jacques Lacan and rhe
Advenrure of Insighr (1987), Felman also argues that
Bonaparte's reading suffers from a serious "blind
 39

nondifferentiation or confusion of the poetic and the

psychotic" (36). Felman maintains: "Eager to point out the
resemblances between psychoanalysis and literature,
Bonaparte, like most psychoanalytic critics, is totally
unaware of the differences between the two: unaware that the
differences are as important and as significant for
understanding the meeting ground as are the resemblances"
(36) •

11. Philip Lindsay's critical method in The Baunred Han: A

Porrrair of Edgar Allan Poe (1953) is, again,
psychobiographical. The key to understanding Poe's work is
primarily the author himself: "His life, almost from birth,
might well have been his own creation, following a pattern
similar to one of his tales, macabre and frenzied and ending
on a note of pointless tragedy. The story, William Wilson,
was largely autobiographical, not only in external details,
but in its emotional content. Here, Poe opened his heart
and confessed that his own pitiless destroyer was himself"
(11). In Edgar A. Poe: The Inner Parrern (1960), David M.
Rein also fails to discriminate between the author and his
characters. For instance, Rein sees Poe's tale "The
Assignation," originally titled "The Visionary," as a
fictional enactment of the writer's Oedipal drama. Rein
identifies Poe with the protagonist, who rescues the
Marchesa's child from drowning in the canal in Venice. In
Rein's reading, the Marchesa Aphrodite is a figure for
Elizabeth Poe or Mrs. Allan; the indifferent Mentoni
represents David Poe or Mr. Allan.
More recently, Daniel Hoffman's Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe,
Poe, Poe, Poe (1972) also follows Bonaparte's method of
psychobiographical interpretation, frequently equating the
author with his fictional characters. For example, in his
discussion of "Berenice" and "Ligeia," Hoffman takes Poe's
supposed impotence as a fact and claims that Poe's sexual
disorder is well represented in his male narrators'
fetishistic fixations on the part-object:
Consider in what ways mouth and eye resemble each
other. Each is an orifice in the body, surrounded
by lips or lids which seem to open and close by a
will of their own. Each is lubricated with a
fluid of its own origin, and each leads inward --
toward the stomach, toward the brain, toward the
mysterious interior of the living creature. The
thought may occur which other orifice of the body
-- of the female body -- these two, in the
respects just mentioned, might be conceived to
 40

resemble. • • • By shifting the object of

fascination from the unmentionable and terrifying
vagina to the mouth or the eye • • • Poe is able
to pursue, in masquerade and charade, the object,
and the consequences, of his obsessional love-
attachment. (234-6)

12. In Of Grammatology, Derrida writes: "[T]he writer writes

in a language and in a logic whose proper systems, laws, and
life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely.
He uses them only by letting himself . . • be governed by
the system. And the reading must always aim at a certain
relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he
commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the
language that he uses. This relationship is not a certain
quantitative distribution of shadow and light, of weakness
or of force, but a signifying structure that critical
reading should produce" (158).

13. However, Freud and Saussure had one important thing in

common: they consider themselves to be scientists. Freud
believed that he had put psychoanalysis on a scientific
ground; Saussure thought he had provided a scientific basis
for the study of signs.

14. Lacan' s "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'" in The

Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading,
eds. John Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1988), pp. 43-4. Hereafter this text is noted
parenthetically in my study as "Purloined Poe," followed by
page number.

15. It is true that both Bonaparte and Lacan use Poe's text
to illustrate Freud's psychoanalytic theory. Lacan, like
Bonaparte, also accepts the basic Oedipal triangular
structure implicit in the story. However, another crucial
difference between the two analysts is that Lacan leaves Poe
the author outside his frame of reference. Bonaparte, by
contrast, sees the minister and the king as representations
of the paternal figures in Poe's childhood (such as David
Poe, John Allan, and Elizabeth's unknown lover), whereas
Dupin is Poe-the-son. Bonaparte tries to explain the
struggle between Dupin and the minister in terms of the
"Oedipal struggle between father and son, though on an
archaic, pregenital, and phallic level, to seize possession,
not of the mother herself, but of a part: namely, her penis"
(483). For Bonaparte, the story, then, is really about a
 41

father and son's Oedipal struggle over the mother's penis.

16. Jacques-Alain Miller, "Bow Psychoanalysis Cures

According to Lacan." Newsletter of the Freudian Field 1
(1987), p. 6.

17. By contrast, for example, in Jacques Lacan and the

Adventure of Insi~7ht, Felman asserts that "Lacan' s approach
no longer falls into the category of what has been called
'applied psychoanalysis'" (48).

18. My reading of a particular text of Poe will be discussed

within the broader context of his other writings. Since a
literary text cannot transcend its history of critical
reception, I will also try to take into account the
important previous Poe scholarship that is inextricably
embedded in the text.
 CHAPTER TWO

THE .. IMAGIRARY" WILSON

It is wrong to equate [Lacan's] Imaginary with imagination.

In a narrow and technical sense the Imaginary order
is the domain of the Imago and relationship interaction.
Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and
the Philosophy of psychoanalysis

The Freudian discovery has exactly the same implication of

decentring as that brought about by the Copernican
discovery. It is quite well expressed by Rimbaud's fleeting
formula poets, as is well known, don't know what they're
saying, yet they still manage to say things before anyone
else -- Je est un autre. -- Lacan, The Seminar II

In other words, all human, anthropogenetic Desire --the

Desire that generates Self-Consciousness, the human reality
-- is, finally, a function of the desire for "recognition."
Therefore, to speak of the "origin" of Self-
Consciousness is necessarily to speak of a fight to the
death for "recognition." -- Kojeve, Introduction to the
Reading of Hegel

It has become a critical commonplace to assume that

Poe's short story "William Wilson"(1839) is an allegorical

drama about a man's struggle with his own conscience or

superego. l At Dr. Bransby's academy, the first person

narrator, William Wilson, first meets a boy who is his

manifest double. They have the same name, the same

birthday, the same height, the same features, and similar

voices, and equal strengths. They wear the same clothes,

42
 43

and they also share the same dates of admission to and

removal from the school. Wherever he goes, the narrator is

pursued by the second Wilson, who always appears at every

critical moment to thwart or expose the first Wilson's

increasingly evil deeds. William Wilson is repeatedly

impelled to ask himself about his namesake: "Who and what

was this Wilson? -- and whence came he? -- and what were his

purposes?" (439). Yet, Wilson is unable to answer these

questions to his satisfaction.

In the discussion that follows, I will explore the

ambiguous and perplexing relationship that exists between

the two Wilsons in terms of the Lacanian theory of the

Imaginary and some of its closely related ideas, such as the

mirror stage, doubling, narcissism, ("primary" and

"secondary") identification, aggressivity, and the birth of

the paranoid ego. Although Poe's "William Wilson" has been

subjected to various critical approaches, ranging from

biographical, philosophical, and psychological to the recent

historical criticism, it has not yet been thoroughly

discussed in the light of Lacanian psychoanalysis. 2 In

contrast to the earlier critical readings which tend to see

the story as a simple, transparent parable about human

conscience, my Lacanian interpretation will provide a more

sophisticated psychoanalytic account of the most conspicuous

 44

feature of the story, that is, the rivalrous structure

inherent in the dyadic, Lacanian Imaginary relationship

between William Wilson and his counterpart. Using the

Lacanian concept of "foreclosure," I will also attempt to

approach some of the otherwise hard-to-explain elements of

the story: What, for example, is the cause of the first

Wilson's horrible Imaginary entrapment? What is the nature

and significance of his enigmatic "unpardonable crime"? At

the same time, my reading will demonstrate that Poe's

"William Wilson" can help us to grasp the psychotic

mechanism of Lacanian foreclosure and the significant

function of the destructive "aggressivity" (which is first

produced in response to the specular imago in the mirror

stage) and its intricate structural relationship with the

Oedipus complex.

In recent decades, Poe's previously neglected work

"William Wilson" has received a great deal of critical

attention for its psychological profundity. Much of the

scholarship published about "William Wilson" has inevitably

focused on the question of the identity of the second

Wilson, and most literary critics have identified the second

Wilson with the first Wilson's moral conscience. For

example, in The French Face of Edgar Allan Poe (1957),

 45

Patrick F. Quinn provides a standard interpretation:

In the expressly psychological literature which

deals with the phenomenon of the Doppelganger,
"William Wilson" has an important place. • • .
"William Wilson" is a first-person account of a
man's struggle with, evasions of, and final
disastrous victory over, his own conscience,
the spectre in his path. (221)

As Jonathan Elmer observes, in his recent work Reading ar

rhe Social Limir: Affecr, Mass Culrure, and Edgar Allan Poe

(1995), it seems to be "an unavoidable and entirely

uncontroversial thesis" that Poe's story is "a psychological

drama about the harassments of conscience" (71).3 For

Freudian or Freudian-influenced critics, the second Wilson

is without doubt representative of the superego figure.

According to Marie Bonaparte, the second Wilson, which is "a

John Allan introjected, II. represents the Freudian superego,

and the protagonist-Poe represents the id-dominated ego

(543, 554). In A Psychoanalyric Srudy of rhe Double in

Literarure (1970), Robert Rogers repeats Bonaparte's

reading, saying that "one of the most representative

superego doubles appears in Poe's 'William Wilson.' Here

the narrator emphasizes his own evil proclivities in

contrast to the good advice and cautionary whispers of his

'guardian angel' double, who resembles him in name, feature,

age, and so forth" (25). Aside from the Freudian

interpretative tradition, some critics have employed Jungian

 46

psychoanalytic terminology in reading the story. In ~he

Power of Blackness (1958), for example, Harry Levin claims

that Poe is not here concerned with "a psychological case of

split personality, like that of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,"

but rather with "the mythical archetype known as the

Doppelganger, a spiritual emanation of the self as it ought

to be" (143). In" 'William Wilson': The Double as Primal

Self" (1976), Eric W. Carlson sees the second Wilson as a

Jungian "shadow self" (37). More recently, in his 1983

article "The Struggle of the Wills in Poe's 'William

Wilson'," Valentine C. Hubbs also argues that "the key to

the understanding of Wilson's double lies in the Jungian

concept of the shadow" (74).

Then, who and what is this second Wilson? Is it the

narrator's moral conscience? Freudian superego? or Jungian

archetypal shadow? From a Lacanian perspective, the second

Wilson can be seen as the first Wilson's Imaginary double of

the self or specular imago reflected in the mirror.

According to Lacan, there are three interacting

heterogeneous orders -- the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the

Real. In the Lacanian tripartite scheme, the three orders

or registers are closely interlinked, each order sharing

some common property with the other two. As Malcolm Bowie

puts it, each of Lacan's three orders can be "better thought

 47

of as a shifting gravitational centre for his arguments than

as a stable concept; at any moment each may be implicated in

the redefinition of the others" (Freud, Prouse, and Lacan

115). Lacan's Imaginary, introduced in his 1936 article

"The Looking-glass Phase," was the first of the three

primary psychical orders to be developed. 5 The Imaginary

order refers to the dimension of experience in which the

phenomena of fantasy, projection, identification, and

libidinal narcissism take place. As the term "Imaginary"

itself suggests, it is also closely associated with such

ideas as lure, trap, deception, illusion, seduction,

fascination, and captivation. In his 1972 article "Jacques

Lacan's Structuralism: Libido as Language," Anthony Wilden

succinctly defines the concept of the Imaginary: "perhaps

Lacan's greatest contribution to psychological and social

theory is his theory of the 'Imaginary order' in human

relationship. The Imaginary is not in the least imaginary;

it is the realm of images, doubles, mirrors, and

identifications with particular Others" (85). The Imaginary

order, or what Lacan calls "the libidinal order in which the

ego is inscribed," is precipitated in the famous mirror

stage, wherein the child makes a primordial identification

with its own specular image reflected back in the mirror

("A, m, a, S" 326).

 48

Lacan first propounded the concept of the mirror stage

to the Fourteenth International Psychoanalytical Congress in

Marienbad in 1936.' That 1936 paper, "The Looking-glass

Phase," was never published. A revised later version, "The

Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as

Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience," was delivered at the

Sixteenth International Congress of psychoanalysis in Zurich

and published in 1949. Together with "Aggressivity in

psychoanalysis" (1948) and "Some Reflections on the Ego"

(1951), Lacan's celebrated paper "The Mirror Stage" provides

his own formulations on the birth of the Ho~ (the ego) in

the mirror phase. The mirror stage, which is grounded in

images and illusions, represents the prototypical experience

of the Imaginary order. In "The Concept of Analysis"

(1954), Lacan maintains that "the imaginary is reduced,

specialized, centered on the specular image, which creates

both impasses and the function of the imaginary relation.

The image of the ego simply because it is an image, the

ego is ideal ego -- sums up the entire imaginary relation in

man" (282).

According to Lacan, the human baby, generally

between the age of six and eighteen months, begins to

recognize its own specular image in the mirror with great

pleasure and delight:

 49

Unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up, and

held tightly as he is by some support, human or
artificial • • • he nevertheless overcomes, in
a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions
of his support and, fixing his attitude in a
slightly leaning-forward position, in order to
hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous
aspect of the image. ("Mirror" 1-2)

This phenomenon, Lacan claims, is grounded in a "real

spec.i.f.i.c prematuri ty of b.i.rth in man" or "anatomical

incompleteness" of the human baby ("Mirror" 4). Here,

Lacan's idea of the "prematurity" is also present in Freud's

account of the biological incompleteness of human birth. In

Inh.i.bit.i.ons, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926), Freud observes

that "the biological factor is the long period of time

during which the youn~ of the human species is in a

condition of helplessness and dependence. Its intra-uterine

existence seems to be short in comparison with that of most

animals, and it is sent into the world in a less fin.i.shed

st;ate" (SE 20: 154; my emphasis). Although most Lacanian

commentators emphasize the Freudian background and

influence, Lacan's theory of the neonatal period of the

infant seems to be more indebted to Melanie Klein's work.

In her 1946 paper "Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms," Klein

stresses the early life of the infant's lack of cohesiveness

and "tendency toward disintegration" or "falling into bits"

(4). Klein refers to this phase of infantile life as "the

paranoid-schizoid position" or "the depressive position,"

 50

because the anxiety that arises from this phase "is

predominantly experienced as fear of persecution" (22).

Klein's depressive position corresponds to Lacan's theory of

aggressivity, which I will discuss later in this chapter.

Although it still lacks motor coordination, the baby

can overcome this uneasiness, or what Lacan calls

"primordial Discord," by identifying with his own mirror

image which appears as unified whole.' The specular image,

representing "the Ideal-I," lures and captivates the child

("Mirror" 2). Whereas before the mirror stage the baby

experienced itself as divided and fragmented, or as a "corps

morcele" (a "body in bits and pieces"), it now comes to

perceive itself as a Gestalt, a unified, integrated

totality. In his 1951 paper "Some reflections on the Ego,"

Lacan argues:

We cannot fail to appreciate the affective

value which the gestalt of the vision of the
whole body-image may assume when we consider
the fact that it appears against a background
of organic disturbance and discord, in which
all the indications are that we should seek the
origins of the image of the . . . corps
morcele. (15)

According to Lacan, the joyful assumption of a specular

image on the part of the child prefigures "the symbolic

matrix in which the I [je or the speaking subject] is

precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified

in the dialectic of identification with the other, and

 51

before language restores to it, in the universal, its

function as subject" ("Mirror" 2). For Lacan, one of the

most significant aspects of the mirror stage is the "primary

identification" between the child and the reflected image:

"We have only to understand the mirror stage as an

identification . namely, the transformation that takes

place in the subject when he assumes an image -- whose

predestination to this phase-effect is sufficiently

indicated by the use, in analytic theory, of the ancient

term imago" ("Mirror" 2). The ego, in Lacan's view, is

essentially an Imaginary construction' formed and developed

by identification with the specular image which represents

"an ideal unity, a salutary imago" ("Aggressivity" 19). The

mirror stage, Lacan says, is a particular case which

demonstrates how the imago, or the image of one's own body,

functions in establishing "a relation between the organism

and its reality . between Innenwelt [the mental or

internal world] and Umwelt [the environment or external

world]" ("Mirror" 4).

However, for Lacan, the significance of the primary

identification between the child and the imago is not

confined to a specific moment in the development of the

child, or the mirror stage. Lacan claims that this primary

identification paves the way for all subsequent secondary

 52

identifications b!tween the self and the other ("Mirror" 2).

In other words, all intersubjective human relationships

which are generally characterized by projection and

identification are extensions of this formative mirror

stage. In 1936-49, Lacan seems to perceive the mirror stage

as one of series of developmental steps with a beginning

(six months) and an end (eighteen months). But, from the

early 1950s onwards, Lacan no longer sees it simply as a

moment in the life of the human subject, but regards it as

the paradigm of the Imaginary order. In "Some Reflections

on the Ego" (1951), Lacan describes the mirror stage as "a

phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In the first

place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive

turning-point in the mental development of the child. In

the second place, it typifies an essential libidinal

relationship with the body-image" (14). Later, in his 1954

lecture "The Topic of the Imaginary," included in The

Seminar I, Lacan further develops the concept of mirror

stage as "not simply a moment in development. It also has

an exemplary function, because it reveals some of the

subject's relations to his image, in so far as it is the

Urbild [archetypal or original] of the ego" (74). Although

many introductions to Lacan describe it in developmental

terms, the Lacanian mirror stage functions as far more than

 53

a passing moment of our lives.

In conceptualizing his theory of the Imaginary

formation of the ego, Lacan takes Freud's account of the

narcissistic structure of the ego as his major reference

point. According to Freud, the stage of narcissism occurs

when the child experiences itself, its own body, as its own

external and libidinal object. In his "Psycho-analytic

Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia"

(1911), Freud writes:

Recent investigations have directed our

attention to a stage in the development of the
libido which it passes through on the way from
auto-eroticism to object-love. This stage has
been given the name of narcissism. What
happens is this. There comes a time in the
development of the individual at which he
unifies his sexual drives (which have hitherto
been engaged in auto-erotic activities) in
order to obtain a love-object; and he begins by
taking his own body as his love-object; and
only subsequently proceeds from this to the
choice of some person other than himself.
(SE 12: 60-1)

In Freud's theory, the ego is formed at the stage of

narcissism, between the stages of auto-eroticism and object-

love. Freud, in his 1914 paper "On Narcissism: An

Introduction," links the formation of the unity of the

ego to the narcissistic stage of development which is

different from the prior stage of primordial auto-eroticism.

Freud argues that the ego does not exist from the beginning

and that for the ego to come into existence, "a new
 54

psychical action" has to take place: "we are bound to

suppose that a unity comparable to the ego cannot exist in

the individual from the start; the ego has to be developed.

The auto-erotic instincts, however, are there from the very

first; so there must be something added to auto-eroticism --

a new psychical action -- in order to bring out narcissism"

(SE 14: 76- 7 7 ) •

It is only through the stage of narcissism that the

unified ego comes into being. Although it is not clear what

exactly he meant by this new psychical action which gives

birth to the ego, Freud seems to suggest the primary

identification between the individual and his own body

image. Later, in The Ego and rhe Id (1923), Freud provides

a clue to the question: "The ego is ultimately derived from

those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus

be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the

body, besides • . • representing the superficies of the

mental apparatus" (SE 19: 26). Freud emphasizes the role of

the visual image of the human body in the constitution of

the ego. Thus, for Freud, the ego is "first and foremost a

bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself

the projection of a surface" (SE 19: 26).

Drawing upon Freud's theory of narcissism, Lacan uses

the metaphor of the mirror to develop his own account of the

 55

Imaginary, narcissistic origin of the ego. 9 Lacan maintains

that it is the specular image, the image of the other, that

first gives the child a sense of an ideal completeness,

totality, and unity. Indeed, the mirror stage is a

dialectic "drama" in which the child proceeds from

recognition of lack to an anticipation of Imaginary mastery:

The mirror seage is a drama whose internal

thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to
anticipation -- and which manufactures for the
subject, caught up in the lure of spatial
identification, the succession of phantasies
that extends from a fragmented body-image to a
form of its totality that I shall call
orthopaedic -- and, lastly, to the assumption
of the armour of an alienating identity, which
will mark with its rigid structure the
subject's entire mental development. ("Mirror"4)

However, Lacan emphasizes that the conception of unity and

mastery is actually a fiction, mirage, and illusion: "But

the important point is that [the Ideal-I] situates the

agency of the ego . . • in a fictional direction" ("Mirror"

2). Lacan thus calls the illusory unity an "alienated,

virtual unity."w In "The Imaginary Dissolution" (1956),

Lacan writes of the fundamental alienation inherent in the

mirror stage drama:

This [specular] image is functionally essential

for man, in that it provides him with the
orthopedic complement of that native
insufficiency, constitutive confusion or
disharmony, that is linked to his prematurity
at birth. He will never be completely unified
precisely because this is brought about in an
 56

alienating way, in the form of a foreign image

which institutes an original psychical function.
(95; my emphasis)

The ego, according to Lacan, is doomed to become fragmented

and alienated, as a result of the discrepancy between the

visual gestalt of one's own body and the cognitive

incompleteness of his real body. In the Lacanian scheme,

the ego is not the center of autonomous, conscious control,

but a source of illusion. As in the case of a delusional

paranoiac subject, the ego is caught up in the Imaginary

dimension, and what Lacan calls "meconnaissance" (which

corresponds roughly to the English words "misrecogniton" and

"misunderstanding") characterizes the fundamental function

of the ego, its refusal to acknowledge the illusions of

unity and autonomy.ll

II

Poe's prefiguring of just such a situation is

strikingly manifested in "William Wilson," where the

Imaginary nature of the doubling is made clear when the

narrator remarks that he recognized, or "fancied" he

discovered, something in his counterpart that brought to his

mind "dim visions of my earliest infancy -- wild, confused

and thronging memories of a time when memory herself was yet

unborn. • the belief of my having been acquainted with

the being who stood before me, at some epoch very long ago -
 57

some point of the past even infinitely remote" (436).

According to the narrator, there is something strangely

familiar about his namesake. Why does the narrator have

this uncanny feeling that the two have been long acquainted?

This has been one of the most puzzling and difficult

questions raised in the story. From a Lacanian point of

view, the second Wilson is both the narrator himself and the

alienating specular other in the mirror.

This dual, Imaginary relationship between the two

Wilsons is further reinforced in the narrator's conflicting

feelings toward his counterpart. In the story, the narrator

first depicts his double as a rather shadowy, rebellious

classmate at Dr. Bransby's school. Given his imperious

disposition, William Wilson has gained "an ascendancy" over

all of his schoolmates; there is only one rival to his

dominance over the others in both studies and sports: "My

namesake alone • . • presumed to compete with me in the

studies of the class -- in the sports and broils of the

play-ground -- to refuse implicit belief in my assertions,

and submission to my will -- indeed, to interfere with my

arbitrary dictation in any respect whatsoever" (431). The

first Wilson is even forced to acknowledge the second

Wilson's superiority: "in spite of the bravado with which in

public I made a point of treating him and his pretensions, I

 58

secretly felt that I feared h~, and could not help thinking

the equality which he maintained so easily with myself, a

proof of his true superiority" (431-2). To the narrator,

the troublesome namesake becomes a constant source of great

anxiety and embarrassment. But, at the same t~e, for all

his resentment and growing animosity toward the other

Wilson, the narrator feels a strange affinity and unwilling

affection for him. The first Wilson tells:

It may seen strange that in spite of the

continual anxiety occasioned me by the rivalry
of Wilson, and his intolerable spirit of
contradiction, I could not bring myself to hate
him altogether. • . yet a sense of pride on my
part, and a veritable dignity on his own, kept
us always upon what are called "speaking
terms," while there were many points of strong
congeniality in our tempers, operating to awake
in me a sentiment which our position alone,
perhaps, prevented from ripening into
friendship. (432-3)

The narrator's attitude toward his adversary displays a

curious ambivalence. The narrator finds it highly difficult

to describe his contradictory feelings towards his rival,

for "they formed a motley and heterogeneous admixture; --

some petulant animosity, which was not yet hatred, some

esteem, more respect, much fear, with a world of uneasy

curiosity" (433). The narrator and his double even become

"the most inseparable of companions" (433). Here, it is

interesting to note that nobody else in the school notices

all the similarities/rivalries except the narrator h~self.

 59

For the narrator, the other Wilson is at once "the namesake,

the companion, the rival" (445). This dyadic love-hate

relationship between the narrator and his counterpart

prefigures the Lacanian mirror stage experience, in which

the subject finds himself both doubled or mirrored by his

own image, and threatened by it as master-like superior

rival.

In order to understand the structural origin of the

Imaginary rivalry, it is useful here to look briefly at

Lacan's theory of aggressivity whose importance has been

neglected by most literary theorists. 12 The concept of

aggressivity is intimately linked to the mirror stage, and

without aggressivity the conflict and rivalry involved in

every Imaginary identification can hardly be explained

either structurally or theoretically. According to Lacan,

the narcissistic, Imaginary identification between the self

and the other has necessarily both erotic and aggressive

characteristics. In his 1948 article "Aggressivity in

Psychoanalysis," Lacan defines aggressivity as "t;he

correlat;ive rendency of a mode of ident;ificat;ion t;hat; we

call narcissisric, and which det;ermines t;he formal st;ruct;ure

of man's ego" (16). The narcissistic identification that

takes place in the mirror stage or mirror phase always

involves the primordial aggressivity "resulting from the

 60

child's intra-organic and relational discordance during the

first six months, when he bears the signs, neurological and

humoral, of a physiological natal prematuration"

("Aggressivity" 19). In Lac an , s view, the gap or beance

between the specular Lmage and the corporeal reality gives

rise to an aggressive tension. This aggressive tension of

"either me or the other is entirely integrated into every

kind of imaginary functioning in man" ("Imaginary

Dissolution" 95). We can see aggressivity as a phenomenon

which is inherent in the dual, Imaginary relations with the

other. Lacan argues that aggressivity as a "correlative

tension of the narcissistic structure" constitutes the

"primary identification that structures the subject as a

rival with hLmself" ("Aggressivity" 22).

Thus, the Lacanian mirror stage, in which the object of

narcissistic identification also becomes an object of hatred

and aggression, is marked by the ambivalent erotic

attachment and extreme rivalry between the ego and the

specular other, between the slave and the master. 1l In a

tale like Poe's "William Wilson," which is so saturated with

representation of Imaginary rivalry, it is hardly surprising

that aggressivity should play so prominent a role. The

first Wilson, like the Lacanian aggressive paranoiac ego in

the mirror stage, sees the "other" Wilson as his rival to

 61

fight to the death; he fears he might become "enslaved" by

what he calls "the elevated character, the majestic wisdom,

the apparent omnipresence and omnipotence of Wilson" (446).

The rivalrous Imaginary relationship between the narrator

and his double is most clearly represented in the climactic

confrontation scene which takes place at a masquerade ball

in Rome. When he attempts to seduce the young wife of the

old Duke Di Broglio, Wilson is again interrupted by his

double, whom he now calls his "arch-enemy" or "the hated and

dreaded rival" (445-6). The narrator, infuriated by his

double's constant interference in his affairs, grasps the

intruder and pushes him into a small ante-chamber adjacent

to the ballroom, where he violently stabs his antagonist.

After plunging his sword repeatedly through his hated

double, Wilson is briefly distracted by someone trying the

latch of the locked door of the chamber. When he turns back

to his dying enemy, Wilson is horrified to see his own

blood-covered reflection in a mysterious mirror:

The brief moment in which I averted my eyes had

been sufficient to produce, apparently, a material
change in the arrangements at the upper or farther
end of the room. A large mirror, -- so at first
it seemed to me in my confusion -- now stood where
none had been perceptible before; and, as I
stepped up to it in extremity of terror, mine own
image, but with features all pale and dabbled in
blood, advanced to meet me with a feeble and
tottering gait. (447-48)
 62

Indeed, as the final mirror scene confirms, the second

Wilson represents the first Wilson's own Imaginary

reflection. Since the claim that there is only one Wilson

is on its face a large claim, it seems to need

contextualization. There are in fact several problematic

scenes in the tale that suggest the double's active agency

and intervention. But, with few exceptions, most recent

criticism of "william Wilson" denies the empirical existence

of the second Wilson because Poe's elusive language

generates reasonable doubt as to whether it ever existed.

In Patrick F. Quinn's words, the second Wilson is "a mental

projection and only that" (221). Valentine C. Hubbs argues

that the double is "never seen or recognized by any of the

pupils in the boarding school and therefore has no existence

outside of the first Wilson's mind" (73). In The Art; of

Fict;ion (1992), David Lodge also writes that "obviously one

can explain the double as Wilson's hallucinatory

externalization of his own conscience or better self, and

there are several clues to this effect in the text. For

example . . . nobody but himself seems to be struck by the

phys ic al resemblance between them" ( 213 ) . Although the

dictions which are used to describe the ontological status

of the double are diverse ("mental projection,"

"conscience," or "better self"), the critical consensus

 63

suggests that the second Wilson is a purely Imaginary

construction.

III

The struggle between the narrator and the specular

double in Poe's "William Wilson" perfectly illuminates

Lacan's theory of the mirror stage, which structures the

subject himself as his own rival and accordingly provokes

the paranoid violence and aggressivity. As we have seen,

Poe's story is mainly concerned with the increasing tension

that springs up between the two Wilsons, and the destructive

Hegelian master-slave dialectic seems to be unavoidable in

this rivalrous Imaginary structure. Why then does the

protagonist have to experience this horror of Imaginary

mirroring or doubling? wilson appears to be helplessly

caught up in the Imaginary dimension. The Lacanian theory

of foreclosure may help us to understand the cause of

Wilson's all-powerful Imaginary entrapment. As I have

mentioned earlier, the realm of the Lacanian Imaginary is

not confined merely to a particular developmental moment.

Although the Imaginary springs from the mirror stage, it

further extends into the subject's subsequent

intersubjective relationships with others. u Even the

subject's successful entrance into the Symbolic order by no

means precludes the continuing function of dual Imaginary

 64

structures in the normal adult subject's psychic life. Yet,

in the case of william Wilson, his Imaginary relationship

with the specular double is closer to the abnormal psychotic

hallucination brought about by the failure of the secondary

Oedipal identification, as I shall attempt to show.

In contrast to the Kleinian object-relations theorist

who stresses the role of the mother and the preeminence of

the mother-child dyad, Lacan, following his master Freud,

reemphasizes the importance of the triadic Oedipus complex

in which the function of the father is most essential.

Lacan criticizes the Kleinians for placing too much emphasis

on the mother and neglecting the important role of the

father. For Lacan, as for Freud, the Oedipal triangle and

the resolution of the Oedipus complex are most crucial to

the subject's later psychical development. In Lacan's

formulation, the child must take over the symbolic function

of the father through the resolution or normalization of the

Oedipus complex in order to be a true subject. Without the

strong paternal image or imago, the subject will have

difficulty in internalizing the Law or Name of the Father

that allows him to enter the Symbolic order. If the figure

of the father is felt to be absent or fails to occupy the

syrr~olic position assigned to him, Lacan contends that it

results in psychological chaos and catastrophe. Lacan

 65

designates this mechanism "foreclosure" (" Verwerfung" in

German). In The Language of PsychO-Analysis (1973),

Laplanche and Pontalis succinctly describe the term as

[A] specific mechanism held to lie at the

origin of the psychotic phenomenon and to
consist in a primordial expulsion of a
fundamental 'signifier' (e.g. the phallus as
signifier of the castration complex) from the
subject's symbolic universe. Foreclosure is
deemed to be distinct from repression in two
senses: a. Foreclosed signifiers are not
integrated into the subject's unconscious. b.
They do not return 'from the inside' -- they
re-emerge, rather, in 'the Real', particularly
through the phenomenon of hallucination. (166)

To put it in another way, foreclosure refers to the complete

exclusion of a certain key signifier, namely, the Name-of-

the-Father, from the Symbolic register. In his 1956 paper

"On the Rejection of a Primordial Signifier," Lacan writes:

"What is at issue when I speak of Verwerfung? At issue is

the rejection [foreclosure] of a primordial signifier into

the outer shadows, a signifier that will henceforth be

missing at this level. Here you have the fundamental

mechanism that I posit as being at the basis of paranoia"

(150). In spite of the physical presence of the father, his

paternal power and authority can nevertheless be lost,

verworfen, or foreclosed in various ways. According to

Lacan, this foreclosure of the primary signifier

precipitates the onset of psychosis.

In Poe's "William Wilson," the evidence of the

 66

narrator's foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, or the

paternal metaphor, is hinted at in the description of his

childhood. Looking back on his childhood, Wilson claims

that he was self-willed, and that his weak parents could not

control him. Wilson therefore became the "master" of his

own actions:

I grew self-willed, addicted to the wildest

caprices, and a prey to the most ungovernable
passions. Weak-minded, and beset with
constitutional infirmities akin to my own, my
parents could do but little to check the evil
propensities which distinguished me. Some
feeble and ill-directed efforts resulted in
complete failure on their part, and, of course,
in total triumph on mine. Thenceforward my
voice was a household law; and at an age when
few children have abandoned their leading-
strings, I was left to the guidance of my own
will. (427)

The narrator's problem is not difficult to follow, even

without the intervention of Lacanian theory: Wilson usurped

the place of the father, and by doing so he lost the source

of his own name and his family identity. Moreover, the fact

that Wilson detests his own name is further proof that he

has rejected or foreclosed the Name-of-the-Father. In

Lacan's view, the place of the child in the social and

kinship structures is preformed: the child already has a

place in a complex unconscious network of social, familial,

and cultural relations, even before he is born. His name,

too, is often selected long before his birth. This name, as

 67

the signifier, becomes inextricably tied to his own identity

and subjectivity. Through the proper name, the child's

presence is thus firmly established in the Symbolic order.

In one sense, the proper name, like the Name-of-the Father,

functions as the poinr de capiron (variously translated in

English as "anchoring point," "quilting point," or "fixation

point") which prevents the constant "glissemenr" of the

process of signification -- "an incessant sliding of the

signified under the signifier" ("The Agency of the Letter"

154). While Lacan, following Saussure, insists on the

arbitrariness of the relation between signifier and

signified, he perceives that the Saussurean notion of sign

still suggests that the signifier serves to represent the

signified. In Lacan's view, signification is not a stable

one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified.

Lacan reverses Saussure's formula, signified/signifier,

asserting the priority of the material element of language

(the signifier) over the concept (the signified). Lacan's

idiosyncratic formula for the linguistic sign is thus the

algorithm Sis, "which is read as: the signifier over the

signified, 'over' corresponding to the bar separating the

two stages" ("The Agency of the Letter" 149). The bar that

separates signifier and signified in Lacan's formula stands

for the resistance inherent in signification. The new

 68

attention to this "barrier resisting signification" calls

into question any view which presumes a stable or fixed

relationship between a word (signifier) and meaning

(signified) ("The Agency of the Letter" 149). According to

Lacan, a signifier can be sustained only in relation to

another signifier: signification "proves never to be

resolved into a pure indication of the real, but always

refers back to another signification" ("The Freudian Thing"

126); "no signification can be sustained other than by

reference to another signification" ("The Agency of the

Letter" 150). Lacan's formula can be schematized as a

succession of signifiers above the bar that separates it

from the signified (which is, in Lacan's view, in fact

simply another signifier occupying a different position

within signification):

51 ~ 52, 53, . . • 5n
s

This signifying chain ("51 ~ 52") leads to Lacan's notion

of qlissement. However, despite the perpetual slippage of

the signified under the signifier, Lacan contends that there

are nevertheless certain privileged points where the chain

of signifiers becomes fixed onto the signified. The point

de capiton is thus the point in the signifying chain at

which "the signifier stops the otherwise endless movement

 69

(glissement;) of the signification" (liThe Subversion of the

Subject" 303). According to Lacan, in psychosis, the point;s

de capicon are lost and a state of continual glissemenc

occurs. In his Seminar III, Lacan maintains that a certain

minimum number of these anchoring points are "necessary for

a human being to be called normal," and "when they are not

established, or when they give way" it results in psychosis

("The Quilting Point" 269).

In "William Wilson," the narrator several times

emphasizes his strong dislike for his own name: "I had

always felt aversion to my uncourtly patronymic, and its

very common, if not plebeian, praenomen. The words were

venom in my ears; and when • • • a second Wilson came also

to the academy, I felt angry with him for bearing the name,

and doubly disgusted with the name because a stranger bore

it, who would be the cause of its twofold repetition" (434).

From a Lacanian viewpoint, the narrator's extreme "aversion"

to his own real name, which is closely connected with his

father's name, is indicative of his failure to introject the

Name-of-the-Father. The new, fictional name of the narrator

(which is often analyzed as "Will-I-am Will's son") also

unmistakably signifies his transgressive desire to deny his

father's lawful authority and substitute himself as

God/Father-like namegiver or originator in place of him.

 70
According to Freud, the successful oedipal

identification or resolution, which is believed to produce

the superego, makes the subject susceptible to all "the

influences of those who have stepped into the place of

parents -- educators, teachers, people chosen as ideal

models. ,,15 At his first school, Wilson encounters a

powerful paternal figure. The Reverend Dr. Bransby, who is

both the principal of the school and pastor of the local

church, exemplifies the Lacanian Symbolic father. It is not

insignificant to note that Dr. Bransby is also called

"Dominie" [dominium], which is Latin for the lord or

master. 16 But, as a result of the total foreclosure, Wilson

never comes to understand Dr. Bransby's important function

as the figure of authority, of the Symbolic Law, in short,

as father-surrogate. For Wilson, Dr. Bransby is nothing but

an incomprehensible paradox:

Of this [local] church the principal of our school

was pastor. With how deep a spirit of wonder and
perplexity was I wont to regard him from our
remote pew in the gallery, as, with step solemn
and slow, he ascended the pulpit! This reverend
man, with countenance so demurely benign, with
robes so glossy and so clerically flowing, with
wig so minutely powdered, so rigid and so vast,
could this be he who, of late, with sour visage,
and in snuffy habiliments, administered, ferule in
hand, the Draconian Laws of the academy? Oh,
gigantic paradox, too utterly monstrous for
solution! (428-29)

The foreclosure of the fundamental signifier results in

 71

profound disturbances in the Symbolic order. Lacan cla~s

that in such cases, where there should be a paternal

structure, there appears "a mere hole, which, by the

inadequacy of the metaphoric effect will provoke a

corresponding hole at the place of the phallic

signification" ("On the Possible Treatment" 201). This

seems to explain why the protagonist's problematic encounter

and confrontation with the double takes place at the school,

which is one of the representative domains of the Symbolic.

Wilson's detailed account of the schoolhouse reflects his

confused state of mind in the domain of the Symbolic. 17 The

school is set "in a misty-looking village of England,"

surrounded by "a high and solid brick wall, topped with a

bed of mortar and broken glass. • . • This prison-like

rampart formed the limit of our domain" (427, 428). The

ponderous gate of the school through which the students pass

to the outside "was riveted and studded with iron bolts, and

surmounted with jagged iron spikes" (429). Wilson perceives

the school as a stifling and threatening force of the

Symbolic that encroaches upon his subjectivity. Most

importantly, the loss of Wilson's sense of location

expressed in his elaborate description of the labyrinthine

schoolhouse itself metaphorically suggests his failure to

situate himself in the realm of the Symbolic:

 72

There was really no end to its windings -- to

its incomprehensible subdivisions. It was
difficult, at any given time, to say with
certainty upon which of its two stories one
happened to be. From each room to every other
there was sure to be found three or four steps
either in ascent or descent. Then the lateral
branches were innumerable -- inconceivable • . .
During the five years of my residence here,
I was never able to ascertain with precision,
in what remote locality lay the little sleeping
apartment assigned to myself. (429)

IV

In an attempt to analyze and make sense of his life,

the narrator tells his story retrospectively with a great

regret. In the opening paragraphs, Wilson, reprimanding

himself, speaks of his "years of unspeakable misery" and of

an "unpardonable crime" (426). He even describes himself as

an "outcast of all outcasts most abandoned" (426). But,

unfortunately, Wilson does not seem to understand the

specific cause of his extraordinary past, nor exactly what

is his real crime: "I would fain have them believe that I

have been, in some measure, the slave of circumstances

beyond human control. Have I not indeed been living

in a dream? And am I not now dying a victim to the horror

and the mystery of the wildest of all sublunary visions?"

(427) .

Much of the earlier criticism also fails to explain

persuasively the true nature and significance of Wilson's

 73

crime. According to some critics, Wilson is the innocent

victim of the sadistic superego. For example, Robert Rogers

notes that

[E]xcept for cheating at cards and excessive

drinking, the various 'debaucheries' are with one
exception unspecified. In this disparity between
the relatively innocuous nature of the
protagonist's crimes and the extreme baseness by
which they are characterized in the story itself,
the tyrannical severity of the superego finds
expression. (25)

In her 1976 article "William Wilson's Double," Ruth Sullivan

holds basically the same position. According to Sullivan,

Wilson has not committed any "unpardonable crime" at all.

In defense of the narrator, she argues:

What are William Wilson's crimes, then? He is

a spendthrift, a gambler, a drinker, an
adulterer (perhaps), and possibly an opium-
taker . • . but nowhere does the narrator
describe deeds meriting such severe
condemnations as 'unpardonable crime.' Not
even the climactic murder-suicide is such a
deed, for it is not clear who kills whom.
Besides, William Wilson, dogged to distraction,
defends himself against a too-harsh superego.
(255)

At first glance, indeed, the narrator's crimes for the most

part are trivial pranks: dishonest gambling, collegiate

dissipation, and attempted sexual intrigue. But, what has

not been considered is Wilson's usurpation of the lawful

authority, or the radical abolition of the Father's Law or

Name. Lacan's theory of foreclosure can account for what is

Wilson's mysterious "unpardonable crime," which lies at the

 74

heart of his terrible misery.

Although traditional psychoanalytic critics have

generally identified the second Wilson with the Freudian

superego, Poe's actual text does not support such an

interpretation. In Freud's writings, the Oedipus complex

is defined as an unconscious set of loving and hostile

desires which the young child experiences in relation to its

parents. It is through the fear of castration that the

subject accepts the intervention of the father and renounces

his desire for the mother. The superego, according to

Freud, is primarily constituted through the Oedipal

identification with the representatives of the law (parents,

teachers, etc), and typically with the father. As the

residue of the father's prohibition, the Freudian superego

(the censor or the judge) is "the heir of the Oedipus

complex" (The Ego and Id 36) • In sum, the superego or

"ideal ego" is closely tied to the imago of the father who

threatens castration, and the formation of the superego is

the result of the subject's resolution of the Oedipus

complex.

The previous Freudian psychoanalytic reading of

"William Wilson," which tends to see the double as the

narrator's superego, is fundamentally based on the

assumption that the protagonist's internalization of the

 75

prohibiting law of the castrating father is already

accomplished successfully. For example, Marie Bonaparte

claims that in the Poe story "it is no longer the conflict

between father and son that is presented, for the

introjection of the repressive father system is now

accomplished. Here, our hero is battling against part of

himself, that which derives from the bans of those in

authority and becomes our moral conscience or super-ego"

(539).

In striking contrast to the dominant Freudian view,

Poe's text itself reveals that the narrator, even in his

earliest childhood, established himself as an authority

figure, "a household law," revolting against the father's

Law. Since his "weak-minded" parents failed to govern his

"evil propensities," Wilson became "the master of my own

actions" (427). wilson desires to exercise "a supreme and

unqualified despotism", defying "the laws" and eluding "the

vigilance of the institution" (431, 438). Moreover,

Wilson's murderous aggressivity toward the double also

indicates his unresolved Oedipal journey. According to

Lacan, the aggressivity, which is closely linked to

"destructive and, indeed, death instincts," must be resolved

by the "secondary" identification by introjecting the imago

of the parent of the same sex as an ego ideal: "What

 76

concerns us here is the function that I shall call the

pacifying function of the ego ideal, the connexion between

its libidinal normativity and a cultural normativity bound

up from the imago of the father" ("Aggressivity" 22). In

Lacan's formulation, the secondary identification which

occurs in the Oedipus complex is "that by which the subject

transcends the aggressivity that is constitutive of the

primary subjective individuation" ("Aggressivity" 23).

In Wilson's case, the Oedipal identification which

would put an end to his prolonged Imaginary entrapment never

takes place. Wilson becomes trapped forever in the dual

Imaginary structure when he forecloses what Lacan calls the

paternal metaphor, or the Name-of-the-Father, embodied in

the figure of the father. The narrator, like the Lacanian

paranoid ego in the mirror stage, assumes his own mastery

and autonomy, but it turns out to be nothing more than his

meconnaissance. As I have discussed above, the problematic

but significant "erotic-aggressive" relation existing

between the two Wilsons can be better understood through

Lacanian psychoanalytic terms, rather than through the

traditional "supere~o" or "moral conscience" readings. At

the same time, Poe's "William Wilson," which is mainly

concerned with the destructive Hegelian dialectic between

the slave-like protagonist and the master-like double,

 77

proves to be a helpful literary text that prefigures and

illustrates a number of crucial Lacanian concepts such as

the Imaginary register, the mirror stage, the birth of the

paranoid ego, meconnaissance, the poine de capieon,

aggressivity, and the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father.

 78

ROTBS

1. Poe's "William Wilson," first published in the annual The

Gift:: A Christ:mas and New Year's Present: for 1840 (published
in mid-1839), is one of his most autobiographical tales. It
includes Poe's memories of both the British boarding school
at Stoke Newington and the University of virginia. Poe uses
the actual name of the schoolmaster (Dr. Bransby) and of a
fellow student (Mr. Preston) at the University.

2. For an interesting historical reading of "William

Wilson," see Theron Britt's "The Common Property of the Mob:
Democracy and Identity in Poe's 'William Wilson',"
Mississippi Quart:erly, 48 (1995), 197-210. In this article,
Britt sees the protagonist as na Whig's version of a
Jacksonian Democrat who attempts to exert his will over the
resistance of his double and everyone else and erase any
differences between others and his will; but he fails
miserably, demonstrating at the level of psychology the
dangerous 'mob' tendencies in democracy" (204). For Britt,
William Wilson embodies "Tocqueville's and Poe's worst fears
for the American experiment in democracy" (210).

3. In The Myst:ery t:o a Solut:ion (1994), John T. Irwin

defines the second Wilson as a "specular double representing
his conscience" (214). In Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-
ending Remembrance (1991), Kenneth Silverman also sees the
tale as an "allegory of the operation of conscience" (150).
For Daniel Hoffman, the second Wilson represents both the
protagonist's own conscience and the "Imp of the Perverse"
(217).

4. In general, "introjection" is the opposite process to

that of projection. In The Language of Psycho-Analysis
(1973), Laplanche and Pontalis describe the term as a
"process revealed by analytic investigation: in phantasy,
the subject transposes objects and their inherent qualities
from the 'outside' to the 'inside' of himself. Introjection
is close in meaning to incorporation, which indeed provides
it with its bodily model, but it does not necessarily imply
any reference to the body's real boundaries. . . . It is
closely akin to identification" (229).

5. Although the Imaginary order seems to precede the

Symbolic order, Lacan emphasizes that "the domain of the
symbolic does not have a simple relation of succession to
the imaginary domain" ("The Symbolic Order" 223). In the
 79

"Objectified Analysis" (1955), Lacan describes the Imaginary

as always already structured by the Symbolic, or the
universal organizing matrix:
The symbolic relation is constituted as early
as possible, even prior to the fixation of the
self image of the subject, prior to the
structuring image of the ego, introducing the
dimension of the subject into the world • • • •
The imaginary experience is inscribed in the
register of the symbolic as early on as you can
think it. ( 257 )

It is true that Lacan's two registers, the Imaginary and the

Symbolic, are conceived from the outset as quite distinct
and opposed conceptual categories which cover different
functions and domains of the psychoanalytic field. However,
it is not easy to completely separate the Imaginary order
from the Symbolic order since visual images also function as
signifiers. In Lacan's view, the images in dreams and
fantasies are already symbolically or linguistically
structured and organized. In the "Introduction to the
Question of the Psychoses" (1955), Lacan discusses how the
visual field is already shaped and determined within the
Symbolic order:
While the image equally plays a capital role in
our domain, this role is completely taken up
and caught up within, remolded and reanimated
by, the symbolic order. The image is always
more or less integrated into this order, which,
I remind you, is defined in man by its property
of organized structure. . . . In the symbolic
order every element has value through being
opposed to another. . . . We can understand
the red car within the symbolic order, namely
in the way one understands the color red in a
game of cards, that is, as opposed to black, as
being a part of an already organized language.
(9-10)

6. Although Lacan repeatedly claims that he invented the

concept of the mirror stage, his theory is in fact
profoundly influenced by the French psychologist Henri
Wallon's original mirror experiments with children and
animals. Following Wallon, Lacan compares the behavior of a
human baby to that of a chimpanzee when confronted with its
own reflection in a mirror: "The child, at an age when he is
for a time, however short, outdone by the chimpanzee in
 80

instrumental intelligence, can nevertheless already

recognize as such his own image in a mirror" ("Mirror" 1).
The chimpanzee is unable to recognize his reflected image in
the mirror and quickly loses interest in it. The human
infant on the contrary becomes fascinated with its own image
reflecting back from the mirror. This is what distinguishes
the human baby from the animal.
According to David Macey, Lacan's slighting of Wallon's
contributions in the presentation of the mirror stage was
typical of Lacan's deliberate self-mystification, which
underplayed the importance of predecessors such as Hegel and
Kojeve (Lacan in Context 4). In Jacques Lacan: European
perspectives (1997), Elisabeth Roudinesco also notes that
"Lacan's borrowing of the psychologist Henri Wallon's notion
of a mirror stage was crucial. Its importance may be
measured by his attempts to play down Wallon's name and
present hLmself as the sole originator of the term. • • • He
spoke passionately of it on about a dozen occasions, and
when he published his Ecrits in 1966 he emphasized again
that the term had always been the pivot on which the
development of his thought system turned" (110). However,
in contrast to David Macey, Roudinesco attempts to give
Lacan some credit. According to Roudinesco, Wallon was a
communist party member and his psychobiology was deeply
based on dialectical materialism. For Wallon, what he calls
the "mirror ordeal" experience represents a dialectical
"transition" in which the child resolves its conflicts and
contradictions (111). But, for Lacan, the mirror stage
represents a symbolic "matrix foreshadowing the evolution of
the ego as imaginary" (112). Roudinesco argues that Lacan's
originality lies in the way he interprets Wallon's
physiological experiment with different angles provided by
Freud's narcissism and Hegel's dialectic:
Wallon subscribed to the Darwinian idea that the
individual turned into a subject through the
succeeding stages of a natural dialectic . • • .
Lacan transforms this experience into a stage . .
. without any reference to a natural dialectic . .
This being so, the mirror stage no longer
bears any resemblance to either a mirror or a
stage (in the developmental sense), or indeed to
any concrete experience. It becomes a
psychological, even an ontological operation, by
which a human being comes to exist as such by
identifying with his semblable . . . when as an
infant he sees his own image in a mirror. (111-12)
 81

7. The Imaginary relationship is essentially a two-figure

relationship which is mainly characterized by an inability
to differentiate between the ego and the imago, between the
subject and the counterpart. If the relation between the
ego and the specular ~age represents the typical Imaginary,
libidinal relationship, the pre-Oedipal mother-child
relationship can be seen as another paradiq.matic dual
Imaginary relationship.

8. Lacan makes a distinction between the ego and the

subject. In "The Nucleus of Repression" (1954), Lacan
argues that "If the ego is an ~aginary function, it is not
to be confused with the subject" (193). In Lacanian theory,
the ego is an Imaginary formation, whereas the (speaking)
subject is essentially a product of the Symbolic. In his
introduction to Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan's Rerurn ro
Freud (1996), Jacques-Alain Miller argues that "we must
differentiate between the subject and ego. That is a
fundamental distinction in Lacan's work from 1948 on . •
the concept of the subject in Lacan is situated at the
symbolic level, while the ego is at the ~aginary level"
(22-3).

9. In his Seminar I, Lacan reexamines Freud's remarks on the

development of the ego in On Narcissism:
A unity comparable to the ego does not exist at
the beginning, nichr von Anfang, is not to be
found in the individual from the start, and the
Ich has to develop, enrwickelr werden. . • • The
Urbild, which is a unity comparable to the ego, is
constituted at a specific moment in the history of
the subject, at which point the ego begins to take
on its functions. This means that the human ego
is founded on the basis of the imaginary relation.
The function of the ego, Freud writes, must have
eine neue psychische Akrion, • . • zu gesralren.
In the development of the psyche, something new
appears whose function it is to form to
narcissism. Doesn't that indicate the imaginary
origin of the ego's function?
("On Narcissism" 115)

10. Lacan, "A Materialist Definition of the Phenomenon of

Consciousness. " The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II. p.
50.

11. Lacan's definition of the ego as an Imaginary

 82

construction can hardly be overestimated, since it is on

this point that what is most distinctive about Lacanian
psychoanalysis can be located, particularly in contrast to
ego psychology. In Lacan's view, what he takes to be
Freud's most original and innovative contribution -- the
discovery of the unconscious -- has been obscured and
dismissed by major schools of post-Freudian psychoanalysis.
The return to the essence of Freud's work proclaimed by
Lacan is intended in large part as a critique of ego
psychology (and object-relations theory). Since the early
1950s, ego psychology has been the dominant school of
psychoanalysis not only in the United States but also in the
IPA (International PsychO-Analytic Association). Ego
psychology draws mainly on Freud's structural model of the
psyche, which is first elaborated in The Ego and the Id
(1923). This model consists of three distinct agencies: the
id, the ego, and the superego. Ego psychology focuses its
attention on the function of the ego, since it plays a
crucial role in mediating between the conflicting demands of
the instinctual id, the moralistic superego, and the
constraints of external reality. Anna Freud's The Ego and
the Mechanisms of Defense (1936), one of the first works to
focus entirely on the ego, emphasizes the ego's defensive
strategies. Following Anna Freud, the ego psychologists
claim that the primary aim of psychoanalytic therapy is to
strengthen and reinforce the ego's mechanisms of defense
against various external and internal stimuli, thus enabling
it to satisfy some of the id's instinctual wishes while
conforming to social expectation. In his Ego Psycho1ogy and
the Problem of Adaptation (1939), which is now generally
regarded as the representative text of ego psychology, Heinz
Hartmann identifies the primary function of the ego with
adaptation to reality.
Lacan is in total disagreement with the whole of ego
psychology. Lacan maintains that Freud's discovery of the
unconscious questions and problematizes the Cartesian
concept of subjectivity, subverting the centrality which is
traditionally accorded to the ego in Western philosophy. In
his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes argues that
"in so far as I am merely a thinking thing, I am unable to
distinguish any parts within myself: I understand my self to
be something quite single and complete" (59). Descartes'
famous self-cognition ("Cogito ergo sum"), which presupposes
the self-contained and self-transparent being or
consciousness, provides a foundation for Western
epistemology and stands for the modern concept of the
unified, autonomous ego. Freud's understanding of the
 83

unconscious challenges and undermines this Cartesian

philosophical tradition which privileges the rational ego or
Cogiro as the locus of truth and knowledge. Although ego
psychology cla~s itself to be the true heir to the Freudian
legacy and considers that it has the correct interpretation
of Freud's work, Lacan argues that the proponents of ego
psychology betray Freud's "truly Promethean discovery" by
returning to the pre-Freudian concept of the subject as a
strong, masterful, autonomous ego ("The Function and Field"
34). In contrast to ego psychology which embodies a return
to a pre-Freudian psychology, Lacan's return to Freud is a
return to the fundamental discovery of the unconscious,
which is held to subvert conventional notions of the
subject.
Lacan's most powerful critique of this school of
thought can be found in the "Mirror Stage" article (1949).
From the very first paragraph, Lacan argues that the
experience of mirror stage is "an experience that leads us
to oppose any philosophy directly issuing from the Cogi ro"
("Mirror" 1). In this passage, Lacan's real purpose is not
to criticize Descartes but to attack the Anna-Freudians and
the ego psychologists who assert the primacy of the
autonomous ego. In opposition to ego psychology, Lacan
argues that the ego is primarily an Imaginary construction
which is produced and developed by the primary
identification with the specular image in the mirror stage.
The subject's fascination and fixation with the exterior,
idealized imago, or what Lacan calls the "Urbild of the
ego," will forever orient the ego "in a fictional direction"
( "Mirror" 2). In" Some Ref lections on the Ego," Lacan
writes:
We have learned to be quite sure that when someone
says 'it is not so' it is because it is so; that
when he says 'I do not mean' he does mean; we know
how to recognize the underlying hostility in most
'altruistic' statements, the undercurrent of
homosexual feeling in jealousy, the tension of
desire hidden in the professed horror of incest;
we have noted that manifest indifference may mask
intense latent interest. . . • Our view is that
the essential function of the ego is very nearly
that systematic refusal of reality which French
analysts refer to in talking about the psychoses.
(11-2)
In his Seminar I, Lacan also describes the ego as the
"master of errors, the seat of illusions" ("Discourse
Analysis and Ego Analysis" 62). Lacan's conception of the
 84

alienated, paranoiac ego whose very existence consists in a

systematic meconnaissance is totally opposed to the ego-
psychology view which regards the ego as the rational
mediator or harmonizer of the psychical conflicts. This
explains why Lacan, for much of his professional life, is so
critical of all the central concepts of ego psychology, such
as the concepts of adaptation and the autonomous ego. In
Lacan's view, the ego psychologist's emphasis on the
adaptive function of the ego tends to ignore the ego's
alienating function and minimize the impact of the Freudian
unconscious upon the subject's mental life. The proponents
of ego psychology claim that the task of psychoanalysis is
to help the analysand's weak ego to become healthy and
autonomous, and that this can be achieved by the
identification of the analysand with the strong, ideal ego
of the analyst. But, as Ragland-Sullivan has pointed out,
Lacan opposes "the idea that there is a whole self that
serves as an agent of strength, synthesis, mastery,
integration, and adaptation to realistic norms" (119). For
Lacan, the ego psychological concept of the autonomy of the
ego is nothing other than a narcissistic illusion of
mastery.

12. Lacan's doctoral thesis entitled Paranoid Psychosis and

I~s Rela~ion ~o personali~y (1932) provides a detailed case
history of a female psychotic whom he calls "Aimee." The
patient was hospitalized after trying to murder a famous
Parisian actress with whom she had never had any personal
contact. For Aimee, the actress on whom she had become
erotomanically fixated embodied an idealized version of
herself, a mirror-image of her ideal ego. Then, what made
Aimee attack her own ideal with no explicable motivation?
How can the same actress who represented her ideal also
become the object of her hate? This question raised in the
study of female paranoia spawned a series of essays on the
mirror stage. Lacan's theory of the mirror stage and
aggressivity can be understood as an attempt to explain why
the psychotic subject attacks the ideal ego. Later, in
"Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamle~," Lacan
writes that "the one you fight is the one you admire the
most. The ego ideal is also, according to Hegel's formula
which says that coexistence is impossible, the one you have
to kill" (31).

13. Lacanian psychoanalysis is profoundly influenced by

Hegel and, more specifically, by Alexandre Kojeve's
provocative interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology of
 85

Spirir (1807). Lacan attended Kojeve's influential lectures

on Hegel given at the Ecole des Haures Erudes in paris from
1933 to 1939 (these lectures were later collected and edited
by Raymond Queneau and published in French under the title
Inrroducrion a la Lecrure de Hegel). It should be noted
that whenever Lacan refers to Hegel, it is always Kojeve's
reading of Hegel. The two most conspicuous Hegelian
influences on Lacan's early work can be found in his theory
of the mirror stage and aggressivity. According to Hegel,
consciousness and other cognitive functions are not positive
properties but rather dialectically developmental ones that
require differential conflict/identification with some
alterity. The subject is reflected in the other and i t is
only through the recognition in the other that self-
consciousness becomes possible (see Hegel's "Lordship and
Bondage" in The Phenomenology of Spirir).
Following Hegel, Lacan argues that the subject needs
another being in order to become a subject. For Lacan, as
for Hegel, self-recognition occurs only via a mirroring
other. Lacan also argues that the idea of aggressivity was
first formulated in Hegel's theory of the master-slave
dialectic: "Before Darwin, however, Hegel had provided the
ultimate theory aggressivity i~ human ontology, seeming to
prophecy the iron law of our time" ("Aggressivity" 26).
Lacan links aggressivity to the Hegelian concept of the
fight to the death. In his 1955 paper "The Other and
Psychosis," Lacan writes:
The dialectic of the unconscious always implies
struggle, the impossibility of coexistence with
the other, as one of its possibilities. The
master-slave dialectic reappears here. . • • It's
in a fundamental rivalry, in a primary and
essential struggle to the death, that the
constitution of the human world as such takes
place. (40)

14. In Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (1968), Anthony

Wilden observes that since the Imaginary is present in all
intersubjective human relationships, the subject's fixation
or captation in the realm of the Imaginary is "a matter of
degree" (174). More recently, in Freud, Prousr, and Lacan:
Theory as Ficrion (1987), Malcolm Bowie also points out that
"The Imaginary grows from the infant's experience of his
'specular ego' but extends far into the adult individual's
experience of others and of the external world: wherever a
false identification is to be found within the subject,
or between one subject and another, or between subject and
 86

thing -- there the Imaginary holds sway" (115).

15. Freud, "The Dissection of the Psychical Personality," SE

22: 64.

16. In "Double Talk: The Rhetoric of the Whisper in Poe's

'William Wilson'" (1994), Julia Stern claims that the term
dominie is "suggestive of the connection between patriarchs
and oppression" (193).

17. Many critics have pointed out that various enclosures

(houses, schools, ships, rooms, chambers, etc.) in Poe's
work often serve as emblems for the mind of the main
character. In his 1975 article "'William Wilson' and the
Disintegration of Self," Robert Coskren argues that "We
should take special notice of the elaborate description of
the school as the narrator presents it, for, in poe,
external setting and particularly architecture almost
invariably mirror the structure and condition of the mind
that dwells within it" (156). Similarly, Julia Stern claims
that "the narrator's painfully detailed representation of
Dr. Bransby's school proves to be no casual or digressive
scene-painting; here, as in other Poe tales, setting
provides a metaphor for the protagonist's mind" ("Double
Talk" 194).
 CHAPTER THREE

THE "SYMBOLIC" PATHER

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
-- H. W. Longfellow, "A Psalm of Life."

The point of rupture came the day that Levi-Strauss for

societies and Lacan for the unconscious showed us that
'meaning' was probably a mere surface effect, a shimmering
froth, and that what traversed us in the depths, what came
before us, what sustained us in time and space, was system.
-- Foucault, Quinzaine lirreraire

"What is a Father?" "It is the dead Father," Freud replies,

but no one listens, and, concerning that part of it that
Lacan takes up again under the heading "Name-of-rhe-Farher,"
it is regrettable that so unscientific a situation should
still deprive him of his normal audience.
-- Lacan, Ecrits

Patricide is a bad idea, first because it is contrary to law

and custom and second because it proves, beyond a doubt,
that the father's every fluted accusation against you was
correct: you are a thoroughly bad individual, a patricide! -
- member of a class of persons universally ill-regarded. It
is all right to feel this hot emotion, but not to act upon
it. And it is not necessary. It is not necessary to slay
your father, time will slay him, that is a virtual
certainty. -- Donald Barthelme, The Dead Father

Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843) is one of his most

well-known confessional murder narratives, which include

"The Black Cat" (1843), "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846),

and "The Imp of the Perverse" (1845). These tales are

87
 88

confessions and descriptions of the hideous murders

committed by the first-person narrators. In "The Black

Cat," which was published later the same year as "The Tell-

Tale Heart," the narrator begins by insisting on his sanity:

"Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very

senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not and

very surely do I not dream" (849). The narrator tries to

deny his madness and present his bizarre tale as "nothing

more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and

effects" (850). Similarly, the unnamed first-person

narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" starts by assuring the

reader that he is entirely sane: "True! -- nervous -- very,

very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you

say that I am mad?" (792). The narrator's profession of his

sanity, however, becomes immediately suspect when he tells

about his "disease," which is similar to that of the "morbid

acuteness of the senses" of Roderick Usher in "The Fall of

the House of Usher" (1839).1 The narrator comments: "The

disease had sharpened my senses -- not destroyed -- not

dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I

heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard

many things in hell. HOw, then, am r mad?" (792).

According to the narrator, his purpose for telling the story

is to defend himself against the accusation of madness. He

 89

claims that the ca~ way he can recount the events proves

his sanity: "Hearken! and observe how healthily -- how

ca~ly I can tell you the whole story" (792). He also

advances the prudence and dissimulation with which he

carries out his murder plan as further proofs of his sanity.

For, after all, "madmen know nothing" (792).

The narrator insists that he has no object in killing

the old man. Indeed, at first glance, his crime seems

motiveless: "Object there was none. Passion there was none.

I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never

given me insult. For his gold I had no desire" (792). Just

like the perverse narrator of "The Black Cat" who kills the

cat "with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the

bitterest remorse at my heart; -- hung it because I knew

that it had loved me" (852), the narrator of "The Tell-Tale

Heart" tells us that the idea of killing the old man

"haunted me day and night" in spite of his affection for him

(792). "Passion," "insult," and "gold" are all common

reasons to commit murder. For example, the narrator of "The

Imp of the Perverse" murders the father figure for an

inheritance. Rejecting a series of commonplace motives for

murder, the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" returns

obsessively to the old man's eye, and tries to account for

the murder of the old man any other way than in terms of the
 90

uncanny eye: "I think it was his eye! yes, i t was this!

One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture a pale blue

eye, with a film over it" (792). Because of his hatred for

the "Evil Eye," the narrator vows to "take the life of the

old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever" (792). The

remainder of the tale focuses on the narrator's obsession

with the old man's eye, and ends with the narrator's

hysterical confession of the murder.

Who is this "old man"? In this tale, Poe gives little

explanation for the narrator's killing the old man other

than revulsion at the vict~'s strange eye. We are never

told the exact relationship between the narrator and the old

man. We simply know that the narrator shares a house with

the old man and that the narrator is placed in intimate

relation with his victim. Concerning the identity of the

old man, various readings have been offered. In his 1981

article "'The Tell-Tale Heart' and the 'Evil Eye'," B. D.

Tucker provides a representative view of the standard

interpretation of the tale which considers the old man to be

the narrator's double 2 :

The equating of "the Evil Eye" with "the evil

'I'" of the narrator has been noted by several
critics and cannot have escaped Poe's
attention. Like William Wilson, the madman is
killing his own doppelganger, and the further
identification with his victim is found in his
feeling the old man's terror as if it were his
 91

own, and his fantasy that he can actually hear

the old man's heart in his own heartbeat. (93)

According to Bonaparte's psychobiographical reading, the

narrator's/Poe's murder of the old man/John Allan is a

parricide: "Among Poe's works, it stands like a faint

precursor of that great parricidal epic which is

Dostoievsky's opus" (495). 1 Yet, Thomas Olive Mabbot' s

historical reading rejects any such interpretation. In the

tale, the narrator mentions that he called the old man by

name. Mabbot claims that the murder is therefore "not

parricide, as some have suspected. A century ago, children

did not address parents by name" (798). But, for Daniel

Hoffman, the old man is, quite literally, the narrator's

biological father. Hoffman claims: "Nowhere does this

narrator explain what relationship, if any, exists between

him and the possessor of the Evil Eye. We do, however,

learn from his tale that he and the old man live under the

same roof -- apparently alone together, for there's no

evidence of anyone else's being in the house. Is the young

man the old man's servant? Odd that he would not say so.

Perhaps the youth is the old man's son" (223). From a

Lacanian perspective, the old men in the tale embodies what

Lacan terms the "Symbolic Father," which is variously

referred to as the paternal metaphor or the Name-of-the-

Father.
 92

In this chapter, I will explore the oedipal

implications of Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," and argue that

the tale is an oedipal drama centered upon the son's violent

transgression of the Law of the Symbolic order. Since the

source of the narrator's extreme aggressivity towards the

old man comes not from the individual person but rather from

the castrating "Evil" eye, from the phallic signifier

representing the oppressive and prohibitive Law of the

Symbolic, I intend to examine the role of the old man in the

Poe story in terms of Lacan's linguistic, non-biological

concept of the Symbolic (Dead) Father, which is crucially

different from the real, biological father. Before

beginning a detailed discussion of the tale, I wish to

review Lacan's notion of the Symbolic register and its

accompanying concepts such as the Oedipus complex,

castration, the phallus, and the Name-of-the-Father. In

comparing and contrasting Lacan's view of the Oedipus

complex with Freud's, I will also attempt to demonstrate the

superiority of Lacanian psychoanalysis to the traditional

Freudian analysis as a theoretical frame.

I. The Symbolic Order

Lacan's concept of the Symbolic order first appeared in

detail in his famous 1953 paper "Function and Field of

Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," which has corne to be

 93

known as the "Rome Discourse" or the "Rapport de Rome." In

simple terms, the Lacanian Symbolic refers to language or

the general background system of culture.' In developing

his theory of the Symbolic, Lacan is in particular indebted

to Levi-Strauss' s structural anthropology. 5 In "The

Symbolic Universe" (1954), Lacan argues that the ideas of

kinship and exogamy are maintained and regulated not by a

natural fear of incest, moral interdiction, or any genetic

necessity, but rather by a universal symbolic function:

What is original in Levi-Strauss's notion of

the elementary structure? • . • Incest as such
doesn't elicit any natural feeling of horror . .
There is no biological reason, and in
particular no genetic one, to account for
exogamy. • • • There is no possible means,
starting from the natural plane, of deducing
the formation of this elementary structure
called preferential order. And what does he
base this on? On the fact that, in the human
order, we are dealing with the complete
emergence of a new function, encompassing
the whole order in its entirety. . . • The
human order is characterized by the fact that
the symbolic function intervenes at every
moment and at every stage of its existence. (29)

By applying the linguistic model to anthropology, Levi-

Strauss can de-biologize the traditional concept of incest

prohibi tion. In The Elementary Structures of Kinship

(1969), Levi-Strauss claims that "considered from the most

general viewpoint, the incest prohibition expresses the

transition from the natural fact of consanguinity to the

cultural fact of alliance" (30). For both Levi-Strauss and

 94

Lacan, the Symbolic as the ordering function of human

culture governs all social relations. 6 The Symbolic, which

Lacan identifies with language, precedes any individual's

birth and persists after his death: "Symbols in fact envelop

the life of a man in a network so total that they join

together, before he comes into the world, those who are

going to engender him 'by flesh and blood' . • • ; so total

that they give • • • the law of the acts that will follow

him right to the very place where he is not yet and even

beyond his death" ("Function and Field" 68). Following

Levi-Strauss's thesis that "the signifier precedes and

determines the signified," Lacan maintains that the Symbolic

register, or the whole system of signifiers, dominates over

the human subject (Marcel Mauss 37). The child is born into

and subjected to language which shapes its destiny; as the

words of oracle pre-determine the fate of Oedipus even

before his birth, the Symbolic order as an all-encompassing

structured system shapes and determines the destiny of the

individual subject. 7 "Here," as Anika Lemaire puts it, "we

find a conception dear to Lacan: the signifier and the

symbolic impose themselves on man from the outside, fashion

him and direct him in an intersubjective social world in

conformity with the laws and norms of that world" (Jacques

Lacan 121).
 95

As I briefly mentioned in my second chapter, in Lacan's

view the human subject is born into a world which has

predated him in a number of significant ways. In fact, the

child already has a place in the kinship system before he is

born. Be may even have a name which is selected long before

his birth and inseparably tied to his being and

subjectivity; the child has already become an element or a

signifier in a complicated, mostly unconscious, network of

symbols. According to Lacan, the child must be introduced

into this pre-existing Symbolic order through the

acquisition of language' and through the Oedipus complex

submitting his desire to the Law of that order. Here, the

Law with a capital "L" refers not to a certain piece of

legislation, but to the fundamental principles which govern

all social and cultural relations. Lacan relates the

Freudian Oedipus complex with the Levi-Straussian incest

taboo, since both serve to differentiate the animal from the

human, the world of nature from the world of culture. 9 Just

as, for Levi-Strauss, the primordial Law or the incest

prohibition, which "superimposes the kingdom of culture on

that of a nature" ("Function and Field" 66), represents the

symbolic function in human society, so, for Lacan, the Law

of the father or what he refers to as le Nom-du-Pere/Non-du-

Pere (the "Name/No-of-the-Father" 10) represents the Symbolic

 96

order or function. This Lacanian pun, which can be heard

as both the name/nom of the father and the no/non of the

father in French, emphasizes the legislative and prohibitive

function of the Symbolic Father.

In "The Neurotic's Individual Myth" (1953), Lacan

elaborates his notion of the Father:

[T]he father is the representative, the

incarnation, of a symbolic function which
concentrates in itself those things most essential
in other cultural structures: namely, the
tranquil, or rather, symbolic, enjoyment,
culturally determined and established, of the
mother's love, that is to say, of the pole to
which the subject is linked by a bond that is
irrefutably natural. • • . The father would have
to be not only the name-of-the-father, but also
the representative, in all its fullness, of the
symbolic value crystallized in his function.
(422-3)

The Lacanian idea of the Symbolic depends on the Law of the

father. But this father, whom Lacan calls the Symbolic

Father or the "figure of the Law," is not a real, individual

father but rather a disembodied entity, a cultural function

or position, or, more precisely, "paternal function."ll In

order to emphasize the law and authority linked to the

Symbolic Father, Lacan separates the Symbolic Father from

the real or the Imaginary father (which is also referred to

as the "paternal pseudo-image,,12):

It is in the name of the father that we must

recognize the support of the symbolic function
which, from the dawn of history, has identified
 97

his persclO with the figure of the law. This

conception enables us to distinguish clearly •
the unconscious effects of this function
from the narcissistic relations, or even from
the real relations that the subject sustains
with the image and action of the person who
embodies it. ("Function and Field" 67)

Although Lacan's perspective always retains Freud's

basic point, his reinterpretation of the Oedipus complex

seems quite different from Freud's. In his Freud, Prouse

and Lacan (1987), Malco~ Bowie announces decisively that

"Lacan reads Freud. This is the simplest and most important

thing about him" (100). Yet, Lacan's relationship with

Freud is never simple; although Lacan consistently declares

that "C'eae a VOlJS d'etre lacaniens, si vous voulez; moi, je

suis fre udi en " 13 (" it's up to you to be Lacanians, if you

want; me, I am a Freudian"), his interpretation of Freud's

work is so original and provocative that it often sel~ms to

contradict his alleged claims to return to Freud. Lacan, as

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen observes, is an "inspired autodidact -

- that is, a prodigious assimilaeor, open to every

influence, quick to grasp resemblances and analogies among

the most diverse fields" (1). Similarly, in Jacques Lacan ,&

Co. (1990), Elisabeth Roudinesco claims that Lacan's genius

lies "less in an ability to forge a new mode of knowledge,

than in a capacity to join together, in a subtle exercise in

what Levi-Strauss was to call bricolage, the essence of the

 98

knowledge of an era. Lacan did contribute an innovative

reading of Freud's texts, but he constructed his concepts

out of a heterogeneous cultural context" (118). Indeed,

Lacan is incredibly good at appropriating the ideas of such

great Western intellectuals as Sigmund Freud, Baruch

Spinoza, G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Ferdinand de

Saussure, Claude Levi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Salvador

Dali, Henri Wallon, and Alexandre Kojeve. As Roudinesco

puts it, one of Lacan's remarkable talents is his ability

"to effect a new interpretation of an original body of

thought • • • to make Freud's text say what it does not say"

(Jacques Lacan & Co. 138).

For Lacan, to return to Freud is by no means simply to

repeat Freud's lessons, but rather to elaborate and develop

what is at best "implicit" in Freud's theoretical

suggestions. In "The See-saw of Desire" (1954), Lacan

himself proclaims that "I will emphasize what Freud does not

underline, but which is implicit in it -- as always, his

observations enable one to complete the theorization" (172).

Perhaps, one of the most significant examples of this is

Lacan's reconceptualization of the Freudian Oedipus complex

in terms of Levi-Strauss' structural anthropology

and Saussurean linguistics. In simple terms, Freud's

Oedipus complex refers to the boy's unconscious desire to

 99

kill his father/rival for the sexual love of his mother. l '

In The Ego and rhe Id (1923), Freud provides one of his

fullest expositions of the Oedipus complex as part of his

account of the new topographical scheme which divides the

psyche into id, ego, and superego:

The boy deals with his father by identifying

himself with him. For a time these two
relationships [the child's devotion to his
mother and identification with his father]
proceed side by side, until the boy's sexual
wishes in regard to his mother become more
intense and his father is perceived as an
obstacle to them; from this the Oedipus complex
originates. His identification with his father
then takes on a hostile colouring and changes
into a wish to get rid of his father in order
to take his place with his mother.
(SE 19: 31- 2 )

In the Lacanian version of the Oedipus complex developed in

the 1950s, what is at stake is not the sexual desire of the

child to sleep with the mother. Lacan's notion of desire

means much more than the sexual impulse Freud emphasized.

Lacan, following Kojeve, argues that the human subject's

desire is "the desire of the Other" ("Of the Subject" 235).

In the Oedipal period, the child desires the "Desire of the

Mother," who is the Other in the Imaginary register: this

refers to both that the child desires what the mother

desires and that the child desires to be the sole object of

the desire of the mother. The child desires to be desired

by the Other, that is, to be loved exclusively by the

 100

mother. But the child painfully learns that the mother's

desire is already invested elsewhere; her desire is

fundamentally directed toward the phallus. Thus, the child

attempts to identify himself with the object of the mother's

desire in order to satisfy both the mother's desire and its

own desire for the mother. "If the desire of the mother is

the phallus," Lacan contends, "the child wishes to be the

phallus in order to satisfy that desire" ("The

Signification" 289). In "On a Question Preliminary to Any

possible Treatment of Psychoanalysis" (1957-8), Lacan

further discusses this logic of desire in the Oedipus

complex:

The child, in his relation to the mother, a

relation constituted in analysis not by his vital
dependence on her, but by his dependence on her
love, that is to say, by the desire for her
desire, identifies himself with the imaginary
object of this desire in so far as the mother
herself symbolizes it in the phallus. (198)

The child soon comes to perceive that the mother does

not have the phallus and that the mother herself is a

"manque a etre" (a "want-of-being" or "want-to-be"), and

this acceptance of the mother's lack of being in turn brings

about its submission to the Name-of-the-Father or the

Symbolic Father who is believed to have the phallus.

Lacan's understanding of the Significance of the phallus is

crucial here. Lacan draws a distinction between the penis

 101

as a male genital organ and the phallus which is the key

signifier of the Symbolic order; even though the male sex

has the anatomical penis, Lacan argues that neither men nor

women can actually possess the phallus, the primordial

signifier which exists in a kind of fantasy realm. No one

can have or control the phallus because it does not exist as

a thing in itself but only through its circulation within

the Symbolic order. What concerns Lacan is not the male

genital organ in its biological reality but the role that

this organ plays in our psychical reality. 15 In "The

Signification of the Phallus" (1958), Lacan insists that the

phallus should not be confused with the penis:

[T]he phallus is not a phantasy, if by that we

mean an imaginary effect. Nor is it as such an
object (part-, internal, good, bad, etc.) in the
sense that this term tends to accentuate the
reality pertaining in a relation. It is even less
the organ, penis or clitoris, that it symbolizes.
• •• it is the signifier intended to designate
as a whole the effects of the signified, in that
the signifier conditions them by its presence as a
signifier. (285)

Lacan raises Freud's concept of the penis to a symbolic

level, to that of the phallus. The phallus is a master

signifier, the "signifier of signifiers," which has no link

with anatomy or biology. The Lacanian phallus is thus

fundamentally a linguistic, not a biological, marker: "The

phallus is the privileged signifier of that mark in which

the role of the logos is joined with the advent of desire"

 102

("The Signification" 287).

Lacan's revisionist reading of Freud's classic formula

is wholly in keeping with the structuralist impulse in that

his account has less libidinal, biological, or sexual

connotations, and that the key term involved in the revised

Oedipal drama is a linguistic signifier rather than an

actual person. Through the intervention of structural

linguistics, Lacan attempts to free the concept of Oedipus

complex from the biological or familial reductionism latent

in classical Freudian psychoanalysis. In Lacan's

debiologizing, structuralist version of Freud's Oedipus

complex, the Name-of-the-Father serves the mediating

function as the "third term," intervening upon the Imaginary

dual relation between the mother and the child and laying

down the prohibitive Law of the Symbolic. Lacan calls this

symbolic intervention "castration" (which should be

distinguished from the Freudian "castration complex,,16). In

Lacan's theory, castration is the underlying state for both

sexes, unrelated to the possession or lack of a literal

penis: both the boy and the girl must give up "being" the

phallus for the mother and suffer the division from the

maternal body, and in this sense both are "castrated."

The child's separation from the mother is experienced as a

devastating, traumatic loss; the loss of Imaginary fullness,

 103

plentitude, fusion, erotic union with her. The pain of this

primordial loss is the reality of castration. 17

The child's Oedipal identification with the Symbolic

Father allows him to internalize the absolute prohibition

upon incestuous desire and gain a status as a castrated,

alienated subject in search of a lost plentitude within the

Symbolic order. In his 1954 paper "Zeitlich-

Entwicklungsgeschichte," Lacan remarks on the important role

of the father/phallus in the Oedipal triad: "The symbolic

relation is eternal. And not simply because effectively

there must always be three people -- it is eternal because

the symbol introduces a third party, an element of

mediation, which brings the two actors into each other's

presence, leads them on to another plane, and changes them"

(155). For Lacan, it is the Law of the Father that both

succeeds and supersedes the M-Other, permitting the child's

accession to the sphere of culture. The Oedipus complex

which transforms the dyadic relation between the mother and

the child into the triadic, triangular structure functions

as the decisive turning point from the Imaginary order to

the Symbolic order. Thus, in Lacan's formulation, the

Oedipus complex manifests the subject's passage from the

Imaginary to the Symbolic, from the world of nature to the

world of culture .18

 104

II. The Dead Pa~ber

In Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," the narrator accounts

for the violent aggression against the old man in terms of

the "Evil" or "vulture" eye -- his murderous aggressivity is

not directed against the individual being but against the

"damned" eye. It is not the old man but his uncanny eye

that inexplicably disturbs the narrator. The narrator tells

us that whenever the old man's "eye of a vulture -- a pale

blue eye, with a film over it" gazes at him, his blood runs

cold (792). Although the narrator says he has no grudge

against the old man, he fears the all-piercing, all-seeing

powerful eye so much that he decides to kill the old man.

Let us briefly consider the murder. Just as William Wilson

spies by lamplight on his sleeping double, so does the

narrator in "The Tell-Tale Heart." Night after night, he

puts his head very slowly inside the old man's bedroom door,

and shines a thin ray of a lantern in on the old man's

closed eye. But since the eye is always closed, he cannot

"do the work." For seven nights, he goes to the door and

looks in, but never finds the eye open. Then, on the eighth

night, the narrator accidentally wakes the old man despite

his extreme caution. The frightened old man sits up in bed

and asks "Who's there?" For an hour they remain as they

are. The narrator finally opens the lantern and shines the
 105

light toward the old man's bed. Be has managed to aim the

light directly into the eye he fears and says "I could see

nothing else of the old man's face or person: for I directed

the ray as if by instinct, precisely upon the damned spot"

(795). At this moment, the eye is wide open, and then the

narrator begins to hear a "low, dull, quick sound, such as a

watch makes when enveloped in cotton" (795). What terrifies

and excites the narrator further is this muffled thumping

which he takes to be the rapid beating of the old man's

heart. The beating grows louder, and it infuriates and

excites the anxious narrator "to uncontrollable terror"

(795). In his paranoia, the narrator fears the noise will

be heard by the neighbors and subsequently will pose a great

risk to his own safety. This prompts him to rush into the

chamber and finally kill the old man. After a few minutes,

the heartbeat ceases, and the narrator feels himself free of

the horrible eye.

Then, what is the nature of his crime? What does the

eye have to do with the narrator's killing the old man? In

Freud's writings, the equation between eye and phallus,

blindness and castration often appears. In "The Uncanny"

(1919), for example, Freud relates the fear of losing one's

eyes to castration anxiety. In "The Tell-Tale Heart," the

old man's evil eye represents not only the father's gaze but
 106

the Lacanian phallus; the fi~y vulture eye, which seems to

have a symbolic power and independent existence apart from

the old man, functions as the phallic paternal metaphor.

The old man's chilling gaze represents for the narrator/son

the Oedipal father's oppressive surveillance and

prohibition. This explains the deadening effect that the

powerful paternal gaze has on the narrator: "Whenever it

fell upon me, my blood ran cold" (792); "it • • • chilled

the very marrow in my bones" (795). The narrator thus tries

to free himself from the affliction of the threatening eye

by killing/castrating the Oedipal father.

Lacan's concept of the gaze was taken up by

psychoanalytic film criticism in the 1970s, especially by

feminist film critics. Although many feminist critics tend

to examine the male position as subject of gaze and the

female position as object of the gaze, Lacan's own

formulation, in contrast, suggests that being the object of

the gaze is threatening for both sexes. 19 As Robert Con

Davis has pointed out, it is not so much the old man's Evil

Eye that the narrator fears as the fact that he believes it

is watching him.20 In the story, the gaze of the old man

reduces the subject gazed upon to an object. How(~ver, by

repeatedly stealing into the room of his sleeping victim,

the narrator exults in his "own powers" (793) -- it is now

 107

his turn to reduce the Other to an object of gaze. The

secret rehearsal of the murder gives the narrator the

illusion of mastery and superiority; when he recounts his

protracted entry into the old man's room, the narrator

emphasizes his extraordinary physical control and sensory

sharpness. For instance, the narrator enters the room so

slowly that it takes him an hour to get his head through the

doorway:

[I] turned the latch of his door and opened i t

-- oh, so gently! And then, when I had made an
opening sufficient for my head, I put in a dark
lantern, all closed, closed, so that no light
shone out, and then I thrust in my head. Oh,
you would have laughed to see how cunningly I
thrust it in! I moved it slowly -- very, very
slowly, so that I might not disturb the old
man's sleep. It took me an hour to place my
whole head within the opening so far that I
could see him as he lay upon his bed. Ha!
would a madman have been so wise as this? And
then, when my head was well in the room, I
undid the lantern cautiously • • . I undid i t
so much that a single thin ray fell upon the
vulture eye. (792-3)

In his entry into the old man's room, into the father's

place, the narrator is anticipating his own forthcoming

entry into the symbolic power. Later, as he nears the

actual murder, the narrator experiences an exalted feeling

of power: "Upon the eighth night I was more than usually

cautious in opening the door. A watch's minute hand moves

more quickly than did mine. Never, before that night, had I

felt the extent of my own powers -- of my sagacity. I could

 108

scarcely contain my feelings of triumph" (793). These comic

entry scenes also suggest the narrator's sexual fantasy

encouraged by the avoidance of the paternal intervention and

surveillance. The narrator's feeling of masturbatory

triumph and uncontrollable joy can be understood in terms of

what Lacan calls "jouissance." According to Lacan,

Jouissance is more than mere pleasure or enjoyment; the

French term Jouissance includes the notions of bliss, of

enjoyment, and of pleasure, but it also has a sexual

connotation, that is, the bliss of sexual orgasm, lacking in

its English equivalents. In his translator's note to

Ecrits: A Selection, Alan Sheridan writes:

There is no adequate translation in English of

this word. "Enjoyment" conveys the sense,
contained in jouissance, of enjoyment of
rights, of property, etc. Unfortunately, in
modern English, the word has lost the sexual
connotations it still retains in French.
(Jouir is slang for "to come".) "Pleasure", on
the other hand, is pre-empted by "plaisir" --
and Lacan uses the two terms quite differently.
"Pleasure" obeys the law of homeostasis that
Freud evokes in "Beyond the Pleasure
PrinCiple", whereby, through discharge, the
psyche seeks the lowest possible level of
tension. "Jouissance" transgresses this law
and, in that respect, it is beyond the pleasure
principle. (x)

In the narrator's extraordinary joy and excitement, there is

clearly this sense of the sexual pleasure contained in

jouissance, as well as a sense of the transgression of law;

here the law is unmistakably Oedipal.

 109

The Oedipal theme of the tale is made more explicit in

the climactic murder scene. The narrator drags the old man

out of his bed and smothers him with it. The old man is

killed by suffocation: "The old man's hour had come! With a

loud yell, I threw open the lantern and leaped into the

room. He shrieked once -- once only. In an instant I

dragged him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him"

(795). After the murder, the narrator feels the anticipated

triumph: "I then smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done"

(795). The narrator's "wild audacity of perfect triumph"

comes from the seemingly successful Oedipal rebellion (796).

The bed here serves not only as the instrument of murder but

also as the metaphor of the Oedipal origin of the conflict.

The narrator takes elaborate precautions to conceal the

body. He meticulously decapitates and dismembers the

corpse, catching the blood in a bucket, and buries the

pieces beneath the floor: "First of all I dismembered the

corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and legs. I then

took up three planks from the flooring of the chamber, and

deposited all between the scantlings" (796). The narrator's

murder and dismemberment of the old man symbolizes the

killing/castration of the Oedipal father. For the narrator,

to assume the place of the father is to become the castrator

rather than the castrated. The narrator/castrator

 110

conversely acquires the phallic power and authority that the

old man loses.

The narrator now believes that the old man's vulture

eye will no longer vex him. He declares exultantly: "Yes,

he was stone, stone dead. I placed my hand upon the heart

and held it there many minutes. There was no pulsation. He

was stone dead. His eye would trouble me no more" (796).

Following the murder of the old man, the police officers

visit his house in response to a neighbor's report of

hearing a shriek in the night. The narrator, however, feels

himself perfectly safe and welcomes them to search the

house:

I smiled, -- for what had I to fear? I bade

the gentlemen welcome. The shriek, I said, was
my own in a dream. The old man, I mentioned,
was absent in the country. . . . I showed them
his treasures, secure, undisturbed. In the
enthusiasm of my confidence, I brought chairs
into the room, and desired them here to rest
from their fatigues, while I myself, in the
wild audacity of my perfect triumph, placed my
own seat upon the very spot beneath which
reposed the corpse of the victim. The officers
were satisfied. My manner had convinced them.
I was singularly at ease. (796)

The narrator gloats upon his triumph over the police who are

vainly searching the premises. For some unknown reason,

however, they stay on, and it is at this point that the

narrator begin to hear again the muffled sound. At first,

it starts as a ringing in his ears, but as it gets louder,

 111

he finds that it is not within his ears. The narrator

becomes disturbed by the continual beating of what he

imagines to be the heart of the dismembered and concealed

corpse announcing the murder from beneath the floorboards.

Excluding the possibility that he can hear the dead man's

heartbeat, we can postulate that the narrator mistakes his

own heart beating fast and loud out of guilt for the

supernatural beating of his murdered victim's heart.

Whether the haunting sound is a guilt-inspired auditory

hallucination or the narrator's misapprehension of his own

heartbeat, it is a traumatic (R)eal phenomenon for him. The

beating sound becomes more distinct. In order to get rid of

the sound, the narrator talks more freely -- but all in

vain. As his terror rises, the narrator is helplessly

driven toward a state of hysterical collapse:

No doubt I now grew very pale; -- but I talked

more fluently, and with a heightened voice.
Yet the sound increased -- and what could I do?
It was a low, dull, quick sound -- much such a
sound as a watch makes when enveloped in
cotton. I gasped for breath -- and yet the
officers heard it not. I talked more quickly
more vehemently; but the noise steadily
increased. I arose and argued about trifles,
in a high key and with violent gesticulations;
but the noise steadily increased. Why would
they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro
with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by
the observations of the men.. Oh God! what
could I do? I foamed -- I raved -- I swore! I
swung the chair upon which I had been sitting,
and grated it upon the boards. (797)
 112

The thumping sound grows so loud that the narrator is sure

the police can hear it and their ca~ess is really

derision.

Here, the situation becomes similar to that of "The Imp

of the Perverse," in which the narrator cannot refrain from

confessing his crime. After murdering his victim and

inheriting his estate, the narrator enjoys his "absolute

security," repeating to himself the phrase "I am safe -- I

am safe -- yes -- if I be not fool enough to make open

confession" (1225). No sooner does this idea occur to him

than he experiences the perverse impulse toward self-

destruction. Driven by the hallucinatory sound ringing in

his ears, the narrator begins to walk fast, then to run

through the street; and he feels "a maddening desire to

shriek aloud" (1225). At last, the narrator unconsciously

blurts out the confession of his crime, and then swoons. As

in "The Imp of the Perverse," it is the narrator of "The

Tell-Tale Heart" who makes the confession before the

exposure of the corpse. Confronting the police, the

narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" believes that he can keep

his newly-gained power. But, the narrator's "perfect

triumph" soon gives way to his hysterical and humiliating

confession of the crime to the unsuspecting police:

They heard! -- they suspected! -- they knew!

 113

they were making a mockery of my horror! --

this I thought, and this I think. But anything
was better than this agony! Anything was more
tolerable than this derision! I could bear
those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt
that I must scream or die! -- and now -- again!
-- hark! louder! louder! louder! louder! --
"Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I
admit the deed! -- tear up the planks! -- here,
here! -- it is the beating of his hideous
heart! (797)

Like the narrator/murderer of "The Black Cat" gives himself

away at the peak of his triumph, in the final scene of "The

Tell-Tale Heart," we find the ironic reversal of the

narrator's short-lived "perfect triumph." What he calls a

"perfect triumph" turns out to be only an illusion: what

seems to be buried or repressed only returns in greater

force to exacerbate and finally overwhelm the subject. The

investigating policemen play the role of the Lacanian

Symbolic Father, which is also Freud's mythic "dead" father.

In To'tem and Taboo (1913) and Group Psychology and 'the

Analysis of 'the Ego (1921), Freud appeals to the myth of a

primal horde governed by a strong adult male, who possesses

all the women and expels the sons when they reach sexual

maturity. According to Freud, both human history and the

emergence of authority have to be understood from out of

this primordial situation. In To'tem and Taboo, Freud calls

the leader of the primal horde a "primal father." Indeed,

only the primal father could really be said to "jouir" in

 114

the sense of exclusive sexual enjoyment of the women of the

horde. The sexually deprived sons kill this primal father

in order to be able to enjoy all his authority and

privileges. After patricide, the young sons, faced with a

potential struggle for the absolute power among themselves

and moved by tenderness toward the absent father, repent the

crime, forswear its repetition, and renounce the father's

women. The sons worship the dead father, elevating him to

totemic status:

They hated their father, who presented such a

formidable obstacle to their craving for power
and their sexual desire; but they loved and
admired him too. After they had got rid of
him, had satisfied their hatred and had put
into effect their wish to identify themselves
with him, the affection which had all this time
been pushed under was bound to make itself
felt. It did so in the form of remorse. A
sense of guilt made its appearance, which in
this instance coincides with the remorse felt
by the whole group. . • What had up to then
been prevented by his actual existence was
thenceforward prohibited by the sons
themselves. (143)

What is remarkable is that the sons submit to the father and

accept his command only after the murder -- the dead father

becomes more powerful in death than he ever was in life.

The sons, having engaged in patricide and cannibalism to

secure the father's jouissance for themselves, discover that

they cannot enjoy the fruits of their crime at all.

Ironically, the sons themselves begin to prohibit precisely

 115

those acts that have previously been forbidden by the threat

of the tyrannical father's punishment.

Why do the sons subject themselves to the law just when

there seems to be no longer any objective provocation for

it? Freud explains this in terms of guilt or moral anxiety.

But it raises another question: why do they feel guilty?

Following the murder, the sons experience the guilt that

derives from their originally ambivalent feelings for

the father. They hate the primal father because of his

boundless authority. Nevertheless, they love and admire him

at the same time. Thus, the sons feel guilty because they

have done away with their love-object. The effect of these

guilt feelings is to make the dead father even more powerful

than the living one. Indeed, as Freud writes later in Hoses

and Monotheism (1939), this explains how the two fundamental

taboos of culture -- against incest and parricide --

"operate on the side of the father who had just been got rid

of: they carryon his will, as it were" (119).

The "father" in the true sense, or, more precisely,

what Lacan calls the "paternal function," becomes

established only after he is overthrown and eliminated.

This paternal function is manifested both in Freud's notion

of the dead father and, later, in Lacan's Symbolic Father.

Freud considered the father to be essentially the dead

 116

father, who holds sway not through presence, but rather

through the debt of quilt provoked by the reason for his

absence. Lacan asks, "what is a Father?" Bis answer is

very clear: '" It is the dead Father,' Freud replies, but no

one listens, and, concerning that part of it that Lacan

takes up again under the heading 'Name-of-the-Father'" ("The

Subversion" 310). After the parricide, the guilt-inducing

"dead" father reigns as the Symbolic Father or the Name-of-

the-Father, the agent of the Law of the Symbolic that

regulates the child's Oedipal desire, precluding access to

the forbidden fruit of enjoyment. As I will further discuss

in the following chapter on the order of the Real, the

Symbolic mode is instituted by the death of the thing in the

sense that the word can only be where the object was. From

Hegel, Lacan takes the idea that the word is "the murder of

the thing" because the signifier erases and supplants the

immediacy of the object i t identifies by making it

symbolically present in speech ("Function and Field" 104).

In other words, a "tree" can be discussed without the tree

being present; the actual tree itself thus becomes

unimportant. Bence, Lacan maintains that the word is "a

presence made of absence" ("Function and Field" 65). In the

Lacanian scheme, death is the ubiquitous phenomenon in the

realm of the Symbolic and is closely related to the death of

 117

the father, that is, the murder of the father of the primal

horde. The Lacanian Name-of-the-Father (as a pure signifier

of the Symbolic order) comes to take the place of the

Freudian dead father. In "On a Question Preliminary to Any

Possible Treatment of Psychosis" (1958), Lacan, discussing

the relationship between death and fatherhood, links the

murdered father of Freud's tribal myth to his Symbolic

Father:

How, indeed, could Freud fail to recognize such

an affinity, when the necessity of his
reflexion led him to link the appearance of the
signifier of the Father, as author of the Law,
with death, even to the murder of the Father
thus showing that if this murder is the
fruitful moment of debt through which the
subject binds himself for life to the Law, the
symbolic Father is, in so far as he signifies
this Law, the dead Father. (199)

In the final confession scene of "The Tell-Tale Heart,"

the murdered father returns in the form of the police,

representative of the Symbolic Law. Here the shift of power

between the narrator and the policemen takes place: the

punishing gaze of the police returns the narrator to the

position of the object of surveillance from which he had

hoped to escape. The narrator's final fall into incoherence

and madness is triggered by his sudden belief that they have

been watching him all the time -- fully aware of everything

he has done. The narrator's growing hysterical anxiety

comes from his fear of the castration represented by the

 118

paternal metaphor, i.e., the policemen. The increasinq1y

loud sound of the old man's beatinq heart also precipitates

the narrator's ultimate loss of control. The insistent

beatinq of the dead father's heart is an apt metaphor for

the quilt-inducinq Law of the Symbolic. Since the narrator

has become the father/phallus by killinq the Oedipal father,

he has to be punished for his cruel act of usurpation. The

rebellious son's final confession and inevitable punishment

restore the father to his riqhtful position. As I have

discussed so far, Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" can be read as

the story of a younq man who "acts out" the Oedipal murder

only to be castrated in retaliation by the aqents of the

Symbolic order. To occupy the father's place is necessarily

to kill him, and thus to be him; but, paradoxically, to be

him is inevitably to be dead.

Poe's text also helps us understand the Lacanian

Symbolic Father better. Throuqhout the Poe story, the

victim is referred to simply as "the old man," and we never

learn anythinq about him. The old man is refused any

reality; only his qhastly pale blue eye matters. Poe

separates the disturbinq and accusinq eye from the old man

and attributes to it the symbolic power and authorit~1i what

plays a siqnificant role in Poe's narrative is not the old

man himself but his "Evil Eye," the paternal metaphor or the
 119

phallus which has an existence of its own as the key

signifier of the Symbolic. Poe's portrayal of the old man

gives "substance" to Lacan's notion of the Symbolic Father

which stands for a paternal position or function and which

is not simply reducible to the presence or the absence of a

real, biological father. Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart"

prefigures Lacan's important formula of the Symbolic Dead

Father -- we cannot kill the Father who is already dead.

 120

ROTBS

1. The narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" has been read in

various ways as a psychotic subject. In "Poe's 'The Tell-
Tale Heart'" (1965), E. Arthur Robinson sees the story as
"the complete fantasy of a madman" (378). In "'Observe How
Healthy -- How Ca~ly I Can Tell You the Whole Story': Moral
Insanity and Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart'"
(1989), Paige Matthey Bynum argues that the narrator suffers
from a disease known as "moral insanity," which "pervert[s]
the sense of moral responsibility necessary to deter crime"
(142). More recently, In "'Moral Insanity' or Paranoid
Schizophrenia: Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart'" (1992), Brett
Zimmerman claims that Poe's characterization of the narrator
"corresponds with current psychoanalytic profiles of the
'paranoid schizophrenic' personality" (39).

2. A number of critics have noted that the actions and

perceptions shared by the narrator and his victim make the
story one of Poe's most pronounced uses of the motif of the
double. In "The Dream in 'The Tell-Tale Heart'" (1970),
John W. Canario writes: "The narrator admits . . . that he
has experienced the same mortal terror as the old man, that
he has groaned in the identical manner, and that he has
undergone this experience again and again just at night, the
time which he has chosen for his observations. Finally, the
suspicion that the narrator and the old man are doubles
becomes a certainty when the narrator complains of the
loudness with which the old man's heart is beating" (195).
In The Rationale of Deception in Poe (1979), David Ketterer
maintains that "in killing his double, like William Wilson,
he kills himself" (105). In "Poe and the Art of Suggestion"
(1982), Richard Wilber also points out that "on some level
the killer and victim of 'The Tell-Tale Heart' are one
person, that they have one heart and one riven nature" (8).

3. Discussions of Poe's male protagonists' attitudes toward

or relationships with the fictional father figures seem
inevitably to address the attitude of Poe toward the father
in his own life. Poe's later stormy relationship with his
foster-father, John Allan, has been the subject of much
biographical and psychological study. "If there is a
villain in Poe's destiny," Daniel Hoffman writes, "it may
have been his nonadoptive guardian" (25). In 1834, John
Allan was seriously ill with dropsy, and less than a year
later he was dead. Poe's description of his foster-father
as a weak, dying old man in bed is repeated in his tales.
 121

In "The Imp of the Perverse," the narrator who inherits the

victim's estate says "I knew my victim's habit of reading in
bed" (1224). In "The Tell-Tale Heart," the narrator sees
the old man in his bedroom each morning instead of waiting
for him to get out of bed. It seems to suggest the old
man's ill health. Marie Bonaparte writes:
The murdered old man resembles John Allan in
several ways, even to the symptom of the thudding
heart. Did not his first attack of dropsy occur
in England, in 1820?: which illness, worsening
with age, in 1834, ended his life? The reader
will recall Edgar's last meeting with his foster-
father and the cane -- attribute of his disease --
which the latter brandished against this intruder
into his once home. His fear of the pounding
heart in the murdered old man's breast thus,
doubtless, directly derives from the oppressed,
laboring and dropsical heart of the Scotch
merchant. (497)

4. The Symbolic order is also the locus of the "Other"

(Au~re). As several critics have noted, the Other is one of
the most complex terms in Lacan's work. Malcolm Bowie, for
instance, claims that "more consistently than any other of
Lacan's terms, 'the Other' refuses to yield a single sense"
(Freud, Prous~ and Lacan 117). According to Anthony Wilden,
it is almost impossible to define the Other since "for Lacan
it has a functional value. • • . sometimes 'the Other'
refers to the parents: to the mother as 'real Other' (in the
dual relationship of the mother and child), to the father as
the 'Symbolic Other,' yet it is never a person. Very often
the term seems to refer simply to the unconscious itself,
although the unconscious is more often described as 'the
locus of the Other'" (Speech and Language 263-4). Lacan
carefully distinguishes this "big (or absolute) Other" with
a capital "0" from the "little other" with a small "0."
Although the term has multiple meanings, the Other can be
equated with both language and another subject; on the other
hand, the little other refers to a specular image or a
counterpart of the ego. While the Other is inscribed in the
Symbolic order, the other belongs to the Imaginary order.
In his 1956 paper "The Appeal, the Allusion," Lacan
elaborates the distinction between the Other and the other:
The other with a small 0, is the imaginary
other, the otherness in a mirror image, which
makes us dependent upon the form of our
counterpart. . . the absolute Other is the one
 122

we address ourselves to beyond this

counterpart, the one we are forced to admit
beyond the relation of mirage, the one who
accepts or is refused opposite us, the one who
will on occasion deceive us, the one of whom we
will never know whether he is deceiving us, the
one to whom we always address ourselves. His
existence is such that the fact of addressing
ourselves to him, of sharing something like
language with him, is more important than
anything that may be placed at stake between
him and us. (The Seminar III 252-3)

5. In the mid-1940s, Levi-Strauss begins to import the

principles of modern linguistics into his study of myth and
kinship relations. Deeply impressed by the ideas of
Saussure and Jakobson, Levi-Strauss tries to make
anthropology scientific by modelling it on structural
linguistics. Levi-Strauss firmly believes that modern
linguistics can provide a valuable method that can be used
to understand and explain areas of human culture other than
language, as if they were also articulated as language(s).
In his Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss (1950),
Levi-Strauss observes that "it is linguistics, and most
particularly structural linguistics, which has since
familiarized us with the idea that the fundamental phenomena
of mental life, the phenomena that condition it and
determine its most general forms, are located on the plane
of unconscious thinking" (35). Levi-Strauss's main task is
to explore the "universal laws which regulate the
unconscious activities of the mind" ("Language and the
Analysis" 59).
Levi-Strauss, relying on insights derived from
Saussurean linguistics, argues that the unconscious social
laws regulating marriage rules and kinship patterns are
structured like a language: "Marriage regulations and
kinship systems [constitute] a kind of language, a set of
process permitting the establishment, between individuals
and groups, of a certain type of communication. That the
mediating factor, in this case, should be the women of the
group, who are circulated between clans, lineages, or
families, in place of the words of the group, which are
circulated between individuals, does not at all change the
fact that the essential aspect of the phenomenon is
identical in both cases" ("Language and the Analysis" 61).
According to Levi-Strauss, in every society there are three
main forms of exchange: the exchange of women, the exchange
 123

of gifts, goods, and service, and the exchange of verbal

messages through language. The renunciation of the women of
one's own family (sister, daughter, mother) signifies
communication between individuals and groups. For Levi-
Strauss, anthropology, like linguistics, is primarily
concerned with processes of human communication. Thus,
language as the example par excellence of the operation of a
sign system can provide an objective foundation for research
into the structures of other cultural modes of
communication.
From the Levi-Straussian perspective, the studies of
cultural and linguistic systems allow certain analogies,
since language and the various social rules (developed
around marriage and kinship relations) are produced by
identical unconscious structures and have the same basic
functions, that is, communication with others and the
integration of the group. In the "Structural Analysis in
LinguistiCS and in Anthropology," Levi-Strauss, comparing
the atom of kinship with the smallest unit of language
(phoneme), argues that kinship systems can be considered to
be homologous with linguistic structures. Like phonemes,
the elements of kinship relations are elements of meaning;
they can achieve their function only when they are
integrated as differentials into a system. Levi-Strauss
also stresses that kinship systems, just as phonemic
systems, operate at an unconscious level. According to
Levi-Strauss, every society or culture consists of
unconscious "symbolic systems": "Any culture can be
considered as a combination of symbolic systems headed by
language, the matrimonial rules, the economic relations,
art, science and religion" (Marcel Mauss 16). Levi-
Strauss's structural anthropology has a profound influence
on the inception of Lacan's thought. In "The "Function and
Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," Lacan
recapitulates Levi-Strauss's major points: "The marriage tie
is governed by an order of preference whose law concerning
the kinship names is, like language, imperative for the
group in its forms, but unconscious in its structure" (60).
Drawing upon Levi-Strauss's The Elementary Structures of
Kinship (1969) which reinterprets the universal prohibition
against incest in terms of the law of exchange and of the
combinative enrichment of the group, Lacan also places
particular emphasis upon the "symbolic function" of the
social laws and prohibitions.

6. In "The Effectiveness of Symbols" (1949), Levi-Strauss,

exploring the parallel between shamanism and psychoanalysis,
 124

equates the unconscious with the symbolic function: "The

Unconscious ceases to be the ultimate haven of individual
peculiarities -- the repository of a unique history which
makes each of us an irreplaceable being. It is reducible to
a function, which no doubt is specifically human, and which
is carried out according to the same laws among all men, and
actually corresponds to the aggregate of these laws"
(Structural Anthropology 203). The Levi-Straussian
unconscious clearly has little to do with the Freudian
individual unconscious. When Levi-Strauss speaks of the
unconscious, he is referring to a "category of collective
thinking" which, like language, mediates self and others
(Marcel Mauss 35, 36). Both the synchronic structure of la
langue put forth by Saussure and the idea of symbolic
function described by Levi-Strauss seem closely associated
with a sort of collective unconscious.
Lacan's approach to the unconscious is influenced by
Saussure and Levi-Strauss. In contrast to most Freudian
psychoanalysts' biologistic mode of thought which tends to
see the unconscious as the site of the instincts, Lacan
argues that the unconscious is "neither primordial nor
instinctual" ("Agency of the Letter" 170). For Lacan, the
unconscious is primarily linguistic in nature: both language
and the unconscious operate with the same linguistic
mechanisms, the two most important ones being metaphor and
metonymy. Hence, "what the psychoanalytic experience
discovers in the unconscious is the whole structure of
language. • • • what it knows about the elementary is no
more than the elements of the signifier" ("Agency of the
Letter" 147). This linguistic view of the unconscious is
summed up in his famous formula, "the unconscious is
structured like a language" ("The Freudian Unconscious and
Ours" 20). As Elizabeth Roudinesco has pointed out
accurately, Lacan's much-revised non-organic, linguistically
structured version of the unconscious owes much to the
unconscious as defined by Levi-Strauss: "Lacan's encounter
with the thought of Levi-Strauss meant he had at last found
a theoretical solution to the problem of how to make a
complete overhaul of Freudian doctrine. In the process, the
unconscious was to a large extent freed of the biological
cast that Freud had lent it, in a direct line from
Darwinism. Instead it was seen as a language-related
structure" (Jacques Lacan 212). In Lacan's formulation, the
unconscious as an intersubjective linguistic structure is
located in the order of the Symbolic.

7. Like other French structuralists and post-structuralists,

 125

Lacan's approach to language is premised upon Saussure's

linguistics and assumes that language predates and shapes
human experience. Although we act as if we created
language, Lacan argues that human subjects are in fact
products of language: "What is the meaning of meaning?
Meaning is the fact that the human being isn't the master of
this primordial, pr~tive language. Be has been thrown
into it, committed, caught up in its gears" ("Psychoanalysis
and Cybernetics" 307). Elsewhere Lacan also claims that it
is language that makes us human: "It is the world of words
that creates the world of things -- the things originally
confused in the hie et nunc of the all in the process of
coming-into-being -- by giving its concrete being to their
essence, and its ubiquity to what has always been. . . .
Man speaks, then, but it is because the symbol has made him
man" ("Function and Field" 65).

8. In his Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud

describes the curious game of his eighteen-Month-old
grandson Ernst. The little boy, not yet able to use words,
utters a lengthy "ooh" (which is interpreted as an
equivalent of the German word fort, meaning "gone" or
"away") when the cotton reel with which he is playing
disappears and da ("there") when the reel reappears. Freud
discusses the significance of this game in terms of the
renunciation. Since the child's game of Fort! Da! is of
great importance to Lacan, it will be useful to reproduce
Freud's passage at length:
The child had a wooden reel with a piece of
string tied round it. . . . What he did was to
hold the reel by the string and very skillfully
throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so
that it disappeared into it, at the same time
uttering his expressive "0-0-0-0". He then
pulled the reel out of the cot again by the
string and hailed its reappearance with a
joyful "da" ["there"]. This, then, was the
complete game -- disappearance and return. . .
The interpretation of the game then
became obvious. It was related to the child's
great cultural achievement -- the instinctual
renunciation (that is, the renunciation of
instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in
allowing his mother to go away without
protesting. He compensated himself for this,
as it were, by himself staging the
disappearance and return of the objects within
 126

his reach. (SE 18: 15)

Lacan places particular emphasis on the linguistic dimension

of the game, that is, on the role which language plays in
the renunciation; the two opposing phonemes enable the child
to symbolize, and therefore to master and tolerate, the
absence and the presence of his mother. For Lacan, the
Fore! Da! game is the moment when the primordial
symbolization which inaugurates the signifying chain is made
manifest, and when the "child is born into language"
("Function and Field" 103). What is anticipated in the game
by the child through the first primitive phonemic
oppositions is language as a whole. Lacan sees the game as
a paradigm for the subject's entry into the Symbolic order:
"This is the point of insertion of a symbolic order that
pre-exists the infantile subject and in accordance with
which he will have to structure himself" ("Direction of the
Treatment" 234). In "The See-saw of Desire" (1954), Lacan
further elaborates the significance of the child's game:
"This game with the cotton-reel is accompanied by a
vocalization which from the linguist's point of view is
characteristic of the very foundation of language [langage],
and which is the only way one may grasp the problem of a
language [langue], namely a simple opposition. What is
important is not that the child said the words Fore/Da,
which, in his mother tongue, amounts to far/here. • • . It
is rather that here, right from the beginning, we have a
first manifestation of language. In this phonematic
opposition, the child transcends, brings on to the symbolic
plane, the phenomenon of presence and absence. . It is
the gate of entry into what already exists, the phonemes
making up a language" (172-3).

9. In The Elemeneary Seruceures of Kinship (1969), Levi-

Strauss argues that the prohibition of incest is "the
fundamental step because of which, by which, but above all
in which, the transition from nature to culture is
accomplished. . • The prohibition of incest is where
nature transcends itself. It sparks the formation of a new
and more complex type of structure. . . . It brings about
and is in itself the advent of a new order" (24).

10. Lacan, "Courtly Love as Anamorphosis," The Seminar of

Jacques Lacan, Book VII. p. 142.

11. In her introduction to Feminine Sexualiey: Jacques Lacan

and rhe ecole freudienne (1982), Jacqueline Rose reiterates
 127

the insignificance of the actual father for Lacan:

The concept [paternal metaphor] is used to
separate the father's function from the
idealised or imaginary father with which it is
so easily confused. • . • Thus when Lacan
calls for a return to the place of the father
he is crucially distinguishing himself from any
sociological conception of role. The father is
a function and refers to a law, the place
outside the imaginary dyad and against which it
breaks. (39)

However, it is important to note that although the Lacanian

Symbolic Father has little to do with the literal biological
father, an actual subject can nevertheless represent the
Symbolic Father, the signifier of the Law of the Symbolic,
as long as he exercises the paternal function.

12. Lacan, "The Dream of Irma's Injection," The Seminar II,

p. 156.

13. Lacan, "Le seminaire de Caracas," in Almanach de la

dissolucion (Paris: Navarin, 1986), p. 82.

14. In The Language of PsychO-Analysis, J. Laplanche and J.-

B. Pontalis define the Freudian Oedipus complex as an
"organized body of loving and hostile wishes which the child
experiences towards its parents. In its so-called posicive
form, the complex appears as in the story of Oedipus Rex: a
desire for the death of the rival -- the parent of the same
sex -- and a sexual desire for the parent of the opposite
sex. In its negative form, we find the reverse picture:
love for the parent of the same sex, and jealous hatred for
the parent of the opposite sex. In fact, the two versions
are to be found in varying degrees in what is known as the
complece form of the complex. • . . The Oedipus complex
plays a fundamental part in the structuring of the
personality, and in the orientation of human desire" (282-
3) •

15. As Lacan continually asserts, the phallus is not the

equivalent of the penis. However, each sex nevertheless
confuses the signifier with a part or whole of its body:
whereas the male is construed as having the phallus because
of his possession of the biological penis, the female is
construed as castrated because of the lack of the organ. As
Ellie Ragland-Sullivan notes, "even though the Phallus does
 128

not refer to the real father, then, nor to the sexual organ,
Lacan used this term to underline the idea that the
biological father, the penian part-object, and the phallic
differential function are confused in language" (283). In
"The Signification of the Phallus, " Lacan himself writes
that the phallus is the privileged signifier not only
because it is "the most symbolic element in the literal
(typographical) sense of the term," but also "the most
tangible element in the real of sexual copulation" and "by
virtue of its turgidity . • • the image of the vital flow as
it is transmitted in generation" (287).

16. The Oedipus complex and the castration complex are

fundamental to psychoanalytic theory and practice. In his
1908 paper "On the Sexual theories of Children," Freud first
described the castration complex. According to Freud, the
child makes the assumption that the anatomical difference
between the sexes is due to the girl's penis having been cut
off. The structure and effects of the castration complex
vary for the boy and the girl. While the boy fears that his
own penis will be cut off by the father, the girl does not
fear castration because she sees herself as already
castrated. She attempts to compensate for this lack or
absence by seeking a child as a substitute for the penis.

17. In recent decades, a new attention to psychoanalysis

emerged as the result of Lacan's radical linguistic
rethinking of Freudian concepts. Lacanian psychoanalysis is
probably one of the most influential currents in feminist
literary theory today, and its appeal for feminists mainly
derives from its emphasis on the symbolically structured
character of gender-differentiated subjectivity. Lacanian
psychoanalysis, unlike object-relations theory, ascribes a
central role to the Oedipus complex or the Name-of-the-
Father in the acquisition of sexual identity. In Lacan's
view, the child is not born a subject; rather it becomes a
subject only through a specific symbolic intervention, that
is, the Oedipus complex, through which it becomes a speaking
subject and acquires a sexual identity by taking up either a
masculine or feminine position. In other words,
subjectivity and gender identity are constituted with the
child's entry into the Symbolic order. What is significant
here is that in the Lacanian formulation both sexes enter
the Symbolic order of language as castrated, irrespective of
their biological sex.
For Lacan, as for Freud, sexual difference is not a
mere reflex of anatomy, but rather a psychical question:
 129

both describe gender identity as an effect of the child's

resolution of the oedipus and castration complexes. For
Freud, it is the presence or absence of the physical organ,
the penis, that organizes psychical paths to gender
identity. In Freud's view, the masculine is equivalent to
such terms as active, phallic, and subject; the feminine is
equivalent to passive, castrated, and object. While Freud
concentrated on the "distinction" (Ent:scheidung) between the
sexes and its psychical consequences, Lacan on the
"relation" (rapport:) between the sexes. For Lacan, the
subject is gendered in and through its relation to the
phallus: in so far as the subject has access to the phallus,
he is masculine; in so far as the subject lacks access to
the phallus, she is feminine. Of all Lacan's concepts, the
notion of the phallus as quintessential marker of sexual
difference and desire has given rise to the most impassioned
resistance in current debates between psychoanalysis and
feminism.
Some feminist theorists like Luce Irigaray and Helene
Cixous have argued that the privileged position Lacan
accords to the phallus as the signifier ext:raordinaire, the
centerpiece of the Symbolic order, unmistakably indicates
that Lacan merely repeats the patriarchal gestures of Freud.
Other feminists writers, such as Ellie Ragland-Sullivan,
Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose, and Catherine Clement,
have defended Lacan, claiming that his distinction between
the penis and the phallus provides a non-biologistic theory
of gender identity. These Lacanian feminists argue that
some feminists hostile to Lacan have misread him by failing
to distinguish the penis from the phallus: those feminists
who "reject Lacan's argumentation have construed his
concepts of Phallus and Castration in a literal sense and
therefore view his thought erroneously as prescriptive and
finalistic" (Ragland-Sullivan 298). Instead, Jacqueline
Rose claims that the Lacanian phallus, which "exceeds any
natural or biological division," is systematically opposed
to any "pre-given sexual difference" (Feminine Sexualit:y
28). In Jacques Lacan and t:he Philosophy of Psychoanalysis
(1986), Ragland-Sullivan, an emphatic defender of the status
of the phallus as a neutral symbol of subjectivity, also
maintains:
I find no a priori Lacanian support for
phallocentrism -- any more than for Lacanian-
supported feminism. Lacan discovered the phallic
signifier, its effects and the resulting structure
of substitutive Desire. These intrinsically
neutral elements give rise to ideologies of the
 130

masculine and feminine that cluster around the

male-female difference and dramatize themselves in
a parade. (298)

Indeed, Lacan's theory of the phallus as the pure signifier

can offer us a means of escaping Freud's biologism and
naturalism and constructing a feminist theory of sexual
difference which views gender identity as a purely cultural
construct. In Lacan's view, masculinity and feminity are
not determined by anatomical and biological factors; they
are symbolic positions rather than biological essences.
Lacan's theory of sexual difference or what he calls
"sexuation" can be used as a way of constructing a non-
essentialist account of gendered subjectivity. However, it
is true that not all feminists accept such an argument. The
question of Lacan's relevance to feminism remains highly
controversial: feminists such as Jane Flax vehemently attack
Lacanian psychoanalysis as entirely problematic and
"profoundly anti-feminist in its content and implications"
(Thinking Fragments 100). There is no doubt that Lacan has
further reinforced this negative impression among feminists
with his provocative, seemingly "anti-feminist" remarks on
woman and on the sexual difference: "Woman does not exist,"
"Woman is not-all," "There's no such thing as a sexual
relation," and "A woman is a symptom."

18. During his professional career, Lacan developed a

sustained and harsh critique of a post-Freudian branch of
psychoanalysis known as object-relations theory. The
British object-relations school, which includes such figures
as Melanie Klein, W.R.D. Fairbairn, Michael Balint, Harry
Guntrip, and D.W. Winnicott, takes as its primary field of
study the relation between the mother and the infant in the
first year of life. Object-relations theory assumes that
the infant, from the beginning of postnatal life, engages in
formative and fantasmatic relations with objects. In
psychoanalytic theory, the term "object" refers not only to
an inanimate material thing in the external world, but also
to a person, a part of the body, or a product of fantasy.
Object-relations theory can be said to derive from the work
of Melanie Klein who insists on the importance of the pre-
Oedipal period of development and of the early symbiotic
mother-infant relationship. According to Klein, the infant
from his first feeding perceives the mother as a breast. In
this early stage, this partial object, the breast, does not
exist for the infant as an external anatomical organ; it
rather belongs to the realm of the fantasy and is internal
 131

to the infant. In her essay "Weaning" (1936), included in

Love, Guilt;, and Reparat;ion (1975), Klein writes that "in
phantasy the child sucks the breast into himself, chews i t
up and swallows it; thus he feels that he has actually got
it there, that he possesses the mother's breast within
himself" (291). In a crucial deviation from Freud, Klein
argues that the penis or phallus is not the determining,
all-important agent which it appears to be for Freud. Even
in the formation of the superego, which is believed to be
formed by the paternal prohibition through the Oedipus
complex by Freud, Klein makes the mother central, deriving
it from the earliest relation to the nursing mother's body.
Indeed, there is virtually no operative Law of the Father in
Klein's formulations.
Lacan accuses Kleinian psychoanalysis of neglecting the
role of the father and of privileging the pre-verbal, pre-
Oedipal stages of child development. In Lacan's view, the
Kleinian analysis which focuses its attention on the
relation between the subject and the fantasmatic object only
deals with the Imaginary dimension, neglecting the Symbolic
order, "the foundation of speech" ("Function and Field" 36).
Lacan argues that the analyst must recover the foundations
of psychoanalysis in speech and language, since
psychoanalysis as the "talking cure" has "only a single
medium: the patient's speech. That this is self-evident is
no excuse for our neglecting it" ("Function and Field" 40).
One of Lacan's fundamental concerns is to restore the
centrality of language to psychoanalysis. In his
introduction to the "Rome Discourse," Lacan writes:
As far as I am concerned, I would assert that
the technique cannot be understood, nor
therefore correctly applied, if the concepts on
which it is based are ignored. It is our task
to demonstrate that these concepts take on
their full meaning only when orientated in a
field of language, only when ordered in
relation to the function of speech.
("Function and Field" 39)

Lacan's emphasis on the role of language, discourse, or what

he calls more generally the "Symbolic" in psychoanalysis
constitutes his polemical "return to Freud" and serves to
distinguish Lacan's approach from other contemporary
psychoanalytic theories and practices represented by ego-
psychology and object-relations. Lacan argues that both
ego-psychology and object-relations theory are based on a
fundamental misreading of Freud's work in which the ego and
 132

object relations are given prLmary considerations: Lacan

criticizes the two major schools of psychoanalysis for
ignoring the most Lmportant dLmension in human experience
the function of language or the Symbolic order. From a
Lacanian perspective, the ego-psychologists and object-
relation theorists are only concerned with the Imaginary
dimension, since the ego is essentially a product of the
mirror-stage experience and the mother-child dyad represents
the pre-verbal, pre-Oedipal stage. It might be argued,
then, that the very heart of Lacan's celebrated "return to
Freud" is his assertion of the primacy of the Symbolic over
the Imaginary. For Lacan, it is the Symbolic or language
that makes us human subjects. Therefore, in Lacan's view,
it is impossible to exaggerate the primacy of the Symbolic
order since the subject is constituted and represented by
the Symbolic: "All human beings share in the universe of
symbols. They are included in it and submit to it, much
more than they constitute it. They are much more its
supports than its agents" (" Zeitlich-Entwicklungsgeschichte"
157) .

19. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis,

Lacan, writing of the gaze as threat, notes that "It is
striking, when one thinks of the universality of the
function of the evil eye, that there is no trace anywhere of
a good eye, of an eye that blesses. What can this mean,
except that the eye carries with it the fatal function of
being in itself endowed . . . with a power to separate"
("What is a Picture?" 115). Later in the same article,
Lacan also remarks that "the evil eye is the fascinum, i t is
that which has the effect of arresting movement and,
literally, of killing life. At the moment the subject
stops, suspending his gesture, he is mortified" (118).

20. Robert Con Davis explains the sole motive for the murder
in terms of the paranoiac narrator's fear of "becoming a
mere object for the eye's gaze" ("Lacan, Poe, and Narrative
Repression" 993).
 CHAPTER POUR

THE XMP(-OSSXBLE) OP THE PERVERSE "REAL"

And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a

chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in
our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its
proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the
skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.
Poe, Arthur Gordon pym

Lacan's real is always traumatic; it is a hole in discourse.

-- Jacques-Alain Miller, "Microscopia"

I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because

there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally
impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very
impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.
Lacan, Television

The Real, taking the position of Freud's unconscious, must

not be confused with the classic concept of "reality," which
Lacan identifies with our phenomenological perception and
which thus depends upon the Imaginary. The only possible
definition of the Real is that it is "impossible" to be
defined and formalized.
--A. Leupin, Lacan & the Human Sciences

During the 1950s, Lacan developed his so-called

"register" theory. While the Imaginary order (the specular

realm of images and identifications) and the Symbolic order

(the background system of language and culture) are

relatively easy to grasp, the order of the Real still

remains the most complex and mysterious of the three. Most

commentators on the Lacanian register theory generally leave

133
 134

out any substantial discussion of the Real. For example, in

"Self and Other in the Child's Experience of Language"

(1981), Judith M. Brett simply states that "Like many others

who discuss Lacan's work I will bracket the Real and talk

only about the Imaginary and Symbolic" (193). The tendency

to gloss over the problematic Real in favor of explications

of the Imaginary and the Symbolic is apparent even in the

very titles of writings influential in the reception of

Lacan into AnglO-American literary and film studies: Fredric

Jameson's "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism,

psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject"

(1977), Jacqueline Rose's "The Imaginary" (1980), and

Christian Metz's The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and

the Cinema (1982). More recently, such works as John

Forrester's The Seductions of Psychoanalysis (1990) and

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen' s Lacan: The Absolute Master (1991)

also fail to provide a detailed account of the Real as a

fundamental category of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory.

If we consider the fact that Lacan himself speaks less

of the Real than the other two orders, the theoretical

exclusion of the Real is to some extent a quite

understandable phenomenon. However, no matter how elusive

and difficult the Real order might be, once it constitutes

part of the Lacanian topology along with the Imaginary and

 135

the Symbolic, the omission of the Real seriously distorts

the meaning of the whole register theory. In this chapter,

I attempt to approach the concept of the problematic Real

through some of Poe's well-known short stories: "The Man of

the Crowd," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Black Cat,"

"The Imp of the Perverse," "William Wilson," "Berenice," and

"Ligeia." Poe's texts will provide useful literary examples

that can explicate and illustrate some of the most

characteristic dimensions of the order of the Real, and at

the same time the Lacanian concept of the Real will help us

to understand certain puzzling elements of the tales.

I. The "Impossible" Real

What is the register of the Real? Although it is very

difficult to penetrate the notion of the Real, we can deduce

some significant aspects of that order by tracing Lacan's

own fragmentary accounts of the Real scattered throughout

his legendary seminars. In his 1955 paper "Introduction to

the Ent;wurf," Lacan characterizes the Real as the domain

"which always lies on the edge of our conceptual

elaborations, which we are always thinking about, which we

sometimes speak of, and which, strictly speaking, we can't

grasp, and which is nonetheless there" (96). Later, in his

Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexualit;y, t;he Limit;s of Love and

Knowledge (1998), Lacan refers to the Real as "the mystery

 136

of the speaking body, the mystery of the unconscious" (131).

Here, the crucial point is that the Lacanian notion of the

Real has very little to do with a common, objective

"reality," which is constructed by the Symbolic and the

Imaginary orders. As Joseph H. Smith claims, the Lacanian

Real "does not refer to our imagistically or linguistically

organized and known reality. The real is that which has not

been or cannot be or resists being so organized and known"

(Arguing with Lacan 6). Similarly, in his recent work

Beyond the psychoanaly'tic Dyad (1996), John P. Muller also

argues that Lacan's concept of the Real should be

distinguished from an actual, external reality which belongs

to the registers of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. 1 The

Lacanian Real is, as Muller puts it, rather that which

eludes us:

The "Real" is a notion to be distinguished from

reality as its epistemological frontier; if
reality is a system of images, logical
categories, and labels, yielding a
differentiated, usually predictable sequence of
experience, then the Real is what lies beyond
as the unimaginable, nameless, undifferentiated
otherness in experience. (75)

Broadly speaking, the Real includes everything which

cannot be mediated by language, that is, by the Symbolic

order. 2 Lacan, in his 1954 paper "Discourse Analysis and

Ego Analysis," characterizes the Real as "what resists

symbolization absolutely" (66). Influenced by Hegelian

 137

philosophy and structural linguistics, Lacan postulates that

the word is "a presence made of absence" because (1) the

symbol is used in the absence of the thing (a manifestation

of "the murder of the thing"') and (2) signifiers can only

exist insofar as they are opposed to other signifiers

("Function and Field" 65, 104). In striking contrast to the

differential relations of the Symbolic order to which "lack"

or "absence" is intrinsic, Lacan claims that "there is no

absence in the real" ("A, m, a, SIt 313)~ the order of the

Real is "absolutely without fissure. "t In his preface to

the English edition of The Four Fundamental Concepts of

PsychO-Analysis (1978), Lacan also remarks that "the lack of

lack makes the real" (ix). John P. Muller elaborates the

difference between the Real and the Symbolic:

The real has no gaps or lacks, and this absence

of lack (if that can be conceived) is the
inverse of what goes on in signification. • • •
Lack is intrinsic to the signifier as signifier.
When we speak or read a word, we do not stop at
the mere sound or drops of ink • . . . We see
through the word to another that is absent. This
absent other is, first of all, all the other
words as the background against which the word has
salience. • . . The real, on the contrary, is a
kind of static whole as well as a kind of black
hole void of internal relations.
("Language, Psychosis, and. "28)

Then, we can assert that what remains irreducible or

inassimilable to language is the order of the Real. 5 To

exemplify this crucial theoretical point, let us take Poe's

 138

first characteristically "urban" tale, "The Man of the

Crowd" (1840).

The anonymous narrator in "The Man of the Crowd,'"

relaxing at the bow-window of a London coffeehouse at the

close of evening in autumn, observes the different types of

people passing by on the busy street outside. He deduces

their social class and occupation from their dress and

demeanor -- the noblemen, merchants, attorneys, tradesmen,

and stock-jobbers. As the night advances, the narrator's

attention is drawn to a decrepit old man whose countenance

displays an "absolute idiosyncrasy of expression" (511).

The old man is short, thin, and very feeble, and his clothes

are filthy though of fine quality. A rent in his cloak

reveals a dagger and a diamond. The narrator perceives the

enigmatic stranger to be the incarnation of "vast mental

power, of caution, of penuriousness, of avarice, of

coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of

merriment, of excessive terror, of intense of supreme

despair" (511). Despite the heavy rain and thick humid fog,

the narrator determines to follow the old man, wondering

"'how wild a history is written within that bosom'" (511).

All night long and through the ensuing day, the narrator

continues to trail the old man through the labyrinthine

streets of London so that he might "know more of him" (511).

 139

The narrator realizes that the stranger cannot bear to be

alone and therefore compulsively seeks people moving from

crowd to crowd. The old man's wanderings seem to be aimless

and he never stops. As the second evening comes on, the

narrator becomes weary unto death and can go on no longer.

The narrator approaches the old man directly and stares him

in the face. But the old man takes no notice of him, and

walks on. Finally, the narrator despairs of comprehending

the old man's dark history and believes that he "is the type

and the genius of deep crime. Be refuses to be alone. Be

is 'the man of 'the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for

I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds" (515). Then

the story concludes with the same German phrase i t began

with -- "er lasse sich niche lesen," which Poe translates as

"it [he] does not permit itself [himself] to be read" (506,

515) .

Poe's "The Man of the Crowd" is an extraordinary story

which refuses the customary definitive disclosure nothing

happens and nothing is resolved. The story takes us into

the uncanny domain of the sur-real or un-real, the world in

which all seems natural and understandable and yet is not.

The narrator's anxious search for the old man's history and

mystery fails because of the latter's impenetrable nature

and resistance. The narrator thus ends up where he began

 140

(in front of the coffeehouse). Indeed, "The Man of the

Crowd" is a narrative about unreadabi1ity, and the

"unknowable" stranger in the tale perfectly embodies the

Lacanian "impossible" Real, which is characterized by its

very resistance to representation. For Lacan, the Real,

like an unknowable X, cannot be known since it exists beyond

both the Imaginary and the Symbolic. It is this

"unknowability" that leads Lacan to link the Real with the

concept of "impossibility." As Ellie Ragland-Sullivan has

put it, the Real is

[Bloth beyond and behind Imaginary perception

and Symbolic description. It is an algebraic
X, inherently foreclosed from direct
apprehension or analysis. The Real, therefore,
is that before which the Imaginary falters, and
over which the Symbolic stumbles. This
Lacanian idea of the Real has led to the
description of it as the impossible. (188)

In his provocative politicized psychoanalytic work The

Sublime Objecr of Ideology (1989), Slavoj Zitek also

describes the order of the Real as "both the hard,

impenetrable kernel resisting symbolization and a pure

chimerical entity which has in itself no ontological

consistency. . • • it is something that persists only as

failed, missed, in a shadow, and dissolves itself as soon as

we try to grasp it in its positive nature" (169). The

Lacanian Real is perhaps best understood as that which

precludes all symbolizations. Therefore, the Real is the

 141

"impossible" meaning, implicitly, the "impossible-to-

symbolize."

Poe s "The Masque of the Red Death,,7 (1842), one of his

I

shortest and yet best-known stories, provides another

helpful example of this "impossible" character of the Real.

"The Masque of the Red Death" narrates the failed attempt of

the aristocratic protagonist at cheating death.' The tale

begins with the vivid description of a deadly plague

stalking the land: "No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or

so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal -- the

redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains,

and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the

pores, with dissolution" (670). Even more terrible, "the

whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were

the incidents of half an hour" (670). Prince Prospero and a

thousand knights and dames seek to secure themselves against

the ravages of the fearful Red Death by retreating into a

fortified abbey surrounded by a high wall and secured by

means of iron gates. After five or six months in the abbey,

Prospero decides to give a "masked ball of the most unusual

magnificence" to divert his courtiers (671). During the

fantastic ball, a strange masked figure suddenly appears

among the courtiers: "The figure was tall and gaunt, and

shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave.

 142

The mask which concealed the visage was made so ne.~rly to

resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that closest

scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat"

(675). The impropriety of the costume immediately shocks

and offends the guests. Although Prospero orders the

hideous figure to be seized and unmasked, all of his guests

are frozen in extreme terror and horror.' In his anger,

Prospero himself with a drawn dagger chases the morbid

figure through the seven different-colored rooms. At the

climax of the tale, as the intruder suddenly turns to

confront his pursuer in the last room, Prospero drops his

dagger and then falls prostrate in death.

When the other revellers summon courage to challenge

and seize the masked stranger, they gasp "in unutterable

horror" at finding "the grave cerements and corpselike mask

which they handled so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any

tangible form" (676). The emptiness or nothingness of the

phantom provokes the "nameless awe" and "deadly terror"

(676). In Poe, Dearh, and the Life of Writing (1987), J.

Gerald Kennedy provides an interesting deconstructionist

reading of the climax:

This is surely one of the most intriguing moments

in Poe's fiction. . • • the maskers attempt to
unmask death, literally to deconstruct the
representation of death. But the cerements and
mask are signs without a proper referent; they
 143

mark the semiotic impasse. • • • Death itself has

no essence; i t cannot be seized, known, destroyed,
or avoided. It is a presence-as-absence whose
meaning is forever denied to presence and already
accomplished in absence. (203)

Like the mysterious death-like figure in "The Masque of the

Red Death" who disappears as fast as the crowd grasps him,

the Lacanian Real refers to an impasse or a kernel of being

which remains essentially "ungraspable" or "unnameable" by

any representation. Therefore, the Real is also closely

connected to the realm of death. In his 1955 paper "Some

Questions for the Teacher," Lacan maintains that "in other

words, behind what is named, there is the unnameable. It is

in fact because it is unnameable, with all the resonances

you can give to this name, that it is akin to the

quintessential unnameable, that is to say to death" (211).

Since it is "ineffable" and "inassimilable" to

symbolization, Lacan, as I have mentioned before, identifies

the order of the Real as "the impossible" (FFC 167). In the

"Microscopia," an introduction to Lacan's provocative

television interview of 1973, Jacques-Alain Miller writes

eloquently:

When you thus encounter impossibility, you

encounter reality -- not "external reality,"
but a reality in some sense within discourse
which results from its impasses. This impasse-
reality is what Lacan, in his terms, calls the
"real." Let us grant him that much: the real
is the impossible. When discourse runs up
 144

against something, falters, and can go no

further, encountering a "there is no" [il n'y a
pas] -- and that by its own logic -- that's the
real. (Television xxiii)

Because it is impossible to mediate, verbalize, or

symbolize, the Lacanian Real is all the more horrifying and

threatening. In his Seminar II, Lacan, comparing the

frightening head of Medusa to the Real, describes that order

as the "object of anxiety par excellence"; it is "this

something faced with which all words cease and all

categories fail" ("The Dream of Irma's Injection" 164). In

our everyday life, we sometimes experience the terrifying

anxiety-provoking Real in the traumatic event. 10

Poe's "The Black Cat" (1843) is particularly useful in

understanding the "traumatic" quality of the impossible

Real. In the story, when the one-eyed black cat causes the

narrator to be thrown nearly headlong down a flight of

stairs, he raises an axe and swings at the cat. But the

narrator's cruel attempt is interrupted by his wife. Giving

way to his murderous impulses, the narrator kills his wife

by cleaving her skull. Be deliberately hides her corpse in

a recess in the cellar and then bricks and plasters a wall

in front of the place. After the wife's death, the ominous

black cat also disappears from the narrator's life. l l For

the first time in a long while, the narrator sleeps well

"even with the burden of murder upon my soul!" (857). The

 145

narrator is very much-relieved to find that the cat has

finally vanished: "The second and the third day passed, and

still my tormentor came not. Once again I breathed as a

freeman. The monster, in terror, had fled the premises

forever! I should behold it no more! My happiness was

supreme! The guilt of my dark deed disturbed me but little"

(858). On the fourth day after the murder, however, the

police come to investigate his wife's disappearance and

carefully search the cellar three or four times. The

narrator exhibits a bravado like that of the

narrator/murderer in "The Tell-Tale Heart." As the police

are about to leave the cellar, the narrator, driven by the

powerful "spirit of Perverseness," goes so far as to tap

with a cane the very wall behind which he has placed the

corpse of his wife. Suddenly, from behind the wall comes a

terrifying, wailing howl:

No sooner had the reverberation of my blows

sunk into silence, than I was answered by a
voice from within the tomb! -- by a cry, at
first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a
child, and then quickly swelling into one long,
long, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous
and inhuman -- a howl -- a wailing shriek, half
of horror and half of triumph, such as might
have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from
the throats of the damned in their agony and of
the demons that exult in the damnation. Of my
own thoughts it is folly to speak. Swooning, I
staggered to the opposite wall. For one
instant the party upon the stairs remained
motionless. (859)
 146

It is precisely at this moment that the narrator of "The

Black Cat" experiences the unspeakable, brute force of the

Real -- he swoons and staggers in an "extremity of terror

and of awe" and then confesses his murder (859). Bow can he

adequately express this shattering experience that takes him

by surprise, that overwhe~s him with shocking effects? The

unearthly, threatening voice from the tomb perfectly

exemplifies the traumatic encounter with the Real, an

impossible kernel that precedes and resists symbolization.

The Lacanian Real is what one stumbles against, and the

contact with the Real usually provokes great anxiety and

horror. We from time to time encounter the invisible face

of the Real in the form of death, sudden catastrophe,

traumatic event, and psychotic delirium.

II. The "Ballucina'tory" Real

In his third seminar entitled The Psychoses (1955-56),

Lacan explores the intricate connection between the Real and

the psychotic subject's hallucinatory perception.

Throughout the seminar, Lacan repeatedly claims that what

has been rejected from the Symbolic reappears in the Real.

Lacan uses Freud's famous "Wolf Man" case to illustrate his

theoretical point; the following passage (quoted in Freud's

1918 paper "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis") is

the Wolf Man's own report about the hallucination of a cut

 147

finger, which occurred when he was five years old:

"I was playing in the garden near my nurse, and

was carving with my pocket-knife in the bark of
one of the walnut-trees that come into my dream
as well. Suddenly, to my unspeakable terror, I
noticed that I had cut through the little
finger of my • • • hand, so that it was only
hanging on by its skin. I felt no pain, but
great fear. I did not venture to say anything
to my nurse • • • • At last I calmed down,
took a look at the finger, and saw that it was
entirely uninjured." (SE 17: 85)

The Wolf Man, in a state of "unspeakable terror," was unable

to say anything to his nurse about the great fear and

anxiety he felt when he suffered the hallucination of

cutting through his finger. In his reinterpretation of the

Wolf Man case, Lacan argues that something that could no·t be

symbolized, something that was rejected by the Wolf Man from

the Symbolic, re-emerged in the Real in the form of a visual

hallucination. Then, what is this "something"? Drawing

upon Freud's analysis, Lacan maintains that what has been

utterly "abolished" or "expelled" in the case of the Wolf

Man is the symbolic castration. In Lacan's formulation,

this symbolic castration is closely tied to the symbolic

"big Other," that is, the Name-of-the-Father. In his 1954

paper "Introduction and Reply to Jean Hyppolite's

Presentation of Freud's Verneinung," Lacan explains:

Just let's look at the Wolfman. There was no

Bejahung [affirmation] for him, no realization
of the genital plane. • . • The only trace we
 148

have of it is the emergence • • • of a minor

hallucination. Castration, which is precisely
what didn't exist for him, manifests itself in
the form of something he imagines to have cut
his little finger, so deeply that it hangs
solely by a little piece of skin. Be is then
overwheLmed by a feeling of a catastrophe that
is so inexpressible that he doesn't even dare
to talk of it to the person by his side. (58)

Lacan goes on to say that the Wolf Man failed to locate a

phallic signifier in the place of the Other; for the Wolf

Man, the symbolic absolute Other no longer exists. Instead,

"there is a sort of immediate external world, of

manifestations perceived in what I will call a primitive

real, a non-symbolized real" (58). The psychotic subject's

"ineffable" and "incommunicable" experience manifests the

horrifying confrontation with the Real, which Lacan compares

to an "abyss," "a temporal submersion," or "a rupture in

exper ience . ,,12

Thus, for Lacan, the Wolf Man's case history serves as

a good demonstration of his main thesis of the seminar III -

- "whatever is refused in the symbolic order, in the sense

of Verwerfung, reappears in the real. ,,13 Bere, it is

important to note that Lacan puts particular emphasis on

Freud's use of the term "Verwerfung" [repudiation or

foreclosure] and its distinction from "Verdrangung"

[repression]. In his "From the History of an Infantile

Neurosis," Freud writes:

 149

We are already acquainted with the attitude

which our patient [the Wolf Man1 first adopted
to the problem of castration. He rejected [er
verwarf1 castration, and held to his theory of
intercourse by the anus. When I speak of his
having rejected it, the first meaning of the
phrase is that he would have nothing to do with
it, in the sense of having repressed it. This
really involved no judgement upon the question
of its existence, but it was the same as if it
did not exist. (84)

Lacan reads Freud's verwerfung as "foreclusion"

(foreclosure in English), which, as I have discussed in the

previous chapter, denotes the expulsion or exclusion of a

fundamental signifier from the Symbolic universe of the

subject, as if i t never existed. u Thus, Lacan claims that

the foreclusion should be distinguished from the repression

which generally characterizes neurosis. 1s In the

"Introduction to the Question of the Psychoses," Lacan,

comparing the structural differences between neurosis and

psychosis, maintains: "What comes under the effect of

repression returns, for repression and the return of the

repressed are just the two sides of the same coin. The

repressed is always there. By contrast, what falls

under the effect of verwerfung has a completely different

destiny. . What is refused in the symbolic order re-

emerges in the real" (12-3). The psychotic subject

perceives in the Real something that has been rejected or

expelled, and this something, in contrast to repression,

 150

does not return from the inside: "the Verwerfung -- that is,

what has been placed outside the general symbolization

structuring the subject -- return from without."u

In The Psychoses, Lacan, focusing exclusively on Judge

Shreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1955), further

examines the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father and its

relation to the Real. According to Lacan, Shreber's

paranoiac delusions and auditory hallucinations are marked

by the rejection of the paternal metaphor, or the Symbolic

Father. The foreclosure of this key signifier is held to be

at the origin of psychotic phenomena. In the case of Judge

Shreber, the promoter of the Law, or the symbol of

authority, is never admitted into the subject's

signification system; in other words, what should be

symbolized, or the Name-of-the-Father, is cast into the

"outer shadows," thereby creating a gap or "mere hole" in

the Symbolic order. However, the foreclosed signifier

nevertheless reappears from without, from the Real, in the

mode of a hallucination in an erratic and unpredictable

manner. Thus, in Lacan's formulation, the failure of the

Name-of-the-Father, the dysfunction or absence of

symbolization, lies at the heart of psychosis.

Poe's "The Imp of the Perverse" (1845) can illuminate

the hallucinatory return of the foreclosed signifier in the

 151

Real. "The Imp of the Perverse" is the story of a

compulsive confession. The narrator deliberately plans his

victim's murder for months and finally kills him with a

poisoned candle: he substitutes a poisoned "wax-light of my

own making" for the one he finds in the victim's apartment,

knowing the man's habit of reading in bed. The narrator

plainly reveals the motive for the murder: "Having inherited

his estate, all went well with me for years" (1224). Since

the crime is committed for an inheritance, the victim can be

regarded as a symbolic father figure. Taking the victim's

place (both his estate and his position), the narrator

temporarily substitutes himself for the father. At first

the narrator/murderer does not seem to feel any guilt: "It

is inconceivable how rich a sentiment of satisfaction arose

in my bosom as I reflected upon my absolute security. It

afforded me more real delight than all the mere worldly

advantages accruing from my sin" (1224). The narrator

believes that he has committed a perfect murder and is safe

from all suspicion if, as he puts it, he "be not fool enough

to make open confession!" (1225).

But, the foreclosed paternal metaphor from the Symbolic

universe of the subject begins to reassert itself in the

realm of the Real. Thus, "the pleasurable feeling grew, by

scarcely perceptible gradations, into a haunting and

 152

harassing thought. It harassed because it haunted. • •• I

would perpetually catch myself • • • repeating, in a low,

under-tone, the phrase, 'I am safe'" (1225). One day the

narrator, confronted by the tormenting "rough voice"

resounding in his ears (which is also described as "the

invisible fiend" or "the very ghost of him whom I had

murdered"), finally confesses his crime and thus destroys

himself:

At first, I made an effort to shake off this

nightmare of the soul. I walked vigorously --
faster -- still faster -- at length I ran. I
felt a maddening desire to shriek aloud. • . •
I still quickened my pace. I bounded like a
madman through the crowded thoroughfares • • • .
Could I have torn out my tongue, I would have
done it -- a rough voice resounded in my ears
a rougher grasp seized me by the shoulder. I
turned -- I gasped for breath. For a moment, I
experienced all the pangs of suffocation; I
became blind, and deaf, and giddy; and then,
some invisible fiend, I thought, struck me with
his broad palm upon my back. The long-
imprisoned secret burst forth from my soul.
(1225-6)

Although the narrator claims to be a victim of the perverse

impulse (which is called "incomprehensible," "unfathomable,"

"indefinite," "unnameable"), he is, from a Lacanian

perspective, a victim of foreclosure. The narrator's

auditory hallucinations accompanied by the psycho-somatic

pains come to fill in the gap or hole left in the Symbolic

order by the foreclosure, and appear in the domain of the

Real. In his 1924 article "Neurosis and Psychosis," Freud

 153

remarks that "the delusion is found like a patch over the

place where originally a rent had appeared in the ego's

relation to the external world. • Neurosis is the

result of a conflict between the ego and its id, whereas

psychosis is the analogous outcome of a similar disturbance

in the relations between the ego and the external world" (SE

19; 149-51). Lacan, employing the identical Freudian

imagery of the "rent," "hole," and "gash," emphasizes the

nature of the delusional "patch." The Lacanian Real can be

understood as a hole, inadequacy, or inconsistency in the

Symbolic order that is "patched" by the projected fantasy or

psychotic hallucinations. Significantly, in Poe's "The Imp

of the Perverse," the hole left by the narrator's

foreclosure of the paternal metaphor comes to be filled in

or patched by "the very ghost of [the father] whom I had

murdered" which appears in the form of auditory

hallucinations (1225).

An episode from Poe's "William Wilson" can also provide

us another substantial example of the terrifying encounter

with the "hallucinatory" Real. In the middle of the story,

the protagonist contrives a nocturnal prank to frighten his

rival as an act of retribution. He creeps to the bedside of

his sleeping enemy. When he opens his lamp and the beam of

light falls upon the sleeping Wilson, the protagonist makes

 154

a traumatic discovery -- the second Wilson is a precise

mirror-image of himself:

I looked; -- and a numbness, an iciness of feeling

instantly pervaded my frame. My breast heaved, my
knees tottered, my whole spirit became possessed
with an objectless yet intolerable horror.
Gasping for breath, I lowered the lamp in still
nearer proximity to the face. Were these, --
rhese the lineaments of William Wilson? . • . Was
it, in truth, within the bounds of human
possibility, that what I now saw was the result,
merely, of the habitual practice of the sarcastic
imitation? Awe-stricken, and with a creeping
shudder, I extinguished the lamp, passed silently
from the chamber. (437)

Although there is no direct description of the face of the

second Wilson, the narrator's account strongly suggests that

for the first time he recognizes the rival/double as

himself. According to Ruth Sullivan, the narrator in this

bedchamber scene "perceives not only that his double carries

his name, effectively imitates him, and so on, but that the

two look, indeed, are exactly alike" (258). In "What

William Wilson Knew: Poe's Dramatization of an Errant Mind"

(1976), Marc Leslie Rovner also contends that the first

Wilson is startled because of "their extraordinary likeness"

(76). More recently, in Edgar Allan Poe: A Srudy of rhe

Shorr Ficrion (1991), Charles E. May claims that "what

Wilson sees is precisely his own perverse self, that is, an

exact duplicate, Narcissus looking into the distorting

mirror of the pond" (99).

 155

The effect of this bedroom confrontation is so

terrifying that the narrator ~ediately withdraws from the

academy. What the narrator encounters here is the

unspeakable and intolerable horror of the hallucinatory

Real. This bedroom scene is a foreshadowing of the final,

climactic confrontation scene where he again faces his own

Imaginary double. When he turns back to his dying

antagonist, the narrator is at a loss for words to describe

the reflection he sees in the mirror of the small ante-

chamber: "But what human language can adequately portray

that astonishment, that horror which possessed me at the

spectacle then presented to view?" (447). Just as with the

Wolf Man case, Poe's protagonist is horrified to the point

of "speechlessness" in facing the hallucinatory Real. As I

have suggested in the previous chapter on "William Wilson,"

the protagonist is suffering from a certain degree of

exclusion from the realm of the Symbolic, from the visual

and auditory hallucinations caused by the foreclosure of the

primordial signifier. In his later work, Lacan claims that

his three interacting orders are tied together in the form

of a "Borromean knot. ,,17 The Borromean knot is made up of

three interlocking rings in such a way that no two rings

actually intersect. As Lacan puts it, the structure of the

knot is such that if "you cut one, every single one of the
 156

others becomes free and independent" ("Rings of String"

124). In the case of William Wilson, the three orders that

Lacan represents by the Borromean knot become unknotted by

the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, a primordial

signifier that anchors or quilts signifier and signified.

Poe's paranoid subjects in the two short stories I have

discussed, "The Imp of the Perverse" and "William Wilson,"

elucidate Lacan's important theoretical point -- a psychotic

hallucination, whether it is visual, auditory, or somatic,

results from the foreclosure of the paternal metaphor or

function. In Lacan's formulation, a hallucination, a

typical phenomenon of psychosis, can be understood as the

return of the rejected (not repressed) in the dimension of

the Real, as the return of the foreclosed signifier which

has never been symbolized. For the psychotic subject, there

is no marked difference between "reality" and the "Real" --

what he perceives as real is what the Lacanian psychoanalyst

takes to be the Real. Since the psychotic subject believes

that what he sees or hears is real, his hallucinated reality

becomes the substrate of reality. Therefore, as Lacan

claims in his 1954 article "Discourse Analysis and Ego

Analysis," we can understand the Real as the "unreal,

hallucinatory reality" (67).

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III. The "Litt1e Piece" of the .e.1

The Lacanian Real is the domain that subsists outside

the subject, outside the system of symbolization. This

explains why it is extremely difficult to give the notion of

the Real any consistency at all. In the Lacanian scheme,

the "impossible" Real is defined by and in direct opposition

to the "possible" Symbolic order. For instance, in his 1956

paper "The Psychotic Phenomenon and Its Mechanism," Lacan,

emphasizing the importance of the Real order in the study of

psychosis, maintains that what defines the Real is its

strict opposition to the Symbolic:

In the subject's relation to the symbol there is

the possibility of a primitive Verwerfung, that
is, that something is not symbolized and is going
to appear in the real. It is essential to
introduce the category of the real. . • . I gave
this name so as to define a field different from
the symbolic. From there alone is it possible to
throw light on the psychotic phenomenon and its
evolution. (82)

Thus, the register of the Real has always been characterized

in negative terms such as the "impasse", the "impossible,"

the "ineffable," the "inassimilable," the "unknowable," the

"ungraspable," the "unnameable," the "unrepresentable,"

etc. In Lacan's formulation, this negative Real is closely

aligned with the " little object a" (objet: pet:i t: a). As Alan

Sheridan puts it:

The "a" in question stands for "aui:re II (other),

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the concept having been developed out of the

Freudian "object" and Lacan's own exploitation of
, otherness.' The" pet:i t: a" (small "a")
differentiates the object from (while relating it
to) the "Aut:re" or "grand Aut:re" (the capitalized
"Other"). . • • Lacan insists that "objet: pet:it:
a" should remain untranslated, thus acquiring, as
it were, the status of an algebraic sign.
(Ecrit:s: A Select:ion xi)

Lacan generally refers to the objet: pet:it: a as "the object-

cause" of desire -- the objet: pet:it: a is any (partial)

object which sets desire in motion. Here, it is important

to note that Lacan always insists on distinguishing desire

from both need and demand. According to Lacan, need is a

purely biological or physical instinct which can be

completely satisfied. In order to satisfy his bodily needs,

the infant must articulate them in language; need must be

articulated in demand. However, there is a fundamental

split or gap between need and demand. In Lacan's view,

every demand is not only an articulation of need but also a

demand for unconditional love. Indeed, the infant is not

merely asking for food when he demands this of his caretaker

(in the first instance, the mother); the infant's demand for

food conceals his deeper longing for absolute love or

recognition by the "M-Other." For the infant, the mother is

there as the Other, as absolute being. But, the problem is

that this very M-Other is also a subject, itself based on

what Lacan terms a manque a et:re, a "want-of-being" or

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"lack-of-being." Although the M-Other to whom the demand is

addressed can supply the object which satisfies the infant's

need, she cannot fulfill that absolute demand for love made

by the infant.

In "The Signification of the Phallus (1958)," Lacan

thus maintains that "the phenomenology that emerges from

analytic experience is certainly of a kind to demonstrate in

desire the paradoxical, deviant, erratic, eccentric, even

scandalous character by which it is distinguished from need.

Demand in itself bears on something other than the

satisfaction it calls for" (286). This "something other,"

or what is left over as a remainder when need is expressed

by linguistic demand, is what Lacan designates by the term

desire. The famous Lacanian dictum that "desire is

metonymy" is a feature of the fact that desire itself can

never quite be articulated ("The Agency of the Letter"

175).18 We can never articulate the whole truth about

desire; no matter what the infant or adult subject demands,

it is always reduced to an object that might satisfy his

biological needs. Lacan thus conceives desire as the excess

or surplus produced by the articulation of need in symbolic

form: "Desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor

the demand for love, but the difference that results from

the subtraction of the first from the second, the phenomenon

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of their splitting (Spalrung)" ("The Signification" 287).

In his 1960 paper "The Subversion of the Subject and the

Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious," Lacan also

writes:

Desire begins to take shape in the margin in

which demand becomes separated from need: this
margin being that which is opened up by demand,
the appeal of which can be unconditional only
in regard to the Other, under the form of the
possible defect, which need may introduce into
it, of having no universal satisfaction.
("The Subversion" 311)

Whereas need can be satisfied, desire can never be

satisfied -- desire is a constant force and pressure which

always searches for something else, and there is no

specifiable object that is capable of satisfying it. Desire

does not seek satisfaction, but rather its own eternal,

metonymic continuation and furtherance. In Lacan's

formulation, the only object involved in desire is the objer

pecic a, or the little object that elicits desire, and it is

represented by a variety of partial objects. Perhaps it

would be best to define the objer pecic a as an object which

causes someone to desire. According to Lacan, the objec

pecic a is associated with the "erogenous zones" (mouth,

eyes, anus, ears, genitals), and those erotogenic parts of

the body are structured in the form of the rim, an

interfacial space where the distinction between the inside

and the outside of the body is both marked and blurred by an

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anatomical border: "lips, 'the enclosure of the teeth', the

rim of the anus, the tip of the penis, the vagina, the slit

formed by the eyelids, even the horn-shaped aperture of the

ear" ("The Subversion" 314-15). These bodily parts are

neither fully contained within the body nor ever entirely

expelled from it; they may be separated from the body:

[T]he mamilla, faeces, the phallus (imaginary

object), the urinary flow. (An unthinkable
list, if one adds, as I do, the phoneme, the
gaze, the voice -- the nothing.) For is it not
obvious that this feature, this partial
feature, rightly emphasized in objects, is
applicable not because these objects are part
of a total object, the body, but because they
represent only partially the function that
produces them? ("The Subversion" 315)

To illustrate the connection between the register of

the Real and the objet petit a, I will take two of Poe's

most representative dying woman stories: "Berenice" and

"Ligeia." Poe's "Berenice"19 (1935), which is one of his

most perplexing and grotesque tales, is the first of his

four tales that bear the title of a woman's name: "Morella"

(1835), "Ligeia" (1838), and "Eleonora" (1841). In the

story, the sickly narrator, Egaeus, describes the

differences between his life and that of his cousin

Berenice, with whom he was brought up together under the

same roof. According to the narrator, his youth is spent

"ill of health and buried in gloom" (210). Unlike Egaeus,

Berenice is described as being "agile, graceful, overflowing

 162

with energy; hers, the ramble on the hillside -- mine, the

studies of the cloister; I, living within my own heart and

addicted, body and soul, to the most intense and painful

mediation -- she, roaming carelessly through life" (210).

But, Berenice is suddenly afflicted with a "fatal disease" -

- a species of epilepsy, a physical disease that frequently

terminates in a trance that resembles death. Under its

influence, Berenice becomes so emaciated that the narrator

can no longer recognize her:

Disease -- a fatal disease, fell like the

simoon upon her frame; and, even while I gazed
upon her, the spirit of change swept over her,
pervading her mind, her habits, and her
character, and, in a manner the most subtle and
terrible, disturbing even the identity of her
person! Alas! the destroyer came and went! --
and the victim where is she? I knew her not
or knew her no longer as Berenice! (211)

Egaeus is at first not drawn at all to his cousin Berenice,

who is graceful and energetic. It is only when she falls

ill that he becomes interested in her. Although he claims

to have had no feeling for his cousin, Egaeus proposes

marriage: "During the brightest days of her unparalleled

beauty, most surely I had never loved her. In the strange

anomaly of my existence, feelings, with me, had never been

of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind •

now I shuddered in her presence, and grew pale at her

approach; yet . . . in an evil moment, I spoke to her of

 163

marriage" (213-14). For Egaeus, Berenice achieves

importance not as a living and breathing individual but as a

fantastic figure, or a physical object to be analyzed: "I

had seen her • . . as the Berenice of a dream; not as a

being of the earth, earthy, but as the abstraction of such a

being; not as a thing to admire, but to analyze" (214).

Before their marriage, Berenice's illness drastically

affects her physical frame; she becomes eventually so

emaciated that "not one vestige of the former being lurked

in any single line of the contour" (215).

After her visit to him in the library, however,

Egaeus's world becomes dominated by the hallucination of the

teeth of Berenice. Of all the particulars of Berenice's

face -- the pale and placid forehead, the once black hair

turned yellow, the hollow temples, the lifeless and

lusterless eyes, and the thin, shrunken lips -- it is "the

teeth of the changed Berenice" that most captivate Egaeus

(215). Egaeus is completely absorbed in contemplation of

her teeth, and his desire eventually settles on the teeth in

the emaciated, skull-like face of Berenice. This time

Egaeus' obsession with the teeth goes far beyond his earlier

momentary "monomaniacal" fixations on random objects. The

dazzling, white teeth are everything he sees and everything

he thinks about:
 164

[T]he white and ghastly spectrum of the teeth.

Not a speck on their surface -- not a shade on
their enamel -- not an indenture in their edges
-- but what that brief period of her smile had
sufficed to brand in upon my memory. I saw
them now even more unequivocally than I beheld
them then. The teeth! -- the teeth! -- they
were here, and there, and everywhere, and
visibly and palpably before me; long, narrow,
and excessively white, with the pale lips
writhing about them. (215)

Shortly afterward, Berenice suffers an epileptic stroke

and apparently dies; her comatose state so resembles death

that she is taken for dead and placed in the family vault.

After Berenice's "death," Egaeus (apparently, though

unconsciously) violates her grave and extracts the entire

set of her teeth from what is in fact the still-living body

of his cousin. Egaeus only becomes aware of this horrendous

deed afterwards through his servant: On the night following

her supposed death, Egaeus wakes from one of his own

trances, experiencing some confused and horrible memory;

there is a small box that lies beside his lamp and an opened

book underscored at a Latin sentence which means "My

companions told me I might find some little alleviation of

my misery, in visiting the grave of my beloved" (218).

Suddenly a pale menial enters and announces tremulously that

Berenice's grave has been violated and that she had been

buried while still alive. The servant then points out

Egaeus' spade leaning against the wall, muddy garments

 165

clotted with gore, and hand "indented" with the mark of

human nails. Crying out, Egaeus tries to open the little

box on the table but drops it. The mysterious box falls

heavily to the ground and bursts into pieces, disclosing

Egaeus' horrible crime: "from it, with a rattling sound,

there rolled out some instruments of dental surgery,

intermingled with thirty-two small, white, and ivory-looking

substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor"

(219) .

Why does Egaeus become obsessed with Berenice's teeth?

What is the meaning of these terrible teeth? According to

Marie Bonaparte's Freudian reading, Berenice symbolizes the

Oedipal mother and her teeth represent a version of the

vagina dencaca (the female vagina furnished with teeth) that

threatens Egaeus with impending castration (218). Following

Bonaparte, Gregory S. Jay also argues that the mouth of

Berenice signifies "a displaced vagina dencaca" (89). In

Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View (1973), David

Halliburton interprets the tale in terms of Poe's fear of

female sexuality. Halliburton claims that Egaeus replaces

his true object of sexual desire (the living Berenice) with

a "more manageable" surrogate object (Berenice's teeth)

because the confrontation with the actual object is

"threatening" (202). More recently, in "Poe's 'Berenice':

 166

Philosophical Fantasy and Its Pitfalls" (1985), Jules Zanger

maintains that Berenice's teeth represent "the external

aspect of the skull beneath the skin, that which will be

left when all the living changes have come to an end. •

Her teeth become for him 'des idees,' that is, they are

transformed into metaphysical essences in the Platonic

sense" (139).

Indeed, Egaeus's fixation on his cousin's teeth is

unquestionably the tale's most controversial element. In

Poe's "Berenice," the heroine's teeth, "long, narrow, and

excessively white," become the ultimate object of Egaeus's

desire (215). From a Lacanian perspective, Berenice's

phallic teeth function as Egaeus's objet petit a, the

"privileged object(s)" around which desires, illusions, and

idealizations circle (FFC 257) .20 Illustrating Lacan' s

formula that desire is a metonymy, Egaeus focuses his desire

not on her person but on the metonymic part-object for her

entire body: "In the multiplied objects of the external

world I had no thoughts but for the teeth. For these I

longed with a frenzied desire" (215). Egaeus falls prey to

the delusion that his peace of mind depends upon physical

possession of the teeth:

Of Mademoiselle Salle it has been well said,

"Que tous ses pas etaient des sentiments," and
of Berenice I more seriously believed que tous
 167

ses dents etaient des idees. Des idees! -- ah,

here was the idiotic thought that destroyed me!
Des idees! -- ah, therefore it was that I
coveted them so madly! I felt that their
possession could alone ever restore me to
peace, in giving me back to reason. (216)

Of course, the possession of Berenice's phallic teeth fails

to fulfill his desire. As Juliet Mitchell claims (after

Lacan), one's need can be satisfied, but some perfect

satisfaction of desire is impossible: "The body's need can

be met, its demand responded to, but its desire only exists

because of the initial failure of satisfaction. Desire

persists as an effect of a primordial absence and it

therefore indicates that • there is something

fundamentally impossible about satisfaction itself"

(Feminine Sexuality 6). Egaeus believes that he can fulfill

his desire by having Berenice's teeth, but it proves to be

nothing other than his own "idiotic thought" (216). As

Lacan might say, need is satisfiable, but desire is

insatiable because it is the result of a fundamental lack-of

being. When the teeth are finally in his possession, they

lose their original symbolic value as the objet pecic a, the

cause of desire. In Lacan's view, the objet a is any object

the subject invests with his desire and presumes to be the

lost object he needs to complete himself. The subject

continuously pursues substitute objects, stand-ins for the

real object of desire that is lost in the separation from

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the M-Other, namely, the phallus. In his 1977 article

"Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamler" (1977),

Lacan writes:

Through his relationship to the signifier, the

subject is deprived of something of himself, of
his very life, which has assumed the value of
that which binds him to the signifier. The
phallus is our term for the signifier of his
alienation in signification. When the subject
is deprived of this signifier, a particular
object becomes for him an object of desire.(28)

In Poe's "Berenice," the beautiful young woman is first

dramatically etherialized and then violently objectified by

her husband. For the narrator/husband, the fetishized teeth

become the sole object of his perverse desire. 21 We find

similar themes and patterns in several of his later dying

woman stories, and "Ligeia" (1838) is the tale that most

resembles "Berenice" in its metonymic substitution of a part

object for the entire body of the woman. Like most female

characters in Poe, Ligeia is not real, but rather

idealized. 22 Ligeia is presented less as a living woman

than as an ungraspable, mysterious something: "a shadow,"

"music," "an opium dream," "an airy and spirit-lifting

vision more wildly divine than the phantasies which hovered

about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos" (311).

The tale begins with a long recitation of Ligeia's

attributes. The narrator/husband's detailed description of

Ligeia's features is highly revealing, since it converts her

 169

into a kind of artwork, a fixed and passive object of

contemplation. zl The narrator/husband treats Ligeia's body

like an inanimate substance: he first detaches her face from

her body, and then fragments her face into forehead, hair,

nose, mouth, lips, teeth, chin, and eyes. z, But, he is most

obsessed with Ligeia's eyes above all her other body

components. The eyes fascinate the narrator in almost the

same way that the teeth fascinate the narrator of

"Berenice" :

The 'strangeness,' however, which I found in the

eyes, was of a nature distinct from the formation,
or the color, or the brilliancy of the features,
and must, after all, be referred to the
expression. Ah, word of no meaning! behind whose
vast latitude of mere sound we intrench our
ignorance of so much of the spiritual. The
expression of the eyes of Ligeia! How for long
hours have I pondered upon it! How have I,
through the whole of a midsummer night, struggled
to fathom it! What was it -- that something more
profound than the well of Democritus -- which lay
far within the pupils of my beloved? What was it?
I was possessed with a passion to discover. Those
eyes! those large, those shining, those divine
orbs! (313)

The narrator tells us that Ligeia has a "strangeness" in the

expression of her eyes, that something ineffable is hidden

in the eyes. The "miraculous expansion" of Ligeia's eyes

both "delight[s] and appall[s]" the male narrator (315).

For the narrator, Ligeia's uncanny eyes, which are "far

larger than" ordinary human eyes and expand "at moments of

intense excitement" (313), function as the objet petit a or

 170

the symbol of the Lacanian missing phallus. After Ligeia's

death, the narrator/husband's grief is not for Ligeia. It

is not the loss of a beloved wife he bemoans when he

exclaims "How poignant, then, must have been the grief with

which, after some years, I beheld my well-grounded

expectations take wings to themselves and flyaway!" (316).

What the narrator was left "wanting" is not Ligeia herself,

but rather the "unattainable" Imaginary specular phallus,

"the radiant lustre of her eyes" (316).

According to Lacan, whatever the subject hopes will

compensate for the loss of the primordial object of desire

is the objee a, the semblance which comes to fill up the

hole or lack inherent in the Symbolic order. In his Looking

Awry (1992), Slavoj Zitek writes:

Why must the symbolic mechanism be hooked onto a

'thing,' some piece of the real? The Lacanian
answer is, of course: because the symbolic field
is in itself always already barred, crippled,
porous, structured around some extimate kernel,
some impossibility. The function of the 'little
piece of the real' is precisely to fill out the
place of this void that gaps in the very heart of
the symbolic. (33).

But, the objee petit a provides no satisfaction because it

is just a signifier or metonymy which must move on to

another signifier in an endless chain of displacements,

which is to say it is just a substitute for the lost object.

For Lacan, the objet a thus represents the object which is

 171

"ungraspable" and "unattainable" in reality. The Lacanian

object/cause of desire (objer a) is not a real object that

can be attained, but rather a fantasy object that exists in

the rea~ of the Real: in relation to the objet a, reality

is marginal, whereas the Real is central. In the Lacanian

scheme, the Real also takes on the quality of the

"impossible" object. Therefore, we can understand the Real

as the impossible -- this time, it figures as the

" impossible-to-attain" or the "impossible-to-satisfy." 25

IV. Conclusion: Poe's "Real" Textuality

The register of the Real is certainly among the most

complex and ambiguous terms in the Lacanian oeuvre. The

Real undergoes many shifts in meaning and usage over the

course of his teaching. Since the term Real does not retain

a stable meaning and is used in a series of different

contexts, I have discussed the Lacanian Real in a fragmented

way, without trying to produce a single consistent meaning.

On the other hand, I have also attempted to reach some

Felmanish mutual implication of clinical and literary texts.

My approach to Lacan's concept of the Real through Poe's

short stories raises an interesting question of how Poe

provides so many examples of what Lacan is talking about.

In this concluding section of the chapter, I will be

concerned with the possible relation of the order of the

 172

Real to Poe's textua1ity.

As I have mentioned earlier, many of Poe's texts are

written around an ultimate indeterminacy which blurs all

distinctions between self and other, life and death, real

and illusion, dream and reality, natural and supernatural,

and masculine and feminine. Poe's texts are often concerned

with the failure or impossibility of representation, and the

endless deferral of meaning seems to be basic to Poe's

works. We can decipher Poe's uncanny textuality in the

light of de Manian "rhetoric." In the opening essay of

Allegories of Reading (1979), de Man asserts:

The grammatical model of the question becomes

rhetorical not when we have, on the one hand, a
literal meaning and on the other hand a figural
meaning, but when it is impossible to decide by
grammatical or other linguistic devices which of
the two meanings (that can be entirely
incompatible) prevails. Rhetoric radically
suspends logic and opens up vertiginous
possibilities of referential aberration.
("Semiology and Rhetoric" 10)

What de Man calls "rhetoric" ("a disruptive interwining of

tropes and persuasion or • . . of cognitive and performative

language,,26) in a text interrupts the possibility of

deciding whether its grammatical structure conveys literal

or figural meaning. De Man's rhetorical/deconstructive

reading procedure produces "undecidability." To illustrate

this aporia or undecidability, he chooses an episode from a

popular TV situation comedy in which one of the characters'

 173

angry question "What's the difference?," directed against

his wife, yields two mutually exclusive meanings: "Asked by

his wife whether he wants to have his bowling shoes laced

over or laced under, Archie Bunker answers with a question:

'What's the difference?' Being a reader of sublime

simplicity, his wife replies by patiently explaining the

difference between lacing over and lacing under" ("Semiology

and Rhetoric" 9). Archie Bunker's wife mistakes his

rhetorical question (which means "I don't give a damn what

the difference is") for a literal one. The point de Man

wants to make is that "a perfectly clear syntactical

paradigm (question) engenders a sentence that has at least

two meanings, of which the one asserts and the other denies

its own illocutionary mode" ("Semiology and Rhetoric" 10).

De Man's next textual example is the last stanza of

Yeats's "Among School Children." Although most readings

assume that the final question of the poem ("How can we know

the dancer from the dance?") is indeed a rhetorical

question, de Man suggests that we can read the last line as

a literal question, "Please tell me, how can I know the

dancer from the dance," which demands some answer to its

question. De Man insists that we cannot decide which of the

two ways of reading (the literal or the figural) has

priority over the other. De Man's reading of the poem thus

 174

reveals:

Two entirely coherent but entirely incompatible

readings can be made to hinge on one line, whose
grammatical structure is devoid of ambiguity, but
whose rhetorical mode turns the mood as well as
the mode of the entire poem upside down. . • .
The two readings have to engage each other in
direct confrontation, for the one reading is
precisely the error denounced by the other and has
to be undone by it. ("Semiology and Rhetoric" 12)

Poe's texts present us with so much difficulty because

they continually create de Manian rhetorical situations in

which it is "impossible" to discover a safe critical

position. For example, "Have I not indeed been living in a

dream?" William Wilson asks. "And am I not now dying a

victim to the horror and mystery of the wildest of all

sublunary visions?" (427). Poe skillfully turns sure

statements into ambiguous rhetorical questions, endlessly

disrupting our sense of control and mastery over the text.

In the last seemingly affirmative line of "Ligeia," the

narrator/husband exclaims that "'Here then, at least,' I

shrieked aloud, 'can I never -- can I never be mistaken

these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes of

my lost love -- of the lady -- of the LADY LIGEIA! '" (330).

Can the narrator never be mistaken? Nothing can be said

with assurance. Poe's rhetorical texts continually confront

and thwart our desire to be the Master or what Lacan later

refers to as the "absolute Other," radically defying a

 175

single, unequivocal interpretation; we are no longer in the

position of the "subject supposed to know" (le sujer suppose

savoir). Poe's undecidable texts, which are notorious for

their resistance in various ways to normalization and

interpretation, are themselves a sign of the Lacanian Real,

the stumbling block or the impenetrable hard kernel

resisting symbolization. This explains, in part, how Poe's

texts can offer such revealing examples in the explication

of the order of the Real.

 176

ROTI:S

1. In his Lacan (1991), Malco~ Bowie makes a distinction

between the traditional psychoanalytic notion of reality and
Lacan's conception of the Real:
For Freud "reality" is the world external to
the human mind, and the "reality principle"
lies in the individual's recognition that this
world places limitations upon him as he pursues
his pleasure. For Lacan, on the other hand,
the Real is that which lies outside the
symbolic process, and it is to be found in the
mental as well as in the material world. (94)

More recently, Elisabeth Roudinesco, in her Jacques Lacan:

European Perspectives (1997), also points out the
"tremendous" difference between Freud's "psychical reality"
and Lacan's conception of the order of the Real; while
Freud's reality presents "a coherence comparable with
material reality," Lacan's Real takes on "an idea of
morbidity, of reste (vestige), of part maudite (doomed or
accursed part), borrowed without attribution from the
heterological science of Bataille" (217). After defining
the Lacanian Real as that which is "excluded from all
symbolization and inaccessible to all subjective thought,"
Roudinesco calls it "a black shadow or ghost" existing
beyond our cognitive perception (217).

2. The Real is the order which also includes the pre-

Imaginary, pre-Symbolic dimensions of the subject's
experience, preceding the formation of the ego, the
organization of the instinctual drives, and the
socialization or symbolization of the anatomical body. For
example, the Real includes an infant's pre-mirror stage body
before it is subjected to the symbolic network of
signifiers. In his first seminar on Freud's technique,
Lacan states:
In the beginning we assume there to be all the
ids, objects, instincts, desires, tendencies,
etc. That is reality pure and simple then,
which is not delimited by anything, which
cannot yet be the object of any definition,
which is neither good, nor bad, but is all at
the same time chaotic and absolute, primal.
("The Topic of the Imaginary" 79)

In The Lacanian Subject (1995), Bruce Fink, equating the

 177

Real with an infant's pre-symbolic body, argues that the

natural human body is "progressively written or overwritten
with signifiers; pleasure is localized in certain zones,
while other zones are neutralized by the word and coaxed
into compliance with social, behavioral norms" (24).
According to Fink, Lacan's register of the Real is "without
zones, subdivisions. • • • The division of the real into
separate zones, distinct features, and contrasting
structures is a result of the symbolic order" (24). In his
Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through
popular Culture (1991), Slavoj Ziiek also points out that
"certain parts of the body's surface are erotically
privileged not because of their anatomical position but
because of the way the body is caught up in the symbolic
network" (21).

3. For Kojeve's discussion of the word as the death of the

thing, see Introduction a la Lecture de Hegel (Paris:
Editions Gallimard, 1947), pp. 372-76.

4. Lacan, "Introduction to the Entwurf" in The Seminar II,

p.97.

5. In one sense, we can say that the order of the Real does
not exist because existence is only made possible by the
signifying function of language. As Bruce Fink points out,
"what cannot be said in its language is not part of its
reality. . . • The real, therefore, does not exist, since
it precedes language • • . it 'ex-sists.' It exists outside
of or apart from our reality" (The Lacanian Subject 25). In
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Sl.avoj Ziiek
describes the Real as that which does not exist but
nevertheless produces intense effects: "The paradox of the
Lacanian Real . . . is that it is an entity which, although
it does not exist . • • exercises a certain structural
causality . . . in the symbolic reality of subjects" (163).

6. Poe's "The Man of the Crowd" has received relatively

little critical attention. Reading the tale in terms of
Oedipal rivalry, Marie Bonaparte sees the mysterious old man
as a fictional representation of the stern, tyrannical John
Allan "fallen on evil days" (418). According to Bonaparte,
the old man's age, poverty, and wanderings are punishments
for the crime of possessing the mother: "Doubtless this
extreme age, famished appearance, and sordid poverty, are
all punishments inflicted by the avenging son, in fiction,
on the rich, evil father whom Providence, to his mind, did
 178

not sufficiently punish during his existence" (419). In The

French Face of Edgar Poe (1957), Patrick F. Quinn identifies
the wandering stranger as the narrator's double (229-32).
More recently, in her 1991 article "'Man of the Crowd' and
The Man Outside the Crowd: Poe's Narrator and the Democratic
Reader," Monika M. Elbert provides an interesting political
reading of the tale. According to Elbert, the story
reflects "the nineteenth-century conflict between
aristocracy and democracy, in the most general sense, and
between the conservative Whig party and the progressive
Democratic party, more specifically" (16).

7. The tale has been mainly subjected to intertextual

readings. In his 1968 article "Art and Nature in 'The
Masque of the Red Death,'" Kermit Vanderbilt discusses the
parallels between Poe's story and Shakespeare's The Tempesc
(1612). Poe's allusions to The Tempesc includes his use of
"Prospero" for his protagonist's name and his borrowing of
Caliban's curse of the "red plaque" on Miranda for his
tale's central idea. In "Poe's Use of The Tempesc and the
Bible in 'The Masque of the Red Death'" (1983), Patrick
Cheney points out that Poe also used the Bible in his tale:
for example, the Red Death "out-Heroded Herod," and he has
come "like a thief in the night." Cheney argues that Poe
"uses Shakespearean and Biblical allusions to reveal a
tragic and ironic reversal of a mythic pattern which The
Tempesc and the Bible have in common. Where the mythic
pattern of both . . . depicts man's victory over sin, death,
and time, Poe's mythic pattern depicts the triumph of these
agents of destruction over man" (32).

8. Like the narrator/mesmerist of "The Facts in the Case of

M. Valdemar" (1845), Prince prospero attempts to defy and
circumvent death. However, as the Valdemar's body
disintegrates into a viscous pulp, the prince's scheme is
helplessly subverted by the terrifying irruption of death
itself.

9. The ghastly intruder in "The Masque of the Red Death" has

been variously identified as death, the plague, the
philistine world, an outside, an anti-christ, etc. In
Bonaparte's Freudian reading, the spectral figure embodies
the castrating father, a "terrible personification of the
criminal father," and Prospero represents the rebellious son
(517); the abbey is the mother's body, which the son has
symbolically raped, and his death (or castration) is his
punishment for that act of the Oedipal transgression.
 179

10. Lacan discusses the traumatic encounter with the Rea1 in

chapter five (" Tuche and Automaton") of Seminar XI: The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Lacan borrows the
Greek terms from Aristotle's second book of the PhYSics, in
which he makes a distinction between two kinds of chance:
whereas tuche refers to chance in so far as it affects
agents who are capable of moral action, automaton, the wider
term, designates chance events in the world at large. But,
Lacan redefines tuche as "the encounter with the real" and
automaton as "the network of signifiers" or "the insistence
of the signs," thus placing it in the Symbolic domain (FFC
52, 53). Lacan elaborates his concept of the Real in
relation to the tuche :
The rea1 is beyond the automaton, the return,
the coming-back, the insistence of the signs • •
The real is that which always lies behind
the automaton. • • • The function of the
tuche, of the real as encounter -- the
encounter in so far as i t may be missed, in so
far as i t is essentially the missed encounter -
- first presented itself in the history of
psycho-analysis in a form that was in itself
already enough to arouse our attention, that of
trauma • . • the real should have presented
itself in the form of that which is
inassimilable in it -- in the form of the
trauma. (FFC 55)

The Lacanian Real is aligned with the tuche, which is beyond

the symbolic automaton. In his article "The Real Cause of
Repetition" (inc1uded in Reading Seminar XI: Lacan's Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis), Bruce Fink claims
that the real "interrupts the smooth functioning of
automaton, of the automatic, lawlike, regulated stringing
together of the subject's signifiers in the unconscious"
(225). In Lacan, Malcolm Bowie offers another insightful
interpretation of the Lacanian tuche: "Lacan' s tuche is in
one sense very simple: it is a tile falling on to the head
of a passer-by • • • a knock on the door that interrupts a
dream. The network of signifiers in which we have our being
is not all that there is, and the rest of what is may chance
to break in upon us at any moment. • • • Another kind of
painful intrusion is • • • the traumatic event proper, which
is extrinsic to signification, as inassimilable to the
pursuit of pleasure, as any foreign body encroaching upon
the human organism" (103).
 180

11. According to Bonaparte, the cat is a totemic mother

symbol, and the narrator's hatred of the cat derives from
his unconscious hatred of the castrating mother: "Why,
because of a bite • • . does a demonic fury instantly
possess Pluto's master • • • ? The mother has wounded her
son's hand, (that common phallic symbol and masturbatory
member), and the son replies by pulling out his penknife"
(468). In Bonaparte's analysis, the perverse narrator's
destructive tendencies are thus related to the fear of
castration. In Daniel Hoffman's reading, the cat becomes a
surrogate for the wife, so that "the synoptic and evasive
glossary of this tale" is "black cat = wife" (231). In his
1984 article "'Mere Household Event' in Poe's 'The Black
Cat, '" William Crisman, rejecting Hoffman's view, argues
that the cat is not a surrogate wife but rather "a rival for
the wife's affections" (90). For Crisman, Poe's tale is "a
jealousy tale on the part of a speaker who is prone to
construe the 'household' as a place for probable infidelity"
(90) •

12. Lacan, "Introduction to the Question of the Psychoses"

in The Sem~nar III, p.13.

13. Lacan, ibid.

14. In "On the Possible Treatment of psychosis" (1957-8),

Lacan states: "We will take Verwerfung • . . to be
foreclosure of the signifier. To the point at which the
Name-of-the-Father is called • . . may correspond in the
Other, then, a mere hole, which, by the inadequacy of the
metaphoric effect will provoke a corresponding hole at the
place of the phallic signification" (201).

15. Lacan refers to the foreclosure of the Symbolic Father

as a "failure of the paternal metaphor" or an "accident" in
the Symbolic order, in the place of the Other. Lacan argues
that it is this defect that "gives psychosis its essential
condition, and the structure that separates it from
neurosis" ("On the Possible" 215).

16. Lacan, "I've just been to the Butcher's" in The Sem~nar

III, p.47.
17. In a note to Lacan's "Seminar of 21 January 1975,"
Jacqueline Rose and Juliet Mitchell write that "More
recently the theory of knots has been used to stress the
relations which bind or link the Imaginary, Symbolic, and
 181

Real, and the subject to, in a way which avoids any notion
of hierarchy, or any priority of anyone of the three terms"
(Feminine Sexuali ty 171) •

18. Like many other French intellectuals of the time, Lacan

was influenced by structural linguists such as Saussure and
Roman Jakobson. Lacan's use of the term "metonymy" owes
much to the work of Jakobson, who established an opposition
between metaphor and metonymy in his major article ("Two
Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances")
which appeared as part two of Fundamentals of Language
(1956). On the basis of a distinction between two kinds of
aphasia (the similarity disorder and the contiguity
disorder), Jakobson described metaphor and metonymy as
principles of substitution and combination operative on the
synchronic and diachronic axes of language. Metaphor thus
corresponds to Saussure's paradigmatic relations and
metonymy to syntagmatic relations. These relations may be
summarized thus:

Trope: metaphor metonymy

Axis: paradigm/ syntagma/

synchronic diachronic

Mode: substitution combination

Relation
(Jakobson): similarity contiguity

Relation
(Freud): condensation displacement

Lacan also follows Jakobson in linking the metaphor/metonymy

distinction to the fundamental mechanisms of the Freudian
dream work. Jakobson claims that metaphor is based on
similarity and linked to the Freudian process of
identification and symbolism; metonymy, on the other hand,
is based on contiguity and linked to the Freudian process of
condensation. However, Lacan has a somewhat different view.
He uses metaphor and metonymy as literary devices or tropes,
linking metaphor to condensation and metonymy to
displacement. Lacan maintains that metonymy involves a
combination of signifiers that is grounded solely in "the
word-to-word connection" (''The Agency of the Letter" 156),
the classic example of which is the use of "thirty sails" to
 182

designate as many ships. Metaphor, in contrast, involves

the substitution of "one word for another" ("The Agency of
the Letter" 157).

19. Poe's "Berenice" has often been criticized as

"horrible," "offensive," "hideous," "gruesome," and
"repulsive." In Poe's own time, the story evoked a similar
critical response. Because of the horrific elements of the
events of the tale, Poe felt constrained to apologize to its
first publisher. Soon after its publication in the Southern
Literary Messenger for March 1835, Poe wrote a letter to its
editor, Thomas Willis White, who had received complaints
about its repulsive subject:
A word or two in relation to Berenice. Your
opinion of it is very just. The subject is by
far too horrible, and I confess that I
hesitated in sending it you especially as a
specimen of my capabilities. The Tale
originated in a bet that I could produce
nothing effective on a subject so singular,
provided I treated it seriously . • . I allow
that i t approaches the very verge of bad taste
-- but I will not sin quite so egregiously
again. (Ostrom 1:578)

Mabbot notes that the challenge probably grew out of a

scandal in Baltimore about grave robbers pulling human teeth
for dentists. See The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe
(Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1978), vol.2, p.207.

20. Berenice's teeth, as the object of Egaeus's fantasy, are

also radically fetishized. According to Lacan, male desire
is essentially fetishistic. In his "Desire and the
Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet" (1977), Lacan, examining
the transformation of Ophelia into a ,. fantasmatic" object of
what he considers to be the missing phallus, argues that
"indeed all objects of the human world have this [fetish]
character, from one angle at least" (15).

21. Freud's first discussion of fetishism appears in "The

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" (1905), but his
most complete treatment is offered in his relatively later
essay, "Fetishism" (1927). In "Fetishism," Freud delineates
the scenario of fetishism as a safeguard against castration
anxiety:
[T]he fetish is a substitute for the woman's
 183

(mother's) penis that the little boy once believed

in and • • . does not want to give up. What
happened, therefore, was that the boy refused to
take cognizance of the fact of his having
perceived that a woman does not possess a penis.
No, that could not be true: for if a woman had
been castrated, then his own possession of a penis
was in danger, and against that there rose in
rebellion the portion of his narcissism which
Nature has • attached to that particular
organ. (SE 21: 152-3)

In Freud's formulation, fetishism originates in the boy's

horror of female castration. The fetishist disavows the
mother's lack of a penis and finds an object as a symbolic
substitute for the mother's missing penis. In Lacan's
theory, the fetish object takes over the role of the
mother's missing phallus, not the penis. The fetishist
makes an object -- an inanimate object, a part of a body, or
the whole of a body -- into the Imaginary phallus,
simultaneously accepting and denying that the mother is
castrated; he disavows the mother's castration by putting
the fetish in place of the phallus. In the case of Poe's
male protagonist, a woman or her body part, as a symptomatic
fetish object, becomes a stand-in for the phallus.

22. Marie Bonaparte sees Ligeia as the writer's unconscious

fictional representation of the dead Elizabeth Arnold Poe:
"Here we may have some unconscious echo of the brilliant
actress-mother who could recite, sing and dance, and whom
her little son must oft have admired on the stage. • . .
Ligeia falls ill before she can fully initiate him into her
portentous science, in the very way Elizabeth herself fell
ill and died, before she could initiate her son into
'forbidden' matters" (229). According to Daniel Hoffman
Ligeia functions in the tale as her husband's "Sacred
Mother." Hoffman claims that this explains "why Husband has
never dared to ask her or remind himself of her 'paternal
name'; for if he did, he would have to face up to its being
the same as his mother's" (246). More recently, in "Poe's
Gothic Mother and the Incubation of Language" (1993), Monika
Elbert also writes:
Like a true mother-teacher, Ligeia inspires and
teaches by appealing to emotions. • . . Not only
does this vision of Ligeia as mother accord with
the widespread nineteenth-century Pestalozzian
notion (held by such notables as Bronson Alcott
 184

and Margaret Fuller) that a child's education

begins in the mother's arms, but it also evokes
visions of Eliza Poe, who must have been for Poe
the embodiment of melody and passion in her role
as actress and mother. (28)

23. It will be useful to reproduce the narrator/husband's

description of Ligeia at length: "I examined the contour of
the lofty and pale forehead • • • the skin rivalling the
purest ivory, the commanding extent and repose, the gentle
prominence of the regions above the temples: and then the
raven-black, glossy, the luxuriant and naturally-curling
tresses, setting forth the full force of Homeric epithet,
'hyacinthine!' I looked at the delicate outlines of the
nose -- and nowhere but in the graceful medallions of the
Hebrews had I beheld a similar perfection • •• I regarded
the sweet mouth. Here was indeed the triumph of all things
heavenly -- the magnificent turn of the short upper lip --
the soft, voluptuous slumber of the under -- the dimples
which sported, and the color which spoke -- the teeth
glancing back, with a brilliancy almost startling" (312).

24. Besides "Berenice" and "Ligeia," another radical

fetishistic exploitation or objectification of female other
can be found in Poe's "The Oval Portrait," a story about the
painter who transformed his young beautiful bride into a
work of art. As Gilbert and Gubar have pointed out, the
tale seems to valorize the typical nineteenth-century
"aesthetic ideal through which [women] have been killed into
art" (The Madwoman in the Attic 17). In "The Oval
Portrait," originally titled "Life in Death" in Graham's
Magazine for April, 1842, a wounded first-person narrator is
brought by his valet to an abandoned chateau to spend a
night. When he changes the position of the candelabrum at
his bedside, the narrator discovers the hitherto unnoticed
portrait of a beautiful young woman: "The arms, the bosom
and even the ends of the radiant hair, melted imperceptibly
into the vague yet deep shadow which formed the back ground
of the whole. The frame was oval, richly gilded and
filagreed in Moresque" (664). As he gazes upon the oval
portrait, the narrator is startled by the "absolute life-
likeliness" of the woman's expression (664). Trying to find
an explanation for the astonishing verisimilitude of the
portrait, the narrator eagerly reads the volume by his
bedside, which describes the chateau's collection of
paintings. He learns from the book that the girl in this
particular picture was married to an unnamed painter and
 185

died at the moment of completion of the oval portrait.

As the male artist works on the portrait, his bride, "a
young girl just ripening into womanhood," slowly dies (663).
The artist ignores his wife's failing health and pays
attention only to the painting. The sadistic painter "would
not see that the light which fell so ghastly in that lone
turret withered the health and the spirits of his bride" and
"would not see that the tints which he had spread upon the
canvas were drawn from the cheeks of her who sat beside him"
(665). In the act of painting, the young bride is reduced
to little more than an object, "a mere head and shoulders"
(664). The vampire-like artist/husband drains the girl's
vitality from her body. As the portrait becomes more and
more lifelike, she grows "daily more dispirited and weak"
(665). When the artist finally finishes the painting, it
becomes a perfect fetish object; he stands "entranced before
the work which he had wrought" (665-66). The male painter's
aesthetic gaze objectifies and finally destroys his wife.
In "The Oval Portrait," the already objectified woman is
transformed once more into a fetishistic art-object to be
looked at by the male narrator/contemplator.

25. From the 1964 Seminar XI: The Four Fundamenral Conceprs
of Psycho-Analysis onwards, the register of the Real becomes
a genuine Lacanian concept, and Lacan's later work is more
and more preoccupied with the Real. In his Encore or
Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexualiry, rhe Limits of Love and
Knowledge (1998), a collection of seminars from 1972-73,
Lacan explores the problematic relations between the sexes
in terms of the impossible Real. Here, Lacan proposes his
controversial thesis: "There is no such thing as a sexual
relationship" ("il n'y a pas de rapporr sexuel"). According
to him, this is the very reality of psychoanalysis:
"Analytic discourse is premised solely on the statement that
there is no such thing, that it is impossible to found
(poser) a sexual relationship" ("On Jouissance" 9). Of
course, Lacan's ambiguous formula has little to do with the
act of sexual intercourse; rather, it is primarily concerned
with the question of the relation between the masculine
sexual position and the feminine sexual pOSition in the
Symbolic order. One of the reasons sexual relations are
impossible is that there is no direct, unrnediated
relationship between men and WO;llen, because all sexuality is
marked by the signifier. In other words, language as the
Other always gets in the way between them. In his 1957
paper "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason
Since Freud," Lacan provides an interesting story about the
 186

relation between a signifier and gender identity with the

example of two identical doors, except that one has written
on it "Ladies," while the other bears "Gentleman":
A train arrives at a station. A little boy and a
little girl, brother and sister, are seated in a
compartment face to face next to the window
through which the buildings along the station
platform can be seen passing as train pulls to a
stop. "Look," says the brother, "we're at
Ladies!"; "Idiot!" replies his sister, "Can't you
see we're at Gentleman." (152)

Language assigns to individual subjects the signifier of

their sexual difference; each sex is defined differently
with respect to a third term. "Man" and woman" are nothing
but signifiers that stand for these two subjective sexual
positions. In "The Function of the Written" (1973), Lacan
states that "there isn't the slightest prediscursive
reality, for the very fine reason that what constitutes a
collectivity -- what I called men, women, and children --
means nothing qua prediscursive reality. Men, women, and
children are but signifiers" (33). Thus there is no
relation, no direct interaction between the sexes. Instead,
there is only each sex's relation to language, the Other,
the unconscious, the Symbolic order.
In Lacan's view, woman is not a truthful representation
of an essential feminity but a fantasy construction of the
male subject. The impossibility of the sexual relation
derives in large part from the fact that the woman does not
exist for the man as a real person, but only as a partial
object or a fantasy object. Thus, when Lacan claims that
sexual relations are impOSSible, he is suggesting the
absence of harmonious relations between the sexes. Lacan's
formula that "there is no relation between the sexes" also
implies that woman cannot function sexually as woman but
only as mother. In Lacan's view, woman is confused with
mother at the level of primordial ur-objects that cause
desire, and this Imaginary confusion rules out the
possibility of woman becoming a symbolic signifier. In "The
Function of the Written" (1973), Lacan remarks:
[W]hat is based on the signifier function (la
foncrion de signifiant:) of "man" and "woman" are
mere signifiers that are altogether related to the
"curcurrent" (courcourant:) use of language. If
there is a discourse that demonstrates that to
you, it is certainly analytiC discourse, because
it brings into play the fact that woman will never
 187

be taken up except quoad maerem. Woman serves a

function in the sexual relationship only qua
mother. (35)

Therefore, as Marcelle Marini has pointed out, "the

definition of the real as the impossible • • • becomes
clearer: the impossible is sexual relation" (Jacques Lacan:
The French Coneexe 61). In Lacan's later phase of teaching,
the order of the Real, which had initially been conceived as
the impossible-to-symbolize, then as the hallucinatory
reality, and then as the impossible-to-satisfy, finally
appears as the impossible-to-formalize of the sexual
relation.

26. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in

Rousseau, Nieezsche, Rilke, and Prouse, ix.
 COIICLUSIOII

Of my country and of my family I have little to say.

Poe, "M.S. Found in a Bottle"

Not only can man's being not be understood without madness,

i t would not be man's being if it did not bear madness
within itself as the limit of his freedom.
-- Lacan, Ecrit;s

Perhaps no poet has been so highly acclaimed and, at the

same time, so violently disclaimed as Edgar Allan Poe. One
of the most controversial figures on the American literary
scene . . . no other poet in the history of criticism has
engendered so much disagreement and so many critical
contradictions. -- S. Felman, Jacques Lacan and
t;he Advent;ure of Insight;

Poe almost uniquely in American literature possessed the

power to touch the unseen, unconscious life, to render
forcefully certain dark psychological states, to suggest the
demoniac in mankind and in nature -- and yet at the same
time to bring a cool rationality, an ironic skepticism, and
even mockery to bear on all that he examines.
-- G. R. Thompson, Poe's Fict;ion: Romant;ic
Irony in t;he Got;hic Tales

Poe holds an idiosyncratic position in the history of

American literature. Although he is generally considered to

be a singularly important figure in American letters, Poe's

literary status has always been uncertain in his homeland.

After his death, Poe was radically vilified and despised by

critics. From Rufus Griswold! to Harold Bloom, many

American critics and historians have continually questioned

188
 189

the quality of Poe's work, often dismissing his popularity

in Europe as a hoax. For example, in Main Currents in

American Thought (1927), Vernon Parrington claims that "the

problem of Poe, fascinating as it is, lies quite outside the

main current of American thought, and it may be left with

the psychologist and belletrist with whom it belongs" (58).

In his monumental classic American Renaissance: Art and

Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), F. o.

Matthiessen excludes Poe from his list of canonical writers.

According to Matthiessen, Poe does not fit in his

ideological framework for American renaissance: Poe was

"bitterly hostile to democracy" and wrote stories that "seem

relatively factitious when contrasted with the moral depth

of Hawthorne and Melville" (xii). T. S. Eliot, in his

famous article "From Poe to Valery" (1949), describes Poe as

a "stumbling block for the judicial critic," concluding only

that Poe's immense influence on French symbolist poets like

Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Valery remains a puzzle or

"enigma" (327, 328). Forty years later, Harold Bloom sums

up Poe's paradoxical position when he writes that "Poe's

survival raises perpetually the issue as to whether literary

me·ri t and canonical status necessarily go together. I can

think of no other American writer, down to this moment, at

once so inevitable and so dubious" (3).

 190

Indeed, as Gary Stonum observes in his "Undoing

American Literary History" (1981), Poe has always been "the

odd man out" in the history of American literature; Poe is

"rarely credited with major historical significance for

anything but his contributions to Gothicism" (9). Poe would

seem to lie far outside the American mainstream2 ; he has

been rejected from the canonical list of American

literature's founding fathers which includes Emerson,

Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman. In some sense, Poe,

like the Lacanian Real, has been an unassimilable traumatic

"hard kernel" or a "stumbling block" to American scholars

and critics. It is thus not surprising that Poe has been

described as the ghost-like figure who haunts the literary

canon or the demonized other who must be exorcized from the

mainstream of classic American literature. However, despite

the strong tradition of condescending attitudes toward Poe's

work in American literary criticism, the richly provocative

and influential essay on "The Purloined Letter" (1956;

English translation 1972) by Lacan contributed to

rehabilitate Poe's canonical status. In his recent work

Edgar Allan Poe Revisired (1998), Scott Peeples notes that

"whatever qualr:ts early- and mid-twentieth-century scholars

might have had about Poe's significance as a 'serious'

writer have all but disappeared in the wake of a series of

 191

essays launched by the eminent psychoanalyst and language

theoriest Jacaues Lacan" (129). Few critics would deny that

the recent recuperation of Poe into the American canon can

be explained in terms of "The Purloined Letter" debates in

the 1970s and 1980s. 3

Today it seems increasingly hard to interpret Poe's

stories wholly outside of a Freudian or post-Freudian

paradigm. Of course, psychoanalytic approaches to Poe or

literature have their own limitations, in the sense that all

critical approaches are limited. psychoanalytic criticism

has often been criticized for its inevitable "allegorizing"

tendency. We can define allegory in simple terms as a

na~rative fiction that has two meanings, a literal (or

primary) meaning and a metaphorical meaning which frequently

has distinct moral, religious, political, ideological, or

philosophical implications. Although critics such as

Gayatri Spivak and Deleuze and Guattari vehemently attack

the allegorizing, reductionist tendency of psychoanalysis,t

all critical interpretation is to some extent allegorical in

that interpretation is essentially an attempt to recover and

translate a concealed meaning in the narrative. Therefore,

as Fredric Jameson argues in The Policical Unconscious

(1981), interpretation must be construed as "an essentially

allegorical act" (2). Criticism cannot avoid allegorizing:

 192

All "interpretation" in the narrower sense

demands the forcible or imperceptible
transformation of a given text into an allegory
of its particular master code or transcendental
signified" . • • • even the most formalizing
kinds of literary or textual analysis carry a
theoretical charge whose denial unmasks it as
ideological. (58)

Another major charge directed against psychoanalytic

criticism is that it ignores the fundamental fact that a

literary text can neither be created nor be understood

without proper reference to its social context. Indeed,

psychoanalytic critics have often failed to recognize that

Poe's whole work is firmly grounded in the specific

cultural, political, racial, aesthetic, and ideological

climate of antebellum America. In order to compensate for

this ahistorical tendency in psychoanalytic criticism, I

have tried to take into account the historical and

biographical contexts of Poe's work in question.

Although I acknowledge that there is some validity to

these various anti-psychoanalytic critiques, the value of

the reading strategy provided by Lacanian textual

psychoanalysis should not be denied or dismissed. In this

dissertation, I have attempted to stage a Felmanish

"dialogue" between Poe/literature and Lacan/psychoanalysis.

Although Lacanian psychoanalysis cannot provide a single,

comprehensive explanation for all the complex dimensions of

Poe's work, it can nevertheless be used in interpreting

 193

certain puzzling aspects of the latter's particular texts;

Poe's literary work, in turn, can provide a useful means of

approaching and explicating Lacan's influential theory of

the registers and his other highly theoretical and difficult

psychoanalytic concepts.
 194

ROft:S

1. After Poe's death, Griswold played the main role in

spreading many calumnies about Poe. In the obituary notice
signed with the pseudonym "Ludwig," which he published in
the New York Daily Tribune on October 9, 1849, Griswold
began by starkly declaring that few people would miss Poe on
a personal level because he had few or no friends. Griswold
depicted Poe as an alienated figure, a "dreamer -- dwelling
in ideal realms -- in heaven or hell, peopled with creations
and the accidents of his brain," a depraved man who "walked
the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in
indistinct curses," whose "harsh experience had deprived him
of all faith in man and woman" (56, 57). Instead of
lamenting the loss of a great writer, Griswold, employing
lies and forgery, concentrated on denigrating the personal
character of Poe as a drunkard and misanthrope. Moreover,
Griswold did incalculable damage to Poe's posthumous
reputation for many decades by equating Poe with his
murderous fictional characters: "Every genuine author in a
great or less degrees leaves in his works, whatever their
design, traces of his personal character" (57). In
September 1850, Griswold, as Poe's appointed literary
executor, republished the infamous "Ludwig" article in a
much enlarged form and appended it to the third volume of
his first collected edition of Poe's work as the "Memoir of
the Author." In this "Memoir," Griswold added many more
rumors and falsehoods he invented. Since it appeared in
every successive Griswold's edition, it reached many more
readers than any other document on Poe and firmly
established the negative stereotype of Poe as a dissolute,
immoral drunkard.

2. In A Hisrory of American Lirerarure, with a View ro rhe

Fundamental Principles Underlying Its Developmenr: A
Textbook for Schools and Colleges (1896), Fred Lewis Pattee
writes that Poe seems "out of place in American literature,
like an importation from the Old World," writing only "to
chill the blood by mere revolting physical horror" (172,
181). In An Inrroducrion to American Lirerarure (1898),
Henry S. Pancoast observes that his "place in our literature
is one of peculiar isolation" -- Poe was a rootless wanderer
who "stands essentially alone" (263-4). According to
Richard Burton, Ppe's work "has no local color, and it does
not reflect our native ideas or ideals; it tells little or
nothing of the soil whence it springs, of the civilization
behind it" (Lirerary Leaders of America 66).
 195

3. In his article "Poe's Secret Autobiography," contained in

The American Renaissance Reconsidered (1985), Louis A. Renza
observes: "Francophile criticism has • • • purloined the Poe
oeuvre from the archives of American literary history. • • •
Suspicious of Poe's character, his popularity, and the
'literary' pretensions of his works, American criticism has
begrudgingly admitted his corpus and • • • even his corpse
into American literature's Hall of Fame, that is, its
institutional courses and anthologies" (58).

4. See Gayatri Spivak's "The Letter as Cutting Edge,"

included in Literature and Psychoanalysis (1977) and Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (1977).
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