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Tel Aviv University the Lester & Sally Entin Faculty of Humanities the Shirley & Leslie Porter School of Cultural Studies Tel Aviv University The Lester & Sally Entin Faculty of Humanities The Shirley & Leslie Porter School of Cultural Studies "Mischief … none knows … but herself": Intrigue and its Relation to the Drive in Late Seventeenth-Century Intrigue Drama Thesis Submitted for the Degree of "Doctor of Philosophy" by Zafra Dan Submitted to the Senate of Tel Aviv University October 2011 This work was carried out under the supervision of Professor Shirley Sharon-Zisser, Tel Aviv University and Professor Karen Alkalay-Gut, Tel Aviv University This thesis, this labor of love, would not have come into the world without the rigorous guidance, the faith and encouragement of my supervisors, Prof. Karen Alkalay-Gut and Prof. Shirley Sharon-Zisser. I am grateful to Prof. Sharon-Zisser for her Virgilian guidance into and through the less known, never to be taken for granted, labyrinths of Freudian and Lacanian thought and theory, as well as for her own ground-breaking contribution to the field of psychoanalysis through psycho-rhetoric. I am grateful to Prof. Alkalay-Gut for her insightful, inspiring yet challenging comments and questions, time and again forcing me to pause and rethink the relationship between the literary aspects of my research and psychoanalysis. I am grateful to both my supervisors for enabling me to explore a unique, newly blazed path to literary form, and rediscover thus late seventeenth-century drama. I wish to express my gratitude to Prof. Ruth Ronen for allowing me the use of the manuscript of her book Aesthetics of Anxiety before it was published. Her instructive work has been a source of enlightenment and inspiration in its own right. I am thankful to Prof. David Schaps of Bar-Ilan University for his kind help with Latin quotes, to Yves Wahl of Tel-Aviv University for looking into a translation from French. I am much indebted to Dan Elharar of the Hebrew University for his help with linguistic questions and for providing me with invaluable references in linguistics. My heartfelt thanks go to my dear friends in Boston, Norman and Barbara Checkoway, who tirelessly searched for material for me at Harvard University, Boston University and at the Boston Public Library. Their goodwill and attendance to my every request were indispensable to my work. The Sourasky Library at Tel-Aviv University was a second home to me throughout my work on the thesis. I am especially thankful to Irit Grofit and Sophie Viental for their incessant help and support along the way. My deep gratitude is due to Dr. Hedda Ben Bassat, Head of the Porter School of Culture for her sensitive and wise advice at the final stage of submitting the thesis, and to Revital Zipori, and Lea Godelman, for their dedication and kind attention. To family and friends I am grateful for lending a patient, thoughtful ear. I dedicate this thesis to the memory of my parents, Haim and Rivka Dan, founding members of Kibbutzim Ramat Ha-Kovesh and Einat, dreamers, idealists, and loving parents. Table of Contents Introduction 1 A. Objectives and Conceptual Frame 1 B. The Psychoanalytic Theory of the Drive 4 C. The Intrigue Plot 9 D. Methodology – A Psycho-rhetorical Approach to Intrigue 20 Chapter One: The Grammar of Masochism in Congreve's The Way of the World 33 Introduction 33 A. The Enthymeme 48 B. Logic and Grammar in Freud's Work 54 C. Rhetoric in Freud's Work – The Joke and the Es of Grammar 64 D. Logic and the Psyche – Lacan's Es of Grammar and Logic 72 E. The Enthymeme in Congreve's Play 79 F. The Rhetorical Function of the Enthymeme and the 96 Play's Intrigue Chapter Two: Fallacy and the Rhetoric of Repression in Congreve's The Double-Dealer 116 Introduction 116 A. Fallacy as Theorized by Aristotle 127 B. Fallacy in Relation to Freud's Theory of the Symptom 129 C. Lacan's 'Mask of Symptom' 133 D. Fallacy – Congreve's Symbolic Failing 135 E. Congreve's Fallacy – With the Logic of the Signifier 141 F. Fallacy and Truth beyond Castration 152 G. Intrigue versus Fallacy – The Over-determination of Reasoning 159 H. Alliteration – Repetition and the Unconscious Repressed 168 I. The Hysteric's Secret 177 Chapter Three: Figures of Speech and the Body of Suffering Jouissance in Three Late Seventeenth-Century Tragedies (or – Tragedy is not Without an Object) 186 Introduction 186 A. Inhibition and the Comic 193 B. Lacan's Concept of Tragedy – The Splendor of the Thing 199 C. Late Seventeenth-Century Tragedy – Not Without an Object 206 D. Lee's Caesar Borgia – The Jouissance of the Eye 219 E. Lee and Dryden's The Duke of Guise – The Presence of the Unknown 251 F. Rowe's The Ambitious Step-Mother – The Ceding of Subjectivity to Libidinal Fixation 287 G. Conclusion 328 Conclusion 332 Bibliography 340 Primary Texts 340 Secondary Texts 340 Hebrew Abstract Introduction A. Objectives and Conceptual Frame The primary concern of this study is intrigue as it is cast in dramatic plot. The concept of intrigue, especially as it is popularly known from the plots of novels and plays, immediately calls to mind its satellites of cunning, secrecy and treachery. The term 'mischief', used in seventeenth century intrigue plays, also indicates the moral harm or injury involved in intrigue plots. Yet the poetics of intrigue, which presents a complex relationship between the intriguer and his duped victim, mostly concerns the effect of the unfolding of intrigue on the reader. The fascination intrigue carries for the reader must be related to its poetics. There is something elusive about intrigue that Machiavell, in Nathaniel Lee's Caesar Borgia, indulges in when claiming mischief to be known to itself only, this being 'enough to mount her ov'r the world' (III.i.242- 243). Yet it is Machiavell's way of fashioning his mischief that fascinates and at the same time perplexes us as to the intriguer's motives and the dupe's resignation to maneuvers that so intimately concern his own self. While there is evidently more to intrigue than meets the eye, in general critical approach to intrigue drama has not been satisfactory in accounting for intrigue's hold on our imagination. My purpose in this thesis is to make amends for this deficiency, mainly by seeking to go beyond the characteristics of intrigue, its disjecta membra, and to arrive at the 'connection that presumably exists between its separate determinants'.1 I attempt to redefine intrigue by constructing its psychic cause, assuming that such cause can be approached and established by the aesthetics of the language shaping intrigue in specific intrigue plays. Such an attempt cannot be 1 The words are Freud's in relation to the criteria and characteristics of jokes brought up by other authors; they are disjecta membra which should be combined into an organic whole. In a similar way it may be said that cunning, treachery, villainy, mischief, scheming, produce only a partial notion of intrigue. They contribute to our knowledge of intrigue, like the separate determinants of jokes, 'no more than would a series of anecdotes to the description of some personality of whom we have a right to ask for a biography' (Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, SE 8, 14). 1 limited to a descriptive analysis of the structure of intrigue as plot. It depends on a broad consideration of rhetorical micro-structures on the one hand, and the tools provided by psychoanalytic theory for the appreciation of their psychic function on the other. But as I demonstrate throughout this thesis, while psychoanalysis sheds a different light on intrigue, indicating the relation of its rhetoric to the unconscious, intrigue as an old literary from, emerging as a product of style, also has something of interest to offer to psychoanalysis. Specifically, this thesis is concerned with the literary form of intrigue and its relation to the psychoanalytic categories of unconscious drives and their object cause, categories which defy representation and as such pertain to what psychoanalysis conceives as the real. The primary question I attempt to answer in this thesis is what intrigue plots can tell us about drives which are their cause. Derivative questions are what structures and forms, micro and macro, in the texts studied here are related to drives, and how these forms are related to texts which feature an intrigue. As these questions indicate, I do not rely on psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic framework to be ''applied'' to texts for the production of new semantic interpretations of the texts. For Lacan, the proper application of psychoanalysis is in treatment, not in literary criticism (Evans, 14). Instead, Lacan as well as Freud perceive literature as source material for psychoanalysis, as what shows psychoanalysis something more about the enigmas which are its concern (Lacan, "Lituraterre", SXVIII, 12.2.71).2 However, it is not my aim to use texts as illustrations of psychoanalytic concepts either. Psychoanalysis redirects our perception of the object, which it conceives as causing effects in the symbolic while being exterior to it. It forces us to explore the relationship between the inscrutable object cause and the various dimensions of the 2 In "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming" (SE 9, 141-153) Freud deals with creative writing as something psychoanalysis can draw upon for knowledge as well as be applied to. As Freud also addresses the question of the effect of the literary work on the reader he in fact covers three possible ways of relating psychoanalysis to literature. 2 signifiers which are its effects (effecting the object in their turn). The main objective of this thesis is to propose the literary form of intrigue as source material for psychoanalysis by means of texts that teach us something about the relation of rhetorical and linguistic micro-structures predominant in them, part of the formal, real dimension of language, to the object cause of drives.3 Five late seventeenth-century plays, all formally constructed as intrigue plots, make up the corpus examined in this study: two comedies by William Congreve, and tragedies by Nathaniel Lee, John Dryden and Lee, and Nicholas Rowe.
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