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. My aim is twofold: to explore the poetics of intrigue plot as manifested in the plays, and to read this poetics as the effect of the unconscious drives that shape the intrigue plot and the enigmatic object which is their cause. An examination of this sort is important in two respects: to make amends for a conspicuous absence in literary research of a study of intrigue as a form in its own right, and to propose a route towards the conceptualization of intrigue that belongs neither to descriptive poetics nor to psychoanalytical hermeneutics. This proposed route adheres to the a-semantic, thus tackling the challenge with which psychoanalysis confronts literary study.4
The objective of this study is to map the connections between intrigue structures and their psychic cause: the drive constellations and the real object these drive constellations veil. The plays treated here are formed as intrigue plots, namely as plots constructed by a character's actions upon other characters. I will be arguing that rhetorical, and by extension, logical and grammatical figures of speech, as well as
3 This point cannot be emphasized enough: even if I rely extensively on psychoanalytic theory, the texts I use for the study of intrigue are no illustration of the theory. It is the relation between stylistic dominants and intrigue in each play that after all enables a psychoanalytic construction of the psychic cause of intrigue. 4 The challenging aim here is to dispense with psychoanalysis as an interpretive paradigm, as a way of psychoanalyzing characters, or of interpreting what they say. Adhering to the a-semantic is a way of by-passing what remains suspicious even as it is absolutely essential for psychoanalytic analysis: the sense of words, words themselves considered to be already interpretative. In light of the critical sensibilities of the late seventeenth century adhering to the a-semantic also means highlighting this period's unique sense of formalism while integrating it with Renaissance and classical conceptions of the art of composition.
3 events and character interrelationships, bear a relation to drive structures which are their psychic cause. I will also be arguing that such drive constellations can be retroactively constructed from literary signifiers which are their effects.
Each play is initially approached through its paratexts. These liminal devices are zones theorized by Genette as thresholds, the fringes of the printed text which control one's reading of the text (2). Paratexts abound in the plays at hand, starting from the dedication and ending with the epilogue, through the title, motto and the prologue. I treat such paratexts as the first holing manifestations of the playwright's deliberations, topologically folding into the plays' world. Between paratext and text, the playwright emerges as the subject of the enunciation, his statements producing an excess of sense which the text's materiality belies, and hence sustains as irreducible to signifieds.
B. The Psychoanalytic Theory of the Drive
The psychoanalytic implications of the literary form I term 'intrigue' concern first and foremost the drive. Drive constitutes a complex concept in Freudian and Lacanian theory. 'Instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness', Freud says
("New Introductory Lectures", XXXII, SE 22, 95). Freud thus considers the drive a
'concept' which he places 'on the frontier between the mental and the somatic'
("Instincts and their Vicissitudes", SE 14, 122), an indeterminable position which will affect further theorization of drive. From its dynamic to its economic function, drive traverses the regressive and the progressive (Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle",
SE 18, 36, 41, 56), the physical and the meta-physical (Zizek, 32), libidinal opening and ontological closure (Lacan, SVII, 93, Zizek, 31), organic entropy and the beyond of destruction and creation (Lacan, SVII, 211-213).
4
Drive pertains to the real in the sense that it bears relation to the
Vorstellungsreprasentanz, the representative of the lack of representation. Drive is of the real in another sense which is particularly significant to the conception of art/literature as symptom. Lacan stresses the indifferent nature of the object of the drive (SVII, 94, SXI, 60, 168). As Zizek perceives it, drive stands for 'blind insistence', 'endlessly circulating around the void of its structuring impossibility' (31).
Its repetitive, non-signifying circularity around an 'eternally lacking object' (Lacan,
SXI, 180), renders drive resistant to representation.
The theorization of the drive is linked with that of perversion. The cause of the drive, Freud seems to indicate in "Instincts and their Vicissitudes", is not the same as the variable object through which it achieves its aim. Perversions which emerge as pairs of opposites, specifically scopophilia-exhibitionism and sadism-masochism, not only represent the circular movement of the drive, the Drang emphasized by Lacan as indicating a lost object. Passive scopophilia and masochism imply a return to the narcissistic object. The vicissitudes which consist in the drive's being turned around on the subject's own ego and undergoing reversal from activity to passivity, Freud says, 'are dependent on the narcissistic organization of the ego and bear the stamp of that phase' (SE 14, 132). Passive scopophilia and masochism thus point to the auto- erotic cause of the drive, even though their object does not coincide with the organic source of the drive, and in both cases the narcissistic subject is replaced by another, extraneous ego, through identification (132).
In Lecture XXXII of the "New Introductory Lectures", Freud, unfolding the major stages of his libido theory, says that sadism and masochism, the latter especially, were a 'stumbling-block' for his initial libido-theory, a theory which opposed sexual instincts to ego instincts, stressing the function of the pleasure principle. By contrast, sadism and masochism become 'the corner-stone of the theory
5 replacing it', which centers on two classes of drives, sexual and aggressive. With the recognition of the inherence of the aggressive drive on the one hand, and of the
'compulsion to repeat' or the death drive on the other, Freud can now account for masochism, 'a queer instinct indeed, directed to the destruction of its own organic home!' (SE 22, 103-104).
Sadism and masochism exemplify a mixture of sexual and aggressive drives.
Erotogenic masochism, pleasure in pain, specifically presents a fusion that enables a theorization of the drive which returns to its auto-erotic cause. This cause is now formulated not in terms of narcissistic identification with an extraneous ego, but in terms of the original death drive of living matter. In Freud's words, 'nothing of considerable importance can occur in the organism without contributing some component to the excitation of the sexual instinct', the tension due to pain and unpleasure included ("The Economic Problem of Masochism", SE 19, 163).
Erotogenic masochism is a residuum of the death drive which has become a component of the libido yet has the self as its object (164). It answers to the desexualization of the ego in sublimation, and to the defusion of the drive sublimation implies ("The Ego and the Id", SE 19, 45-46, 56-57). Another aspect of the same fusion presented by masochism is nevertheless the aggressiveness involved in the unconscious need for punishment ("New Introductory Lectures", SE 22, 108).
In Lacan's Seminar VII it is sublimation that reveals the essence of the drive.
Sublimation indicates the drive's relation to das Ding, the Thing as distinct from the object (111). But perversion, which like sublimation indicates the drive's paradoxical modes of satisfaction beyond the pleasure principle, comes more closely to shape the theorization of the drive in Seminar XI. The drive, Lacan says in his eleventh seminar, is not perversion; but the structure of perversion indicates the subject's position in the drive's loop. While the eternally lacking object which the drive circumvents dislodges
6 satisfaction from the auto-eroticism of the erogenous zone, perversion runs counter to the 'headless subjectification' which the hollowed object indicates of the drive. In contrast to creationism and the ex-nihilo beyond the signifying chain sublimation points to, perversion reveals that 'the course of the drive is the only transgression that is permitted to the subject in relation to the pleasure principle'. The intervention of the other presented through the grammar of perversion will enable the subject to realize
'that there is a jouissance beyond the pleasure principle' (SVII, 212, SXI, 179-180,
183-184).
If the gap which desire encounters at the limits imposed upon it by the pleasure principle has its contours in the loop of the drive, then perversion marks the beyond of jouissance, with the subject determining himself as object (185). In his "On
Freud's "Trieb"" Lacan distinguishes the drive from desire. As Jacques-Alain Miller points out: 'desire comes from the Other, and jouissance is on the side of the "Thing"'.
Jouissance is linked to object a, jouissance is embodied in the lost object (Reading,
422, 423). From his position as the object a the pervert questions jouissance, suspending the metaphorical substitution of jouissance enforced by castration in the sexual act. The masochist especially knows something about unalienated jouissance
(Lacan, SXIV, 31.5.67, p. 11, 14.6.67, pp. 10-13).
What drive constellations can be extracted from the plays studied here? In
Lecture XXXII of his "New Introductory Lectures" Freud warns against the tendency in popular thinking to assume as many and as various drives as momentary need requires, suggesting rather that behind ad hoc drives there lies 'concealed something serious and powerful which we should like to approach cautiously' (SE 22, 95).
Intuitively, intrigue brings to mind the drive for mastery and destruction, or sadism proper (as dealt with by Freud, among other places, in "The Economic Problem of
Masochism", SE 19, 163). In theme and content, the tragedies selected for this study
7 represent yet another vicissitude of drives: passivity as the opposite of activity, such as discussed by Freud in "Instincts and their Vicissitudes" (SE 14, 127). The passivity seems to be that of the hero, or the villain's victim. However, upon examination of the texts' grammatical and rhetorical schemata, a different picture emerges, one which more closely evokes the complex notion of erotogenic or primary masochism, described by Freud as the 'taming of the death-instinct by the libido' ("The Economic
Problem of Masochism", SE 19, 164).
The Lacanian notion of jouissance as satisfaction in suffering, or painful pleasure, as well as the destination of the unimpeded course of every drive, suggests an affinity between jouissance and primary masochism, and their fundamental relation to the death drive (Miller on Lacan's "On Freud's "Trieb"", 425-426; Evans, 33, 92).
Freud amalgamates masochism with libido, thus incorporating masochism within the regulative function of the pleasure principle (SE 19, 164), whereas jouissance as 'the path towards death' is perceived as the transgression of the pleasure principle (Evans,
92). However, both notions suggest that only if we understand pleasure in pain in terms of the uninhibited drift toward the Thing, which is drive in its (jouissante) totality, can we perceive the lure and danger of masochism, a danger which is constantly courted and recoiled from by intrigue as presented in the plays, not without hampering intrigue.5
Passivity, masochism and the death drive thus seem to be the psychical underpinnings of intrigue which is habitually considered the scene of ultimate
5 Note that in Lacan's Seminar VII, 186, it is suggested that jouissance lies in aggressivity turned by one against oneself so as not to cross a certain frontier at the limit of the Thing (and compare with Freud's "The Economic Problem of Masochism" SE 19, 167). Jouissance both with respect to the transgressive aggressiveness of the law beyond all law and to the drive bound under the dome of the Real Ich is an inaccessible opacity (SVII, 21, 209, SXI, 190-191). But starting from the "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" Freud suggests that precisely the drives of the ego are significant for a theory of libido. Perversion in that sense is a conflation of the Real Ich and Lust Ich (SE 7, 217-218). The on-going modification of ego-drives in Freud's theorization of the drive enables the inclusion of the body in the metapsychology of the drive; the auto-erotic fate of the drive, the drive's unconditional satisfaction, is sustained by the death-drive, as suggested by "The Economic Problem of Masochism". This is where the body of jouissance takes effect.
8 activity. In each and every play examined in this study the picture created by the text's semantemes, by events and character interrelationships, is that of a schemer manipulating others. Masochism and the death drive are betrayed by grammatical and rhetorical structures which interfere with this picture. Grammatical and rhetorical figures of speech are the manner in which the psychic cause of intrigue is constituted, and often suppressed.
C. The Intrigue Plot
A conception of intrigue as a particular plot, as well as a particular psychic structure, emerges from a construction (in the Freudian sense) of drive constellations in texts featuring an intrigue. However, the selection of such texts calls for preliminary formal considerations, for several reasons. To begin with, there has been no serious attempt to grapple with intrigue as heterogeneous to the form of dramatic action couching it, be that form comedy or tragedy. Furthermore, the term 'intrigue' has been commonly used in critical theory for generic designations, some of them bearing on the choice of texts for this study.
Any attempt to define the intrigue plot must take into account the long history of the form. At the same time, any such definition is confronted with the difficulty of presenting intrigue as an independent literary form. Finally, a definition of intrigue requires a consideration of agency: the intriguer shaping intrigue. By 'intrigue plot' I mean a plot constructed generally to some ends by a character, who 'acts' in the psychoanalytic sense, who makes maneuvers (uses the symbolic) to create real effects in the lives of other characters. In the case of intrigue, but not in the analytic act, the maneuvers are always conscious. In tragedy a maneuvering agent of this sort is usually easily distinguished from the hero whose flaws constitute a different kind of
9 plot motivating force. In comedy, the intriguer is often the hero and the intrigue is more difficult to isolate.
Historically, intrigue has its roots in the Old Comedy. Crystallized into a formula in Greek and Roman New Comedy, it was introduced into Renaissance comedy. The formula found favor with Italian erudite comedy of the sixteenth century, leading to the invention of a series of 'tool characters who structured the actions from within the plays through their intrigues' (Beecher, 6). New Comedy incorporated two forms of contrivance and deception: the irony of the trickster, which it borrowed from Old Comedy, and the irony of situation, borrowed from tragedy.
New Comedy's borrowings from Euripides introduced recognition scenes, which were also prominent in medieval stage romances. As Salingar indicates with respect to classical as opposed to medieval legacy in Renaissance, 'more than anything else, it is the invitation to enjoy an exhibition of some form of deceit that distinguishes comedy from romance in the theater', be that the irony of the trickster or of situation (84, 128).
Renaissance theory of the technique of comedy makes the useful distinction between the 'artifice' of the playwright and the 'deceptions' of his characters
(Salingar, 87). By 'intrigue' I mean the latter: the deliberate deceptions of characters as distinct from their innocent, coincidental mistakes. Innocent mistakes belong with the playwright's artifice, contributing to the ironic effects of the 'artificial order', which marked the difference between the revived classical dramatic structure and medieval theater. The 'artificial order', the causal construction of events, which the
New Comedy brought into the world, rested primarily on retrospective exposition, enabling mise-en-scènes of rediscovery and recognition as well as dramatic irony
(Salingar, 76-77).6
6 My preliminary definition of intrigue form is different from Holland's descriptive one of intrigue in Restoration comedy. His seems more in line with what Salingar shows to be the ironies of the comedic form, the gaps in knowledge created by the distinctive logos of comedy as a whole (Holland, 227,
11
The distinction between the deceiving effects of artificial composition and the deceptions produced by a surrogate maker in the place of the playwright himself is essential to a theorization of intrigue. In effect, this initial distinction informs both the development of intrigue through New Comedy, Renaissance and late seventeenth century drama, and a critical approach to intrigue. While the artificial order of events utilizes retrospective exposition, conducive to recognition and discovery, the intriguer's plot is substantially progressive (Harbage, 39). Moreover, the schemer takes pride in his inventive skills and often takes the audience into his confidence, so that the audience knows more than the characters (Salingar, 118). Irony of situation may thus spring in relation to intrigue (as when the villain is punished with the means of destruction he intended for his enemies) but not necessarily in line with intrigue
(the same villain's plan remaining what it is).7 Good artificial composition presents intrigue as an essentially heterogeneous component that is structurally bound to puzzle the spectator, even when harnessed by retrospective exposition to create its own ironies.8
Critical theory of intrigue has recognized the structural independence of intrigue. However, it has generally tried to reconcile intrigue to good composition, either through the relation of intrigue to social values and its contribution to the establishment of a new collective order (Beecher, 28) or through the variable vocation
Salingar, 94). As for tragedy, Revenge tragedy is a subtype formally differentiated from the type I am using here by the accentuation of a justified cause and thereby, the subordination of intrigue to the theme of revenge. 7 A good example of this distinction would be Barabbas's scheme and destruction in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta. A more complex instance is Mollier's comedy L'ecole des Femmes, where every step of Arnolphe is innocently anticipated and countered by Agnes, overturning the knowing plotter- unknowing dupe relationship to the effect of plunging the former in the predicament he set out to avoid: that of being cuckolded. 8 The heterogeneous nature of the intrigue plot is one more reason why this type of plot is of interest to psychoanalysis. Intrigue drama is structurally different from the myth and drama whose epitome is the Oedipus drama. While the action of the Oedipus drama consists in a process of revealing, of recognition through retroactive probing, the intrigue plot is substantially progressive and its significance lies in its complete opacity. The intrigue plot precipitates a riddle rather than recognition. The fundamental riddle of intrigue has been formulated by Shakespeare in Iago's words: 'Demand me nothing; what you know you know: From this time forth I never will speak word' (Othello, V.ii.300).
11 of the intriguer. Beecher in particular has stressed the archetypal aspect of the intriguer as trickster; the trickster is the archetypal embodiment of the impulse for play and takes delight in his own wit (11, 25). A tool character which is a by-product of comedic structural and thematic experimentation, the intriguer in his turn becomes a generic presence that is a revival of an archetype of pleasing yet frightening anarchy
(28). Here the gap between the playwright's artifice and the intriguer's scheme diminishes with the growing serviceability of the intriguer to the collective order (19).
The theory of tragedy has posed its own difficulty to the absorption of intrigue. An Aristotelian perspective concerning the tragic effect of intrigue tragedy has been presented by Harbage. According to Harbage, intrigue is a comic ingredient imported into tragedy. It is the employing of comic methods in relation to tragic materials. Harbage contends that intrigue does not spoil the ultimate tragic effect, even if it gives rise to responses which are at war with moral judgment, so long as it is represented as evil and is associated with evil men (42). Harbage points out the structural contribution of intrigue to classical tragedy, as it entails a progressive and serial, rather than retrospective narrative method. However, he generally contends that intrigue is irreconcilable with tragedy, making the latter 'cross-bred from comedy' (38-
9, 44).
In early and late seventeenth-century drama the term 'intrigue' is reserved for the classification of types of tragedy and comedy which bear some relation to Spanish drama. 'Intrigue tragedy' is a term used by Walter Cohen to designate an early seventeenth-century genre, sub-classified as heroic, satiric and pathetic, which late seventeenth-century serious drama remodeled (175, 200).9 'Restoration intrigue'
9 The sub-genre Cohen refers to as satiric includes such intrigue tragedies as Webster's The Duchess of Malfi and Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling. While including a revenge theme, it is not this theme that renders them unsuitable for a study of intrigue. If anything, it is the diffused nature of the intrigue in each play that renders them problematic. If indeed Lee's Caesar Borgia is influenced by Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (Van-Lennep in his unpublished dissertation about the sources of Lee's
12 designates early Restoration tragicomedy and the plot formulas it adopted and elaborated, the Fletcherian tragicomedy and Spanish romance (Loftis, 66-71, Brown,
"The Divided Plot", 69, 78). What is meant by the term 'intrigue' in these classifications is more readily gathered from the formal description of tragicomedy as featuring love conflicts sustained by 'a series of accidents, misunderstandings, coincidences, mistaken identities, and night-time escapades' (Brown, "The Divided
Plot'', 69). The term thus relates at once to an intricate plot and to motifs such as love, revenge and scheming.
Dryden was critical of Spanish intrigue plots, 'where accident is heaped upon accident', suggesting that their structure makes them more a farce than a play
("Preface to Troilus and Cressida", Ker I, 208-209). Aphra Bhen's The Feign'd
Curtezans exemplifies Spanish intrigue comedy, but in addition to the elements characteristic of the bustling action of such comedies it has a farcical subplot which in its turn becomes Behn's satirical vehicle (Shell, in Todd, 39-40). The play thus combines two modes of handling intrigue, the tragicomic and the farcical. What these two modes have in common is the equal weight given to motivated trickery and coincidences or accidents, a formal drawback for my purposes. In farce deliberate deception and accident are even more saliently indistinguishable since, as Hughes has indicated, intrigue is subordinated to the 'fitful, extravagant, episodic pieces of stage business' which are the real stuff of farce (24).
Tragicomedy and farce, prominent late seventeenth-century dramatic forms, though utilizing intrigue, are formally unsuitable for the purposes of this study.
Rather, they serve to stress the function of a sustained intrigue plot measured against
plays points out the connection, pp. 378-379) then it would be interesting to see the difference between Bosola, a moody, suffering malcontent kind of an intriguer (actually in the office of a spy) and Machiavell, a sculptor intriguer, who artist-like designs Borgia's fate (see Armistead's Nathaniel Lee, 113). At the same time, such relationship as transpires between De Flores and his co-intriguer and dupe Beatrice in The Changeling, while again diffusing the function of the intriguer, accentuates the complexity of intriguer-dupe relationship.
13 an action that maintains the inassimilability of intrigue, not however through intrigue's satirical value. Contrary to Brown's implication that Restoration intrigues, or tragicomedies, are inherently empty because they prioritize form over meaning, lacking the 'serious implications of social satire' (Dramatic Form, 31-32, 40, "The
Divided Plot", 70), Behn's play indicates that satire is not just the province of the
'intrigue-like' comedy. And by further contrast, Canfield has indicated that in its more subversive form comedy unabashedly celebrates transgression as trickery, thus relinquishing satire (Word as Bond, 146).
In effect, intrigue comedy that would comply with Brown's charge as properly satirical, much like Beecher's claim for the social and cultural serviceability of intrigue, proposes the problem of effacing the structural gap between intrigue and the artificial composition of dramatic action. Traugott has suggested that the rake of
Restoration comedy indicates a congruence of the intrigue and the action through his wit: 'If wit and a naturalistic understanding of motives are necessary to penetrate the masks of manners, the rake cannot be hoisted by his own petard at the end of the play.
Who will replace him?' (396-397). But where satire makes intrigue the instrument of the action, it is now style that becomes the linchpin of the incommensurability of intrigue with respect to good composition. At a time when wit 'has arrived to a more high degree', and critics 'weigh each line and ev'ry word', as Dryden says in his
"Epilogue to the Second Part of The Conquest of Granada" (Ker I, 160-161), intrigue manifests its heterogeneity not through its subversive message but through style, where its message comes to a halt. Rather than 'an agency of insight', as Traugott would have it, wit, as Dryden seems to imply, is neither reflective nor corrective of an incorrigible society. Instead, it is an opaque aesthetic measure, and as such supports the irreducibility of intrigue to any of its social messages.
14
Restoration heroic tragedy is no less episodic than the tragicomedy or farce
(Rothstein, 8, Canfield, Nicholas Rowe, 18). And yet, its intrigue, devised and carried out by the villain, is more prominently the sustained product of an internal structuring agent. At the same time, the episodic nature of the heroic play inflects the villainy portrayed: for example, in Rowe's The Ambitious Step-Mother, an affective tragedy in the heroic style, the scenic structure of the play is conducive to the scene of disintegration which intrigue becomes. The type of text necessarily imposes its own demands on the study of intrigue form, and in the case of Restoration tragedy this may mean a clash with a conception of intrigue as a structural dominant, as a sustained plot rather than an episodic, accidental manifestation. However, the more inauspicious features of Restoration serious drama, those features which indicate its resistance to uninterrupted interconnectivity - its episodic nature, its failure 'to match device and content, style and substance, or manner and matter', as Marshall has argued (179) - evidence a textual entanglement with the object as what gets in the way of smooth representation. As such, these features may prove all the more suitable for a psychoanalytic study aiming to account for drive constellations in intrigue as the real which veils intrigue's enigmatic object cause.
The texts selected for this study have all been considered in light of the formal limitations mentioned above. Generally, the plays foreground an intrigue devised by a character who acts as an intriguer. Intrigue set at the level of plot shares in the themes unfolded by the plays. However, the importance of these plays is that they exhibit the style most saliently in addition to the clear formulation of intrigue, and as such serve best to introduce the relation of intrigue to perversion. The fundamental incompatibility of intrigue with the ideal retrospective construction, its manner of perverting the phantasmatic good composition of story and character interrelationship emerges at the level of style. It is through style that each of the texts demonstrates the
15 inassimilable particularity of intrigue, even if in the comedies this inassimilable particularity appears to be more successfully veiled.
The intrigue plays I use in this thesis are not only a choice selection for their stylistic amenability for a study of intrigue. They are also representatives of their time.
Some other considerations hence go into the selection of these specific plays. First, they are the work of leading playwrights of late seventeenth century England, playwrights who between them, in their contribution to each other's works through dedications, prologues, epilogues and poems, represent for us the literary interests and controversial issues of an age that was intellectually and artistically defining itself a new with a hind view of classical and Renaissance poetic achievement (see for example Lee's commendatory poem to Dryden on his Poem of Paradise, Dryden's To
Mr. Lee on His Alexander, and Congreve's Preface to Dryden's Dramatick Works
(The Dramatic Works of John Dryden, Vol. V, 109-110, The Works of John Dryden,
Vol. I, 106-107, and Summers' The Complete Works of William Congreve, Vol. IV,
181-185, respectively). Dryden, 'the first great modern critic' and the chief representative of his century in the field of criticism, as Spingarn says (I.cvi), was a friend of both Lee and Congreve, and they share in the same self consciousness about form and style as he does. Rowe is considered by the critic in the anonymous A
Comparison between the Two Stages to have 'the fairest Pretence to succeed Dryden in Tragedy of any of his Brethren' (190). Again, it is his stylistic finesse that is applauded (183, 185). Second, both Dryden and Rowe were concerned with the function of plot in tragedy, and as Rothstein has shown, contributed to a tragic theory in the late seventeenth century (14, 20). Finally, each individual play, while highlighting some of the generic evolution of the drama of the period along with its aesthetics and politics, foregrounds the predominant aspiration for a cultivated stance through a peculiar perception of style as natural when refined, thereby artificial. This,
16 in addition to a finely contrived intrigue plot, renders these plays a proper object of my study.
Critical approaches to intrigue in Restoration drama are subordinated to critical theories of this drama as a whole. Broad-scale studies of Restoration drama such as Holland's, Brown's, Braverman's on one side, and Rothstein's, Hume's,
Kavenik's and Shepherd and Womack's on the other, also present two major critical approaches, ideological and historicist versus affective and cultural. Rothstein's affective approach is in line with seventeenth-century theories which define tragedy in terms of effects wrought upon the audience (Rothstein, 8, Hume, 151). Rothstein acknowledges the effect of the Elizabethan ingredient of villainy on Restoration heroic play to be psychological within limits (65-66). Hume, embracing Rothstein's approach in his own manner, accentuates villainy in Restoration tragedy by broadening villain tragedy into the category of Horror Tragedy (199-200). The
'slaughterhouse' results of villainy are hence over-emphasized as producing greater audience response (202).
When considered by critics with respect to Restoration comedy, intrigue becomes a more complex notion. Hence Holland broadens the notion of intrigue to encompass the whole climate of thought which infuses Restoration comedy, a genre whose uniqueness rests in the 'dialectic between inner desire and outward appearance'
(4, 45, 114). Holland thus makes the important suggestion that as an expression of this dialectic, Restoration comedic intrigue, like disguise, becomes a self-aware semblance, open to investigation as such. Brown's historicist study of the generic evolution of Restoration comedy reformulates the significance of comedic intrigue.
Her study conveys an evaluative precedence of the mature satiric comedy, considered intrigue-like and more serious and meaningful, over the 'empty vessel' of intrigue form (31, 40).
17
Braverman's more recent study of Restoration drama, significantly titled Plots and Counterplots, altogether ignores the literary potential of intrigue in both comedy and tragedy. Instead, Braverman studies drama as mediating political conflict through the literary vehicle of romance, a 'resilient mode that accommodates social consensus by resolving its contradictions by narrative means' (34). Furthermore, Braverman's historicist critical practice presupposes a correspondence between text and (historical) context, a correspondence which in Lacanian terms is fundamentally imaginary.
Braverman's avoidances suggest that in contrast to romance, intrigue cannot be subsumed by ideological contextualization because its own narrative is too inherently disruptive to occlude contradictions. It is the function of romance as conceived by
Braverman that implies the different status of intrigue, suggesting intrigue's commensurability with the psychoanalytic concept of the real.
Hume, whose affective approach has paved the way for a later culturalist view of Restoration comedy as mediating nothing, as an instrument of pleasure only
(Shepherd and Womack, 135), assigns little importance to intrigue beyond its function as device, although one significant enough to indicate a common plot formula (128-
129). Insisting on the formulaic nature of late seventeenth-century comic drama,
Hume makes the important point that formulas should not be considered trivial (144).
However, he regards Restoration comedy as a genre 'designed to provide an experience, not a proposition for analytic dissection' (147). By rejecting analytic dissection, Hume seems to forfeit the object of interpretation altogether, taking us nowhere with regard to intrigue. Not only does intrigue become indistinguishable in nature (as Hume himself implies, 121), and so insufficient for his own classificatory purposes, but its formulaic significance and pleasurable appeal, though recognized are not analyzed, and so gain us no insight (literary or otherwise) into the form or even into its non-analyzability.
18
Culturalist critics such as Kavenik, and Shepherd and Womack, grapple with
Restoration comedic intrigue in a different manner. Treating Restoration comedy as a theatrical product aimed at an audience, they emphasize its pleasure-inducing function. Kavenik perceives 'rakish comedy', a comedy of intrigue to the extent that the rake-hero manipulates the action by his wit (Traugott, 400), as a compromise formation which 'both gratifies an illicit desire and also represses and punishes it' (50-
51). Shepherd and Womack link theatrical aesthetics with intrigue plot in the conception of double entendre. As an extensive double entendre an intrigue plot makes dramatic form into a product of desire by prolonging and elaborating its sexual aim, to the effect of parading its own theatricality (131). Like Holland, Shepherd and
Womack expand the notion of intrigue to comprise a whole genre along with its historical-cultural milieu. And yet, unlike historicist critics, they seem more alert to the possibility of approaching intrigue psychoanalytically, as a form bearing relation to the unconscious and jouissance, even if within a cultural context.
By and large, critical studies of Restoration drama do not examine intrigue rigorously, as a form in its own right. Intrigue is utilized to explain other aspects, be they formal, ideological, philosophical or cultural. Critical studies of the plays selected for this study similarly center on theme, style and form, hardly on intrigue as such. This thesis, in contrast, proposes a way of penetrating into the nature of intrigue as such, with a view to constructing its psychic cause, that is, by attending to the unknowable of intrigue and hence irreducible to ideological or historical criteria. The importance of the way proposed here is that it takes its bearings from the aesthetics that is uniquely of Restoration drama.
19
D. Methodology – A Psycho-rhetorical Approach to Intrigue
The approach taken by this study to the literary form of intrigue takes its bearings from psychoanalysis' own concern with the function of interpretation, its initial tool in the analytic session. As perceived by Lacan, psychoanalytic interpretation is to be made to 'find anew the forsaken horizon of being' ("The Direction of Treatment",
Ecrits, 536). Psychoanalytic interpretation, conceived by Lacan as an act, bears on the unrepresentable real of psychic life, specifically the subject's relationship with jouissance (Gueguen, 65, 69). It may be asserted at this point that the question of interpretation is answered methodologically; the re-conceptualization of the form of intrigue offered by this study is the effect of the method employed for its analysis.
The claim of the present study is that the unnamable of intrigue, regarding which literary interpretation has remained deficient, requires a form of analytic interpretation that is an act in the domain of the real, an intervention aimed at contracting the text's phantasmatic layer rather than expanding it further through the addition of significations.
Methodologically as well as conceptually, this thesis is informed by Freudian and Lacanian theories and conceptions of structure and representation. One of the main concerns of recent psychoanalytic theory is the relation of the literary text to the most elusive of the three Lacanian orders, the real as distinct from the imaginary and the symbolic. Consideration of the real hinges critical analysis on representation and the object of representation on the one hand, and on the limits of interpretation on the other, since in Lacanian terms the real is constituted as what resists an interpretable formulation. The work of art, including the literary text, is thus conceptualized as a symptomatic figuration of the real, that is, as a form of emptying. An artwork is a symptom emptied of its individual, paradoxical core of enjoyment. What operates in creation is 'the symptom separated from the jouissance which it formally enveloped'
21
Miller says in "Reflections on the Formal Envelope of the Symptom" (21). The emptying of the formal envelope of the symptom is the condition of creation, in so far as it proceeds from nothingness. Yet even as the work of art indicates the emptying of jouissance as a sense enjoyed by the subject, it gives rise to jouissance universally
(21). Jouissance which cannot be symbolically represented is now invested in the symptom's formal envelope itself. Conceived as symptomatic, the artistic act is irreducible to meaning or content. Instead, as Ruth Ronen expalins, 'the effect of the real produced by art shows itself through what subverts and disturbs the symbolic function' (Representing the Real, 90). This is a crucial point of departure that calls into question a strictly structural or formal literary study which, as a rule, tends to perceive artistic signs as meaningful, effectively integrated structures, even if subversive.
As symptom, the literary text engenders a void: it is not a surface manifestation of a repressed object but a substitutive formation, substituting a signifier for a lack, for an absent, lost object (Soler, ''Literature as Symptom", 215,
Ronen, Rep., 99). Immanent to the conception of the literary text as symptomatic is an idea of the object of representation which is radically different from the object as conceived in Aristotelian and structuralist poetic theories. In Lacanian terms, the
Thing (rendered operative in the form of the object a) is an emptiness at the heart of the real, created by the symbolic operation (SVII, 121). The object a can be aesthetically experienced only as an effect and is therefore incompatible with the
Aristotelian pre-existent object of imitation. And it is irreducible to signifieds and hence is incompatible with the reconstructed object which structuralist critical activity produces as it seeks to establish the rules that make meaning possible (Barthes, in
Adams, 1198).
21
Resistant to sense, and of purely topological reality (Lacan, SXI, 257), the object a (the object cause of drives) is not given to representation. The unconscious posits a similar problem. The dream as one of the formations of the unconscious indicates that the unconscious is constituted by representations and is hence symbolic.
However, the mechanisms of the unconscious interfere with interpretation. 'In interpreting a dream we are opposed by the psychical forces which were responsible for its distortion', Freud says in The Interpretation of Dreams (SE 5, 525). The modes of representation used by the dream work for reproducing dream-thoughts undercut considerations of representability and intelligibility as promoting dream interpretation.
And even where analysis of unintelligible dreams is thorough, there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled: 'this is the dream's navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown' (SE 5, 525). In Ronen's words, 'while language is there to constitute the unconscious, the unconscious is constituted as a lack in language itself'. As an object of interpretation the unconscious is at once accessible and inaccessible. A repressed object or the representation-lacking real is enveloped by the dream's perceptual image, yet the object is not the content of the dream. An unconscious object of thought emerges in the failure to represent it, in the split between the image and what it represents. The real of the mind appears as an excess of sense which no interpretation can reduce to content or formulate explicitly (Rep.,
95-96).
The manifestation of the unrepresentable is a major consideration for any theoretical approach to a literary form. It may therefore be asked by means of what specifically literary mechanisms the real is perceived. The paradigm for thinking the dialectical conditions for a representation of the real might be the relation between the manifest content of the dream and the dream thought. The relation between the manifest content and the thought is that of asymmetry and elision: the thought is
22 either represented in insignificant components of the image or not represented at all.
The unvisualizable and repressed object is assumed from the very existence of the image, whereas interpretation is 'a necessary stage in acknowledging that the given image has an impossible-to-represent object of the unconscious as its product' (Ronen,
Rep., 95). Lacan's conception of the Kantian Thing, and of the hole the work of art envelops, and Freud's recognition of the dream's impenetrable navel, locate representation of the real that is the object in the dialectical distance between the image and the object. Interpretation functions as the limit or the impossibility of sense, enabling the emergence of the object as resistant to articulation.
Elision, asymmetry and repetition thus function as measures and means for the representation of the real where such representation is predicated on the necessary safe distance between the Thing and the image which produces this void as its product. There is, however, a more radical manner of encountering the real in the work of art, conceived by Lacan with regard to Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. If
Saussurian linguistics means that the signified constitutively misses the referent, so that the signifier is merely an approximation of a cause that is forever missed, the referent returns to stuff the signifier by the decomposition of lexicalization performed by Joyce in his late work. In Joyce's later work, words are decomposed to their maximum semantic echoes through the harrowing of letters, thus making a 'writing of resonances' which ultimately cancels imaginary evocations. Such writing at the level of the letter is Joyce's symptom, his mode of jouissance, and more so: 'it is a little a which allows the subject to be named', says Miller; Joyce 'transforms himself into the
Bedeutung' ("Lacan with Joyce", pp. 20, 28).
On the one side the dream as a paradigm of the impossibility of sense with respect to an object that is unapproachable, on the other side the Joycean letter as a paradigm of the impossibility of sense with respect to an object-as-organ whose
23 defiance of the imaginary and the symbolic elicits anxiety (Ronen, Aesth., 151). These are the two modes of thinking the real in art which two major phases in Lacanian teaching have produced. But there is another way of approaching the real, a way that has its roots in the function of the dream-work: the technique of jokes and formalist conception of literary technique. Shklovsky defines artistic creation in terms of impeded perception, accomplished by the technique of defamiliarization (12, 22). In
Shklovsky's terms, substitutive formations are immanent to literary technique:
'defamiliarization is found almost everywhere form is found' (18). If 'forms made difficult' is what constitutes the literariness of a text, is it not possible that the real as that which 'remains stuck in the gullet of the signifier' (Lacan, SXI, 270) emerges through forms as such, rather than by the effects of repetition, elision and asymmetry produced by signifiers (Ronen, Rep., 95)?
Psycho-rhetoric, a field extensively developed through the work of Shirley
Sharon-Zisser, has placed the poetic function itself in the holed yet real referent. The rhetorically-determined axes of language (selection and combination subjected to the principle of equivalence), most frequently encountered in poetry, make Jakobson's formulation of the poetic function relevant to Lacan's conception of the real in two ways: these axes mark the limit of language and exceed sense, and they produce violation of the norm. In these two aspects rhetorical micro-structures are topologized as the text's 'vacuoles', Lacan's mode of representing the capture of jouissance in the field of the Other of signifiers. The vacuole is the imposition of the holed object of satisfaction on the metonymical gap of desire, or the lack of being which the Other of language implies for subjectivity (SXVI, 12.3.69, Sharon-Zisser, "The Poetic Function from Jakobson to Lacan", 286).
What is the norm which rhetorical forms violate? Sharon-Zisser emphasizes the perverse nature of poetic micro-structures as homeomorphic with the violations of
24 universals. Such universal is the anatomical function of bodily organs and zones which sexuality erogenizes and perverts to serve the satisfaction of the drive. Hence,
'the poetic function as a category of structure is structurally sexual in its predication on the operation of othering (violation of the norm, defamiliarization, defeated anticipation)' ("The Poetic Function", 283-284). But there is yet a more intimate relation between rhetorical forms and the perverse nature of sexuality as precipitate of the unconscious. Following the work of psychoanalyst Michele Montrelay, Sharon-
Zisser indicates that in certain cases the phonic-graphic mass is not a representation of an organ, but becomes 'an organ in itself' ("Rhetorical Erotogenenicity", 16).
Rhetorical forms, especially figures of speech which are excessive to sense, perceived by classical and Renaissance rhetoricians as 'ornaments' and 'flowers', are organs of satisfaction, not vehicles in which erotogenicity is represented. Flowers of rhetoric have a topological structure whose center is a hole from whence sense leaks out; their structure reasserts the pressure (Drang) of the drive circling around the lost object, the hole in primordial satisfaction which is manifested in the body's orifices whose topological representation is that of an edge structure (12, 18).
Employing Lacan's conception of structure as the 'cause of discourse itself', his recasting of structure as the real in his fourteenth and sixteenth seminars, Sharon-
Zisser's perception of rhetorical forms as perverse, functioning as erogenized and hence anatomically aberrant zones, also suggests a relocation of the function of the letter/litter, the substance of which the literary text is made. The letter dissolves the semblance of signifieds, Lacan says in ''Lituraterre". The letter gives support to the signifier as its cause under erasure (SXVIII, 12.5.71 pp. 13, 17). This materiality in suspension that voids semblance is shifted in Sharon-Zisser's work to mechanisms of style which object to sense. The vacuole which is the cause of the signifying chain is thus not 'outside of the text'; the object of satisfaction constituted by forms of
25 grammar and rhetoric, is indexed in the poetic text as 'wound' or hole in the poetic text's Bedeutung, voiding the text of sense ("The Poetic Function", 282, 288).
The effect of the work of the letter is manifested in the poetic function, in forms of style, the dimension of language exceeding sense, which the edge structure of the drive now becomes. As Sharon-Zisser says, 'Jakobson's thinking of poetic language as predicated on the occlusion of the Bedeutung alongside the foregrounding of quintessentially a-semantic grammatical forms points…towards a psychoanalytic theory whose emphasis with regard to the structure of the poetic text would be not only the hole of the Thing, the always particular lost object around which poetry turns as its cause, but even more so the forms of style as micro-structural manifestations of this hole, which do not support sense, as Jakobson claims, but void it' ("The Poetic
Function", 289).
Two further implications of the erotics of rhetoric theorized by Sharon-Zisser concern the writer/poet, and the relation of style to plot. With regard to the writer, psychoanalyst Herve Castanet says that writing is dealing with the real: a praxis that produces the writer as its effect (9). A literary style can thus teach us something about the particular object cause of desire that produced this style and the writer as its effect.
The work of art itself, Sharon-Zisser says, is 'an object cut and ceded from the organism of its maker'. Poesis is then a cutting no less than making; like all objects ceded from the organism of the speaking being, the poetic text indicates the operation of the cut which is the movement of the drive itself. The work of art is of the order of the drive, just as rhetorical micro-structures and themes or undecomposable motifs, are erogenized loci of the author as subject effect ("Thin(g)king Shakespeare", 181-
182, 186, 188). Whether a ceded object or an erogenous zone, the text so located functions as a component of the drive as conceptualized by Freud.
26
If poesis as such marks the movement of the drive, can it not be said that a particular plot form is similarly subjected to the same making which owes service to the drive? Psychoanalysis generally regards plot, much like narrative, as essentially phantasmatic. Miller says that in literature 'the real remains veiled by the imaginary: the characters, the story, the beginning, the end, all the Aristotelian semblants of poetics, whether they be imaginary or symbolic' ("Lacan with Joyce", 11.) But as
Ronen indicates, the dissimulating operation of art reveals as it conceals: 'das Ding is only signified as lack when something appears in its place'. Thus the well-constructed tragedy provides 'an effective meaningful concealment of the rupture of symbolization that tragedy in fact stages' (Rep., 105, 116). However, seeing that intrigue subverts good composition, even when subordinated to the ironic purposes of retrospective construction, there is a question whether the evocative function of dissimulation is sufficient to account for intrigue as plot form.
Structurally, intrigue occupies the perverse underside of well-constructed action. Intrigue intermittently joins in with irony of situation or retrospective exposition and unfolds independently of the aesthetic cause of such construction. The progressive plot of the intriguer, from planning to the achievement of his goal, is no different from the retrospective action couching it in enabling the extraction of an underlying fabula. Yet the difference in plot construction introduced by intrigue also calls in question ideal construction by presenting the collapsibility of any effective mythos into its revealing argument or fabula.10 Intrigue then is a plot form that disavows the efficacy of good composition at the same time that it disavows the symbolic rupture an ideal composition is made to conceal. While indicating this same rupture by resisting explication by means of causal structure it also complies with causal construction of events. While establishing a radical opacity in symbolic terms,
10 In the Poetics Aristotle presents the argument or the story as ordered differently from the episodes of the plot (XVII, pp. 25-26).
27 intrigue both indicates the failure of construction to give sense to acts and cleverly establishes itself as substitutive for the same lack or failure. Disavowal of the lack in the Other and substitution of this lack is what renders intrigue of the order of perversion.
Furthermore, in the plays examined here, intrigue partakes of thematic interest in the enigmas of pleasure. Through theme and content the plays formulate the mise- en-scène of intrigue as the phantasmatic scene of sado-masochistic drives.
Approaching intrigue through the psychoanalytic theory of rhetorical forms conceived by Sharon-Zisser is hence in tune with the phantasmatic and perverse aspects intrigue plot foregrounds.
Such an approach nevertheless poses a challenging question: how can the erogenicity of poetic technique as voiding rather than producing sense support a conception of plot? This thesis is thus largely dedicated to exploring the productivity of the erotics of rhetoric as a way of addressing plot. Rhetorical forms are not conceived as semantically complementing theme and character interrelation. Instead, style is conceived as a stratum from which no sense can arise, where the empty origin of intrigue is listened to and responded to by way of theoretical construction.
Conversely, theory is my means of approaching the void produced by style to construct the psychic cause of intrigue. Theory is extensively referred to as a way of establishing the relation of rhetorical forms to this cause.
The theoretical aspects this thesis encounters in tackling the question of drive as the cause of intrigue lead to the same point of concern regarding the representation of the real or the object. How can drive be aesthetically perceived in a literary text?
Analytic practice has marked the way in different forms. In Freud's "Constructions in
Analysis", the 'archaeological debris' with which the analyst constructs what has been forgotten is the living matter of fragments of memory, associations and the behavior
28 of the subject of the analysis (SE 19, 259). Words here are not the sole material of analytical constructions. However, Freud's analysis of the Wolf Man, and his arrival at the letter (as well as sign) V, the pivot of the essential moments of analysis, produces the model of working with words and letters for Lacanian psychoanalyst
Serge Leclaire. Leclaire seeks the first signifier, the essential formula which constitutes his analysand's unconscious in its singularity, by extricating a persisting chain of signifiers and attending to its literal interplay (80-81, 83). Leclaire's practice suggests a possible method of analyzing texts, where the imprints of an actual subject's jouissance are the product of words and forms alone.
Freud goes beyond words; Leclaire centers on words alone. Montrelay makes use of the whole linguistic gamut, including non-signifying forms. Montrelay elaborates on Freud's assertion that words are 'the essential tool of psychoanalysis' (SE
7, 283), arguing that the words of the analysand should be heeded as though defamiliarized, as we would attend to words in a poetical or literary work: their sound, rhythm, logic and grammar ought to come into play as well as literality ('Le double statut', 89-90). Montrelay suggests that no particular words need be privileged, and that various linguistic elements acquire significance in analysis. In line with Freud's own contribution to linguistic and rhetorical study in his work on jokes, and following
Sharon-Zisser I propose to add grammatical and rhetorical schemes of composition to the chains of signifiers, out of which drive structures, the text's unconscious formulas, are constructed, something Lacanian psychoanalysis has not done so far.
Grammatical and rhetorical figures of speech are aimed to produce effects in the listener; they have no meaning in themselves. To account for these microstructures as ciphers of the unconscious of the text, to give them erotogenic value or treat them as the stigmata of pleasure, as Leclaire does with regard to the letter (53, 67), is to indicate the function of rhetorical forms in their interaction with signifiers. But this
29 does not mean raising these forms to the status of signifiers. Rather, they provide the structural and logical underpinning of the plays' phatasmatic signifying drift. At the same time they exhaust sense, and are essentially singular: functioning differently in each and every text, they attest to the playwright's particular mode of enjoyment.
Grammatical and rhetorical forms thus constitute the irreducible litter of the imaginary dimension of sense and signified. The psychoanalytic perspective of this study nevertheless recognizes that what cannot be accounted for, what is veiled by rhetorical forms, and hence remains the text's ultimate enigmatic object, is the object at the cause of intrigue's constitutive drives. This object is effectuated in what hampers intrigue, what dislodges intrigue from the order of active, linear causality.
Theoretical questions concerning the relation between the signifier and the unrepresentable are not foreign to the cultural context of the second half of seventeenth century England. John Dryden's critical work both bears directly on the praxis of play writing of his time and addresses points regarding representation which are of relevance to both the conception of literature as symptom and to the notion of grammatical and rhetorical forms as the real dimension of language. In "An Essay of
Dramatic Poesy" (1665-6?) as well as in "A Defense of an Essay of Dramatic Poesy"
(1667) Dryden debates representation of the tragedy's object of imitation in terms of the object's transparency and the necessary distance from it through rhyme. Not without an awareness of a paradox, Dryden advocates a gap between the represented object and its mode of representation. He is less concerned with the imitated object than with 'affecting the soul', and he implies that the effect of delight is inseparable from the artfulness of the representation. In our terms, Dryden recognizes that the symptomatization of the real is bound with pure form (rhyme), that artificial figuration belying psychological transparency has an impact because this is where something quite different is encountered. Artificiality may appear as a means of
31 fending off realism, as Corman suggests in relation to Congreve's comedies (in
Kenny, 262). But it could be that Congreve's pride in the artificial design of his comedy, as suggested by his defense of The Double-Dealer (ed. Dobree, 113-114), marks a trend similar to that presented by Dryden with regard to serious drama. In the seventeenth century, comedies as well as tragedies employ artificiality as a means of gesturing towards the real object they veil.
That the drama of the time is amenable to psychoanalytic theory is suggested by Traugott in his study of Restoration comic form. Traugott turns to Freud's Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious to explain the psychological origin of the paradoxical ethic of the Restoration, its 'sentimental nostalgia for the heroic imposed upon an obsessive commitment to naturalism'. The comedy is a device of the society's unconscious, revealing in an indirect though economic manner the feeble pretensions of an aristocratic society to the aristocratic values of love and honor (396). Traugott places a psychoanalytic account side by side with Hobbes's naturalistic philosophy of the mind, predominant in the conception of the courtly rake as straddling heroic drama and satirical comedy. Yet his conclusion that manners and their deceptive uses, which are the attributes of society itself, make the world of manners comedy 'a sort of
Hobbesian state of nature in the drawing room', that 'manners, however artful, are natural' (398), suggests that the application of psychoanalysis to the ethical climate of the time can only afford a limited view of the uniqueness of Restoration comedy compared to comedy in general.
Freud, in contrast, suggests a different direction of psychoanalytic study when turning to Shakespeare's Macbeth to explain cases observed in the clinic through figures 'which great writers have created from the wealth of their knowledge of the mind', and only this way suggesting something about the tragic hero for literary study of tragedy ("Some Character Types met with in Psychoanalytic Work", SE 14, 318).
31
Such deliberations regarding style as Dryden's and Congreve's, as well as their stylistic preferences, indicate the paramount importance late seventeenth century aesthetics laid upon representation, and as such are of relevance to psychoanalysis at its current juncture of interest in the relation of the signifier to the subject's mode of enjoyment. Again, it is the erotics of rhetoric, or rather, rhetoric in its application to psychoanalytic thought, that leads back to the nature of intrigue as devised in the plays discussed in this thesis.
In the chapters below the plays' artificiality of style is examined. In each play, stylistic dominants which are considered as the texts' sense-voiding vortices, and hence as invoking jouissance, become the building blocks for the reconstruction of the plays' 'logical complement of being' (Lacan, SXIV, 24.5.67). Thus, the first chapter deals with the enthymeme in Congreve's The Way of the World. My main claim in this chapter is that the play's stylistics leads us into the logic of phantasm through perversion as conceived by Freud in 'A Child is Being Beaten'. The second chapter deals with Congreve's The Double-Dealer, concentrating on the fallacy and alliteration as dominants. The play's stylistics is conceived to unfold the progression from villainy as perversion to the neurotic unknown secret, the symptom. The third chapter is devoted to three tragedies, Lee's Caesar Borgia, Dryden and Lee's The
Duke of Guise, and Nicholas Rowe's The Ambitious Step-Mother. Through a discussion of the plays' figures of speech I attempt to show that intrigue can be conceived in the terms of the aesthetics of anxiety as these figures become the texts' object-as-organ invoking unlimited jouissance. Each play in its particular way indicates intrigue's implication in the object cause of the drive, an enigmatic core of masochistic pleasure which, while not solving the ever-lasting mystery of the intriguer's motivation, at least points to intrigue's navel of failure.
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Chapter One: The Grammar of Masochism in Congreve's The Way of the World
"'tis the way of the world,…of the widows of the world" (Congreve's The Way of the World, V.i.501-502)
"I know nothing about it: a child is being beaten" (Freud, 'A Child is Being Beaten', SE 17, 181)
Introduction
The Way of the World (1700), William Congreve's last and most famous contribution to the stage, is an intrigue comedy whose significance regarding the question of style and its pertinence to the psychoanalytic investigation of the intrigue plot form emerges in two principal ways: a critique of character representation, and the play's stylistics. The first of these is broached by the playwright in his dedication and concerns the representation of ridiculous characters in comedy. The second concerns the play's stylistic dominant, the enthymeme. The enthymeme is a 'rhetorical mode of demonstration' theorized by Aristotle in his book The Art of Rhetoric. Both these ways are equally important and address the same question. Starting from the line of inquiry suggested by Congreve's dedication, this chapter focuses on the enthymeme in his last comedy. It examines the relation of the enthymeme to the configuration of drives basic to the masochistic phantasm staged by the play's intrigue. Intrigue, as considered in this dissertation, is the manifestation of drive organization at the level of the semblant, the imaginary combined with the structure of the signifier or the symbolic, perceived through dramatic action and character interrelationship.
In his dedication, Congreve expresses his discontent with the way characters who are meant to be ridiculous are portrayed in most contemporary comedies: these characters, he contends, 'are of fools so gross' that they should rather 'disturb than
33 divert the well-natured and reflecting part of the audience; … instead of moving our mirth, they ought very often to excite our compassion'. This, he says, moved him 'to design some characters which should appear ridiculous, not so much through a natural folly (which is incorrigible and therefore not proper for the stage) as through an affected wit: a wit, which at the same time that it is affected, is also false'. In consequence of such a design, a hasty judgment of character is impeded and not without hazard to the playwright, as theater-goers overcharged with criticism may let fly their censure, having rashly mistaken their aim. Congreve attests to the fact that
'this play has been acted two or three days before some of these hasty judges could find the leisure to distinguish betwixt the character of a Witwoud and a Truewit'
(Dedication, 3-4). In what he calls a 'digression from the true course' of his dedicatory epistle, Congreve actually problematizes the concept of true wit while imputing the difficulty involved in its discernment to hasty judgment. The equating of affected wit with false wit may lure one to believe it possible to distinguish a would-be wit from a true one. But in effect, the possibility of judging characters by their wit is seriously, even if hypothetically, called into question. We think we can make the distinction between Witwouds and Truwits, but we cannot.
Congreve has addressed the question of wit in relation to characterization in his letter to Dennis Concerning Humour in Comedy (1695). He asserts there that it is difficult to define Wit (and likewise Humour) for it is 'of infinite variety'. Yet he attempts to make a distinction between Wit and Humour, suggesting that although
Humorous characters do not exclude Wit, an idea of what Wit is may begin with its marked difference from Humour, which he takes to be A singular and unavoidable manner of doing, or saying any thing, Peculiar and Natural to one Man only (in
Comedies by William Congreve, edited by Dobree, 1-2, 7). To the extent that 'the
34
Manner of Wit should be adapted to the Humour' (2) Wit cannot have the same natural inevitableness as Humour.
In effect the concept of 'wit' is an object of study in The Way of the World, and precisely a slippery one. Thus Mirabell, discussing Witwoud's character with Fainall, is critical of Witwoud's 'commonplace of comparisons' and his inability to distinguish
'an affront' from 'jest' and 'downright rudeness' from 'satire' (I.i.198-205). However,
Mirabell himself enjoins Fainall's similitude (of Witwoud growing by the knight his half brother 'like a medlar grafted on a crab') with an elaboration that is suggestively
'commonplace' ('So one will be rotten before he be ripe, and the other will be rotten without ever being ripe at all' – I.i.190), to the extent that he is presented as consciously borrowing from Shakespeare's As You Like It. Similarly, Mirabell's demand for precision in expression when Petulant refrains from one, alluding instead with a 'what-d'ye-call-'ems' to the gentlewomen he arranges to look for himself, starts off a set of comic repartees that are the Witwouds' rather than his own (I.i.349-356).
From the very beginning, then, the orderly conception of 'wittiness', such as seen in the notion of 'turn' which the Restoration substituted for the 'conceit' of the metaphysical school (Spingarn, I. xiv, Fujimura, 22), as well as wit as an indicator of character, are questioned. For this maneuver on the part of the playwright enables a reassessment of the function of style at the same time that the commonplace, both in diction and plot, especially as handled by Mirabell, enables a more complex perception of wit.
The implications of affected wit as marker of character are twofold. First, affected wit suggests a breach of the ideal of decorum and the proportion of judgment and fancy it implies. Critical readings of the play's stylistics have thus emphasized the polarity it stages, either between rationality and plain truth and propriety (Hinnant,
380-381), or between rationality and morality (Markley, 238-239). Secondly,
35
Congreve not un-purposely makes it difficult to assess character through the index of wit; in this way he is the 'passive poet' of the prologue who forces theater-goers to put their own acumen to the test. Indeed, it is precisely this difficulty that has spurred readers to attempt such an assessment. The improprieties of affected wit, which underline the opacity of language with respect to character, have been reassigned the same mirroring function Congreve has rendered doubtful.
Both Hinnant and Markley are thus engaged in the attempt to distinguish
'proper from improper uses of wit', as a means of settling the blurred distinction between true and false wit. Hinnant turns to an external standard in Dryden's definition of wit as 'propriety of thoughts and words', and even more so in the abuses of language enumerated by Lock (374, 376), whereas Markley seeks it within the play, in 'moral and immoral speech' (Markley, 237, 234). Congreve's view of language as a tool of characterization is unsettling in so far as 'forms of wit are shared by fools and villains', as Markley states. Markley resolves the problem by claiming
'true decorum' no longer a formal category but 'a matter of the heart rather than of the tongue' (234). Hinnant attempts to measure true wit as opposed to false one in light of such abuses where the link between 'words' and 'thoughts' is broken, yet propriety as gauging wit is rendered suspicious by such examination, for by 'abuses of wit' Hinnant only manages to point out types of wit. His claim that 'passion is Congreve's test for sophistry in The Way of the World' suggests to my mind that this test helps to support characterization rather than the trueness or falsity of wit as such: the distinctive quality of Mirabell's wit is betrayed when he is 'under the stress of passion' while
Fainall's affected speech shows its fragility 'when governed by passion' (281, 382,
385). Hinnant rightly observes that Congreve is ambivalent toward the Restoration tradition of intellectual wit, concluding that 'Congreve's comedy is circumscribed by an awareness of the limits of human speech' (380, 386).
36
Yet Congreve's lead with regard to style and characterization may be followed along a different consideration of the relation of wit to judgment which affected wit defies. In its limited sense of critical judgment, 'judging well' concerns the ability to
'observe those excellencies which should delight a reasonable reader' (Dryden,
"Apology for Heroic Poetry", Ker I, 179). But the relation of wit to judgment, a topic
'common to all ages', (Crane, 14), has broader implications. In Dryden's perception, judgment informs wit as a measure of representing well, be that of folly or of what is noble ("Defence of the Epilogue", Ker I, 172). Dryden takes 'wit' to mean more than
'the jerk or sting of an epigram' or 'the seeming contradiction of a poor antithesis'.
Rather, he extends wit to 'poetic composition' in general: wit in the poet is Wit writing, the faculty of imagination in the poet, while the result of his thought is Wit written. This very idea already points to what is beyond fancy and judgment, to elocution, even as they constitute elocution's indispensable preliminaries. Hence,
'propriety of thoughts and words' means 'thoughts and words elegantly adapted to the subject' (in the sense of topic) ("Annus Mirabilis", "Apology for Heroic Poetry", Ker
I, 14-15, 190). 'Propriety', indicating such elegant adaptation of thoughts and words, is
'representing well', but not merely in the sense of 'boldness of expression' managed by
'coolness and discretion', on which Dryden insists in 1695 (in "A Parallel of Poetry and Painting") as much as in 1677 (in his "Apology for Heroic Poetry") (Ker II, 149,
Ker I, 186). Rather, in elocution, or the 'art of clothing and adorning' an invented thought, Dryden seems to seek an accuracy in the expression that concerns wording as much as words, such as exemplified by Virgil's writing: 'Virgil is so exact in every word, that none can be changed but for the worse; nor any one removed from its place, but the harmony be altered' ("A Parallel of Poetry and Painting", Ker II, 148-
149). I suggest that the kind of je ne sais quoi that Dryden implies by his admiration for Virgil's knowledge of 'how and where to place his colors' on top of 'knowing his
37 colors' (Ker II, 150), Dryden's search for a poetic quality that concerns style beyond the invented thought and its fanciful molding, is not dissimilar to Congreve's own attempt to subordinate wit to the problematic aspects of style, or as he implies in his dedication, to give priority to 'purity of style' as the measure of his own poetic distinction (Dedication, 5). It is in light of the paradoxes betrayed by the 'graces of elocution' (Dryden, "Annus Mirabilis", Ker I, 15-16) that affected wit may be revisited as working within the boundaries of propriety precisely by its counter-effect as 'disturbing' rather than 'diverting'.
Virgil, relating things from himself, Dryden explains, gains more liberty to
'express his thoughts with all the graces of elocution, to write more figuratively, and to confess as well the labour as the force of his imagination'. Similarly he says of
Virgil that he 'makes a seeming stumble' while demonstrating his dexterity' ("Annus
Mirabilis", Ker I, 15-16, "A Parallel of Poetry and Painting", Ker II, 149). Elocution confesses more than just the proper. A later reading of Dryden's conception of wit is that of Addison, who acknowledges that wit as Dryden defines it is 'not so properly a definition of wit, as of good writing in general'. However, Addison reads Dryden's
'propriety of words and thoughts adapted to the subject' literally: Euclid is in this sense the greatest wit, for 'there never was a greater propriety of thoughts and words adapted to the subject, than what that author [Euclid] has made use of in his Elements'
(337). It seems to me that Dryden's definition, read in the broader critical context he provides in his writings, defies Addison's notion of true wit as mixed wit, to the extent that what Addison cites of Cowley seems more of fanciful conceits, which according to Dryden, do not necessarily indicate the kind of exactness, often attained like 'the pencil thrown luckily full upon the horse's mouth', that he sees in Virgil's poetic model ("A Parallel of Poetry and Painting", Ker II, 148, 151). I suggest that Dryden's understanding of wit gives precedence to form, not in the sense of forms that Addison
38 dismisses as false wit (such as the anagram or the pun – 327, 333), but form as would answer to Pascal's idea of the mathematical and the intuitive minds, where intuition is part of judgment, mathematics of intellect (7, 10). There is a formal quality upheld by
Dryden that combines the palpability of principles that are removed from ordinary use with the principles found in common use in the intuitive mind, to use Pascal's words
(7). Translated into the terms of literary critical theory, Dryden's treatment of elocution, I suggest further, points back to Renaissance conception of the art of composition as artificial, that is as formalistic, while maintaining a different view of this artificiality as 'refined', in line with the poetical perception and aspiration of his own age.
Congreve implies that affected wit is a more 'diverting' way of presenting ridiculous characters. Hence, he avows commitment to the arousal of pleasure by affected wit as 'undisturbing' (Dedication, 3). But the aesthetics Congreve proposes is no less disturbing than the one he critiques. In fact, this aesthetics suggests a refusal to make the tongue an index of a paradox or a gap between language and motives, between signifier and signified. The 'disturbance' is hence shifted to the signifiers themselves. They fail to signify themselves as markers of character. This especially concerns the notion of 'wit', a master signifier functioning in proper name combinations (Witwoud, for one). 'Wit' is a signifier implicated by its designated
'wits': whatever 'wit' signifies becomes elusively known through its referential 'wits', at once true and false. Nor are such notions as 'motives' and 'morality' privileged with respect to 'wit'. The signifier is rendered strange to itself. The concept of true wit as ideation of character is made paradoxical since 'wit' cannot signify its genuineness.
Congreve's dedication, I suggest, places a logical paradox at the heart of his play: once affected wit has been introduced as a viable 'verbal equivalent to farce without being particularly symptomatic of particular humors or types' (Hinnant, 374),
39 wit cannot be wholly true with false wit forming part of wit, and on the other side, true wit cannot be dissociated from false one as one facet of wit. However, this paradox does not concern the incommensurability between language and character which has been troubling critics of his play. The paradox lies in the harmonious relation between signifiers which Congreve creates by not privileging any particular signifier as primarily accountable for wit as 'true'. Congreve's dedication, which as paratext is the play's "undefined zone" between the inside and the outside (Genette, 2), thus precipitates what Lacan calls 'the metaphorical effect of language'. The metaphorical effect of language concerns a remainder which evades signification, here indexed by affected wit as barring wit from its trueness. Through the proportional relation between signifiers a signified effect is produced that is a One too many. This in turn introduces negation into every harmony, undermining the possibility of a unified, total 'Universe of Discourse' (SXIV, 14.12.66, pp. 6, 9-14).
Through the disturbing quality of signifiers Congreve highlights the play's status of an artifact that suspends any interpretative activity directed at the signifier- signified divide. The paradox underlying the play locates the metaphorical effect of language in the 'undisturbing' function of the signifier, in its proportional, non- privileged relation to a fellow-signifier. It is a signifier made 'disturbed', rather, by its heterogeneous signified effect, by what evades judgment where the trueness of wit is concerned. The trap set by Congreve for judges of his play consists in what this
'undisturbing' function of the signifier sets in motion. Critics handling the play's stylistics have tended to stop at the play's dislodged master-signifier and get caught by its evasive remainder. They have remained at the level of the metaphorical effect of sense, the level of signifiers and significations, even when considering features of style. Tools of aesthetic judgment such as decorum support the metaphorical effect of
41 sense by implicating the subject in what is sensed as 'proper'.11 Yet the critical effort has generally been to restore a universe of discourse tilted by Congreve, and to undo what is lacking in the signifying chain.12
The metaphorical effect of language, the lack introduced by signifiers with respect to their designative selves, is important for understanding something about the true nature of subjective thinking: the position of the subject in thinking is indeterminate for, as Lacan says, the subject is not simply in the position of acting being but is 'fundamentally determined by the act', this way producing an additional signifier signifying some lack in the Universe of discourse (SXIV, 14.12.66, pp. 11,
13). However, judging by Congreve's dedication, an engagement with the level of significations in reading his play is bound to draw the reader into errors of judgment while blinding him to the 'care and pains' invested by the poet to attain a more correct expression (4-5). Psychoanalytically, the level of signifiers involves us with an
11 As suggested by Dryden's defense of heroic poetry, judging well subsumes a subject capable of recognizing the delighting excellences that proceed from a true genius of poetry (Ker I, 179). Implied here is an aesthetic judgment of taste which suspends knowledge of such excellences while referring to a pleasurable cognitive state of universal validity, which Dryden claims for heroic poetry 'from the general taste and approbation of all ages' (181). The suspense of a knowledgeable correlation between heroic poetry and the pleasure it gives supports the indeterminacy that informs the lack induced by the metaphorical effect of sense. 12 A conceptual indeterminacy of the object of critical judgment such as effected by Dryden's aesthetic stance as a basis for further theorization of poetic writing in his apology for heroic poetry, seems to be forfeited in the critiques of Hinnant and Markley for example, as each one in his way attempts to justify his criteria for judging Congreve's stylistics. Yet these critiques are especially enlightening where the critics indicate the difficulty tackled by their approach. Thus Markley, insisting on the fact that 'Decorum in [Congreve's] plays recovers its Latin root: his dramatic language strives to be both a utilitarian vehicle and a register of his characters' moral nature' (200), eventually points out that 'Congreve's efforts to accommodate morality and ideology at the close of his final play, paradoxically testify to the structural tensions that persist between the languages of moral comedy and wit'. The language of wit, he says, is 'inconclusive – its function is essentially to continue its existence, to perpetuate its ironies, to add or undermine one more truism' (249). And Hinnant has to account for the objection that the emphasis on propriety in the dialogue of Mirabell and Millamant, however admirable from the standpoint of truth, is an error because it lacks dramatic vividness. He hence concedes that 'if The Way of the World deals with the opposition between true wits and false wits, the scenes between Millamant and Mirabell make clear that these categories are not static' (381). Quite in line with Congreve's own assertion that the manner of wit should be adapted to the Humour (Concerning Humour, 2) Hinnant points out that the distinctive quality of Mirabell's wit is betrayed under the stress of passion: 'True wit, in this sense, serves not so much to exemplify his acuteness as a judge of men as to clarify, even to heighten, his plight as a lover' (381). At such moments that Hinnant is called upon to answer for the evasiveness of the nature and function of true wit, we are reminded that even if the manner of wit is adapted to one's character, we should be wary of considering wit a transparent tool of characterization.
41 unavoidable lack, signified as 'a signifier too many', an evasive remainder whose interpretive fixation leads to the same errors rendering judges 'hasty'. At the same time, Congreve insists on pure turns of style, gesturing towards a mind that is not only intuitive but also mathematical, in Pascal's words, 'able to reach to first principles of things speculative and conceptual' (8-9). It is at this point that Congreve's notions of character design offer something to a psychoanalytic concern with the drive. They point the way towards a departure from the metaphorical/signified effect of language.
Style is no mirror of character and 'wit' is a misleading master-signifier. Congreve's trap for his judges at the level of the signifier invites us to seek the rational import of his style elsewhere, in the pure structures of elocutionary forms of logic, whose resistant opacity with respect to the effect of sense is also what safeguards in them the poet's mode of enjoyment, this way pointing to the psychic cause of the play's intrigue.13
An inquiry into the forms and figures of rational language does not seek to explain their failure to provide a mirror reflection of character. These forms are opaque by virtue of their artificiality, what in Dryden's terms makes Wit writing 'more delightful than nature' ("Annus Mirabilis", Ker I, 15). Their artificiality thus warns us against being captured by any pure and simple mimetic quality of rational language. If we seek to approach drive and phantasm by means of a remainder or an inassimilable element which designates the real of the subject by escaping signification, our route should be elocutionary forms of logic as what objects to mimesis. Such forms suggest a guideline in Dryden's ideal of decorum inasmuch as he grants importance to elocution, whose artfulness emerges in the 'hits of words a true poet often finds … without seeking', in a 'diamond'-like quality that raises the expression beyond its sense
("A Parallel of Poetry and Painting", Ker II, 150-151). This is where Dryden's ideal of
13 The move from the metaphorical/signified effect to pure structure as effect of language is the direction Lacan takes in his seminar on phantasm (SXIV, 14.12.66, p. 10).
42 decorum veers to accommodate 'abuses of language' as inherent to artistic composition at the same time that his perception of style reenacts Renaissance as well as classical purely rhetorical study of literature. The enthymeme in Congreve's The
Way of the World, while constituting the same subversion of readability suggested by moments of lucky hits of wording which draw a 'Good Heavens' from Dryden (Ker II,
150), also aligns Congreve's style with Renaissance logical and rhetorical literary sensibility.
The play presents its dominant mode of argumentation from the very beginning, in the opening dialogue between Fainall and Mirabell. These two characters are the agents of the play's double intrigue. Their exchange straightaway condenses into the generalized form of a maxim which has the character of an enthymeme: 'No, I'll give you your revenge another time, when you are
not so indifferent; you are thinking of something else now,
and play too negligently; the coldness of a losing gamester
lessens the pleasure of the winner. I'd no more play with a
man that slighted his ill fortune than I'd make love to a woman
who undervalued the loss of her reputation.' (I.i.4-9)14
Clenched arguments of the type presented by Fainall (in bold above) are momentary textural thickenings, arresting attention more by their form than by their content. They recapitulate the sense and thematic bearing of the statements enclosing them and therefore add little, by way of sense, to the argumentative edifice. These argumentative formulations conform to Aristotle's definition of the enthymeme, a definition whose problematic aspects they make emerge by their effect on the listener.
14 Other instances where a condensed statement forms the peak of the argument, either in the middle or at the end of the argument's formulated sense, and can be termed an enthymeme, are: I.i.81-82, I.i.130- 132, I.i.245, II.i.93-97, II.i.233-234, II.i.281, II.i.350-353, II.i.391-392, II.i.440-441, III.i.140, III.i.602- 604, III.i.622, IV.i.140, IV.i.147-154, IV.i.347-349, V.i.350. The one quoted above (in bold) and two other instances will be discussed in detail later on.
43
The impact of enthymematic arguments stems from the holes they cut in the streamlined dialogue, from their strict formalism at the limit point of sense.
Semantically, Fainall's apophthegm of displeasure supports the phantasmatic inquiry into pleasure which intrigue induces. On the level of plot and character, intrigue fashions its scene of pleasure by way of such interrogation, through the positions of the intriguer and his victim. Fainall's refusal of the pleasure offered him by Mirabell thematically sets up the exchange value of pleasure. The intriguer and his victim present the positions of the sadist and the masochist by what they identify and locate regarding pleasure, in their effect upon one another.15 In the terms of Lacan's seminar on the logic of phantasy (31.5.67, p. 8, 7.6.67, p. 12), the imaginary level of intrigue, where its story coheres and produces meanings, is therefore not one of dual inter-subjectivity. Intrigue is impinged upon by the register of the Other through the intriguer and his victim's research of how one enjoys or suffers. The argumentative cast of the preoccupation with (dis)pleasure further dispels imaginary inter- subjectivity in the sadistic-masochistic interrelationship staged by intrigue.
Enthymemes, which are the play's mainstays of argumentation, form part of the elocutionary stratum of representation, subtending the phantasmatic level of plot and character. If intrigue, constructed by characters within the world of the play, introduces the Other into its phantasmatic mise-en-scène by means of sadistic- masochistic research, the enthymeme designates the real beyond veils of sense and signification by its formalism. The enthymeme neither completes nor supports plot and character. Instead, if any harmony exists between style and plot, it is only to leave the enthymeme an irreducible remainder. This is implied by the function of the
15 Thus the opening scene brings out Fainall's dissatisfaction with Mirabell's reserved attitude, his way of withdrawing pleasure, while Mirabell seems well aware of Fainall's self indulgent demand for a passionate attitude as a sign of accommodating the need for more pleasure. Mirabell hence remarks: 'You have a taste extremely delicate, and are for refining on your pleasures', to which Fainall replies: 'Prithee, why so reserved? Something has put you out of humour' (I.i.10-12).
44 enthymeme in the argumentative structure of the play: the enthymeme is superfluous to sense, and is thus a surplus form. Enthymematic articulations hence persist as residues of the writer-subject, forming 'the micro-structural vortices that function as attempted solutions to the poet's mode of enjoyment (that is, satisfaction in suffering)'
(Sharon-Zisser, "The Poetic Function", 288).
The status of the enthymeme as a textual dominant conforms to Roman
Jakobson's conception of the term in two respects. First, the enthymeme 'guarantees the integrity of the structure' as a surplus form which condenses the play's poetic function. Hence, it is internally excluded from the play's structure, like the letter with respect to the signifier and signification. In terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the letter is the material substance that does not mean anything, the cadaverous matter by which the impossibility of writing the sexual relation holes any dream of harmony
(Lacan, Encore, 34-35, Sharon-Zisser, "The Collage", 78). Through its sense exceeding dimension, I claim, the enthymeme is of the nature of the letter.
But in turn, the enthymeme is an artistic device, a product of technique whose form cannot be subsumed by the strict materiality of the letter. What makes the enthymeme the focusing component of the play is precisely the logical complexity its simple surface of a 'claim backed by a reason' enfolds. Furthermore, the enthymeme is a complex form which implicates rhetoric with logic and grammar. The enthymemes in Congreve's play consist of an articulation cast in a certain rhetorical form such as the apophthegm. But this form is supported by a quantitative relation between three terms, disrupted by the syntactic structuring of the apophthegm. The rhetorical function of the enthymeme combines its grammar and logic. Only as structurally triple-layered does the enthymeme manifest the configuration of drives at the base of the play's intrigue. And it does so by traversing the three arts of rhetoric, logic and
45 grammar. As will be explained below, it is the enthymeme's implication of these three arts that renders it of interest to psychoanalytic thought.
Logic, grammar and rhetoric, traditionally conceived as three distinct arts, engage psychoanalytic thought with regard to formations of the unconscious such as the joke. Their status also comes into play in Freud's and Lacan's theorization of the phantasm and its perverse underpinnings, what is involved in the drive. Specifically, we may consider logic in relation to the phantasm. In the phantasm as conceived by
Lacan the subject's being, or perverse jouissance, is constituted logically, through the
Id. The Id is nevertheless conceived grammatically. Grammar may be related to
Freud's conception of the component drives of sadism-masochism and scopophilia- exhibitionism. Here the active-passive aim of the drive emerges grammatically in the voice of the verb. Finally, rhetoric concerns Freud's conception of the dream-work and the joke-work. The technique of certain jokes, however, combines rhetoric with logic.16 The enthymeme's relation to the masochistic phantasm is thus considered in light of psychoanalytic perception of the three arts of logic, grammar and rhetoric.
A psychoanalytic interrogation of the enthymeme begins with the form's composite structure: its status as a rhetorical form of logic. Structurally and conceptually, the enthymeme has the status of a construction in analysis. As formulated by Freud, a construction would be a 'putting together' of fragments of lost experience that are rejected by unconscious thought. A construction is not attested to by memory yet bears an element of truth ("Constructions in Analysis", SE 23, 258,
261, 265, 268). A construction in analysis takes after a delusion where a present disavowed fragment (of reality) is replaced by another fragment disavowed in the remote past (268). A similar structure is presented by the masochistic phantasm,
16 Respectively, the logic of phantasm is discussed by Lacan in his Seminar XIV. Freud discusses the active-passive reversal of sadism-masochism in "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes", SE 14, 127-129, and the structure of the perverse phantasy in 'A Child Is Being Beaten', SE 17, 177-204. The techniques of jokes are discussed by Freud in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, SE 18.
46 where the subject's disavowed being emerges as an object of pleasure in the guise of another beaten child. In logical and grammatical terms, the enthymeme constitutes the text's litter/letter as a surplus form of a double disavowal such as a construction in analysis and the phantasm present.
The enthymeme as emerging in Congreve's play, I argue, is structurally isomorphic with the masochistic phantasm as theorized by Freud and Lacan.
Syllogistically and syntactically the enthymeme manifests the economy of pleasure in displeasure which the intrigue on the level of plot at once stages and veils. The logic and syntax of the enthymemes studied here present the same double negation that
Lacan sees in the structure of the signifying arrangement of the phantasm, a double negation which enables the emergence of being.
However, the isomorphism of the enthymeme and the masochistic phantasm is not only logical and grammatical, but also essentially rhetorical. It is the enthymeme as a rhetorical amalgamation of logic and grammar, indicating a disruption of one by the other and excessive of sense, that embodies the perverse underside of intrigue in
Congreve's play. Put otherwise, the enthymeme as a composite structure of double disavowal functions as the Es – in Lacan's terms the anaesthetic object a where perverse jouissance is situated in the phantasm - with respect to the phantasmatic inquiry of displeasure effected by the interrelationship of the play's two intriguers.
My claim is that the enthymeme structurally produces a disavowed object of perverse pleasure and functions as a locus of perverse jouissance vis-à-vis the play's action. In my discussion of The Way of the World I pursue this claim along the following route: first, I examine the classical and Renaissance conceptions of the enthymeme. Then, I trace the relation of logic, grammar and rhetoric to the drive in
Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology, "Negation", 'A Child Is Being Beaten' and
Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. Then, I turn to Lacan's logical
47 conception of phantasm in his seminar The Logic of Phantasy. Finally, I examine three instances of enthymematic statements in the play in relation to the play's intrigue and the masochistic phantasm as intrigue's real core. My examination of these statements highlights their structural pliability as shifting between logic, grammar and rhetoric.
A. The Enthymeme
The model for my treatment of the enthymeme in Congreve's play is The Lawyer's
Logic (1588), a treatise on logic by the Ramist Abraham Fraunce. The treatise is valuable for methodological reasons, as well as for its conception of the enthymeme.
Methodologically, Fraunce presents the Ramists' shifting focus from rhetoric to logic by using Spenser's pastoral for his exempla and Virgil's eclogue of Corydon and
Alexis for a complete logical analysis (120, 123). This choice is not incidental. It conforms to Ramism's rigorous theorization of structure, and the indulgence in the beauties of the semiotic it induced in the rhetoricians of sixteenth-century England. As
Sharon-Zisser points out, Ramism and pastoral share in common a concern with the structural and formal dimension of the sign. Ramism and the pastoral collaborate structurally in so far as the pastoral interrogates the category of the archaic, the most ancient past of the drives, the past-oral/aural, not in its imagistic and thematic dimensions, but semiotically ("The Beginning", 3-4, The Risks of Simile, 39). The structural collusion of Ramism and pastoral with respect to elocutionary structures has bearing on the interrogation of the structures of logic; logic is interrogated through the eroticism of the pastoral.
However, the eroticism of the pastoral applied to logic in turn suggests something about the inevitable collision between the singularity and copiousness of elocution and the clenched formality of logic, of which Fraunce is aware. Fraunce
48 suggests the existence of two distinct strata in the compositional make-up of the literary work. One consists in words, the semantemes of language, the other in forms of logic which Fraunce, in line with the Ramist division of rhetoric and logic (Howell,
165), is careful not to translate into 'figures'.17 The relation the treatise forms between logical precepts and literary illustrations produces a remainder in the logical structures themselves: their non-absorbability into the illustrative words that overflow them. The
'Art of reasoning' (which artificially perfects nature) and erotic pleasure converge in the irreducible stratum of the places of logic and the method of their disposition. The constitutive elements of logic become jouissance matter by virtue of not being the product of words. They are the letter as such.
The enthymeme is a rhetorical form of logic which bears a problematic relation to the syllogism, Aristotle's unique invention of a form of reasoning. In the
Rhetoric Aristotle defines the enthymeme 'a kind of syllogism', a 'rhetorical syllogism' and a 'proof' (I.i.1355a11, 1356b8, pp. 9, 19). His definition has suggested for generations of logicians and rhetoricians the peculiarity of enthymeme as a compressed form that calls for an unraveling and a supplementation. Modern readings of Aristotle's doctrine of the enthymeme have contested its syllogistic function. They claim the enthymeme to be a 'relaxed form of syllogism', a 'syllogism of a kind', and hence not to be interpreted in terms of the invariable necessity of syllogism (Burnyeat, in Rorty, 91, 105, 110).18 Following Ramus, who calls Enthymema 'a mutilet
Sellogisme' (81), Fraunce calls enthymeme 'nothing but a contracted syllogism'
(sig.98) or a 'contracted and short syllogism' (99).
17 Crane points out that as a result of the Renaissance emphasis on style, 'invention' often came to designate a group of rhetorical devices for amplifying and embellishing a theme. The Ramists, in contrast, handed over all investigation and arrangement to logic; they considered figures of thought to be included in the processes of dialectical investigation (89, 55). 18 And see also Raphael who, like Burnyeat, although in a different manner, is concerned with the demonstrative aspect of enthymeme and is careful to distinguish it from scientific reasoning (249). Burnyeat claims that enthumema (consideration) represents probable reasoning that is formally invalid yet merits judgment (Rorty, 109).
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An enthymeme as defined by Fraunce is an imperfect syllogism: 'If any part of a syllogism be wanting, it is called then an imperfect syllogism or enthymeme'
(sig.97). The notion of the enthymeme as an imperfect syllogism was a commonplace by the sixteenth century, going back to Quintilian, following Cicero's antithetical enthymeme which was based on the Stoic notion of syllogism (Burnyeat, in Furley,
39, 42).19 For modern critiques of Aristotle's theory of the enthymeme this imperfection implies the enthymeme's inherent inconclusiveness. Burnyeat, for example, explains that an enthymeme as rhetorical demonstration is a consideration, a sort of argument presented to an audience in a context where certainty and conclusive proof are not to be had (in Furley, 12-13). By contrast, for Fraunce, imperfection determines what is satisfying about the enthymeme's formalism.
Fraunce introduces an elaboration on the Latin sense of enthymeme, 'cogitate':
'to think, to excogitate, to toss a man's mind, and meditate. For the mind never rests when an imperfect syllogism is put down, before it hath supplied that which wanteth, the better to judge of the whole perfect syllogism' (sig.98). In Fraunce's terms the thought or consideration enthymeme implies is formally harnessed to a rectification of what is functionally unsettling to man's mind, the form being 'wanting' or holed in relation to the 'whole', perfect syllogism. The idea of this incompleteness as a lack tossing the mind captures the excitatory dimension of the enthymeme. It is a form that stages the loop-like motion involved in the attainment of satisfaction. Fraunce's annotation graphically implies the potential coming to rest this wanting promises once completed.
Fraunce's adumbration of the pleasurable potential of the enthymeme requires more elucidation from a different direction. The enthymeme is allied to all kinds of
19 This is suggested, for example, in Boethius' reference to the enthymeme as an 'incomplete syllogism, some of whose parts are omitted either for the sake of brevity or because they are already known, and so argumentation of this sort also does not fall outside the genus of syllogism' (Ciceronis Topica, 279/1050, p.31).
51 argumentation which for Fraunce 'come all to one': the syllogism (99). As a 'kind of argumentation' the enthymeme belongs with the second part of Ramistic logic, called both Judgment and Disposition, which in itself is divided in two, the axiomatic and dianoetical (syllogistic). A mutilated syllogism that is confirmed by supplying a missing part, the enthymeme becomes a tool for subjecting contingent propositions, which are also axioms, to syllogistic judgment. Syllogistic judgment proceeds by the invention of a third argument: 'where an axiom is doubtful, it makes a question: therefore for proof of the truth, we must invent a third argument' (sig.97).
Syllogistic judgment is not dependent on the axiomatic truth value but on the
'orderly disposition of the question with the argument invented: so that not the argument properly, but the syllogisticall disposition, doth either prove or disprove the question' (98). The enthymeme functions as a formal procedure that lends consistency to the Art of reasoning. It transforms the doubtful nature of the proposition or axiom into the syllogism as determining consequence by the relation between three terms:
'The necessity of the consequence in a syllogism depends on that old ground, that such things as agree in any third thing, must also agree among themselves'. The third argument is the 'line of measure' by which things are judged (sig.98).
The invention of a third argument must take into account a dimension which is strictly connected with the categorical syllogism. In the hypothetical and the disjunctive syllogism the whole question is contained in the Major, whereas in the categorical syllogism the Major is only the later part of the question, which is the predicatum or the attributum 'because it is spoken, affirmed, attributed or applied to the former [part of the question]' (99). In other words, as a categorical syllogism, the enthymeme concerns either the subject (minor) or the predicate (major), yet the latter is foundational.
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In line with the Ramist two parts of logic, the enthymeme bears relation to the topoi or topics of invention as well. Fraunce's treatise suggests a difference from
Aristotle's conception of this relation. In the Rhetoric Aristotle distinguishes between enthymemes and their topics, 'for each of these things is different in kind' (II.22,
1395b2, p. 289). The topical, Aristotle says, is a method of selecting premises about probabilities. The topic or 'head under which several enthymemes are included'
(II.xxvi, 1403a1-2, p. 343) is distinguished from the 'material' of enthymemes and hence appears formal in nature rather than content-centered. But conceived as a thing to be considered in the process of syllogizing, the topic is the groundwork by which an argument is construed. The construction of arguments proceeds from the topic, the latter never functioning as a premise. Hence the topic precedes the composition of an enthymeme.20 Furthermore, the Rhetoric says very little on the patterns of inference in which enthymemes are formed.21
By using the enthymeme as a formal procedure of supplying a missing part,
Fraunce seems to reverse the scholastic progression from the topic to the argument.
The topos is affirmed as such by the formalism of the syllogism. Fraunce thus grants the syllogism priority with respect to the topic of invention which is close in spirit to
Aristotle's Prior Analytics. Aristotle concludes therein that not only dialectical and demonstrative syllogisms are effected by means of [syllogistic] figure, but 'also rhetorical syllogisms and in general every kind of mental conviction, whatever form it may take. For all our beliefs are formed either by means of syllogism or from induction' (II. xxii-xxiii, 68b10-15, p. 513).
20 In Aristotle's Topica, a topos for the most part consists in an instructive address to the dialectician, an argumentative scheme and a general principle or rule (see for example the topos of contrary of accident, II.vii, 113a20, p. 361). 21 Burnyeat indicates that in the Rhetoric, the maxim backed by a reason which together forms an enthymeme is often impossible to represent syllogistically (in Furley, 23).
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The patterning of the enthymeme is associated with a precise syllogistic form.
Ramus's 'mutilate' syllogism (82), and Fraunce's 'contracted kind of argumentation'
(104), are cast in the contracted form of the third figure syllogism in Aristotle's
Syllogistic (the middle term is the subject of the premises or 'that of which both the predications are made' – Prior Analytics I.vi.28a10, p. 225). This contracted form is similar to the enthymematic maxim in which the reason of what is said is apparent
(Rhetoric, II.xxi, 1394b6, p. 283) although it is evidently not universal (it uses the particular quantifier 'some').22 Fraunce's contracted syllogism has an aesthetic point in view: the clearness of reason and judgment is content with a more contracted kind of argumentation (104). However, the third form, as appealing to judgment, accentuates the fundamental function of the enthymeme for every syllogism: the necessity of supplementing a missing element for the syllogistic judgment to take effect. All syllogisms are in this sense enthymematic.
There is yet another side to the enthymematic procedure or the subjection of a proposition to syllogistic judgment: this is how Fraunce in effect extracts the enthymeme from Spenser's text. The status of a verse as enthymeme or rhetorical proof is not evident. A helpful directive to this end is Aristotle's injunction that a third term should be recognized. In Congreve's play a third term suggests itself through its repetition in the argumentation. However, Fraunce's handling of Spenser's verse indicates that the enthymeme is both the key to the syllogistic process and its end result. Hence, a verse is considered an enthymeme only retrospectively, after it was arranged and judged syllogistically.
22 Fraunce's example is 'Some confidence is virtue, as constancie: Some confidence is not virtue, as Rashness' (constancy is confidence and rashness is confidence, the minor, are implied) (104).
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B. Logic and Grammar in Freud's Work
Fraunce's treatise on logic is anticipatory of psychoanalytic thought in its treatment of the pastoral on the one hand and of the syllogism on the other. As indicated in the section above, it is a treatise that lodges logic in the pastoral, whose archaic form is co-located with the archaic forms of the libido, or the source of the Triebe, by Lacan in his seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (89, 93-94). A consideration of logic through the pastoral is nevertheless of further significance for a conception of the drive apart from instinct. Thus Lacan also refers to the pastoral as the domain that prefaces his consideration of sublimation, a mode of satisfaction of the drive, in terms of das Ding, in terms of what indicates the true nature of the Trieb as not simply instinct (111). Indeed, even the archaic forms of the libido, the source of the drive, are a limit point rather than a revelation of harmony between one's body and the world
(93). In other words, Fraunce anticipates Lacan not just by connecting the pastoral with the drive but also in the sense that the pastoral does not suggest to him a return to nature. For Lacan the domain of the pastoral posits what resists being absorbed into this domain. Natural amelioration is bound to be disrupted by the paradoxical character of moral conscience, or the drive persisting behind it. Fraunce, concerned with logic rather than with ethics, co-locates the pastoral with the drive through logic.
With respect to the syllogism Fraunce's treatise is anticipatory of psychoanalytic thought precisely in the relation of the syllogism to the enthymeme.
The syllogism, as unraveled through the enthymematic procedure, is endemic to thinking as conceived by Freud in his early writings. Thinking is a circuitous path from the memory of a satisfaction to an identical cathexis of the same memory.23 In
Freud's Project the circuitous path of thinking draws on the syllogistic mechanism of completing a missing term. Judgment, on the other hand, is grammatically attuned to
23 This is how Freud describes thinking in The Interpretation of Dreams (SE 5, 602).
54 the cognition of the wished-for object of satisfaction as real by the dissection of the thing from its cathected predicates. The relation of unconscious thinking to the syllogism and of judgment to grammar in Freud's work is the focus of the following discussion.
The unconscious activity of reproductive remembering is initially based on the law of association by simultaneity, Freud explains. This is a hallucinatory mode of primary thinking which results from the experience of satisfaction or the removal of endogenous stimulus by a helpful person (318-319). However, for discharge to occur, a wishful attraction towards a wished-for object relies on indications of its reality. The unconscious is not in a position to make a distinction between the idea of an object and a perception of it since it can only work on the basis of analogous states. A distinction between a perception coming from outside and memory is made possible by the inhibitory ego (322, 325-326).
A non-hallucinatory mode of remembering reproduces the wishful state through an intermediate motor image. This kind of reproduction is evoked by dissimilarity or a partial coincidence between a complex of perceptual cathexes and a wishful cathexis of a memory. The ego inhibits discharge unless an identity is established between the wished-for state and the perception that is similar to this state.
Freud's description of thought activity beginning from the non-coincidence of perception and memory is suggestively syllogistic: a component portion of the perceptual complex (neuron a) remains constant and coincides in both the wishful memory (neuron b), and in the unwanted perceptual image (neuron c) (327-329).
The wishful memory, neuron b, escapes perception and is only accessible by an associative process following from the perceptual component similar to it, neuron c: 'The aim is to go back to the missing neuron and to release the sensation of identity
– that is, the moment at which only neuron b is cathected, at which the traveling
55 cathexis debouches into neuron b', Freud says. As a rule, an access into the missing neuron b is found by means of a motor image interpolated between neuron c and neuron b (327-329, and compare 378).
Thought activity of the ego follows the connections of the perceptual image in search of a missing mnemic image of a thing whose coincidence in the two cathexes, if conceived syllogistically, indicates its function of a middle term that is absent from the conclusion. Neuron a is the constant perceptual component which judgment sets apart as the 'thing'. However, the movement of thought is in search of the wishful idea of the memory, the neuron b. Neuron a in its function as 'thing' is an absence that does not enter the activity of thought and that the syllogistic procedure would reactivate in the middle term. The notion of a missing neuron b suggests another mechanism, the mechanism of supplementing a predicate or of completing a predication. The constant component is not what thought seeks. Rather, thought seeks to revive a mnemic image that predicates something of the object of satisfaction through a perception that falls short of attaining primal satisfaction.
Judgment, like thinking, is a mechanism of the ego. Judging is a means for the cognition of an object that may be of practical importance. Originally, Freud says, judging is an 'associative process between cathexes coming from outside and arising from one's body – an identification of information or cathexes from perception and from within'. At the same time judging represents a method by which perceptual cathexes can be transmitted and discharged (334). In the Project Freud defines the ego as an apparatus that is exemplary for judgment in the sense that the ego consists in the totality of unconscious cathexes in which, at a given time, a permanent component, a group of neurons which is constantly cathected, is distinguished from a changing one
(323, 369, 383). A sort of a judging apparatus, the ego resembles the syntactic kernel of the constant 'thing' and the thing's changing predicates.
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Like thinking, judgment is concerned with establishing the situation of satisfaction (332). However, its method of proceeding from the perceptual state given in reality to the wished-for state is that of syntactical dissection rather than that of a syllogistic supplementation of a missing term. To safeguard satisfaction where indications of reality confirm only a part of the whole perceptual complex, judgment completes similarity into identity by dissecting the complex into a component portion that remains the same (neuron a) and a component portion that varies (neuron b).
'Language will call neuron a the thing and neuron b its activity or attribute – in short, its predicate' (328).
The basis of judging is the presence of bodily experiences, sensations and motor images of one's own: 'the ego forms judgment through a discovery in its organization that perceptual cathexes coincide in part with information from one's own body'. Without the latter, the perceptual complex remains un-understood (333,
383). Primary-imitative judging thus works by means of predicates which it supplies through motor images: 'the perception may correspond to an object nucleus + a motor image. While perceiving the perception … one innervates the motor image of one's own which is aroused towards coinciding [with the perception]' so that movement is carried out. 'Things' are residues which evade being judged. They are not assimilated into the predicative and activity proceedings of judgment (333-334).
Freud distinguishes between judging and reproductive thought by the cathexes through which they proceed: cognitive or judging thought seeks an identity with a bodily cathexis; reproductive thought seeks identity with a psychical cathexis of one's own. The aim of all thought processes is to bring about a state of identity, the conveying of a cathexis emanating from outside into a neuron cathected by the ego
(332). However, the relation between judgments and the activity of thought is discussed in terms that combine the logical mechanism of quantified inclusion and the
57 grammatical mechanism of qualified distinction. Grammatical-syntactical kernels provide thought with the means of forming quantifiable coincidences between endogenous and perceptual cathexes. Thought forms these coincidences 'in a manner which is, as it were, valid generally and without regard to the perception which is the real one at the moment' (383-384).
Judgment and thought nevertheless present two different missing elements.
Judgment isolates a constant, non-understood component in a perceptual complex which is the thing, whereas remembering or reproductive thought seeks a missing term or a wishful state that is related to the thing. Judgment recognizes a thing by its changing and hence understandable part, the attribute or movement of the thing (383).
Reproductive thought seeks a wished-for state that is a predication of the thing through partial coincidence with another term or cathexis. Seeing that the predication is missing, reproductive thought reinstates satisfaction in a process that is virtually enthymematic.
Later writings of Freud indicate that the two different functions underlying thought and judgment are perceived primarily in grammatical terms. But the basic interrelation of logic and grammar as disparate mechanisms that impinge on one another is maintained. The reproductive and attributive activity of the ego in forming judgments is discussed by Freud in "Negation" (1925). The ego judges existence by attempting to rediscover in perception (reality) something which is presented in the ego. Originally the mere existence of a presentation was enough to guarantee its reality; now thinking works to re-find in reality something that 'has once been perceived'. Existence has meaning in terms of re-finding an object, and its judgment is conditioned on objects having been lost which 'once brought real satisfaction'.
Although the real is perceived as an outside, the capacity of thinking to reproduce a representation of a perceived object remains the essential element of reality testing
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(SE 19, 237-238). Thinking thus works by the same traveling or conveyance that originally was from perception to the searched-for memory image.
Another function of judgment is to affirm or disaffirm a thing by its attribute.
The attributive function of judgment concerns what the ego wants to take in and what it prefers to expel. What is alien to the ego and what is external to it are identical,
Freud says. This is where intellectual judgment and repression coincide. 'A negative judgment is the intellectual substitute for repression; its 'no' is the hall-mark of repression', Freud says with respect to negating something in a judgment (236).
Judgment of existence is predicated on a primal loss, whereas negative judgment which expels something into repression is predicated on the symbol of negation, at the same time that the negative enables 'taking cognizance of what is repressed' (235).
With the 'no' of negative judgment the grammatical function of judgment as dissecting proceeds into repression. Thinking in its turn retraces in reality a memory of satisfaction and is made capable of cognizing the repressed by means of negation.
Thinking and judgment interlace through negation, since it is only with the ability of thinking to negate that the function of judgment is made possible. But through negation thinking and judgment as subservient to desire intersect with the drive.
Negation concerns the 'origin of the intellectual function from the interplay of the primary instinctual impulses' (239). The polarity of judgment corresponds to the two classes of drives, Eros and the death drive. Specifically, negation, 'the successor to expulsion', to the ego's original process of expelling things from itself, belongs to the instinct of destruction (239). Considered in this light, intellectual judgment, to the extent that it is negative and is substitutive for repression, also means a de-fusion of drives that has taken place through a withdrawal of the libidinal components.
The notion of expulsion suggests the ego's mechanisms of deflecting the death drive and projecting into the external world a part of itself that is hostile ("Instincts
59 and their Vicissitudes", SE 14, 136, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle", SE 18, 54).
Thinking is endowed with a first measure of freedom from the consequences of repression by means of negation, yet what it expels as real tallies with the drive defused from its libidinal components. In terms of Freud's theory of the two classes of drives, de-fusion indicates sadism made independent as a perversion ("Ego and the
Id", SE 19, 41).
What is expelled is thus twofold: 'recognition of the unconscious on the part of the ego is expressed in the negative formula' Freud says ("Negation", SE 19, 239).
Lacan in his first seminar places this mode of recognition on the part of the ego within the non-symbolized real. Something not recognized irrupts into consciousness in the form of the seen (58-59). However, what is expelled into the real outside is not only the unrecognized. Something strives to manifest itself in it, in the form of inversion.
Freud's "Negation" suggests that this is the drive. Negation thus paves the way for connecting thinking with perversion.
In its double mechanism of attribution and assertion of reality, judgment is engaged with the drive. Freud's original conception of the ego in the Project as a core of neurons cathected from within and the actions or attributes related to this core is to this effect. Through negation the dimension of the drive in judgment is elaborated and accentuated. The negative is a grammatical structure that enables a manifestation of what is expelled by the ego. In a similar way negation also points to thought and judgment as working by omission. Omission is indicated through the attributions of judgment and predications of reproductive perception.
A mode of omission or expulsion suggests itself in one species of thought activity that disregards the reality principle: the phantasm. Phantasy is the weak point in our psychical organization and is connected to 'the delay in educating the sexual drives to pay regard to reality', Freud says in "Two Principles of Mental Functioning".
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Phantasy takes advantage of the experimental kind of acting which thinking enables precisely to attain discharge rather than postpone it (SE 12, 221-223). Negation marks for Lacan an essential aspect of the phantasm in its relation to being or the drive. The exclusion of ideas from cathexis in repression and the externalization of the real, the ego's modes of mis(re)cognizing its inside for its outside, may be perceived both logically and grammatically in terms of a component that is negated. In the masochistic phantasm negation is marked by a particular syntax which embodies the subordination of phantasm to the (beyond of) the pleasure principle alone.
Freud's and Lacan's concept of the phantasm involves a precise formulation of the way thought splits between logic and grammar when seeking to establish the situation of satisfaction by means of negation. 'A child is being beaten', the statement of Freud's patients in his study of the masochistic phantasm, indicates logic and grammar through the indeterminacy of agency the passive structure creates. As Lacan perceives it in Seminar XIV, in phantasm the I is holed. The phantasm constitutes a perfectly articulated affair where non-existence at the level of the unconscious is marked and given sense as non-reference by the "it speaks" (ça parle) of the Id. It is an articulation of thinking that is linked to being as what is lost in it. The being of the
I is rather affirmed in the form of a refusal. The ego, which is only a thinking-judging apparatus devoid of being, gains its substance precisely from this 'emptying' of being
(11.1.67, pp. 5-6, 11-12).
Lacan distinguishes the Ding, the unsayable thing, from the holed reference which the I makes in phantasm: 'The I … is inverted, is alienated… in something which is pense-choses' (thing-presentation) (11.1.67, p. 11). However, to the extent that the syllogistic movement of reproductive thought seeks to attain a missing image of an object of satisfaction, and to the extent that the immediate aim of reality-testing is 'not to find an object in real perception which corresponds to the one presented, but
61 to re-find such an object' ("Negation", SE 19, 237), non-existence is affirmed not in the Ding, but in the process das Ding sets in motion as satisfaction by way of approximation. Thinking constitutes being as an experimental kind of acting for the securing of satisfaction ("Two Principles", SE 12, 221). Hence, being may be situated in the logic of thinking constructed by Freud as what satisfaction means in terms of the approximation of a third term, the Ding, rather than in the unattainable lost object.
In logical terms, negation enables a form of expulsion/affirmation of being such as the enthymematic proceedings of thought create in approximation of satisfaction. However, while syllogistic reproductive thought and negation functioning in reality judgment concern the capacity of thinking to reproduce representations of a lost object of satisfaction, the grammatical formulation of expulsion in the phantasm relates specifically to agency, to the substantive-subjective category of the sentence and the agent of the phantasy this category effaces. The
Ding, which Lacan calls the beyond-of-the-signified (SVII, 54), may not be the same as a non-reference, yet the substantive-subjective category reinstates the neuron a in a different manner from the middle term inasmuch as the substantive is a form which institutes referentiality. In Fainall's enthymematic statement 'the coldness of a losing gamester lessens the pleasure of the winner', much like in the phantasmatic statement
'a child is being beaten' agency is obscured, enabling a psychical dislodging that supports the indeterminacy of the subject of the action. As Lacan says about 'a child is being beaten', 'it is only in the world of language that the subject of the action gives rise to the question of who supports it, namely, for whom does he act' (SXIV, 18.1.67, p. 7). In the phantasmatic articulation the substantive-subjective category is made ambiguous by the passive structure, which is what enables Freud to establish agency as (un)certain where the subject of the phantasm and the beaten child coincide ('A
Child Is Being Beaten', SE 17, 185). In a similar way, the enthymeme in Congreve's
62 play stages the question about agency raised by the phantasmatic statement, of who is acting and for whom. The Ding here becomes the a of being if the syllogistic function of the neuron a is perceived grammatically.
Lacan's theorization of the phantasm dismisses a distinction between the logical and the grammatical. He refrains from specifying agency through a grammatical analysis. If being is detected by Lacan it is detected negatively, and therefore the grammatical structure has to be understood as a structure whose function is not to locate being but to point out its locale as not given to any such specificity as provided by a grammatical analysis. However, in so far as thinking and being form a unique interchangeability in Freud's theorization of thought activity, for instance in the Project, the logical and the grammatical resume their traditional distinctiveness as two levels of one and the same mechanism. The syllogistic setting of a neuron a is a mode of forming an absence that re-emerges syntactically as an effaced category of agency.
The enthymematic proceeding of thought nevertheless forms a lack that cannot be conceived in referential terms. It is lack as such, similar to the one established by
Fraunce through the enthymematic loop around the topos. Yet in Aristotle's syllogism the middle term can be either the subject or predicate of a proposition. This point calls forth the persistent tension between the grammar of the syllogism, the relation of predicate to subject, and its metaphysics of class inclusion and the introduction of the generic nature by the specific (Ross, 27-28). Even if in the first figure of the syllogism the middle term coincides with the predicate, we will see that such formation can establish agency where it is precisely made obscure syntactically, as in 'the coldness of a losing gamester lessens the pleasure of the winner'. Class inclusion and the introduction of the generic by the specific works in the case of the enthymeme in
Congreve's play to make 'coldness' introduce, in the form of omission, excluded
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'pleasure' or 'displeasure', whereas a 'cold' agent is established so as to introduce another subject of the action, again in the form of omission, the producer of the statement for whom this 'cold' agent acts. One lack thus re-remerges as another: the lack constituted by the syllogism reemerges as a lack constituted grammatically in terms of a defused agency so that the one suffering and the one 'willing' or 'enjoying' this suffering coincide in one and the same passive-active agent.
The omission of a term and an effaced substantive appear to be the manner in which thinking and judgment intersect with the drive. Freud seems to indicate this with regard to the original judging ego as well as the ego under the sway of castration.
As I will show later on, enthymematic statements in The Way of the World are anticipatory of this perception of the relation of grammar and logic to the drive in
Congreve's tendency to postpose the syntactical subject, hence causing grammar to interfere with the quantitative function of the syllogism. But more needs to be said about Freud's remarkable contribution to the conception of rhetoric as an art, that is as reducible to a system by means of which the rhetorician obtains success, and precisely in relation to Witz, before a full appreciation of the enthymeme, in light of Congreve's reservations about wit, can be attained. The joke is a formation of the unconscious where thinking and the drive interact, but in a manner that combines logic with rhetoric. The joke then will be considered next.
C. Rhetoric in Freud's Work – The Joke and the Es of Grammar
My point of departure for a consideration of the function of technique, or the joke work, as a key to a reformulation of rhetoric by psychoanalysis is Lacan's perception of the Id as structured in the dream. In his seminar on the phantasm Lacan says that
Freud has contributed something new to the relation of thinking and being, a contribution that has its bearings in the pathological subject. The subject suffers from
64 thinking, and hence represses it. The fragmented and fragmenting nature of thinking is evidenced in the ego, which is absolutely dispersed in the set of signifiers that constitute the dream. A 'thinking that is not I' emerges in the translation of the dream- content to the tongue of the dream-thought by means of the dream-work. In the dream fragmented thinking which assumes a 'not I' is nevertheless purely logical, and in
Lacan's sense, indistinguishable from the grammatical. Lacan insists on the function of language in the dream as the source of this thinking that exists as it is not I who think (18.1.67, pp. 7-8). Can this 'not I' that the unconscious structured like a language produces as the fallen part of alienation, the grammatical structure that Lacan designates the Es, the Id (18.1.67, p. 6) also be detected in another formation of the unconscious – the joke?
The joke is not the same as the dream. It is an aesthetic form and is perceived as such by Freud. Unlike any other formation of the unconscious, the joke, or Witz, is a rhetorical form that had already been treated by Cicero (who sees wit as related to an art even if it cannot be taught) (De Oratore, II.liv.217, p. 357, Vol. III) and
Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria, Book VI, Vol. II). But as a form of aesthetic enjoyment, the joke marks for Freud something other than 'an aesthetic idea' whose contemplation generates enjoyment 'which has its aim only in itself'. The aesthetics of jokes consists in deriving pleasure from mental processes, 'from the mere activity of our mental apparatus' (Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, SE 8, 95-96, 179).
This is a shift in the perception of aesthetic enjoyment from pure ideation to mental activity subserving the satisfaction of 'our major vital needs' (95). It alerts us to what in the joke is constitutionally 'active' rather than ideational. The constitution of the Es of the joke begins in the fundamental distinction between aesthetic ideation and its governing activity towards satisfaction.
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Jokes are active in the measure that their essence depends on the techniques of jokes (130). Freud studies the joke through a formal investigation of these techniques.
Two aspects of this investigation concern the question of style in Congreve's play.
One aspect is the notion of the 'joke-work' or 'technique', and its relation to the unconscious and the satisfaction of the drive. The other is Freud's distinction between the verbal and the conceptual joke. The conceptual joke is a category that revisits logic as 'a shifting of the psychical emphasis' (50). And as we will see, the conceptual joke, even more than the verbal one, underlines the implication of technique for
'playing with thoughts'.
Freud's investigation of the mechanisms of jokes begins with the distinction between thought and expression, postulating that the character of being a joke can reside in both. The joke thus consists in a 'joking envelope' and the 'substance of the thought' (16, 92). In certain jokes, a translation of the thought into different words hampers the thought's joking character. This leads Freud to conclude that 'a joke is not anything that resides in the thought' but 'in the form', in the 'verbal or expressive technique' of the joke (17). The focus on 'technique', which is Freud's initial step in his study of the joke as an 'organic whole', begins with the 'wording' of the joke, for which the term 'verbal technique' stands (14, 17).
A different type of joke technique involves the conceptual joke, where the joke is independent of verbal expression, depending 'not on words but on the train of thought' (52). Such jokes, whose structure comprises faulty thinking, displacements, absurdity, representation by the opposite (88, 124), are jokes relating to thinking. Yet
Freud subsumes them under the formal notion of 'technical methods' or 'technique'.24
24 Put otherwise, Freud categorizes conceptual jokes as formal, a categorization that merits a comparison with Cicero's De Oratore. Cicero includes the category of the laughable as understatement- overstatement in 'wittiness of matter', types of pleasantry 'dependent upon facts' and 'includ[ing] narrative' (II.lxvi.264, 267, Vol. III, pp. 397, 401). Freud includes overstatement in 'representation by the opposite', of the type of saying the opposite of what one thinks (71-73). The categorization of
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With the formal subsuming the conceptual, what is considered the substance of thought coincides with figures of thought such as 'opposite' (possibly Freud's unique version of the figure of 'contraries' [Crane, 91]), and a psychical side–tracking which is a shifting of the emphasis coincides with fallacy, or faulty reasoning (50-51, 63).
In Freud's conception of the joke as an 'organic whole' the joke is a 'psychical process' by virtue of the 'joke-work'. Jokes' relation to the unconscious consists in the verbal and conceptual methods (primarily condensation and displacement) without which 'the joke invariably disappears' (14, 42, 54, 88). Freud thus distinguishes between the characteristics of the joke as a manifest content, and an underlying technique or the joke-work that marks a revision of the joke-thought by the unconscious (167-168). Technique as the founding element of the psychical status of the joke is a psychical mechanism, analyzable yet safeguarding the joke's resistance to reduction (52-53). It is as a mechanism of encryption that technique's relation to pleasure is established. The activity towards pleasure and instinctual satisfaction takes its form in the rhetorical mechanisms of the unconscious (130).
Jokes are governed by the pleasure principle in their regulatory effect on psychical expenditure and psychical relief (120, 124, 127, 169). They draw on the tendency to economy, utilizing such mechanisms as condensation for their brevity and pleasurable effect. The techniques of the conceptual joke disregard the conditions of critical judgment for making sense. They are counter-logical and hence ought to produce un-pleasurable defensive feelings as does any inefficient intellectual functioning (125). However, it is precisely the absurdity-techniques of jokes that accentuate 'pleasure in nonsense' by whose means jokes are made 'psychical relief'.
overstatement as 'conceptual' is Freud's; his terminology is significantly different from Cicero's when it comes to 'wit of matter' as opposed to 'wit of form'. Freud's categorization underscores the joke's technical method, not content or sense. And see for that matter Freud's distinction between abstract/tendentious and verbal/conceptual jokes; the latter classification is clearly formal and therefore can be utilized by either of the former (91).
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They yield pleasure through an economy in psychical expenditure or a relief from the compulsion of criticism (127). Freud indicates that objections raised by critical reason are in effect a major inhibitory force that plays a part in the formation of jokes (171).
The revision of a preconscious thought by the unconscious, the hidden part in the formation of a joke, serves the purpose of 'renewing the original yield of pleasure' from the nonsensical play with words of early childhood, in defiance of critical reason
(165-166, 169, 178).
The pleasurable effect of nonsense is assigned to the play with words that condensations point at as unconscious thinking. Condensations perhaps more clearly turn a preconscious thought into a thin(g)king that is not-I. And yet nonsense which is inherent to the activity of the mental apparatus and what renders it pleasurable is constitutive of the conceptual joke. At the same time Freud indicates that pleasure in nonsense does not exhaust the purpose of jokes. There is another end in view which concerns the satisfaction of the drive. This is also where the category of the tendentious joke comes into play, an independent category which pertains to both verbal and conceptual jokes (91).
Tendentious jokes enable the satisfaction of lustful and or hostile drives in the face of an obstacle that stands in their way (101). The relationship between this mode of satisfaction of the drive and the pleasure in nonsense which is one of the joke- work's motives is not clear and simple. Freud points out with respect to tendentious jokes that had the pleasure they yield been only drawn from the sources of play upon words and of liberated nonsense, it might not be strong enough to be the kind of pleasure these jokes produce by the lifting of deeply-rooted inhibitions and repressions (134-135).
In a footnote Freud explains that the twofold root of the pleasure in jokes, playing with words and playing with thoughts, 'which corresponds to the very
68 important distinction between verbal and conceptual jokes', hinders a general statement about jokes. This is because playing with thoughts and playing with words cannot have their motive in the same kind of pleasure. Playing with thoughts meets with intense suppression and can only yield pleasure in the lifting of an inhibition.
Freud thus indicates that the conceptual joke as tendentious combines two sources of pleasure: the original pleasure in play and liberation of nonsense which the unconscious revision restores, and the pleasure in the lifting of inhibitions which the preliminary pleasure in nonsense supports (138). In this way playing with thoughts brings together nonsense and the satisfaction of the drive.
The various techniques of verbal and conceptual jokes are not enough to explain the nature of the joke, says Freud (61, 65-66). Yet technique, what is indicative of the relation of jokes to the unconscious, points beyond this relation by means of nonsense. Absurdity techniques mark the relation of the joke to the drive.
From the jest, through the innocent joke, to the strongly purposive joke, the yield of verbal pleasure is the decisive point that marks the relation of jokes to the unconscious. In this sense every joke is also tendentious (177). And yet absurdity techniques underlying conceptual relations and connections of thoughts profess the
'total impression of enjoyment' a joke makes on us, bribing our powers of criticism so that we are unable to decide at once what share of the pleasure arises from its joking form and what share from its apt thought content (132). In jokes where the kernel of thought is more valuable than the joking envelope it is impossible to separate the share taken by thought content from the share taken by the joke-work (94). The nonsense that persists in the conceptual/tendentious joke, obtrusively intensifying its effect, fulfils the double sidedness of the joke as 'sense in nonsense' by bewildering us
(138). Technique hence underwrites the relation of the joke to the drive as nonsense
69 puncturing sense. Nonsense will be the manner in which technique becomes the Es of grammar in the joke that is specifically conceptual.
The joke is a unique formation of the unconscious because, as Freud stresses, it is bound by the condition of intelligibility while its sense is merely a protective facade against criticism (SE 8, 131, 179). Intelligibility and meaning do not overlap.
The distinction between them relates to the displacement of the pleasure in nonsense to its formal manifestation in the joke technique itself. The joke technique is what safeguards pleasure from the scrutiny of criticism through the facade of sense. The conceptual-tendentious joke manifests this crucial conception of technique by means of logic. Logic and technique combine to formulate rhetoric in terms of sense holed or abused by nonsense. The rhetorical dimension of the joke rests on technique as superfluous to sense yet indispensable for the joke's intelligibility. By the same token, the pleasurable effect of the joke is constituted by its technique as much as by its
(non)signifying effect. The subject is present not only in the perplexing effect of technique, but in the technique as such.
Absurdity techniques point to the opacity of the joke-work, marking the relation of the joke to perversion as fore-pleasure. The tendentious joke releases incomparably greater pleasure by assisting another possibility of pleasure which is obstructed by critical judgment (137). Technique, viewed through Freud's conception of the Witz, adds another aspect to the ideal of decorum, the baffling of critical judgment in the producer of the joke as well as in the third person it is addressed to.
Technique affords pleasure through the lifting of inhibition by first subverting the effect of Oedipal interdiction on senseless wording and nonsensical thinking (138).
Much like the grammar of phantasm, the conceptual/tendentious joke is psycho- rhetorically related to perversion as a 'scar' of the Oedipus complex, with the difference that it introduces the pleasure gained through nonsense. On the basis of the
71 study of the technique of jokes, Freud suggests to us that playing with thoughts is where the joke is related to the drive because this is where a 'thinking that is not I' reveals itself as technique itself.
Technique expands the idea of structure to cover more than grammar as the logic of language. Technique allows us to seek the affirmation of the being which one cannot think not in the interrupted consistency of the signifying chain but in the inconsistencies the rhetorical points to as the construction of logic and grammar. More importantly, Freud's perception of rhetorical technique in terms of the original sources of verbal pleasure, the pleasure in nonsense, with a view to fighting reason and critical judgment (not without nonsense being used to represent judgment contained in the thought), is not inimical to Congreve's defiance of true wit through 'commonplace of comparisons', for example, and Dryden's search for the ultimate wording in the model of Virgil. In Freud as in the late seventeenth century poets, wit seems to reach beyond decorum to elocution as such, with its inevitable way of subverting propriety while striving for the properly poetic. With Freud this subversive nature of the rhetorical becomes 'a psychical factor', at the service of the drive (133). It is again only against this backdrop of what serves wit in counter-indication of its Hobbesian preliminaries that the function of the enthymeme in Congreve's comedy comes into play.25
25 References to Freud's Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious have been made by both Fujimura and Traugott (63-64, 396, respectively), in an attempt to explain the comedy of wit and how it affects us. However, both critics fail to observe Freud's insistence on the difference between Witz and the comic, and both relate mostly to the purpose of the joke rather than its genesis (indeed regarding the purpose of the joke, Freud connects the joke with sophisticated society: 'only when we rise to a society of a more refined education do the formal conditions for jokes play a part'- SE 8, 100). Fujimura, while seeking in Freud's Witz the model for the 'vicarious satisfaction through wit' for 'such primitive tendencies as sex and hostility', effected by the wit comedy (64), much like Traugott, turns the joke into a satirical tool of comedy, enabling the expression of morally inadmissible content. It may be more profitable to turn to Freud's Jokes for a structural perception of the problem or the failings of wit rather than for an explanation of the subject matter of wit in comedy.
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D. Logic and the Psyche – Lacan's Es of Grammar and Logic
The relation of rhetorical forms of logic to a theorization of psychical phenomena in terms of logic is not self-evident. Formal logic has been applied to psychical operations by both Freud and Lacan, not simply to indicate an affinity between logic and the psyche. Nor was it merely for broaching the question whether the unconscious is immanently logical or logic immanently psychical. Freud, Lacan points out in his fourteenth seminar, insisted on veering the psychoanalytic project from the 'tide of mud' of occultism, from conceiving of language as a means of reaching out to the beyond of the unthinkable reality of sex (18.1.67, pp. 11-12). In the Project for a
Scientific Psychology, Aristotelian logic provides Freud with the structural models for psychical operations, indicating the ontic status of logic in the workings the psyche. In
Lacanian thinking this consubstantiality of logic and the psyche has radical significance for the conception of subjectivity. Lacan approaches the unconscious through logic, but logic as the matter of language (12.4.67, p. 4, 24.4.67, p. 2).
Lacan is even more meticulously concerned with extracting the phantasm from the domain of the imaginary. Taking up the enigmatic statement of Freud's patients,
'A child is being beaten', where the subject's regressive and loving subjection to the act of beating is rejected from unconscious thought, Lacan turns to modern formal logic for the purpose of scaffolding being as the negated agency of the phantasm. Modern logic, he explains, has purified logical problems of the intuitive element retained in
Aristotle's logic, with the result that 'it allows us to pose the problem of logic quite differently… in reaching what in it, as such, is pure structure. Which means: structure: effect of language' (SXIV, 11.1.67, p. 9, 14.12.66, p. 9).26
26 The French transcript is different from the English one. The last sentence is taken from the French – 14.12.66, p. 5.
27
Lacan thus proposes a leap from modern logic to structure as the effect of language, bearing in mind that the object of logic is bound by the formal conditions of discourse (21.6.67, p. 3). A transposition of a purely logical maneuver into the structure as effect of language emerges in Lacan's model of the status of the phantasm.
Lacan's theorization of the phantasm commences with one of de Morgan's laws of transformation, the negation of transformed conjunction. This enables Lacan to form an empty set at the intersection of the two sets constituting a negated cogito, a cogito of an I am not thinking where being is at stake (11.1.67, pp. 8, 3, 14.12.66, p. 15). The empty set forms a double refusal (of both thinking and being) which collapses the forced alienating choice of thinking at the expense of being. By formally modeling the phantasm on the empty set at the intersection of the two sets of I am not thinking and I am not, Lacan captures the function of negation in the stating subject of phantasm, the not being the I of his I am not thinking (21.12.66, pp. 3-5, 11.1.67, pp. 3, 8, 12).27
This formal modeling designates for Lacan a fine distinction between the unconscious and the Id, which enables him to position with exactitude Freud's modification of the cogito of Descartes. The Id is made a correlate of the I am not thinking in so far as Das Denken in Freud's double principle of the psychic event (SE
12, 225) is nothing other, Lacan says, than 'a trial formula, the path along which we have to find satisfaction for what presses us and stimulates us, by some motor procedure to be traced in the real' (11.1.67, pp. 3, 8). Where the Id is concerned, thinking and not thinking are interchangeable. The 'not thinking' is what the Id is with respect to the unconscious to which 'everything is allowed… except to articulate
"therefore I am"'. In the reality of the unconscious being is denied and therefore can only be recognized in the 'not thinking' of the Id (21.12.66, pp. 3-4).
27 Put crudely, the I is doubly negated: not I that thinks, not I that is thought of.
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The logical modeling of the phantasm on de Morgan's law undergoes transposition into structure as the effect of language at the level of the Id. The Id, the I am not thinking in relation to the I am not of the unconscious, is manifested in the grammatical structure in which the phantasm is constituted. In Lacan's conception of the phantasm, 'A child is being beaten' is a closed grammatical structure which is
'nothing other than the essence of the Id'. It is a structure which negatively positivizes in everything that is not I the I as such, excluded from the phantasm (11.1.67, p. 10).
Lacan's matheme of the phantasm couples the object a with the barred subject. The logical constitution of the small a in conjunction with being, upon whose instauration with respect to the cogito Lacan is bent in the seminar, consists in the two operations of union and intersection. Union and intersection mark the ambiguous position of the small a as belonging to the body yet placed in the Other.
The small a marks a point of union, or the liaison of the subject to the Other of language, the treasury of signifiers. But it is also a point of incommensurability of the subject with the One of the sexual union and the body as the locus of jouissance. The a is a remainder which in the truth about sex forms a locus of jouissance outside the body, outside the sexual act (16.11.66, p. 7, 14.6.67, pp. 7-8). The a is a remainder whose intersectional position is also suggested in the One-too-many of the signified effect which makes it impossible for the signifier to signify itself (unless in the repetitive nature of the act).
How is the logical double operation of the a conceived in terms of structure as the effect of language? Lacan seems to imply that in the formula of the phantasm the a is isomorphic with grammatical structure itself. It is intimately linked with structure as such. The a emerges where signification fails. The a is thus coeval with the Es of grammar (or grammar as 'It') which Lacan associates with the empty (albeit boiling)
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'cauldron of sexuality'. 'It' marks the wasteland of signification where the sexual relation is concerned. This makes grammar the irreducible structure outside signification with the a as its core object. Language does not dominate what is involved in sexual reality, which is the reality of the phantasm as Freud shows it to be.
Freud's analysis of this reality, Lacan says, points to the double alienation of language with respect to sexual Bedeutung. The first is an alienation consisting in the impossibility of assimilating into thinking the subject's subjection to the drive. This is an impossibility of being which is subsumed in an I am not thinking. The second alienation concerns the attempt to interpret unconscious thought. The same radical inadequacy of thinking to the reality of sex persists in this attempt since interpretive thinking is predicated on signifiers that come from the Other. At this point, where language by its very status is 'antipathetic' to sexual reality, the agency of castration, what severs signification from the sexual, is rediscovered as pure structure, as logical, in the object a.
What the function of castration means in the logical, theoretical status of the subject of scoptophilic and sado-masochistic drives is that the unthinkable of the sexual reality of the drives can only be approached by grammatical structures (18.1.67, pp.11-12, 24.4.67, pp. 9-10). Language does not provide signifiers for sexual reality
(an attempt to think otherwise means the same occultism Freud was wary of).
Language only provides the grammatical structures which by virtue of the hole they cut in signification are as close as we can get to the drive itself.
The phantasm consists in the coupling of an I am not thinking with a grammatical structure, the signifying articulation 'A child is being beaten'. The statement leaps to the eye as a closed semantic unit in which the I is constituted only in its negativity. The unconscious Bedeutung qua not being is the closed sense which
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'escapes' and is hence a 'truth sense'. For Lacan this truth sense has the status of the excluded third of the Aristotelian law of bivalence (not falling under the 'either true or false' bivalence of propositions). The unconscious Bedeutung constitutes a moment of comprehension in the subject itself, a comprehension whose truth lies in its resistance to hermeneutic interpretation.
The a object is also what in the structure holds together the split subject as on- looker and the beaten child. It is an indeterminate position which the signifying arrangement produces so as to close the gap between the subject of the phantasm and the object of his satisfaction (the beaten child). Over the signifying articulation, Lacan says, there wanders what is 'impossible to eliminate, which is called the gaze'. This gaze holds together the on-looking subject of the phantasm with the beaten child, the stating subject with the subject of the statement. The gaze instituted by the articulation is a point of inclusion and exclusion of the subject. Put otherwise, the phantasm is a signifying arrangement that produces a split subject supplemented by the truth operation of what the articulation reveals negatively as 'I am not'. Being which is negated at the level of the unconscious is the 'complement of the purely signifying grammatical structure of the phantasm' (14.6.67, pp. 2-3, 21.6.67, pp. 4, 13). The phantasmatic structure holds together the split subject of the phantasm, revealing by means of its empty Bedeutung the truth of the subject's (non)-being.
Lacan's theorization of the structure of the phantasm (or its status, its state of affairs), following Freud's work, indicates the pertinence of the structure of the phantasmatic articulation to a conception of its logic: the grammatical structure is the means by which the I am not of the logical model is instituted. His theorization also alerts us to the significance of this structure as such. For Lacan, the signifying arrangement of the phantasm is important for its tight passive packaging. This is in
76 contrast to Freud whose main concern is the unpacking of the grammatical unit as a key to the subjective agency of its verbal kernel. Freud thus focuses on the grammatical category that emerges as holed, as unknown, the substantive category of the doer and the receiver ('A Child Is Being Beaten', SE 17, 181, 184-185). For Lacan it is as closed that the structure lends itself to being conceptualized in terms of the Es of grammar. The structure forms the I am not thinking of the Id as an 'it speaks', the
French ça, positivizing being as 'I am – that' (11.1.67, pp. 12-13). It is this arrangement that in the logician's conception gives the phantasm the place of an axiom in the order of neurotic desire. The phantasm is an axiom in the sense that for the different neurotic structures there can be reconstructed the appropriate laws of transformation that assure its presupposed role.
The axiomatic function of the phantasmatic arrangement has to do with its truth function, with its non-referential Bedeutung. An attempt to unpack the structure and unravel its referent means inserting it into the discourse of the unconscious. The middle moment, the second phase of 'A child is being beaten', the one where the subject is in the place of the beaten child, Lacan points out, is obtained only in exceptional cases. In the case of the neurotic, the axiomatic role of the phantasm is qualified by desire, seeing that desire is of the Other and hence can never be known
(21.6.67, p.14). And yet the phantasmatic arrangement articulates this unknown desire through its Bedeutung. The axiomatic status of the phantasm as truth function thus concerns perverse jouissance emerging in the I am not of its referent. The structure maintains an economy of perverse jouissance predicated on the disjunction, in the field of the Other, of the body and of jouissance. In the preserved part of the body produced as Es, jouissance can take refuge.
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In Lacan's conception of the Cartesian cogito in his seminar on the phantasm the non-being of the subject of the unconscious is approached through logic and is complemented logically by the logic of language, as opposed to its significations. The logical-theoretical status of the subject is crucial. It enables the extraction of the subject from unconscious thinking subjected to signifiers, and the rediscovery of the function of castration in sexual reality (18.1.67, p. 12). What does it take for a structure to institute the non-being of the unconscious as a logical complement, or formulate the subject's inability to locate his being in his cogito? Does Lacan's theorization of the phantasm mean that only the passive arrangement, which grammatically supports the reversal of the sado-masochistic drive so as to enable the emergence of the 'I of is beaten', is viable for the truth operation regarding being, which Lacan recognizes in the statement of Freud's patients (11.1.67, p.10)? Can it be any other grammatical packing that has something of the nature of the Es, any arrangement which would sustain the logic of phantasm by engendering a particularized being in a 'neutral' un-particularized form? Or is it no particular form at all but grammar as such that the phantasmatic articulation establishes as logic of the phantasm? Moreover, can logical structures, perceived independently of grammar, be considered the Es of the empty Bedeutung of the unconscious? Freud's treatment of the conceptual joke suggests as much about the unconscious mechanism of logical displacement. Renaissance theory of logic, specifically Ramist, suggests as much through the aesthetics of logic.
A consideration of the enthymeme in Congreve's play indicates that the rhetorical cast of logic and grammar supports the same logic of phantasm constituted by the Es of grammar. I argue that Lacan's stopping at the closed structure of the phantasm in order to avoid the sense effect of language need not foreclose the Freudian concern with technique in its variety as a means of approaching 'instinctual
78 satisfaction', or the subject's subjection to the drive. Freud's conceptualization of rhetorical techniques indicates the relation of jokes to the drive. In a similar way the study of the enthymeme seeks to explore the rhetorical dimension of the grammatical
Id. Only as rhetorical does the enthymeme function as the Es of perverse jouissance vis-à-vis the inquiry of displeasure on the level of plot.
E. The Enthymeme in Congreve's Play
So far, the discussion followed the trajectory proposed by Congreve's questioning of style in his dedication. The attempt has been to establish the status of the enthymeme as a complex form traversing logic, grammar and rhetoric, as well as the status of the enthymeme for psychoanalytic conception of unconscious thinking and the logic of the phantasm. The discussion now proceeds to the enthymeme in Congreve's play, taking after Fraunce's manner of unfolding the enthymematic structure of samples from
Spenser's pastoral. A rhetorical form of logic and grammar, the enthymeme in
Congreve's play constructs a moment of expelled being which Lacanian thought identifies as the perverse core of phantasm, the logical locale of masochistic pleasure such as is constituted by the second phase of the sadistic-masochistic phantasm of a child being beaten.
Fraunce introduces syllogistic judgment into invention, the first part of logic, through an illustration from Spenser's pastoral (sig.6-7). The syllogistic procedure performed on the Spenserian verse concerns the treatment of arguments (terms) and the manner of their consideration. The syllogism is posited as the ultimate ordering principle of arguments considered not severally but in relation to other arguments.
Specifically, the enthymeme functions as a starting point in the process of the syllogistic affirmation of the topos. The enthymeme is hence presented at the
79 beginning of the process: 'Paris is idle, therefore he is wanton' (19). The syllogistic treatment of Spenser's verse raises a question regarding the construction of an enthymeme out of the illustrative citation: when not provided straightforwardly by the logician, how is an enthymeme to be recognized in the literary text? Fraunce's illustration of the syllogistic disposition of arguments has something to offer in this respect.
The contingent proposition Fraunce puts forth to be confirmed syllogistically by another argument – 'Paris is no good sheepheard' – is a conclusion drawn from what in the pastoral is introduced as 'an effect and working of Paris'. Fraunce formulates a syllogistic conclusion based on the depiction of Paris's misdeed, and by so doing he turns the verse in its entirety into an enthymeme in its rhetorical function as artificial proof (sig.6, Rhetoric, I.i, 1354a4, p. 5). The verse is thus found to enmesh the Medium or the third argument, 'an Arbiter honoraris, a determiner, a reconciler', as Fraunce calls it (7), which settles the partial agreeableness of the conclusion 'Paris is no good sheepheard'. Fraunce's dispositional procedure institutes the enthymematic status of the verse retrospectively, as it were, by means of the syllogism. He thus displays the verse's enthymematic structure as a contracted and wanting form of reasoning. The syllogistic reconstruction of the verse's argument is juxtaposed with the enthymematic verse. It emphasizes the art of syllogistic disposition without subordinating the
Spenserian rhetoric to the strictness of the syllogistic form, a strictness of which
Fraunce is wary (98).
Much like Ramus's own practice in The Logike, Fraunce's treatment of
Spenser's verse does not offer a stripping bare of the verse's syllogistic backbone
(Ramus, 89-90). Fraunce's practice makes the syllogistic ordering of the rhetorical
81 proof a counterpart of the rhetorical layout.28 At the same time Fraunce provides an analysis of the verse which points to the reducibility of the enthymeme. By means of the reduction of the enthymeme the relation between the rhetorical layout of the argument and its syllogistic disposition is explored.
The first change imposed by the syllogistic formulation of Spenser's verse is the introduction of the proper name "Paris", which is absent in the verse and is given only in the eclogue's Glosse (The Works of Edmund Spenser, Vol. 7, 70, 74). The syllogistic transposition requires the reproduction of the culprit shepherd's proper name in the minor premise and in the conclusion. The major premise has to be reconstructed in the form of a universal proposition. The resulting syllogism is a 'Negant Speciall' in
Ramus's terms, or a first-figure predication of none of B (the universal celarent, or particular ferio) (Fraunce, 7, Prior Analytics, 25b40, 26a25, pp. 211, 212). Fraunce thus reproduces the implied proof constituted by the verse in a first-figure syllogism. A first-figure syllogism is the perfect syllogism, completed by means of the original assumptions, that is, requiring no additional premises or conversion (Pr. An. 26b30, p.
217, 29a15, 30, pp. 233, 235).
We follow Fraunce's procedure when we come to deal with Fainall's complaint at the opening scene of The Way of the World: 'the coldness of a losing gamester lessens the pleasure of the winner' (I.i.6-7). The maxim-like nature of the argument makes it 'enthymematic but not part of an enthymeme', the type of enthymeme highly esteemed in the Rhetoric (II.xxi, 1394b6, p. 283). An enthymematic maxim is one in which the reason of what is said is apparent. Hence, no epilogue stating the reason is necessary. Fainall's maxim contains the reason that settles, in the words of the
28 Fraunce's treatment of Spenser's verse is hence not the same as a translation of the enthymeme into a syllogism, as he does with the denied enthymeme where the topic of invention is concerned. The denied enthymeme is an enthymeme that is confirmed by supplying a missing part, either the major or the minor, or else some prosyllogism (sig.7).
81
Rhetoric, what is 'contrary to the general opinion' (1394b4, p. 281): a losing gamester is no pleasure to the winner. The maxim provides a reason, or a middle term, in the attribute 'coldness'. A recasting of the enthymematic maxim 'the coldness of a losing gamester lessens the pleasure of the winner' in a syllogism, though for a very different end than Fraunce's use of Spenser's verse, entails similar changes.
The only way of transposing Fainall's maxim in a perfect syllogistic form which is universal necessitates the introduction of a proper name and a reconstruction of the major premise:
He that is a cold loser lessens pleasure.
Mirabell is a cold loser.
Therefore, Mirabell lessens pleasure (Barbara)29.
The syllogism thus produced does not supplant the maxim. It must be considered in relation to the maxim for the implications of the syllogistic wording to be brought out in full relief. The syllogistic wording is prescribed by Aristotle's definition of Term:
'The premise can be analyzed into the predicate and the subject, with the addition or removal of the verb to be or not to be' (Pr. An. 24b20, p. 201). In the case of the
Mirabell syllogism this prescribed wording cancels out the subjective genitive of the maxim ('the coldness of a losing gamester'), and translates it into its correlative, 'cold loser'. In terms of Aristotle's discussion of the category of relation and correlation, which concerns the relative class of terms said 'to be of other things' or the genitive dependence, the syllogistic transposition highlights a mistaken correlation in the
29 Ross points out that the Prior Analytics entirely ignores judgments about individuals, assigning discussions and inquiries mostly to species (289). However, Brennan, adducing Jevons, points out that classical logicians considered the subject terms of 'singular affirmative and singular negative propositions to be distributed like subjects of A and E propositions' (25). This makes the affirmant/negant special type of syllogism which uses a proper name more in the universal nature of Fainall's maxim than the ferio or darii which involve a particular premise (Some lovers are cold) (Pr. An. 26a25, 33a25, pp. 213, 263).
82 maxim. In the case at hand, the coldness is that of a cold loser, the coldness of a loser when considered not simply as a loser but as a cold one (Categories, 6b39-7a5, p. 51).
At the same time that the syllogism brings out the false correlation of coldness with just any loser, the relation between the syllogism's three terms – A(major)=less pleasure, B(middle)= cold, C(minor)=Mirabell (loser) – does not register what the maxim underscores as the case of the noun, the genitive as such. This means that the premises do not indicate that 'less pleasure' is predicated differently of 'cold' and of
'Mirabell', or that 'coldness' is applicable differently to the extremes (pleasure and
Mirabell). Rather, the major (less pleasure) is stated of the middle (cold) and the middle is stated of the minor (Mirabell), so that, in Aristotle's words, 'the last [term] is wholly contained in the middle and the middle is wholly contained in the first', the extremes thus admitting of perfect syllogism (Pr. An. 25b35, p. 209). In the maxim examined, it is coldness that displeases, not Mirabell. In the syllogism it is the cold loser Mirabell who is the cause of displeasure.
In its syllogistic unfolding, 'the coldness of a losing gamester' becomes x is cold and therefore x is less pleasure. However, the genitive case is the enthymematic transposition of an attribute, a transposition that is not functional in the logical relation between the terms. Syntactically, the enthymeme transcribes the middle term in an abstract noun or a predicative substantive, and adds a category (the genitive case) that posits a faulty relative-correlative relation (Jespersen, The Philosophy of Grammar,
136, Aristotle, Categories, 6b, pp. 47-51), to the effect of diluting any substantial relation between an attribute and a particular agent. What the enthymeme thus seems to veil is the possibility of such an agency. The enthymeme positions the cause, the grammatical adjunct, in a primary position, but at the same time weakens its
83 predicative function, or its applicability to an agent, by recasting this relation in the genitive.
It should be noticed that the weakening of the predicative function is relative to the operation of the syllogism since the enthymeme creates an appearance of an imperfect predication. It puts in abeyance the possibility of 'whole containment', that is, of one term being predicated of all of another as in a universal statement (Pr. An.
24b30, p. 203). This is a predication which in the syllogism fixes an attribute to a particular agent and makes possible the relocation of this agent in a new class, the class of those who lessen pleasure. The abstract noun that gives the maxim its universal nature syntactically is not the same as the universal predication presented by the syllogism, where it is the quantitative relation between the terms which enables
'something other than what has been assumed to necessarily follow from the fact that the assumptions are such' (Pr. An. 24b20, p. 201).
In the case of Fainall's enthymematic maxim, its syllogistic unfolding shows that it is the quantitative relation (the distribution of the middle in relation to the extremes and of the extremes in relation to the middle) that guarantees specification of the agency of less pleasure. If the middle – 'cold' – is to be wholly contained in the first term – 'less pleasure' – this means that 'some losers', to which the middle only partially applies, is in effect unspecific. The universal is what produces a specific agent insofar as the singular proposition is a universal one, for, as Jevons says, 'it clearly refers to the whole subject, which in this case is a single individual thing' (Brennan, 36). Full distribution means that it is not just any loser but a particular one.
What the enthymematic maxim veils by means of the genitive, which while forming a faulty correlation between coldness and the loser, weakens the predicative function of coldness with respect to the loser, the syllogism unravels in a specific
84 agent. In this way the syllogism forms a specific object for what the enthymeme holds as coldness and less pleasure. Coldness and pleasure converge equally in this object formed by the syllogism, without registering the ambiguity the enthymeme maintains as to whether it is the particular agent or his coldness that lessens pleasure. This ambiguity gains significance from the relation of the syntax of the enthymeme to its syllogistic unraveling. Syllogistic inclusion that produces agency and specifies predication is instituted by the enthymeme disruptively, highlighting the ambiguity of its syntax. By so disrupting syllogistic containment the enthymeme becomes a subverted formulation of the professed displeasure it signifies. The gap between syntax and syllogism is the enthymeme's mode of 'negation'. This raises the question of whether the coldness clothed in a specific agent is not also what renders this agent an imaginary object of pleasure.
Is it only with respect to agency that the enthymeme undercuts its syllogistic underpinning? 'The coldness of a losing gamester' is a problematic case because it requires a singular proposition. Two other examples ought to be considered, then, the first one of which is Fainall's exclamation 'what a wretch is he who must survive his hopes' (II.i.95). This aphoristic compression of the entire argument contains an implicit reason and is supplemented by an explanatory epilogue which both precedes the exclamatory maxim and is echoed in the similitude that follows it. This is the general structure of an argumentative passage we have noticed in the play's opening argumentation. In this particular case, in addition to a universalized subject, the unspecified 'he', the middle term, by means of which the syllogism is effected, has to be recovered from the passage as a whole, in the manner prescribed by Aristotle, that is, only 'if in any argument the same term is stated more than once' (Pr. An. 46b1,
47b10, pp. 359, 367). Fainall's argument is made to resolve what is contrary to general
85 opinion: the accomplishment of a hope leaves one miserable, or in Fainall's words: 'if I should live to be rid of my wife, I should be a miserable man' (II.i.90).30
Fainall's proof begins with the introductory 'For' and condenses into the exclamatory aphorism which forms the heart of the argument. However, the argument presents an indeterminate cause (third term) since it is equally anchored in the amplifying statement which immediately follows the maxim: 'Nothing remains when that day comes, but to sit down and weep like Alexander, when he wanted other worlds to conquer' (II.i.95). Syntactically, the three statements composing the passage share a pattern of delayed or postposed subject of the sentence (Hockett, 201, 206-207): the post auxiliary position of the subject in the exclamatory 'what a wretch is he', the supplementary participial which does not share the same subject with the main clause in 'For having only that one hope, the accomplishment of it…', and the empty subject, and the extraposed one, of the 'Nothing remains but' pattern (Huddleston,
97,1191,1403, Frank, 307, 357-358).
The 'Nothing remains but' pattern of the closing statement hinges on an indeterminacy with respect to the real subject of the sentence and on a similar indeterminacy about its topic or theme. The pattern is misleading, for 'Nothing' has merely a syntactic function indexing the actual postposed topic or theme of the sentence which is 'to sit and weep' (to sit and weep is all that remains). However, the primary position of 'Nothing' and the emphatic construction it creates with 'remains'
(Bloomfield, 171), makes 'Nothing remains' the apparent topic or theme of the sentence. Moreover, the insertion of the peripheral clause 'when that day comes' between 'Nothing remains' and the non-finite subject clause (itself without expressed
30 The whole section is as follows: Fainall says to his mistress (Mrs. Marwood) about his wife: 'Excellent creature! Well sure if I should live to be rid of my wife, I should be a miserable man.' …'For having only that one hope, the accomplishment of it of consequence must put an end to all my hopes; and what a wretch is he who must survive his hopes! Nothing remains when that day comes, but to sit down and weep like Alexander, when he wanted other worlds to conquer" (II.i.90-97, my emphasis).
86 subject), loosens the modification of 'Nothing' by the 'but' of the exception pattern
(Nothing but x), allowing 'Nothing' to function as an absolute negator (Huddleston,
788). Although the exclamatory enthymematic maxim encapsulates the argument as a whole using an inversion pattern of its own, it seems only a preparatory appendage to a pattern that is even less distinctive as far as the subjective function is concerned. Here ambiguity persists in the double function of the same pattern as both exception
(Nothing remains but) and negation (Nothing remains).
This predominant shifting of the subjective constituents (Huddleston, 25), has implications for the syllogistic transposition of Fainall's proof. 'Nothing remains…but to sit and weep' is the false anchor of the proof. It makes the third term, or the cause, indeterminate by foregrounding what in effect is the cause's consequence: 'to sit and weep' is the equivalent of 'being a wretch', it belongs with the class of 'wretches'.
'Wretches' is the first or major term of the syllogism, and is consequent on the cause or the middle term, which is 'the accomplishment of one's hopes' whose equivalent in the
Alexander comparison is 'having no other worlds to conquer', both forming the class of
'having nothing'. We note that the modified 'Nothing remains' reappears implicitly in the similitude: 'Like Alexander [for whom nothing remained but to…] when he wanted other worlds to conquer'. But as an independent and unmodified unit 'Nothing remains' conflates semantically with '[no] other worlds to conquer'.
In other words, the enthymeme blurs the distinction between the major and the middle terms by anchoring the proof on the noun 'Nothing'. While not being either the major or the middle, 'Nothing' applies to both as a grammatical link: the class of
'accomplishers' [have nothing other than to be] the class of 'wretches'. At the same time, 'Nothing' as a syntactic subject imposes itself on the middle term semantically, so that the middle has to be conceived by its means:
87
Those who have nothing to conquer are wretches.
Survivors of their hopes have nothing to conquer.
Survivors of their hopes are wretches.
This forms a perfect, first-figure syllogism (A(major)=wretches, B(middle)= have nothing, C(minor)=survivors of their hopes/accomplishers).
Noticeably, the enthymeme here introduces a grammatical dimension into syllogistic predication which bears specifically on substantive and subjective constituents. In the case of the first enthymematic maxim ('the coldness'), the genitive case of the noun undercuts the containment of the minor in the middle or a full predication that entails the specification of the agent of displeasure. In the case of the exclamatory maxim ('what a wretch'), the fronting of the noun 'Nothing' as the empty subject blurs the distinction between the major and the middle. 'Nothing' functions simultaneously as modified and non-modified, so that it traverses both the major and the middle terms (accomplishers have nothing but to be wretches, accomplishers have nothing to conquer). The grammatical unit interferes with the containment of the minor term in the middle.
Grammatical interference affects the major which is a full predication that entails regularization of the relation between the generic and the specific (survivors of their hopes have to have nothing to conquer in order to be wretches, they [do not have to] have nothing but being wretches) (Ross, 27, 397-398). That is, something impedes the containment of the specific 'survivors' in the generic 'wretches', and the impediment occurs in the middle term. The major being normally wider than the middle, the grammatical middle disrupts the quantified relation between the terms. The enthymematic exclamative and its elaborated proof suggest that it is not necessity or the validity of the argument that the enthymeme underlines or casts in doubt. Rather,
88 the enthymeme underscores the relation between the terms. I wish to argue that this relation is the key to the distinction between the grammar of the enthymeme and the quantified logic of the syllogism. Here it is the middle term, rendered disruptive rather than reconciling, that gains significance (Fraunce, 7).
Aristotle instructs us to regard the middle term in a first-figure enthymeme from a sign (rather than probabilities) as an 'index'. He adds in brackets that the name
'index' is given to that which causes us to know, and the middle term is especially of this nature' (Pr. An. 70b5, p. 527). A sign in the first-figure enthymeme thus suggests something about the nature of the middle term which is not mentioned anywhere else in the Prior Analytics, namely that the sign is a limit manifestation of the middle, standing for evidence, something that gives knowledge (Ross, 498). Formally, the middle term is the term that makes deduction possible by relating predicate to subject.
In Aristotle's words: 'we shall never have any syllogism proving that one term is predicated of another unless some middle term is assumed which is related in some way by predication to each of the other two;…we must take some middle term relating to both [terms], which will link the predications together' (Pr. An. 41a5,10, p. 319).
An enthymeme is a syllogism from probabilities or signs (Pr. An. 70a10, p.
525). As a syllogism from probabilities, the enthymeme is of generally accepted premises and hence does not posit the middle as an index or evidence. And yet the middle term may be thought of as a formal determiner whose indexical function emerges retroactively and negatively. It is not itself referential but rather an indispensable constituent of deductive referentiality. The significance of the middle term is its being a constituent which is absent from the deductive conclusion at the same time that it is directly responsible for its construction.
89
In Fainall's exclamatory enthymeme and its similaic epilogue the indexicality of the middle is underwritten by the obstructive effect of the grammatical layout of the enthymeme. The syllogistic middle is hollowed by an indeterminate syntactic pattern, becoming a dislodged term that points out its ex nihilo kind of place. This is a place which is semantically supported by the noun 'Nothing', the no-place that institutes the whole deductive process. In the opening enthymeme an established agency by means of the syllogism locates (dis)pleasure in an imaginary object (the agent of displeasure).
By contrast here the locale of (dis)pleasure is not in the major term, in the class of
'wretches' where the miserable Alexander is, but in a 'Nothing' for a place. The
'Nothing' of grammar at the heart of deductive proof is the object cause as such, or the ex nihilo of the drive, indexed negatively as unknowable by the effect of the grammar of the enthymeme on the quantified syllogism. This effect takes place only when the condensed enthymematic maxim is broken up into its syllogistic and grammatical constituents.
The third example from Congreve's play to be examined here is taken from the
Proviso scene. It is more complex because it involves an extended exchange of arguments in favor and against 'solicitation' that cannot be transposed in one syllogistic arrangement and is suggestive of the structure of the dilemma.31 It is also hard to pinpoint an enthymematic maxim which encapsulates the argumentation. That is because the disputation concerns a topic which is the same as the cause or the middle term of the three syllogistic dispositions yielded by the dispute in its entirety. The enthymematic bent of the disputation is aimed at resolving what is contradictory to
31 In the form of a dilemma Mirabell and Millamant's exchange could be formulated as follows: If one is solicitous one lessens pleasure/ If one is confident one is impudent/ One must either be solicitous or confident/ Therefore either lessen pleasure or be impudent. However, that does not cover the possibility of being solicitous and pleasing, which is Millamant's standpoint (IV.i.135-150).
91 general opinion, namely, that a woman should be solicited, in Millamant's words, 'to the very last, nay, and afterwards', that is, after having consented (IV.i.135-137).
The turn the question takes foregrounds the attributes of solicitation, encapsulated in an oxymoron: the 'agreeable fatigues of solicitations' (IV.i.140).
However, the genitive construction which grants primary position to the attributes of solicitation ('agreeable', 'tedious') only partially uncovers the complex structural relation of the argumentation to its syllogistic groundwork. This relation is complicated by the manner in which the argumentation progresses and by the vicissitudes of the middle term the argumentation entails. The middle term functions as the asserted topic of the disputation ('solicitation'), but the argumentation progresses towards an enthymematic declarative which completely effaces the middle/topic, in Millamant's assertion: 'There is no so impudent a thing in nature as the saucy look of an assured man, confident of success' (IV.i.150). At this point the middle term
(solicitation) can only be implied based on its repeated appearance in Mirabell's and
Millamant's preceding arguments.32
The dispute relates to the consequences of solicitation for the yielding giver and the one soliciting. Both disputants present these consequences in negative terms:
Millamant's negative 'Nothing to bestow' without solicitation, Mirabell's the
'diminished value' of what is conferred by the soliciting party, 'loss of grace' on his part
32 The exchange between Millamant and Mirabell runs as follows: Mirabell, completing Millamant's citation of a couplet from Edmund Waller's poem The Story of Phoebus and Daphne, Applied, comes to the mention of Daphne, asking Millamant whether she locks herself up from him to make him search 'more curious' or to signify 'that here the chase must end', his pursuit be crowned for she can fly no further. To which Millamant replies: 'Vanity! No. I'll fly and be followed to the last moment, though I am upon the verge of matrimony; I expect you should solicit me as much as if I were wavering at the grate of a monastery, with one foot over the threshold. I'll be solicited to the very last, nay, and afterwards.' Mirabell: 'What, after the last?' Millamant: 'Oh, I should think I was poor and had nothing to bestow if I were reduced to an inglorious ease, and freed from the agreeable fatigues of solicitation.' Mirabell: 'But do not you know that when favours are conferred upon instant and tedious solicitation that they diminish in their value, and that both the giver loses the grace and the receiver lessens his pleasure?' Millamant: 'It may be in things of common application, but never sure in love. Oh, I hate a lover that can dare to think he draws a moment's air independent on the bounty of his mistress. There is not so impudent a thing in nature as the saucy look of an assured man, confident of success. The pedantic arrogance of a very husband has not so pragmatical an air' (IV.i.140-150, my emphasis).
91 and 'lessening of pleasure' on the part of the solicited. The enthymeme typically forms a compressed version of the two separate arguments enfolding it: the lover drawing air
'independent on the bounty of his mistress', and the 'pedantic arrogance' and
'pragmatical air' this involves. Unlike the dispute, the enthymeme forms a conclusion in which only the major term is made explicit: man 'confident of success', or confident lovers (I.iv.146-151). The middle term, solicitation, is established by implication with reference to the preceding arguments for solicitation (Millamant's) and against it
(Mirabell's), whereas the minor term of the preceding arguments changes from 'giver's favors' (giver solicited and soliciting, the minor does not register the distinction between them) to 'giver's pleasure' (this time clearly giver solicited).
It might be said that by using the middle term as the topic of the disputation the progression of the dispute towards the conclusive enthymeme is a way of divesting the enthymeme of its epilogue or explanation. It is a way of voiding the enthymeme's cause, or for that matter, its syllogistic transposition. The explanative epilogue precedes rather than follows the enthymeme. It hence disappears from the concluding enthymeme, which is nevertheless entirely resonant of this very epilogue. The enthymeme is thus established as an effect of the divested cause.
How is the enthymematic declarative of Millamant constructed? 'There is not so impudent a thing in nature as the saucy look of an assured man, confident of success' forms a complex structure using a 'dummy' grammatical subject, 'There', and an attributive construction with the pre-head degree modifier 'so', 'so impudent a thing'
(Hockett, 201, Huddleston, 435). Within the 'There is' construction the actual subject,
'the saucy look' is first indexed by 'a thing'. We find here two conflated patterns, that of the attributive 'not so [impudent a thing] as' and 'There is [not] a thing as', which doubly postpose the actual subject upon two anticipatory elements, 'There is' and 'a
92 thing'. The two patterns manifest a subordination of the subject in the attributive construction and an extraposition of it in the 'dummy' construction. There is no telling if the whole 'saucy look' clause functions as the actual subject of the 'dummy' subject
'There is', since the modified noun in the attributive construction, 'a thing', is syntactically co-extensive with the 'saucy look'. This way the structure as a whole, while implying a superlative ('The most impudent thing in nature') and focusing on attributive constituents ('impudent', 'saucy', 'assured', 'confident'), renders indeterminate the subjective function in the sentence. It chains vying topics (the 'saucy look', the
'impudent thing'?) and displaced subjects, with the abridged absolute construction
'confident of success' suggesting its own implied subject 'he' and the participle 'being'
([he being] confident of success).
In addition to a postposed subject, there is also the negative construction 'not so impudent a thing [as]', echoed by the independent clause 'not so pragmatical an air', and the emphatic so (IV.i.150). The negative is thus used in the bound mode of a comparison:
A thing is not impudent to the degree
to which degree
a saucy look is [impudent] (Pence, 102-103).
However, since the structure of the sentence makes possible a transposition of the subject and predicate, 'The most impudent thing in nature is the saucy look' or 'A saucy look is the most impudent thing', this same indeterminacy has two logical implications.
First, the proposition equally affirms the presence of 'the saucy look' in the 'thing', or the presence of 'impudent thing' in the 'saucy look'. The actual subject is thus one but there are two topics. Second, if the transposed propositions are subjected to negation, a contradiction might ensue: 'impudent is not something that is not saucy' (Millamant's
93 claim) and 'saucy is not impudent'. That is, in Aristotle's terms, the proposition 'invites more negations than one corresponding to the same affirmation' (On Interpretation,
17a25, 20b1-10, pp. 123, 149-151). The foregrounding of the negative construction underscores an attributive element of non-solicitation (its being impudent) in the same manner that the genitive structure 'the saucy look of an assured man' gives priority to an accident of non-solicitation (a saucy look).
The negative structure, however, has further implications for the syllogistic underpinning of the enthymeme. While displacing the middle term or the cause
'solicitation' at the level of grammar, the negative construction also necessitates a negated formulation of 'solicitation' to be maintained as the cause in a syllogistic disposition of Millamant's declarative. If we treat 'saucy look' as a sign of non- solicitation – he is non-solicitous because he has a saucy look – we follow in
Millamant's misleading footsteps, making an accident a proof. The effected syllogism is then refutable (Pr. An. 70a10-25, p. 525 – a second-figure Camestres):
Being non-solicitous means having a saucy look.
No lover has a saucy look.
No lover is non-solicitous.
Another possibility is to adhere to the universal inclination of the argument and to form a first-figure syllogism. A problematic Barbara then ensues because of the necessity to formulate 'solicitation' negatively:
Non-solicitation lessens pleasure.
Confident lovers are non-solicitous.
Confident lovers lessen pleasure.
94
Or a perfect Celarent:
No solicitation is obtained from confident lovers.
Givers' pleasure comes from lovers' solicitation.
Givers gain no pleasure from confident lovers.
The grammatical layout of Millamant's assertion produces the ultimate example of the unsettling effect of the grammar of the enthymeme on its logical groundwork. The grammatical structure tilts the substantive components of the sentence through accumulating subjective elements and suspended topical
(theme/rheme) determinacy. Further still, while displacing the middle term, at least semantically, the grammatical structure also negativizes the middle so that it can be used in positive syllogistic constructions only as 'non-solicitation' or in negative constructions as 'no solicitation'.
Millamant's enthymeme presents a mode of dislodging the syllogistic core of the enthymematic articulation. The core is constructed retroactively; it is a cause functioning in an after-the-fact manner, as we have seen in both Fraunce and Freud. A dislodged syllogistic core indicates what makes the enthymeme relevant to a theorization of the phantasm in terms of logic as subsumed under grammar: the unique form of conflicted agreement between grammar and logic upon which the rhetorical status of the enthymeme is established. Lacan points out that the importance of the phantasm in the functioning of the drive connects the phantasm with the montage of the drive, the sado-masochistic drive in particular. This montage is traced and ordered grammatically 'by the application of diverse reversals (Verkehrung), of partial and chosen negations' (SXIV, 11.1.67, p. 10). The enthymeme has a structural affiliation with the montage of the drive by its peculiar formalism, being suspended between
95 grammar and logic. At the same time, the enthymeme shares the rhetorical status of the joke, rhetorical because related to unconscious drives, without being an equivoque.
The relation of the enthymeme to the montage of the drive lies in the disruptive effect of the two arts, grammar and logic, on one another. The enthymeme is not the Es of grammar as such, the not-I as 'the rest of all the grammatical structure' (11.1.67, p.
10). Rather, the enthymeme is more of the order of the technique of the joke in the sense that the rhetorical is established as a specific mode of defamiliarization that both utilizes and hollows the grammatical and the logical. Thus, while concretizing the logical and the grammatical as the effect of castration on the signification of the real of sex, the enthymeme also forms the logic of phantasy whose core is the dislocations and disruptions the three arts effect in the formation of one elocutionary structure.
F. The Rhetorical Function of the Enthymeme and the Play's Intrigue
Rhetorically, as a structure suspended between logic and grammar, the enthymeme produces a remainder of disavowed enjoyment, marking it as a locale of such enjoyment in relation to the play's intrigue. Jouissance twice lost, Lacan says, first under the signifier, then in the anaesthetic object a, is rediscovered by the pervert and gives the Id its essence as Es (14.6.67, p. 7). The rhetorical function of the enthymemes in the play is precisely to institute the perversion at the heart of the phantasm staged by the intrigue. We already see that in terms of Jakobson's conception of the poetic function as projecting the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination, intrigue's real core is instituted rhetorically, by the enthymeme, for the enthymeme in the play indicates the poetic function as such (Language in
Literature, 71). The enthymeme foregrounds a-semantic grammatical forms that commonly displace the subjective category and exhibit multifarious notional inter-
96 propositional equivalences as well as intra-propositional equivalence of patterning, as in the case of 'the coldness of a losing gamester'/'the pleasure of the winner'. These grammatical forms interfere with the enthymeme's syllogistic bearing. In this sense the enthymeme also constitutes a violation of a norm or an 'erogenization qua aberration' which, in Sharon-Zisser's theorization, marks a form as rhetorical ("The Poetic
Function", 283, 288). However, Renaissance perception of the three arts enables us to formulate with more precision the particular manner in which the enthymeme in
Congreve's play institutes a negated being as perverse jouissance. It is this institution of negated being that is cardinal to a psychoanalytic conception of the masochistic phantasm. Having considered the structure of enthymematic articulations in Congreve's play, I now proceed to examine their rhetorical function in light of the Renaissance conception of rhetoric and logic, and in relation to Freud's and Lacan's conception of the grammar of the phantasm.
Renaissance as well as seventeenth-century theorists of rhetoric acknowledged the indispensability of rhetorical artistry, even when it is not supportive of sense.
Puttenham defended the 'idle toys' and 'trifles' certain rhetorical devices produce (111-
112). Almost a century later, Dryden defends poetic license by its technique. He emphasizes artistry, consisting in tropes and figures, which rhetoric has devised for verse. Like Puttenham, Dryden supports his defense of what in poetry displays the excessive, idle and superfluous nature of rhetoric not just by the authority of its forefathers (Homer, Jonson for Dryden), and hence by its persistence, but by art being constitutionally this very 'excess' (indeed as seen in his treatment of the 'wording' in
Virgil's works). Poetic license, Dryden says, is the liberty to speak things in verse, first and foremost, and the propriety of thoughts to words consists in how thoughts are expressed ("Apology for Heroic Poetry", Ker I, 188-190).
97
The commingling of art and excess which rhetoric marks is also suggested by
Freud's treatment of jokes in terms of technique. Jokes as formations of the unconscious are not just thoughts subjected to the defamiliarizing modes of arrangement enabling their surprising effect. Jokes are also rendered 'idle toys' by their defamiliarizing effect. They exceed the 'altogether grave and worldly', in Puttenham's words (111) or are licentious in Dryden's terms, because they have 'such and such effect' upon the audience (184). Their sense effect, that is, is subordinated to what in them is art, as Freud shows by their baffling effect on our critical judgment.
If poetic license derives its authority from rhetoric 'made an art' (Dryden, Ker
I, 184), if rhetoric as art means such license, what is the fate of logic with respect to elocution or the expression of thought? Fraunce's treatise on logic does not supply a rhetorical analogy for the enthymeme in the form of a specific figure, such as the
Etiologia, or the 'Reason render', supplied by Puttemham (228-229). As we have seen, the enthymeme is constitutive of the syllogistic judgment of the topics of invention, and thus impinges on them in their logical function as 'places', apart from the versified configurations of them extracted from Spenser's poetry. However, Fraunce's distinction between logic, rhetoric and grammar raises questions concerning the relation between these arts and imposes an unavoidable shift in the notion of excess as mark of the artistic. If the hallmark of art is form and technique rather than sense, as Shklovsky suggests, then in logic this hollowing effect of art on sense rests in logic's being
'always necessary and never contingent [in respect of her precepts], for otherwise it were no Art' (sig.5).
Necessity is the hallmark of the Art in logic, marking the complete, self- sustained formal relations in which this art consists. Fraunce's terminology for the basic disposition of arguments is grammatical: the subject and the adjunct (sig.6),
98 which nevertheless is not to be confused with the 'affections' or logical relations his dispositions unfold (such as cause and effect) (7). Fraunce also debates whether an argument should be considered severally, that is, almost as a grammatical unit, as though it had 'no affection or relation to any other thing'. At the same time, he considers the relation between a concept of reason and 'copious and Rhetorical phrases'. Following Ramus, he concludes that 'though there be many words, yet they all express but one conceipt of reason, and that is this single and sole argument which we here talk of' (sig.9). In other words, in Fraunce's terms logic is irreducible, and in this respect it is also rhetorically excessive, exceeding sense.
When it comes to the figural or rhetorical configuration of the enthymeme,
Aristotle specifically distinguishes style from 'a real enthymeme'. He refers to 'a concise and antithetical statement', such a style only appearing to contain a real enthymeme (Rhetoric, II.24, 1401a, p. 325).33 Illustrations of demonstrative enthymemes derived from the topic of opposites suggest a particular figuration, and so do rhetorical questions and the maxim (II.23, 1397a, p. 297, 1397b, p. 301, II.21,
1394a, p. 279). Generally, however, Aristotle's illustrations of enthymemes imply that there is no one figuration of the enthymeme and that it can be formulated in various ways. Fraunce's methodology offers something different: the enthymeme does not take shape in a particular figure but emerges as a possibility contained in the verse once it is unfolded syllogistically. The verse may then be considered enthymematic by virtue of the complement it evokes to sustain syllogistic judgment.
Fraunce offers a critical method that produces the verse in the form of an enthymeme only by what the verse invokes syllogistically, not by any configuration on its part. This draws attention to the arrangement of the versified argument precisely as
33 And see, by contrast, Cicero's definition of enthymeme, especially his modus ponendo tollens. For Cicero the enthymeme is principally a form of conclusion from contraries (Topica, xiii.55, p. 423).
99 independent of the figures rhetoricians assign for the enthymeme. However, if the arrangement of the enthymeme is not specifically figural, there is still a question what it is about its structure which admits of syllogistic unraveling at the same time that it betrays so little of its enthymematic nature. Fraunce's allusions to the differences and similarities between grammar and logic offer a possible answer to this question (sig.5-
6).
In Congreve's play condensed arguments which momentarily alter the play's elocutionary texture, such as the arguments studied in detail here, are more distinctly gnometic or sententious (Puttenham, 235-236). They are so less by their 'moral doctrine' than by their phrasing. Puttenham calls sententious figures 'Rhetoricall'. In
Puttenham's terms this means that they execute both the function of auricular figures
('tunable to the ear') and the function of the sensible figures ('stirring to the mind')
(196-197). These sententious arguments are logical in Fraunce's sense because they invoke a contingent and doubtful conclusion that has to be resolved syllogistically.34
They are also rhetorical, in the sense that they are constructed in one of the figural forms Aristotle gives the enthymeme, the maxim. This is not to say that every sententious articulation is enthymematic, but to point out a characteristic of argumentation in Congreve's play. In the play, a fully developed argument forms a vorticial, concentric arrangement around a condensed universalized version of the same argument, cast sententiously and adding little in terms of sense.
The sententious encapsulations in Congreve's play are hence generalized 'idle toys'. In addition to being grammatical-logical structures answerable to the formalism of the enthymeme, they are superfluous sense-wise and are strikingly impersonal.
They have the bearings of the thinking-which-is-not-I that Lacan ascribes to the
34 Such a doubtful conclusion as 'Mirabell is no giver of pleasure'.
111 function of the Id (Es) in the phantasmatic articulation, where the non-being of the I, the 'I am not', emerges in the form of an impersonalized 'that'. The rhetorical Es effect of such sententia is this extra-semantic function of 'that'.
In keeping with Fraunce's distinction between the three arts of logic, grammar and rhetoric, we note that the Es effect of the sententious condensations of argumentative constructions is rhetorical in Puttenham's sense of being both sensible and auricular, of stirring the mind by pleasing the ear (197). And yet grammatical arrangement is very much what is left to argumentative verse which is not marked by a figure. This much is suggested by Fraunce's avoidance of such rhetorical marking, to the effect of preserving the verse a raw matter for syllogistic judgment. The particular syntax of the sententia at the heart of lumps of argumentation in Congreve's play thus attracts the eye as the carrier of these argumentations' effect but beyond that, as what furnishes the argumentation with unexpected complexity.
By contrast, the irreducible aspect of the 'sentence with a grammatical structure' which is the phantasm, maintains what is in Lacan's terms the peculiar state of the subject of the phantasm. The subject is split between the alienating statement and the object of pleasure it produces, and his own existence in both the grammatical construction and the scenic garb of his unconscious desire (SXIV, 30.11.66, p. 2,
11.1.67, p.12, 14.6.67, p. 2, 21.6.67, p.13). Compared to such discursive formations of the unconscious as the joke, the phantasmatic articulation is devoid of technique, the rhetorical support of unconscious constructions. The enigmatic, alienating nature of the articulation is sustained by its pure grammaticality: it comes from no-where and
111 belongs to no-one. That is what makes the articulation an Es, a truth meaning produced by the Id with respect to the drive, the sado-masochistic drive.35
Pure grammaticality furnishes the drive with the effacement enforced by repression which in the phantasm, Freud indicates, 'remains all-powerful' ("Two
Principles", SE 12, 223, Lacan, SXIV, 18.1.67, p. 11). The phantasmatic structure, however, is also amenable to topological imaging in the form of the Moebian double loop. The Moebian loop translates alienation (the subject split between what cannot be thought and what cannot be) into a correlative, correspondent and hence repetitive single enclosure forming an 'in-mixing of subjects'. The alienated I, the 'I am not', is thus enfolded and repeated in the Es statement in which the I am not thinking of the reality of the drive is constituted (SXIV, 15.2.67, pp. 9-10).
This 'in-mixing of subjects' which the grammatical structure makes of the mechanism of phantasm is suggested by Freud's unraveling of the phantasm's deep structure. The grammatical unfolding of the articulation 'a child is being beaten' follows the transformations of the sado-masochistic drive, revealing in the process the agency of the subject's ego, made unrecognizable to the subject. Freud makes a clear connection between the different articulations the enigmatic statement of his patients breaks into and the transformations of the drive in terms of the sexual phases of the psychic organization. The second phase, whose wording runs: 'I am being beaten by
35 In 'A Child Is Being Beaten' Freud seeks the genesis of perversion, specifically as formulated by sadism and masochism (SE 17, 191). In the much earlier "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" Freud points out the special position sadism and masochism occupy among the perversions, marking their aspects of activity and passivity, which are the universal characteristics of sexual life. Sadism and masochism are already observed in infantile sexual life as component drives that are initially distinct from erotogenic sexual activity. They are late to enter into intimate relations with genital life, can become exaggerated and independent of the sexual drive, and make the skin their differentiated erotogenic zone. If perversion indicates for Freud the extension of the aim of the drive beyond the regions of the body designed for sexual union, and a lingering over relations to the sexual object that deviate from the final sexual aim, then sadism and masochism are defined at a further remove from the orifices of erotogenic sexuality (SE 7, 150, 158-159, 169, 192). In 'A Child Is Being Beaten' sadism and masochism are viewed through the retroaction of what remains of the Oedipus complex in the unconscious.
112 my father', is a construction of analysis. It remains unconscious as a rule, constituting the vanished Bedeutung of the articulation ('A Child', SE 17, 185, 189-190).
The second phase of the phantasm is masochistic, Freud explains, in the sense that it forms a regressive substitute for the genital incestuous love for the father in addition to maintaining the punishment for the forbidden genital relation. A transformation of sadism into masochism is involved in this regression from the genital organization to the earlier sadistic-anal stage. It is the outcome of a sense of guilt which is a scar-like formation of the Oedipus complex. Being beaten is a convergence of a sense of guilt and sexual love, the sense of guilt taking 'as much objection to sadism as to the incestuous object-choice genitally conceived' (189, 194). In its own turn the perversion, originating in a constitutional premature growth of a single sexual component initially irrespective of the Oedipus complex, remains the inheritor of the charge of libido from that complex (192).
Freud's analysis and theorization of the phantasm bear upon two psychical planes: thought activity and perversion in its relation to the drive. In the "Two
Principles" Freud refers to the all-powerful, inhibitory function of repression in the phantasm; repression inhibits ideas whose cathexis is likely to occasion a release of unpleasure, leaving thought activity 'subordinated to the pleasure principle alone' (SE
12, 222-223). Freud regards the beating phantasy in 'A Child Is Being Beaten' as 'a primary trait of perversion'. Its phases range from a simple inference ('my father is beating that child, he loves only me') to a complex one that eliminates the subject's existence in the phantasy. This complexity is manifested in the unconscious, regressive, masochistic phase which remains the source of libidinal excitation in the apparently sadistic third phase of the phantasy (SE 17, 180- 181, 189, 195).
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By means of grammatical analysis and an inference of missing links Freud reconstructs the genitally conceived incestuous object-choice (the father). The presence of this object-choice in the substitutive unconscious articulation is manifested by the predicative component undergoing change from 'loves' to 'is beating', and the agency of the pleasure involved, the subject and author of the phantasy now being the beaten child. Freud's reconstruction provides Lacan with a logic consisting in a certain relation of the subject to the object of pleasure, a logic which combines two planes, thinking and perversion, by means of grammar. This grammar retains for Lacan its missing links as missing. The grammar institutes the empty set of subjectivity as no- being and/unless no-thinking, so that being (functioning inferentially in Freud's analysis) becomes a non-reference in Lacan's theorization of the phantasm.
In the case of argumentation in Congreve's play, grammar plays a similar role to that indicated by Freud. Here I go beyond Fraunce's method to suggest that the enthymeme is not only instituted by the complementary premises or the conclusion it evokes, which the syllogistic disposition supplements. Rather, the enthymeme is produced by the transgressive operation of its grammatical arrangement with respect to its syllogistic object cause, when grammar plays havoc among the terms of syllogism.
The enthymeme is constituted in the space between logic and grammar. It knots both in a single construction where a term which is curtailed at one level emerges as a denial at another, in the virtually dissected substantive category which in the phantasmatic articulation designates agency. The rhetorical Es effect of the sententious figuration which holes the play's semantics of argumentation is itself structurally doubly holed.
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Such is the case of the enthymemes analyzed above. Like the grammar of the phantasm, the Es of rhetoric is an effect of structure, consisting in a double negation.36
For Lacan, the significance of grammar lies in its status of pure structure. As pure structure, grammar constitutes a syncopation of the chain of signifiers; it is a rupture in signification which enables us, as he says, to 'pass from the level of unconscious thinking to the logical, theoretical status' of the subject. Grammar, that is, is a structure that simultaneously sustains the unthinkability of subjection to the scopophilic and masochistic drives, and a logical-theoretical conception of this subjection (SXIV, 18.1.67, pp. 11-12).
A similar perception of the function of grammar is suggested by Freud's grammatical reconstruction of the phases of phantasy. The passive-active structure parallels the masochistic transformation of anal-sadistic debasement of the forbidden genital relation, a transformation which supports a conscious sadistic beating-phantasy
(SE 17, 189-190). The montage of the drive is grammatical. For Lacan as well as for
Freud the real of the drive is sustained grammatically.
The grammatical unfolding of the phantasmatic articulation is our key to the perversion of masochism. The object a of Lacanian thinking comes into play at this point. This is 'the core-object around which the status of the grammatical subject turns',
Lacan says. Its logical status is established in its position outside the signifying chain while belonging to it. It is a holed 'core-object' that logically/grammatically complements the lack introduced by castration. A logical complement, it enables a glimpse of unconscious thinking by syncopating the signifying function of language,
36 Note that the effect produced by the grammar of the enthymeme in the form of indeterminate subjective/topical functions, as in the case of Millamant's 'There is no so impudent a thing in nature as the saucy look of an assured man, confident of success', is rhetorically defined by the figure of transposition, the placing of words in a sentence out of the natural order of construction for the purpose of pleasing the ear (Lane, 104-105).
115 the latter always insufficient where the truth of the unconscious is concerned (18.1.67, p. 12, 25.1.67, p. 1, 24.5.67, pp. 9-10).
Based on the grammatical reconstruction of phantasy Freud theorizes a reality of sex in terms of perversion through the denied genital sense of the incestuous wish for the father (SE 17, 196, 198). In Lacan's thinking this reality of sex is taken further to designate the impossibility of 'a relation full of certainties' between man and woman in general, consisting in the failure to signify the sexual relation. As a logical complement of the missing phallus, the object a indicates this failure by the uncertainty that pervades any knowledge as soon as sexuality is introduced. The subject is unable to attain knowledge of what is involved in the body as locus of jouissance, an ignorance on which such jouissance is dependent. This necessary alienation of the subjectified body, the body as effect of signification, locates jouissance in the body as barred from knowledge. The object a marks alienation precisely in what escapes from the alienating grip of signification on the body. Not all bodily jouissance is an alienated jouissance – that is what the object a marks for perversion in the form of a foreign body pinnacled where the guilt enforced by the Oedipus complex leaves a scar.
Jouissance is rendered an inadmissible foreign body engendered as guilt, cut from the
Oedipus complex (SXIV, 18.1.67, pp. 10-11, 24.5.67, p. 10, 31.5.67, pp. 2, 8, 11,
14.6.67, p. 4).
The logic of phantasy is suspended on the economy of phantasm, on jouissance as exemplified in the masochist's relation to this foreign body. The masochist becomes one with this foreign body as waste product, capturing his jouissance from the only corner where it is manifestly graspable. In Lacan's reading of Freud, what in masochism marks regression, through guilt, from genital relation, tallies with the object a as supplementing the presumed intact One of the sexual union. Perversion
116 situates itself at the level of the small a, at the marginality of bodily manifestations of the object a. It does so in an inverse path to that of castration, in denial of the disjunction of the body and jouissance.
The masochist thus defines by his place the locus in which jouissance takes refuge from a representation of the sexual act. Knowing something of its show, the masochist is derisive of the sexual act (14.6.67, pp. 2, 6-7, 10-11). By its structure the phantasmatic articulation 'a child is being beaten' makes an object a in the form of foreignness where masochistic jouissance is realized at the body's limit, detached from the sexual act. In Freud's conception, the masochistic outside position has a narcissistic side. In the regression from the genital organization to the earlier sadistic-anal stage there follows a transformation of the sadism of this stage into masochism, which is passive and in a certain sense narcissistic (SE 17, 194). This narcissistic identification with a foreign body subjected to unpleasure is maintained by the closed structure of the articulation. The grammatical structure produces a manifestation of the object a as the external locus of jouissance in the gaze that holds together, in an unalienated fashion, the perverse subject of the phantasm and his object of pleasure (SXIV, 21.6.67, p. 13).
What are the implications of enthymematic argumentation for Congreve's play?
Structurally, the double loop of a syllogistic term struck by caducity and a syntactical indeterminate subjective function maintains the potential of perversion in the double effacement and regressive negation in which the sado-masochistic drive is constituted in the articulation of the phantasm. The enthymeme forms a single rhetorical construction which (somewhat like the gaze that the phantasmatic articulation is objectified into) conflates the subject's denied existence and a foreign locus of jouissance. Foreignness negatively designating such existence informs the sententious figuration of the enthymeme as well as the relation between its grammar and logic.
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And in this manner the enthymeme bears relation to the preoccupation in Congreve's play with the question of pleasure on the level of plot and character interrelationship.
Pleasure is a major theme in the play; it surfaces in characters' persistent negotiations over the amount, degree and measure of pleasure allotted to them. Thus there is a symmetry between the opening scene (of Mirabell and Fainall) and the
Proviso scene (of Mirabell and Millamant), as both Fainall and Millamant refuse what appears to be an indifference on the part of Mirabell. Fainall compares Mirabell's slighting his ill fortune at the game of cards to a woman undervaluing the loss of her reputation (I.i.7-9). Millamant, on the contrary, asserts her worth and pleasure, erecting the kind of obstacle Fainall would like to see in Mirabell, insisting as she does on
Mirabell's endless solicitation: 'Ah, I'll never marry, unless I am first sure of my will and pleasure' (IV.i.152). Fainall's complaint regarding Mirabell's coldness suggests his demand for a stronger resistance which will allow him to enjoy his victory in a more aggressive manner, a demand that is later on supported by his bitterness against his mistress, Mrs. Marwood, who is attracted to Mirabell. Instead, he is forced into a passivity which he overtly resents. His forced passivity is echoed conversely in
Millamant's demand for a more aggressive chase on the part of Mirabell, the kind of aggressiveness Fainall claims for himself with regard to Mirabell, but is inversely made to enjoy from Mirabell.37
37 In the opening scene the two intriguers (both fighting for a legacy from Lady Wishfort) are presented as suspicious of one another's relationship with Mrs, Marwood, Lady Wishfort's close friend and secret mistress of Fainall. Marwood has frustrated a previous plan of Mirabell to gain Lady Wishfort's approval of his match with Millamant, her niece, and Mirabell suspects Fainall of being her lover and party to her designs. Fainall on the contrary, suspects Marwood of being in love with Mirabell and seeks to establish whether Mirabell returns the sentiment or not. However, in this highly charged scene of mutual scrutiny Fainall betrays his complex attitude towards Mirabell, even as he attempts to move him into a more vehement confession. Hence he is critical of Mirabell's cruelty 'not to satisfy a lady's longing' and suggestively points out that Mirabell has slighted Marwood's advances: Women, he says 'do not easily forgive omissions of that nature' (I.i.77-78, 84). Later on Fainall gives vent to his jealousy in his mistress's ears, claiming he sees through all her 'little arts' as she, like his wife, dissembles her aversion to Mirabell (II.i.116-118). Fainall's professed policy is that 'Tis better to trade with a little loss, than to
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If we return to Congreve's doubting perception of true wit (stylistically speaking), we see that wit only succeeds in highlighting the perverse underside of the relationship between the two intriguers through Mirabell's repetition-with-a-turn of
Fainall's witty remarks, turning them as well as his own replies into commonplaces:
Fainall: 'Yet you speak with an indifference that seems to be affected…' Mirabell: 'You pursue the argument with a distrust that seems to be unaffected…' and another instance: Fainall: 'one is all pulp and the other all core' Mirabell: 'So one will be rotten before he be ripe, and the other will be rotten without ever being ripe at all' (I.i.85-90,
188-191, respectively). 'Commonplace of comparisons' rendering wit as failing at the level of signification, bolster the perverse dimension which the enthymeme constructs as 'a child is being beaten'. By way of the commonplace, here the tool of indifference and evasion, one intriguer subordinates the other to the lessening of pleasure, forcing him to dwell on the effect of frustrated satisfaction while gauging his motives.
Commonplace metaphors reinstate the fragile status of wit as dependent on signifiers and significations. In contrast, the enthymeme is an elocutionary form constituting the real beyond semantization and sense interpretation. In this sense the relation between the enthymeme to commonplace metaphors is somewhat like that of the mathematical intellect in relation to intuition. The enthymeme thus supports the theme of pleasure dominating the diegetic dimension of the play, quantified in terms of less and more, in a different way. It cuts under the theme of pleasure so as to render the signifier 'pleasure' not one with itself. By its very function the enthymeme introduces pleasure as a foreign locus. The enthymeme thus produces a sense effect that splits the play's thematics of pleasure. Pleasure as conceived semantically is inverted by the enthymeme in the same manner that in the phantasm thinking is estranged by being,
be quite eaten up with being overstocked' (I.i.183-184). This is suggestive of what he may be coveting secretly.
119 while maintaining an 'in-mixing' with this unbearable being (Lacan, SXIV, 14.12.66, p.
6).
This manner of introducing negation into the play's semantic level has another aspect when the enthymematic construction is examined syntactically. Enthymemes' indeterminate subjective category taps phantasmatic thought activity in its original, primal mode of dissecting judgment, where an unattainable object of pleasure is set apart in the form of a thing and an approach to it is made by another missing element.
Lacan's reminder as to the difference between the perverse act and the neurotic act nonetheless remains operative here. The perverse act is concerned with the question of jouissance. The neurotic act, even if referring to the model of the perverse act, is concerned with sustaining what has nothing to do with the sexual act, namely, the effect of desire (SXIV 7.6.67, pp. 12-13). The enthymeme as a mode of judgment sustains the perverse act in the sense that it sets for itself an object of study, an object of pleasure, in an extraneous point of approximation with respect to the primal lost object of satisfaction.
The extraneous point indicated by the enthymeme is seen again in the relation between its rhetorical form and the play's theme of pleasure. The enthymeme casts in the alienating form of the maxim a doubly negated, doubly effaced, unthinkable core of satisfaction. The rhetorical construction of the enthymeme introduces a negated, denied locus of pleasure. It thus points at the trade value of pleasure, the play's elocutionary site of 'trading with a little loss', to use Fainall's idea of gaining one's pleasure (I.i.182).
Perverse jouissance emerges in the trading itself, in the possibility of the inversion or deprivation of pleasure which the rhetorical form of the enthymeme sustains. Similar to the enthymeme's perverse function as indicator of a core of satisfaction in displeasure is the enthymeme's undermining effect on the play's proclaimed rational style. The
111 enthymeme as a dislodged construction which is not exactly logic, not exactly rhetoric, not exactly grammar, but all three together, introduces a foreign element into this rationality. Hence, rationality can only be conceived in terms of the I am not thinking of the sado-masochistic drive, where the disjunction between the body and jouissance collapses (24.5.67, p. 9, 7.6.67, pp. 3, 12).
At another level, at the play's phantasmatic layer of plot and characters, the disjunction enforced by knowledge or signification between jouissance and the body is suspended, questioned, studied in the existence of two vying intrigues and two intriguers. One intrigue (Mirabell's) determines the plot in its entirety in absence, as a retrospective conception of a 'game' settled legally prior to the action (Braverman,
Plots, 215). The play is concluded with the production of a black box, containing a deed of conveyance of Fainall's wife (Lady Wishfort's daughter) to Mirabell while a widow and prior to her marriage to Mr. Fainall, a precautionary step to secure her from
Fainall's rumored inconstancy and tyranny of temper. This step is discovered at the end in retrospection, and reorganizes the logical connection between Mirabell's plot to marry Lady Wishfort to his servant and then release her from the contract on condition that he can marry Millamant and gain her property, and Fainall and Marwood's plot to dispossess Mrs. Fainall and Millamant of their fortune, a plot which rests on
Marwood's disappointed advances to Mirabell and Fainall's resentment of his mistress's and wife's secret love of Mirabell, in addition to Fainall's calculated greediness in marrying a rich widow ('and wherefore did I marry, but to make a lawful prize of a rich widow's wealth, and squander it on love and you?', he exclaims to Marwood –
II.i.180). The question of knowing something about non-alienated jouissance and the means of its attainment, which differentiates the practice of the masochist from that of the sadist, is suggested here by the relation of one determining intrigue consructed in
111 absence to the intrigues constructing the plot of the play, bearing in mind that the economy of phantasm consists in an 'I am not thinking', in what the unconscious cannot think. What the enthymeme constructs for an empty place by means of its logic and grammar, the play's phantasmatic level of plot, where intrigue takes place, presents in the form of the perverse practice itself.
Both the elocutionary forms and the plot of Congreve's play produce the experimental aspect of perversion in the displacement of the object of jouissance. Thus the supremely masochistic stance of the intriguer is made apparent in Fainall's identification with the rejected waste product of his marriage. The demonstration and parading aspect of masochism involved is suggested in his calculation of the losses he presumably suffers by this marriage: 'I am married already, so that's over. My wife has played the jade with me. Well, that's over too…Now for my reputation. As to my own,
I married not for it, so that's out of the question…'Tis against all rule of play that I should lose to one who has not wherewithal to stake' (III.i.588-600, SXIV, 14.6.67, pp.
9, 12-13).
However, this paraded misery is taken over by what we would not identify as masochistic, Mirabell's part as intriguer. Here masochism as a practice suspending all interest in what is happening in the field of the Other, the grabbing of jouissance without consideration of any law (14.6.67, p. 12), rises to its height when the intriguer selects the waste product of theater, 'an artifice which love contrived' (V.i.350), as a foreign body from which to draw his pleasure. It is a tried out device, the residue of a plot left from other plays and other playwrights (Mirabell mentions Jonson's Volpone
(II.i.260), but his scheme within the plot, meant to force Lady Wishfort to allow his marriage with Millamant without forfeiting Millamant's fortune is reminiscent of
112
Jonson's The Silent Woman).38 By contrast, Mirabell's master-plot and successful device, played out outside the plot and represented in it by the title of 'the way of the world' of the widows of the world, another repetition-with-a-turn Mirabell produces of
Fainall's pessimistic yet cynical observation to Mrs. Marwood on finding out that his wife had been Mirabell's mistress and is now his confederate – 'all in the way of the world' (III.i.547) and when his own secret liaison with Mrs. Marwood is discovered –
'let 'em know it, 'tis but the way of the world' (V.i.432-434, 501-503), in effect leaves him the duped object of the intriguer's pleasure. The master-intriguer produces for
Fainall what a phantasmatic longing has erected in the form of the play's opening enthymeme in the first place: deprivation of pleasure as core of jouissance.
Like the opening enthymematic argument, the play's title (The Way of the
World) sets a pattern. The title becomes a paratext as an idiomatic Es (It) type of expression. Grammatically it is a genitive construction that hovers between subjective and predicative functions. Pitted against this title, Mirabell's master-plot of the way of the widows of the world undergoes negation to debouch into something commonplace enough to be foreign. It is an expression trite enough to maintain masochistic jouissance where the intriguer, using the very phrase himself, can only reinstate for us what in the phantasmic articulation remains unconscious as a rule, a second phase which in Freud's words, 'has never had a real existence' and is a 'construction of
38 Mirabell is of inter-textual savvy. In fact, almost all the characters in the play make allusions to other plays and poetry, but Mirabell's way of interspersing his speech with such allusions suggests that he is a conscious borrower of literary sources (for example, he refers to Foible as Dame Partlet, which brings to mind Chaucer's The Nun's Priest's Tale – I.i.117). The thin line between the sources which reverberate in Congreve's writing and his character's cultivated savoir faire further emphasizes the function of borrowed, hence commonplace tropes in the effort towards true wit. It should be noticed that not only Mirabell's 'inside intrigue' on Lady Wishfort is reminiscent of Dauphine's ingenious plot to get his misanthropic uncle to give him an annual allowance in Jonson's The Silent Woman, but also his 'outside plot' to secure Mrs. Fainall's estate is suggested by the same play, in Truewit's warning to Morose before his marriage that one's future wife may have conveyed her virginity beforehand 'as your wise widows do of their states before they marry, in trust to some friend' (II.ii.135).
113 analysis' ('A Child', SE 17, 185). The commonplace here functionally joins in with the enthymeme.
What makes a chain of signifiers an articulation of the phantasm? What does it require to form a second phase that can only be constructed in analysis, to positivize a negated, denied existence? Congreve inadvertently broaches a similar question in his dedication, raising doubt as to what makes style 'true wit' or otherwise phrased, what makes style a truth effect. A possible way of answering these questions is by means of the metaphorical effect of language. With respect to any articulation, any signifier and signification, the metaphorical effect of language is produced as a remainder that splits the signifier, thus making it a signifier that does not signify itself. Being, the ultimate question of the phantasmatic mechanism hence emerges as a meaning effect. Another route towards an answer is nevertheless suggested by following Lacan's manner of inserting thinking in the real. This means seeking structure as an effect of language in what any closed unit of sense forms grammatically, constituting a structure qua grammar.
The enthymeme focuses our attention on such questions by virtue of its position with regard to the three arts of logic, rhetoric and grammar, traditionally conceived by rhetoricians and logicians as distinct, even if interrelated. The enthymeme is a form stipulating a displaced position which makes it a unique configuration of all three. It is this configuration of the three arts in a single construction that alerts us to the implications of these arts for psychoanalysis. With the enthymeme we assign psychical significance to the three arts in the form Freud has identified for us with respect to jokes. Jokes carry the ex-nihilo of the drive in their techniques as such, first and foremost, as well as in the equivocations produced by the means of these techniques.
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The enthymeme in Congreve's play is harnessed to the theme of pleasure the intrigue interrogates at the level of plot. Yet its significance lies in its structure as emptying intrigue of its significations. Like any other instance of the poetic function the enthymeme functions perversely and thereby poetically: it exceeds the dimension of sense and violates form (Sharon-Zisser, "The Poetic Function", 288-289). However, the enthymeme structurally institutes an occluded Bedeutung. Both poetic language and subjectivity are predicated on the occlusion of the Bedeutung. The enthymeme, like the Es, inversely and paradoxically institutes such holed Bedeutung. It does so by being a rhetorical form that displaces its logical and grammatical components.
Structurally, the enthymeme is like the conceptual joke and the phantasmatic articulation; it is a residue of the Oedipus complex instituting jouissance as a foreign body, an I am not, and this is the effect of what it subjects to caducity in its logic and grammar. Thus, while carrying the theme of pleasure, the enthymeme manifests perversion as the logic of phantasm by subverting and inverting pleasure while knowing nothing about it, and knowing something about it in the masochistic way. By this complex structure, the enthymeme indicates the function of technique as such.
Enthymeme's erotics of rhetoric are the product of disrupted logic and grammar. Yet in hence lodging and objectifying being in logic, the enthymeme in Congreve's play forms the real of intrigue.
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Chapter Two: Fallacy and the Rhetoric of Repression in Congreve's The Double- Dealer
"No Mask like open Truth to cover Lies, As to go Naked is the best Disguise" (Congreve's The Double-Dealer, V.iv.18-19)
"There is more than one kind of ignorance." (Freud, "Introductory Lectures" XVIII, SE 16, 281)
Introduction
Congreve's second play, The Double-Dealer (1693), holds special appeal for an inquiry into the nature and psychic cause of intrigue for two main reasons: the introduction of villainous blocking characters into a comedy of wit and the way villainy is maintained vis-a-vis the peculiarities of the play's style. The problematic aspects of the comedy are noted and defended by Congreve in his dedication, suggesting all the more that the question of a villain galling the play's hero cannot be dissociated from a language perceived as pliable, and dangerously so. The stylistic dominants of the play, the fallacy, or fallacious reasoning, and alliteration, nevertheless function in such a way as to enable a different perception of villainy, anchoring villainy in the unconscious.
While the play's intrigue exploits the troubled laws of the signifier, the play's stylistic dominants invert these laws to institute the limiting function of castration and repression so as to avert the perverse potential of intrigue qua 'intellectual' villainy.
This chapter, then, deals with the subversion of villainy by the alienating function of the signifier in the symptom, starting from the waywardness of the signifier on which such villainy in the play rests.
The Double-Dealer is a comedy featuring an intrigue plot headed by a villain and his female accomplice who attempt to undermine the marriage and right of inheritance of Mellefont and Cynthia, the virtuous and honest couple of the play, on
116 the day before their appointed wedding. As Corman has pointed out, in Restoration comedy those characters in opposition to the marriage of the young couple are powerless and incompetent; the real struggle is within the lovers themselves. In The
Double-Dealer 'the dramatic interest is given to the barrier characters…Not only do they represent a serious threat to the marriage, but they represent the presence of evil, a force alien to Restoration comedy' (358). More important however is Congreve's way of soldering villainy to the play's comic objective and the implication of this admixture for a conception of language at the service of the poetics of intrigue in comedy. Such conception has its roots in Mellefont's (the play's dubious hero) own idea of a plot that sanctions mirth at the price of folly and noise, seeing that, as he says, 'There are Times when Sense may be unseasonable as well as Truth' (I.iii.1-11). Quite in line with this perception, both sense and truth become so pliant at the hand of the play's various characters that Mellefont, in spite of his care and foresight, which he professes early on
(II.vi.), is eventually caught up in a plot he is too credulous to detect as dangerous to himself.
It is the riotous pliability of language, of words, in The Double-Dealer that renders intrigue as taking its bearings from the troubled laws of the signifier. The playwright's dedication and the motto of the play similarly suggest that the symbolic order is liable to indeterminacy. At another level, that of micro-forms of logic and rhetoric, the treacherous potential of the symbolic order is manifested in the tactics of deception used by Maskwell, the play's villain-intriguer. He occasionally relies on fallacy to effect and justify his tactics. A 'thinking villain', Maskwell appeases his emotionally inflammable accomplice and dupe, Lady Touchwood, with reasoning:
You know you lov'd your Nephew, when I first sigh'd for you; I quickly found it; an Argument that I Lov'd; for with that Art you veil'd your Passion 'twas imperceptible to all but Jealous Eyes (I.vi.69-74, my emphasis).
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The argument is fallacious as much as persuasive, for a lover's jealous eyes may indeed detect falseness in the beloved but not every such detection denotes love. Reasoning then implies faultiness; its forms are conducive to the elusive nature of the consciously manipulative intriguer and his intrigue at the same time that they call attention to the less conscious maneuvers these very forms enable. This section of my thesis thus focuses on fallacious reasoning in The Double-Dealer: it examines fallacy as another aspect of the relation of rhetorical forms of logic to the drive and masochistic pleasure basic to intrigue. Intrigue, as has been claimed, both stages and veils such pleasure.
The relation in the play between the intrigue plot and the masochistic drive is not established by means of fallacy alone. Fallacy, which is an argumentative form, is supported by a rhetorical form, alliteration. The style of The Double-Dealer suggests pleasure taken in words whose peculiar lettering and sound gain as much importance as their sense and comical allusion. There seems to be a preference for such words as give precedence to the sound patterns they create, without however overemphasizing their defamiliarizing function. A random sample of such patterning is Lady Touchwood's answer to Maskwell's question 'What Friend have I betray'd?' - 'Your fond Friend
Mellefont' (I.vi.8-10, my emphasis). It is hence not easy to call such sound patterning a stylistic dominant for it appears unobtrusive. Similarly, we cannot say that the play abounds with passages of sophistical reasoning.
Yet sophistical argumentation in combination with alliteration take the value of dominant as the forms that distinguish The Double-Dealer from The Way of the World in its manner of unraveling the masochistic underside of intrigue. Fallacy and alliteration rhetorically manifest something that is not 'consciously' articulated on the play's semantic level: the fallibility of the signifier and its implications for the notion of villainy. Through fallacy and alliteration the intriguer's villainy ceases to function
118 exclusively as an element of the play's conscious semantization; perceived rhetorically, intrigue partakes of the unconscious. Fallacy and alliteration function as dominants in the play by pointing, each in its own fashion, to the instance of the letter or the signifier in the unconscious. They subvert the play's conscious semantization by indicating the alienating effect of the signifier and the heteronomy it thereby introduces into self- knowing, indeed 'thinking' or 'reasoning' villainy. As it is the dimension of the signifier that is at stake in these dominants, and precisely at the level of the letter, their subversive function is by way of the symptom, nailing in jouissance while constituting it as repressed.
The indeterminacies of language, from which villainy may very well take its support, emerge already in the paratexts The Double-Dealer hinges on. In both the motto of the play and the dedication an unsettling of the opposition between signifiers, necessary for the production of signification, proposes itself. The play's motto alludes to Horace's reference to comedy intermixed with tragedy ('Yet at times even comedy raises her voice'), and to Terence's Self Tormentor (Syrus's 'I can deceive…simply by telling the truth'). Moreover, the 'regular design' of which Congreve boasts in his
Epistle Dedicatory (113-114) does not preclude a hero of the play who, contrary to convention, is a 'Gull, and made a fool and cheated' (115). Congreve thus produces for the audience a design that not only tinges comedy with the raised voice befitting tragedy, but threatens to blur the distinction between truth and lie, as well as the conventional distinction between a True Wit and a gullible Fool.
In defense of this irregularity Congreve raises the question whether every man is 'a Gull and a Fool that is deceived'. Cunning in one character ought not to be mistaken for Folly in another, he warns (Epistle Dedicatory, 116). However, this minuteness on Congreve's part does not produce clearer distinctions. The proposition
119 that contraries may interweave seamlessly evolves here to a denial of their signifying translucence by canceling their relational position. Cunning in one is not measured against the gullibility of another, nor is being a gull a sign of folly. An impossibility to judge character traits by their reflecting differentia lays the ground for the perplexity induced by villainy and the villain-intriguer.39 Congreve's double play of canceling differences between signifiers and rejecting their transparency leaves unresolved a problem that was to bother his contemporaries and later critics. The problem concerns the relation of villainy to cunning and secrecy: what makes villainy an undiscerned cunning, or what renders unrecognized treachery villainous.40
On the diegetic level of the play Congreve orchestrates a complex intrigue plot where not one but various intriguers play their part in echo of a major intrigue concocted by Maskwell, the villain-intriguer. In a manner that anticipates an itinerant purloined letter, intrigue as the play's major plot component is assigned an intricate route. With the scheming agency shifting and relocating between one villain and two double-dealing seducers and their seduced married women, intrigue becomes an object of desire in its own right. Maskwell is set apart from the rest of these minor intriguers,
39 As Congreve asserts in the dedicatory epistle, if every man who is deceived is a gull and a fool 'the two Classes of Men will be reduc'd to one, and the Knaves themselves be at a loss to justify their Title' (p. 115). However, Congreve's argument in effect supports such inconclusiveness. The opacity of villainy is further suggested by characters' difficulty to provide a justified, clear assessment of Maskwell's true character. Careless, the hero's friend, suspecting Maskwell from the start, can only say: 'Faith I cannot help it, you know I never lik'd him; I am a little superstitious in Physiognomy' (I.iii.95- 97). But this opacity is staged by the play through the signifiers as such. 40 The problem has found expression in various critical essays that have dealt with the rake hero in early and late seventeenth century comedy. These critics have for the most part resolved the troubling effect of the villain in terms of Hobbesian philosophy and the qualified acceptance of libertinism by the English stage. See for example Traugott, who sees Maskwell as the dramatized nasty side of the rake–hero, split from his attractive qualities which are represented by Mellefont (383, 389, 404), as well as Gosse, who perceives Maskwell as 'the apotheosis of Hobbesian egotism' (277) and Weber, who refers to him as 'the Hobbesian rake of naked aggression' (152-153). Corman sees the villain as the rogue hero of Jonsonian punitive comedy and the play as a synthesis of the Jonsonian punitive comedy and the Fletcherian wit one (357-358, 362). Eugene McCarthy, on the other hand, relates to the problem of 'how villainy is to be identified' in the terms of 'providence' and 'chance' enhanced by the play, pointing in the direction of 'chance' as the way of coping with the kind of evil represented by Maskwell (413, 417).
121 or prompters of love intrigues, by his strategy of deception, which is telling his victims the truth of his designs. His name bears testimony to the efficacy of this strategy.41
A certain indeterminacy regarding characterization that is advantageous for the action in The Double-Dealer continues to echo in Congreve's last comedy, specifically through the treatment of wit. In The Way of the World Congreve seems to undermine the notion of wit as governing rational style. He denies True wit the status of the constitutive mark of rationality by subordinating it to the perversion attested to by the enthymeme. Thus both the play's enthymematic argumentation and double intrigue enable the reconstruction of an unconscious masochistic 'second moment'. In The
Double-Dealer rational style is similarly qualified when figuring in the deliberations which serve to justify the intriguer's mode of scheming. The intrigue played out on the level of plot and character, the phantasmatic level of the play, calls forth the possibility of a rhetorical and logical code that may obliterate a sustaining distinction between truth and lie, between intriguer and victim. This is a code which fails to mark clear-cut relations and differences offering to make a cut in the real.
Yet the stylistic dominants of Congreve's second comedy are not displayed with the same prominence as in his last one. At the play's elocutionary substratum we find that a logical configuration of the master plot, or major intrigue, takes the form of disputation, cast in occasional sententia that rest on fallacy. Apparent reasoning is a separate category in logical and rhetorical theory of composition, and appearance is to a large extent what is questionable about it. Side by side with such disputation the reader's eye, and spectator's ear, begin to trace pervasive alliterative sound patterns.
41 Made to secure the interests of both Mellefont, the hero, and Lady Touchwood, Mellefont's aunt and enemy, Maskwell, under false pretence, apprises Mellefont of his double dealing: 'Come, cheer up; why you don't know, that while I plead for you, your aunt has given me a retaining Fee; --- Nay, I am your greatest enemy, and she does but Journey-Work under me' (I.vii.12-16). Mellefont treats such candor as a sign of loyalty to himself.
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They are forms of repetition that endow certain labials with salience precisely in the measure that their accumulating musicality appears contingent and accidental.42
These stylistic dominants shape the structure of the play as object, a product of the playwright's psyche, as Miller defines the neurotic's work of art. As product of the neurotic playwright's psyche, the work of art gives shape, enclosure to his lack of being incarnated in castration ("Sept Remarques", 9-10). The play's stylistic dominants do so by marking the object-like nature of this product as disturbed, and thereby disturbing.
In the case of Congreve, the symbolic order itself harbors pitfalls and snares; it condenses the subject's lack of being in its failings, failings inherent in the same rational style Congreve is celebrated for.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, what can be learned from intrigue as constructed at the play's various levels concerns the fallibility of reasoning and symbolization. The question of 'what am I' intrigue poses to psychoanalysis may thus be answered with the play's particular way of registering the subject's mode of enjoyment. Particularity pertains to the play's manner of 'bruising' the promising coherence of language. Such bruising dialectically reveals something about intrigue while enabling a re-examination of some of the riddles that engage psychoanalysis.
The play's motto and dedication, as well as style, collude to indicate the misleading nature of language and its inherent capacity for masking well its indeterminacies. The villain eludes judgment by the common difference between
42 Instances of such incidental sound concatenations abound. To cite two more: 'Oh Mellefont! I burn; married to Morrow!' or 'O, Maskwell…thou know'st me, knowest the very inmost Windings and Recesses of my Soul' (I.vi.110-112, my emphasis). As Bonamy Dobree has noticed regarding Congreve's style in general, here was an artist who realized that his material was words, whose prose (in The Way of the World, for example) displays a 'delicate play of the vowels', a 'dancing rhythm' and cadence. It is a style that made him a poet 'lineal to the throne' for whose 'Reign' Dryden 'Well had been Deposed', the heir Dryden chooses to his laureateship: 'On that your Brows my Lawrel had sustain'd' as Dryden says in the verses he wrote to his dear friend Congreve on his comedy The Double-Dealer (Introduction, xix, xxvi, xvii, 119).
122 cunning and folly or gullibility. He marks an opacity attested to by the evil-doer who holds the key to his workings, a secret of which he has complete knowledge. In other words, the signifying chain as such connives to veil the villain's not knowing. At the same time, the villain's strategy is that of lying when not lying. This is a strategy that precludes knowledge and professes subjectivity under the bar of repression. The character and his mode of reasoning proclaim a refusal of the cut imposed by the instance of the signifier in the unconscious, the cut incarnated by castration, while evincing this same subordination to the cut by his strategy.
In a reversed manner, the character and speech of Lady Plyant, Sir Paul's immaculately chaste wife, suggest that an inapplicability of the cut incarnated by castration emerges as ignorance. Lady Plyant's name testifies to the way her words run ahead of her secret yearnings, as when she rails at Mellfont for allegedly intending to seduce her: 'and then seducing me, debauching my Purity, and preventing me from the
Road of Vertue, in which I have trod thus long, and never made one Trip, not one faux pas; O consider it, what would you have to answer for, if you should provoke me to
Frailty? Alas! Humanity is feeble, Heav'n knows! very feeble, and unable to support it self' (II.v.34- 41). This state of being seduced even before Mellefont is able to say anything to the contrary is culminated in a complete reversal of the situation to present
Mellefont as besotted with her: 'But be sure you lay aside all Thoughts of the Marriage, for tho' I know you don't love Cynthia, only as a blind for your Passion to me; yet it will make me Jealous, - O Lord, what did I say? Jealous! No, no I can't be jealous, for I must not love you' (II.v.91-98). It is almost as though Lady Plyant's words determine her state of mind, throwing her sexual attraction to any man other than her husband in our and her face before she knows anything about it. This kind of double function of language as both a tool of knowledge and ignorance of the characters about the
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'innermost recesses of their souls', emerging here at the level of signifiers, may have been the reason why Markley, for example, insists on the transparency and confessional clarity of characters' language in the play. 'Transparent language' Markley says, is the result of Congreve's endeavor in the play to reconcile his desire to perfect an idealized version of gentlemanly conversation and to develop further a 'poetic' prose to register the psychological conflicts of his characters'. This revelatory discourse,
Markley nevertheless concedes, does not help us distinguish the good characters from the evil ones (207, 209, 214). I suggest that language as such becomes a double-dealing agency in the play, at least in the first two acts, even before the strategy of double- dealing takes the form of a substantial plot constructed by the villain (II.vii.26).
Fallacy and alliteration, I claim, reveal the underside of intrigue through their isomorphism with the structure of symptom and the repression it implies. The symbolic order emerging in The Double-Dealer carries the potential danger of not being subjected to any such limit, any such restriction as necessitating repression. The symbolic order is perceived as bearing its own doomed failure to sustain neurotic registration of castration. This is seen at the level of signifiers, as speech runs riot to reveal more than what one attempts to conceal, and in the faultiness of reasoning.
Conceptually, however, alliteration complements fallacy to reinstate what collapses at the level of reasoning. It is a reinstatement of alienation, enabling perversion to find its place in what Freud says of the hysteric's symptom: 'The contents of the clearly conscious phantasies of perverts (which in favorable circumstances can be transformed into manifest behavior) …and the unconscious phantasies of hysterics (which psycho- analysis reveals behind their symptoms) …coincide with one another even down to their details' ("Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality", SE 7, 165-166).
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Alienation is a representation, Miller says in his article "The Sinthome, a
Mixture of Symptom and Fantasy". Alienation foregrounds the subject of the signifier, just as separation foregrounds the subject of jouissance. The significance of symptom in Lacanian thought is the turn it offers to the conception of the signifier or the missing signifier the subject constitutes. The subject is barred in representation; he remains distinct from S1 and S2, being only represented. Yet the symptom is also an effect of truth that resists knowledge, being invested with jouissance.43 It is a substitutive mode of satisfaction and concerns the relation of the subject to jouissance. The symptom thus enables the combining in a single writing of the unary trait representing the subject and the subject of jouissance (17-18, 26-31). The symptom forms the subject's insignia
(marking the real of the subject). Hence, metaphor as structure of the symptom may be said to reinstate the signifier as the materiality empty of meaning which is the letter.
Fallacy, as I will attempt to show, conceived rhetorically and in combination with alliteration, indicates a similar structure, specifically by introducing the notion of repression.
Alienation as the road to jouissance constitutes the coming together of jouissance which is not reducible to phantasm, and the signifier representing the subject, which the symptom is. This is the backtracking of Congreve's symptomatic discomfort with the rationality supporting intrigue to what is satisfied by a symptom, unbeknownst to the subject. Thus, an effort towards repression is what the play stages by its stylistic dominants and intrigue, turning perversion into the hysteric's secret. By its stylistic dominants the play stages an effort towards alienation in the sense of inscribing villainy with repression. The play's intrigue and style suggest that villainy as thinking, as rational, carries the mark of perversion by its refusal of castration, and they
43 And in French: 'le symptome, verite qui resiste au savoir a partir de la jouissance' (Miller's seminar Du Symptome, 19.1.83, pp. 187-188).
125 do so in their effect of turning perversion into the repressed indicated by the hysteric's symptom, the hysteric's version of perversion. This is a logical rather than temporally set process, although we will see that alliteration presents itself most effectively at the point where Maskwell's intrigue is at its peak, promising success (V.xi). The effort towards alienation, as I have indicated above, is constituted along three lines which are synchronically interwoven: the level of signifiers where differentia is blurred, the level of elocutionary dominants, fallacy and alliteration, as instituting what can be perceived psychoanalytically as the bar, or repression, and the level of plot or the intrigues where events become consubstantial with the repressed established rhetorically.
In pursuance of my claim for a perception of The Double-Dealer as a play instituting intrigue around the structural notion of the symptom, I will next turn to
Aristotle's theorization of fallacy and its function, specifically in his On Sophistical
Refutations. I will then consider Freud's conceptualization of the relation between repression, the hysteric's lie and the symptom. Fallacy in Congreve's play will be subsequently considered through the Lacanian conception of the alienating function of the signifier and the beyond which alienation introduces. Finally, the status of intrigue, and the function of the intriguer in the play will be examined in relation to fallacy and alliteration as the modes of instituting masochistic pleasure as the hysteric's unknowable secret.
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A. Fallacy as Theorized by Aristotle
The study of fallacies begins with Aristotle's On Sophistical Refutations, and it is this work that provides a guide for a treatment of fallacious reasoning in The Double-
Dealer (Hansen and Pinto, 3). This early work of Aristotle relates to the misleading aspects of language and the uncertainty that bedevils the concept of argument and the syllogism (Gabbay and Woods, 47). A sophistical refutation is a refutation in appearance, embedding a fallacy or a non-fallacy with the wrong conclusion. But the possibility for anything in language or thought to be 'apparent' arises from the deceptive similarity of words and the 'inability to distinguish the identical and the different', as Aristotle says (On Sophistical Refutations, 169b5).
Aristotle's distinction between fallacies dependent on language and fallacies not dependent on language points to the inherent imperfection of language. Aristotle locates the most fertile and widespread cause of fallacies in the fact that we use 'names as symbols in the place of things' (165a10-15, Hamblin, 82). However, Aristotle insists that there is no real distinction between arguments 'used against the word and those used against the thought.' The first refer to the meaning of words, the second apply to the sense which the speaker was thinking when he made the concession. Aristotle introduces the dimension of the speaking subject to the relation between fallacies dependent on language and fallacies not dependent on language. He says that 'the application to the thought does not depend on the argument but on a certain attitude of mind in the answerer towards what has been conceded' (170b12, 20, 30). This invokes the question of language as imperfect prior to a subjectivized modification of it. While pinpointing imperfection in language as such, Aristotle suggests language is liable to falsification because there is an attitude of mind involved. This means that there would be no such thing as a 'perfect language' where fallacies of thought alone could in theory
127 arise, so long as there are arguers (and compare Hamblin, 81). Arguers, or speech, will not allow a neutralization of the imperfection of language.
Although Aristotle suggests that the deception arising from similarity of language also blurs a vision of the truth (Sophistical, 169a34), there is no strict relation between genuine argument and truth. In Aristotle's definition refutations which contain fallacies are refutations that 'do not affect their object but only appear to do so'
(Sophistical, 165a5). Aristotle is concerned with the standards of good argument and their violation. Truth is conceived in terms of genuine as opposed to apparent reasoning, apparent reasoning not necessarily implying lying. In other words, for
Aristotle, truth seems to pertain to the mechanisms of reasoning, less to the latter's
(misleading) effect, although the paradox of lying truth as an aspect of fallacy does come up later on in On Sophistical Refutations (180b).
Fallacy is a rhetorical as well as logical category. Aristotle deals with fallacies in his Rhetoric, referring to them as apparent enthymemes. A point has to be made with regard to the availability of fallacious arguments for those who 'wish to play the sophist' (Sophistical, 165a30). Rhetorical theory indicates that language, or in structuralist terms, the code, is not only imperfect by definition, but comprises sophistical aptitude in the form of a body of codifiable, repeatable argumentative patterns available for anyone's use.44
Fallacies are distinct, extant logical and rhetorical structures which indicate the fundamental, self-sustained imperfection of language and reasoning. As such, what
44 Regarding this availability, I follow Johnson's definition of fallacy, which he indicates to be in line with Aristotle's term, "paralogismos": 'A fallacy is an argument that violates one of the criteria/standards of good argument and that occurs with sufficient frequency in discourse to warrant being baptized' (Hansen and Pinto, 116). Johnson nevertheless contends that to revitalize a theory of fallacy, 'we should delete reference to matters of appearance', whereas 'appearance' is precisely what is at stake in detecting a fallacy. As Woods and Irvine suggest, any good example of fallacy will be one the reader is unable to recognize (Hansen and Pinto, 115, Gabbay and Woods, 97).
128 do fallacies imply for the psychoanalytic concern with the unconscious and its formations? And further still, what do fallacies as soldered to the idea of truth and its paradoxical nature imply for the theorization of unconscious thinking? The first of these implications emerge in Freud's theory of the hysterical symptom.
B. Fallacy in Relation to Freud's Theory of the Symptom
In his Project for a Scientific Psychology Freud turns to fallacious reasoning as the model for the hysterical mechanisms of repression and pathological defense. Symbol formation is Freud's term for the preclusion of an unpleasant idea from thought (its repression) and its symbolic replacement in consciousness. The hysteric's mechanism of symbol formation rests on a false connection between an unpleasant affect and a memory of a repressed experience: the memory arouses an affect which it did not give rise to as an experience (SE 1, 356). A false premise thus intervenes as a way of deferring the initial experience. The symbol which enters consciousness is attached to the false premise. This is typical of repression in hysteria, Freud says. 'We invariably find that a memory is repressed which has only become a trauma by deferred action'.
Freud hence refers to the hysteric's mode of repression as the 'Hysterical Proton
Pseudos' (where a false argument is drawn from a false premise) (SE 1, 352, 356).
The hysterical symptom embeds a lie, and as such has its model in the
Aristotelian proton pseudos. Freud points out the interplay, the continuous tension between faulty logic (a fallacy resting on a false premise, which constitutes a fundamental lie), and a symptomatic outcome that professes the truth constituted by this lie, and is hence 'quite rationally constructed having regard to all the pieces of the associative process' (355). The logical structure of the function of enjoyment or the satisfaction of the drive which the hysteric outlines (for the neurotic subject) upholds
129 enjoyment as an unattainable absolute. This makes any enchainment of repressed signifiers prototypically fallacious. Any unconscious concatenation is underwritten by what Lacan terms the 'sovereign lie', the hysteric's logic of lie qua rejection that guarantees the persistence of desire as unsatisfied (Lacan, SXVI, 5.3.69, pp. 10-12).45
Freud nevertheless suggests that the same faulty logic that marks hysterical displacement of affect from actual impressions or experiences to memories of them is more than just a sign of a lie. Repression as precondition of symptom formation also predicates ignorance as the key to the symptom's structure. In his essay on psycho- analysis and legal evidence Freud says the criminal and the hysteric are both concerned with a secret. The difference between them is that the criminal knows the secret and hides it whereas the hysteric is ignorant of the secret. The hysteric has succeeded in repressing strongly cathected ideas and memories, and the wishes that arise from them, in such a way that they play no part in his thinking (SE 9, 108). The repressed ideas nevertheless remain operative and persist in symptomatic formations whose purpose cannot be perceived by the subject ("Introductory Lectures'' XVIII, SE 16, 284).
The relation of the symptom to language is indicated by Freud in his Studies in
Hysteria. The hysterical symptoms are 'mnemic symbols' of mnemic residues of affective experiences and acts of thought. In the course of analysis the hysterogenic zone of the symptom 'joins in the conversation', leading Freud to draw a parallel between the somatic symptom and the symbolic expression sought by the patient for her painful thoughts. Freud indicates that the hysteric's sensation would sometimes 'call up the idea to explain it, sometimes the idea would create the sensation by means of symbolization'. He further suggests that 'both hysteria and linguistic usage alike draw their material from a common source' (SE 2, 297, 148, 152, 180-181).
45 Obsessional ideas similarly consist in distortion from their original wording, Freud explains in the Rat Man case. Distortion enables such ideas to persist, since conscious thought is thus compelled to misapprehend it (SE 10, 224).
131
As later suggested in Freud's lectures, the symptom bears a relation to early experiences and impressions which were once conscious, as well as primal phantasies which the symptom represents ("Introductory Lectures" XVIII, XXIII, SE 16, 284,
367). Symptoms are thus symbolic-somatic substitutes which effectively convert residual affects of traumatic experiences into wish-fulfilling modes of sexual satisfaction. As such, hysterical symptoms may represent various unconscious impulses which are not sexual, but 'they can never be without a sexual significance'
("Hysterical Phantasies and their Relation to Bisexuality", SE 9, 163-164).
The structural implications of fallacy for unconscious thinking have been dealt with extensively by Freud in his work on jokes. Freud lists the techniques of jokes that are given the form of logical argument but are in fact illogical, jokes that rest on displaced psychical emphasis or on the train of thought rather than on words. His analysis of jokes that conceal a piece of faulty reasoning, or exhibit a piece of nonsense or stupidity, and of jokes that make use of deviations from normal thinking through displacement or absurdity, indirectly unravels fallacies which are both dependent and not dependent on language, in accordance with Aristotle's classifications (Jokes, SE 8,
50-52, 56, 60). Freud's treatment of these techniques points to the consubstantiality of faulty, sophistical reasoning, and the workings of the unconscious.
However, faulty logic functions differently in jokes than in symptom formation, even if in both cases satisfaction is attained by pathways ordinarily avoided by thought.
While in the hysterical symptom faulty logic marks the mode of repression, in the joke faulty logic enables the lifting of repression. Freud establishes a link between jokes that are structurally dependent on playing with thoughts, on thoughts being nonsensical, and the lifting of inhibition necessary for the satisfaction of the drive
(132-133, 137-138). Lacan's conception of the joke as 'message' with respect to the
131
'code' is relevant at this juncture. In the message meaning is born and truth is to be found: 'the truth that is to be announced, if there is any truth, is there in the message'
(SV, 6.11.57, p. 8). A faulty or nonsensical line of thought is crucial here. What Freud underlines for us is that for the message to have any truth, it has to appear logical while being fundamentally fallacious (Jokes, SE 8, 60).
Freud is nevertheless concerned with questions that bring out a surplus quality of the sophistical joke. He asks, for example, what makes a joking instance a genuine joke as opposed to a 'sophistical' joke or simply 'a piece of sophistry' (61).
Considerations of this sort suggest that the unconscious mechanism of displacement and the specific technique of the joke leave an unspecified remainder. The aesthetic quality of the joke is not saturated by these mechanisms. In other words, Freud alerts us to the fact that a rhetorical structure has a residual quality that surpasses technique.46
This point finds further support in the notion of joke as fore-pleasure. Like the erotogenic zones the joke enables the production of greater pleasure of satisfaction, or allows new sources of pleasure ("Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality", SE 7, 211,
Jokes, SE 8, 137-138). The residual quality of rhetoric finds its economic measure in pleasure that circumvents genital sexuality.
Freud's consideration of the aesthetics of the sophistical joke adds another aspect to the function of faulty logic in the symptom. It suggests the possibility of establishing the aesthetic quality of fallacy in Congreve's play. This quality cannot be limited to either the mechanism or the signifying function of fallacy. It requires a different dimension which may be conceived as the truth effect of fallacy. This is where the Lacanian theory of the signifier makes it possible to go beyond the Freudian theory of the formations of the unconscious and their relation to faulty logic.
46 Aristotle in effect claims something similar when saying that the function of Rhetoric 'is not so much to persuade, as to find out in each case the existing means of persuasion' (Rhetoric, 1355b14). Persuasion and the means of persuasion are not one and the same.
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C. Lacan's 'Mask of Symptom'
In Lacan's early theory, the symptom fulfills a memory function, conserving in the subject's unconscious a traumatic encounter with propositions derived from the Other of the law. The symptom is the subject's message to the Other and is formulated through the discourse of the Other. It receives its meaning by the interposition of the symbolic order (SI, 196-197, Soller, Reading, 51-52).
The symptom is thus a signifying structure which retroactively institutes the signifier of which it is an effect. Repression forms the basis for the minimal schematization of symptom as metaphor in Lacanian theory, with one difference,
Miller points out in his seminar From the Symptom to Fantasy and Back: if metaphor means a signifier that implants itself in the signifying chain with respect to the rest of the chain, the symptom stands for what is trapped in the chain as resistant to knowledge. This is the subject himself, erased, barred under the signifier of the symptom. In the symptom the subject is alienated, whereas in phantasy he is separated, something of his being becoming restored by means of the object (19.1.83, pp. 187-
188, 192-193).
In his seminar on the formations of the unconscious Lacan speaks of the symptom as the mask with which unconscious desire clothes itself. The symptom speaks up to a certain point. It goes in the direction of the recognition of desire, yet manifests itself as a mask which renders desire unreadable. The symptom as a mask does not only point to its own paradoxical form but to the ambiguous nature of the hysteric's desire. Her interest lies in the situation of desire, from the man's as well as the woman's angle. Unconscious desire, Lacan hence asserts, is of a double character: it seeks recognition as desire but is a desire for nothing. The mask of the symptom is
133 indicative of the double nature of unconscious desire. It makes desire 'something other than anything whatever that is directed towards an object' (16.4.58, pp. 6-9).
Lacan's notion of the symptom as a mask in his seminar of 1958 may be considered anticipatory of his reference to the symptom as 'a truth value' in his 1971 seminar, The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst. This strictly logical attribute of the symptom now concerns the dimension of being (or the drive) that eludes the subject as
'speaking being'. The symptom hence bespeaks 'a being of refusal' (2.12.71, 3-4).
Lacan's double view of the symptom as a mask and a truth value marks the points of reference that fallacy bears to the symptom.
Fallacy as conceived by Aristotle, but even more so as it functions in
Congreve's The Double-Dealer, has structural implications for the psychoanalytic conception of unconscious thinking. Fallacious arguments only apparently affect their object. Fallacies are in this sense a model of 'signifierness', or defied signification
(Lacan, SXX, 19). Closely related to the defiance of the task of signification suggested by fallacy is the relation between the signifier and truth. Truth is repeatedly dealt with by Lacan in his effort to theorize and locate what the very function and field of language makes indistinct, the place where the subject emerges as truth for the analyst.
I suggest that the question of truth arising from fallacy is inextricably linked with the rhetorical status of fallacy, more specifically its erotics. Truth as what in the signifier pertains to jouissance is a way towards establishing the erotics of fallacy. In this respect fallacy constitutes a special test-case of the relation between unconscious thinking and rhetorical forms, particularly those of argumentation. It adds a different angle to the question of the status of these forms in psychoanalytic thought, a question which has already been addressed in relation to The Way of the World.
134
Both the structural and rhetorical aspects of fallacy are pertinent to the psychoanalytic perception of subjectivity as effect of the signifier. This pertinence nevertheless requires a closer consideration of Lacan's early theory of the signifier and of the subject of desire on the one hand, and of his later theory of the beyond of the signifier and the truth of jouissance on the other. The joke then, rather than the symptom, will first be addressed as unfolding the techniques of the signifier. Following a close analysis of fallacious arguments in Congreve's play, it will be shown that fallacy evokes the function of the signifier in the unconscious both structurally and rhetorically. Fallacy institutes the skewed position of the subject of desire with respect to the Other of language, which the function of the signifier implies. Yet in its rhetorical function fallacy addresses the subject of jouissance, beyond the signifier.
D. Fallacy – Congreve's Symbolic Failing
Fallacy as emerging in The Double-Dealer is directly connected with the predicament of reasoning, but not only in the sense of the correctness of its process. Maskwell, the play's major intriguer, indeed asserts the expeditiousness of invention in his initial apophthegm: 'One minute, gives Invention to destroy,/ What, to rebuild, will a whole
Age employ' (I.vi.137-138). Yet his scheme of destruction evolves and is rationalized in a series of soliloquies by which, in Congreve's words, 'the Poet finds it necessary to let us know the whole Mystery of his Contrivance', thus making us 'conceal'd
Spectators of the Plot in Agitation' (Epistle Dedicatory, 115). Congreve defends his use of soliloquy as a way of informing us of Maskwell's thoughts. He thus alerts us to the function of the latter's reasoning with himself about designs which in their nature
'cannot admit of Confident' as the latent model of the plot in its evolvement. The importance of the model, moreover, is to counter the 'shallow Artifice' or a 'Bubble'
135 like contrivance such as Maskwell's first trick of making Lady Plyant believe
Mellefont loves her, which is the result of quick invention rather than of deliberation
(II.vi., vii.46, I.vi.125). Hence, any faulty aspect of Maskwell's reasoning gains weight as structurally reverberant of what fails at the play's level of signifiers.
Maskwell's deliberations have a certain rhythm, consisting in protracted argumentation that closes in an apophthegm. His first self debate concerns his prospective treacherous moves against Mellefont.47 It bears the markings of three structural components which complement one another. In terms of argumentation his soliloquy is constructed as a rhetorical syllogism, enumerating six parts:
Proposition 'Beauty (Cynthia's) guilds Crimes',
Major Deceit or Treachery 'shall be imputed to me as a merit',
Proof of the major 'Love cancels all the Bonds of Friendship',
Minor Love (my love of Cynthia) means rivalry,
Proof of the minor 'Love like Death is a universal Leveller of Mankind'
(making unequals equal in rivalry) (II.viii.3-14) (following
the example in Joseph, conclusion excepted, 364-365).
In terms of disputation, the soliloquy is in line with Blundeville's definition:
'Disputation is a contention about some question in hand, either for finding out the truth, or else for exercise sake', except that it has the appearance of one kind of
47 This first soliloquy comes after Maskwell has secured Mellefont's unquestioning trust by apprising him of his designs. The full text is as follows: 'Till then, Success will attend me; for when I meet you [Mellefont], I meet the only Obstacle to my Fortune. Cynthia, let thy Beauty gild my Crimes; and whatsoever I commit of Treachery or Deceit, shall be imputed to me as a Merit – Treachery, what Treachery? Love cancels all the Bonds of friendship, and sets Men right upon their first Foundations. Duty to Kings, Piety to Parents, Gratitude to Benefactors, and Fidelity to Friends, are different and particular Ties: But the Name of Rival cuts 'em all asunder, and is a general Acquittance – Rival is equal, and Love like Death an Universal Leveller of Mankind' (II.viii.1-14).
136 disputation, the 'Dialecticall, which belongeth to probable opinion' while in fact being of the kind called 'Sophisticall, which tendeth only to deceive' (161). In terms of the figures of disputation, which represent the rhetorical analysis paralleling the logical analysis of the techniques of disputation, the soliloquy has the form of anthypophora, a reasoning with self, asking questions and answering them oneself (Joseph, 214, 381).
Maskwell's disputation proves sophistical by committing two fallacies. The first one concerns the proof of the minor, and is embedded in his argument that he is not being treacherous since his actions are motivated by love, an argument which is perfectly valid syllogistically. However, the master plotter argues in his defense that rivalry between friends is justified in the name of love, implying that since love and rivalry share in common a "leveling" (equalizing) quality ('Rival is equal, and Love like Death an universal Leveller of Mankind' – II.viii.13-14), and both cancel ties, they also share a certain fundamentality ('Love cancels all the Bonds of Friendship, and sets
Men right upon their first Foundations' – II.viii.7-8). 'Setting men right upon their first foundations' is ambiguous. It is hence equally predicated of both love (love makes a rival out of you) and rivalry (this is what you are fundamentally).
A formal fallacy emerges here. Maskwell applies the universality of love to rivalry where rivalry appears to be only an element of love; rivalry is used both in 'a certain respect' and 'absolutely'. This is a fallacy of using words absolutely (Aristotle's
Rhetoric, 1402a10, Sophistical Refutations, 167a1). Set syllogistically, this would form a fallacy of the Illicit Minor:
Love sets men upon their first foundations
Love makes rivalry (cancels Bonds of Friendship)
Rivalry sets men upon their first foundations.
137
The conclusion makes an assertion about all rivalry, its minor term, but the premises make no assertion about all such rivalry. The conclusion therefore illicitly goes beyond what the premises warrant (Copi, 230).
Another fallacy appears in the second part of Maskwell's self-debate where he asks whether there is not 'such a Thing as Honesty'.48 Here the proposition is that there is such a thing as honesty but 'whosoever has it about him, bears an Enemy in his
Breast' (II.viii.14-16). The major (bearing one's own enemy) is then elaborated by the assumption that being scrupulous and conscientious means cheating nobody but oneself. The minor (being honest) is then developed by means of example. Maskwell forms a reason by example pointing to the likeness of honesty and wisdom, or of the honest man to the wise man that is a Coxcomb, on the basis of their both being made fools by nobody but themselves. An example, Fraunce says, is 'an argument from the like and equal … and no argumentation of it self without help of syllogism' (The
Lawyer's Logic, 99). A reason by example 'allureth the ignorant' (Lever, quoted in
Joseph, 364), seeing that the similitude of the particulars is not really the cause why being made a fool by oneself belongs to being honest, if we follow Blundeville's warning concerning the validity of an argument from example (152).
But if Maskwell's argument against honesty is weakened by example, there is a further twist to his argumentation in the sense that he questions the notion of honesty by turning it around. Honesty is assumed to mean being one with oneself, and being true to others to be the same as being true to oneself. Maskwell introduces inner division, proving the non-existence of honesty by subverting the term's defining assumption (there is no honesty because honest people deceive themselves). While
48 Maskwell's soliloquy continues: 'Ha! But is there not such a Thing as Honesty? Yes, and whosoever has it about him, bears an Enemy in his Breast: For your honest Man, as I take it, is that nice, scrupulous, conscientious Person, who will cheat no Body but himself; such another Coxcomb, as your wise Man, who is too hard for all the World, and will be made a Fool of by no Body, but himself: Ha, ha, ha' (II.viii.14-22).
138 appearing to be a sort of petitio principii, the argument is not only an ungenuine proof of the non-existence of honesty, but in effect is an argument in appearance only or an assumption masked as an argument. This is where the arguer seems to forego expediency and turn to a contrivance of logic as an object of pleasure in itself. This foregrounding of argument suggests the function of reasoning as displacing the grand issues it is supposed to address. Congreve warns us in his dedication not to treat
Maskwell's reasoning with himself as talking to us or to himself; 'he is only thinking', he says (115).49 It is again the structure of thinking presented by such reasoning that throws light on what happens unawares in the case of Lady Plyant's speech.
One more complex sort of fallacy encapsulates Maskwell's strategic credo, that of 'discovering the whole and real truth of the matter' to his victim 'that he may not suspect one word on't'. The fallacy is set in an apophthegm or a gnome: 'No mask like open Truth to cover Lies / As to go Naked is the best Disguise' (V.iv.18-19). The fallacies previously discussed were fallacies not dependent on language. They were fallacies arising from 'a hidden assumption in the matter' (Joseph, 367-368, and see also Sophistical, 166b20, Hamblin, 62). In contrast, this fallacy seems to arise as an ambiguity in the language (Sophistical, 166b20, Joseph, 368). Equivocation and ambiguity result from names or expressions properly signifying more than one thing, or from words customarily used in more than one sense, or when a word has more than one sense in combination with another word (Sophistical, 166a15).
Maskwell's fallacy does not exactly answer to any of those, excepting a possible ambiguity of 'Lies' as noun, false statement, and verb, being in horizontal position. He nonetheless commits the formal fallacy of four terms with respect to
Truth, which is the middle term (the cause for disclosing everything as best way to
49 For his own purposes, Maskwell nevertheless makes use of 'talking to himself' to be seen as debating by Lord Touchwood, Mellefont's uncle, whom he attempts to dupe into making him his heir instead of Mellefont (V.iii.1-36).
139 cover lies: Truth is the best way to cover lies
To reveal everything is to tell truth
To reveal everything is to cover lies).
Truth is made an equivocation that confuses it with a lie: there is truth and there is truth and there is such truth that is the best form of lie.
The argument as a whole is set upon similitude, or example, which is a weaker argument. Being truthful is compared to being naked as the best form of covering, although the similarity does not mean that the cause for being naked is to hide. The argument is thus made even more equivocal by its very syntax. If it is assumed that going naked is the best disguise, the conclusion in the form of 'No Mask like open
Truth' suggests that open truth is the best mask. However, by itself the phrase suggests that open truth is no mask, it is like being naked, or on the contrary, that truth that could have been the best way of lying is not to be found: there is no such mask and hence it is as good as going naked (no mask like open truth as going naked). The equivocation may be carried to absurdity.
Whether we examine this quintessential apophthegm as an amphiboly or as circular reasoning, we find that it runs the risk of being an absurdity by dispossessing truth of its distinctive quality as the opposite of lie. The idea behind the apophthegm is given a specular cast when Maskwell says: 'let me see, I have the same Face, the same
Words and Accents, when I speak what I do think; and when I speak what I do not think – the very same' (II.viii.26-29).
Sophistical reasoning as seen in The Double-Dealer calls in question the very mechanism of reasoning and the notion of truth that we intuitively attach to it.
Maskwell's soliloquy outlines a carefully constructed argumentation embedding fallacies which cut the ground from under a conception of truth as distinct from lie.
141
Congreve's treatment of fallacy is different from the way it is originally treated by
Aristotle. He yokes fallacy to the paradoxical strategy of deceiving by means of truth, thus attaching the notion of truth-telling to faulty reasoning. Double-dealing is hence sustained by the art of constructing arguments. Maskwell prefers 'Cunning and
Hypocrisie' to 'Wisdom and Honesty', yet his soliloquy suggests that the imperceptibility of dissimulation as art with respect to nature, their being indistinguishable, stems from the process of reasoning from which this art takes its support. Reasoning as such points to 'dear Dissimulation' as 'the only Art not to be known from Nature', in Maskwell's own words (II.viii.29-31).
E. Congreve's Fallacy – With the Logic of the Signifier
Maskwell's sophistry concerns the implications of fallacy for psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious both structurally and in relation to truth. As a logical structure, fallacy represents the fundamental connection of unconscious thinking to faulty logic. This relation is elaborated by Lacan in his early theorization of subjectivity in terms of the effect of the Other and otherness of language on the subject. It will henceforth be shown that fallacy structurally manifests this effect, beginning with the joke.
As a formation of the unconscious the joke is a paradigm of the relationship between the signifier and desire. In Seminar V, it is precisely the joke of faulty logic that enables Lacan to present the essential moments of the progress of subjectivity, from need to its remodeling as desire and respectively, from devalued sense to ambiguity or no-sense. In the joke of faulty logic the interrogation of sense is authenticated by the other as a novelty that reproduces the primary pleasure of satisfied demand (4.12.47, pp. 13-15). In this manner the joke also represents the essential
141 mechanisms of the signifier, metonymy and metaphor, and their interrelation with desire and satisfaction.
In his discussion of the joke Lacan introduces as a given the fact that in rational discourse 'not a single semanteme corresponds to a particular thing' (SV.
6.11.57, p. 7). The relational status of signs in language indicates for Lacan its difference from the fixed code of the bees: 'The form in which language expresses itself in and of itself defines subjectivity', he says in "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis". The imperfections of language recognized by
Aristotle thus become the product of the fact that language is subjectivized, specifically insofar as there is speech (Ecrits, 83, 85). The relation speech bears to language is maintained in Lacan's conception of the joke in terms of a message with respect to the code of usages which is located in the Other, 'the companion of language'. There is interdependence between the code and the message which at the same time distinguishes one from the other. The code is indispensable for the production of the message, but the joke's value as a message lies in its difference from the code (SV,
6.11.57, pp. 7, 9, 14).
The formulation of the joke in the Jakobsonian terms of code-message points at the essentially displaced position of the subject in relation to the Other. The joke foregrounds the profound ambiguity of every formulation of desire by its manner of surprising the Other into accepting and authenticating the slightness of words for sustaining a full sense. The joke manifests the subject's displaced position as a step
(pas-de-sens) emptied of every kind of need, made by the subject to the Other, where the subject finds what is latent in him of his desire. In other words, the joke is a form of displacement proper in the sense that it marks the subject's desire as not given to signification: the joke 'alludes to nothing except to the necessity of the pas-de-sens'
142
(4.12.57, pp. 15-16). Yet, while displacement marked by the joke goes hand in hand with the alienation of the subject's desire by the paths or laws of the signifier, a primitive pleasure of a mythical, archaic satisfaction of demand, received by the subject in his first use of the signifier, is restored (SV, 4.12.57, p. 15).
The joke presents a pas-de-sens, an allusion to nothing, a total absence of the object (SV, 4.12.57, pp. 13, 15-16). This is the subject as an effect of the signifier: a hole in signification. It is therefore impossible to topologically represent the signifier, the signified and the subject on the same plane (6.11.57, p. 6). On the signifying plane the subject is a hole that best conceptualizes the unconscious as the chapter in one's history 'that is marked by a blank, or occupied by a lie', the 'censored chapter', as Lacan says in "The Function" (Ecrits, 50). Faulty logic underwrites the barred subject by its structural affiliation with the distorting paths of the signifier, specifically as suspending sense.
The dislocating effect of the signifier, maintained in the code-message relation, is explained by Lacan in respect of the distinction between need and desire. Desire is the symbolized modification of need, once need has been formulated as demand. In the verbal demand there is something that transforms need, and puts it on the plane of desire. Desire is hence defined 'an essential shift with respect to everything that is of the order of the imaginary direction of need' (SV, 4.12.57, p. 9). The structure of fallacy represents the essential effect of the imposition of the signifying grid on human need: the symbolic means an unbridgeable gap between satisfaction or pleasure, and the imaginary direction of need. The mechanisms responsible for the refraction of need and its emergence as the 'beyond of need' are the mechanisms of condensation and displacement, or in Lacan's paralleling linguistic terms, metaphor and metonymy. The metonymic combinatory and the metaphoric new meaning that punctures it are the
143 laws of the signifier that establish the relation between repressed pleasure or satisfaction and desire as remodeled in the code of the Other (27.11.57, pp. 2-3,
4.12.57, pp. 6, 10-11, 14-15).
The ambiguity of the joke attests to the treatment it has undergone with the purpose of restoring to desire what is lost by the ravages of the signifier. Pleasure is restored through the waste left behind at the level of the metonymical chain on the one hand, and whatever is not fully realized at the level of the metaphor. However, the return of metaphor as satisfaction to the reduced sense or peu-de-sens which the metonymical chain produces as it translates need into the terms of desire is that of pas- de-sens. Desire meets its repressed correlative in the form of a lack. In the conceptualization of the joke through the laws of the signifier the aesthetic value of the joke, its residual rhetoricity (what Lacan perhaps means by its foreignness) is hence located in subjectivity that is constituted as missing, as a lack. The lack is indicative of what is essential to subjectivity as opposed to individuality. Subjectivity, however, is the condition for the joke being what it is (4.12.57, pp. 12-16, "The Function", Ecrits,
60).
Whether conceptual or verbal, the joke indicates the subverted correlation between desire and satisfaction through the mechanisms of metonymy and metaphor.
At the same time the joke represents subjectivity as a lack sustained by a primordial satisfaction. The joke is essentially a form of gaining pleasure. The relation of fallacy to the signifier emerges more distinctly in Lacan's eleventh seminar. In Seminar XI the splitting effect of the signifier is formulated in terms of the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the statement. The subject is conceived as split between what he says and what he does not know he means. This brings to the fore the unconscious as a gap, a hole, a causality that can only assert itself in impediment or failure, and whose only
144 certainty is that it deceives (SXI, 21-25, 33). Any assertion on the part of the patient,
Lacan says, is double-sided, establishing itself by a certain lie (138). On account of the division between the statement and the enunciation the assertion of the subject emerges as a lie.
In opposition to the well known paradox that will call I am lying telling the truth, the subject's lie is no paradox. The subject's capacity to become the propositional content of his statement is alienated by the otherness of language. His message is not one with the linguistic I, the shifter formulated in the Other to index the one who speaks (SV, 6.11.57, pp. 8-9). The subject only potentially constitutes the content of this I, and is never wholly contained in it. The subject's message hence bears what is estranged in him by a signifier attached to him by the Other; in his enunciation he is indeterminate insofar as the unconscious is manifested 'as that which vacillates in a split in the subject – desire' (SXI, 139-140, 26, 28).
The subject's enunciation bespeaks his desire, but desire can only be maintained as enunciation with respect to the statement. The conception of desire as emerging in the gap in which the unconscious as cause is constituted, entails a certain relation between the truth of the subject and what renders him indeterminate and vacillating. Desire is the nodal point, 'a last residuum of the effect of the signifier in the subject', and is therefore 'the Freudian cogito'. Desire hence necessitates a deceiving enunciation. There is no other certainty for desire beside a statement as what establishes an enunciation meant to deceive. Thus the Freudian unconscious as formulated by the law of the signifier symbolizes the uncertainty of desire by sustaining it as essentially 'unapprehensible', 'necessarily lacking'. This dimension of the signifier is seen in hallucination, where a 'natural metaphor' which is a form of
145 satisfaction becomes an enunciation, a metonymy, because of the symbolic presence of need, that is, an unconscious desire that is not apprehensible (141, 154-155).
If in every statement there is a dimension of desire, an enunciation, and therefore the subject's assertion is double-sided, then fallacy is a paradigmatic structure of the inevitable division introduced by the unconscious in its symbolic formulation.
Fallacy is not a semblance of what lies or deceives in subjectivity. Fallacy is a structure of a lie. It is a structure that requires an 'unmasking' of its false procedure, a solution that disentangles its fault, which Aristotle indeed supplies (Sophistical, 175a20,
179b25). In what it asserts as valid, a fallacy establishes a truth in appearance that holds in abeyance what it fails to affect. Thus in the case of Maskwell's illicit argument about rivalry, we notice that rivalry, precisely as functioning absolutely, becomes the measure of the discarded friendship as the obstacle to the leveling or equalizing quality of Love and Death. Rivalry as the opposite of friendship is the manner of displacing such leveling, or questioning its sense. This also suggests that there is nothing moral about Maswell's deliberation; treachery, rivalry and friendship are the metonymical terms that devalue what cannot be grasped about Love and Death. Thus fallacy, structurally, posits the inevitable dislocation of desire with respect to the need that is latent in it, and of the subject as desiring, when passing through the defiles of the signifier. At the same time, fallacy constitutes a manifest substitution. It is a fraudulent artifice that hollows reasoning, postulating a gap that calls for a construction. In this respect, fallacy embodies the division of the subject from the angle of repression and castration.
What does it mean to be divided, having been 'born with the signifier'? The dividing effects of language, Lacan shows in Seminar XI, have bearings on sexuality, on the libido, and on the drive (188, 198-199). Only that part of sexuality that passes
146 through the networks of the signifier is accessible to the subject. The Dasein of sexuality emerges in between the symptom which is a scaffolding of signifiers built on a primally repressed signifier, and the interpretation the symptom presupposes in analytic experience (SXI, 176). But there is more to the alienating effect of the signifier than that. The libido as pure life instinct loses something when entering the world of signifiers, to which the drive attests by being partial.
The circular movement of the drive introduces heterogeneity, an otherness, and sexuality as exercising its activity through the mediation of the partial drives is subject to the same alienating principle. Hence sexuality is established in the field of the subject by way of two lacks which are interlinked: the first is the consequence of the subject's dependence on the signifier, which is first of all in the field of the Other, and the second is the consequence of his being subject to sex, to sexual reproduction, which entails individual death. The partial drive thus represents in itself 'the portion of death in the sexed living being' (193-194, 204-205). Such real lack that is taken up by the defect enforced by the structure of the signifier, by the relation of the subject to the
Other, is expressed in the vel of alienation; subjectivity entails a forced choice or no choice between being and meaning. The subject is positioned in this vel; his appearance as meaning in the Other constitutes the unconscious as non-meaning. His appearance as meaning is eclipsed by his disappearance as being (211).
Disappearance, or aphanisis, of the subject's being is the petrifaction of the subject in the signifier (207). Aphanisis is connected with the drive through Freud's conception of primal repression, which consists in 'the psychical (ideational) representative of the drive being denied entrance into the conscious'. This psychical representative nonetheless 'persists unaltered from then onwards and the drive remains attached to it' ("Repression", SE 14, 148). Primal repression as explained by Freud in
147
"The Unconscious" means that an unconscious idea received no cathexis from the preconscious, and hence is not to be seen as subjected to the withdrawal of cathexis
(SE 14, 181).
The primal lack indicated by primal repression affords Lacan the metaphorical structure of the split subject, of the Vorstellungsreprasentanz as the point of the subject's aphanisis. A signifier is sunk underneath, forming a point of attraction that organizes all further repressions, and which in itself is a kernel of pure non-sense, a point of freedom that is beyond signification but of determining effects for the subject.
This is also the point where the subject, in his separation from the vel of alienation, discovers his desire as his lack as such, 'the lack of his aphanisis' (SXI, 218-219, 250-
252). Miller points out that the primordial metaphor by which Lacan reformulates primal repression is the same structure as the metaphor of the symptom, which means that there is a signifier that pushes the subject beneath the bar, a signifier that is barred, disconnected, with respect to the rest of the signifying chain. Primal repression constitutes a primal signifying substitution from which the subject does not return except by being conveyed under the signifiers (From the Symptom, 1.12.82, p. 104).
The structure of metaphor as essential to the conception of subjective signification is central in Lacan's theorization of the Oedipus complex and castration. It is by metaphor, the paternal metaphor, that the Name of the Father comes to substitute what remains impossible to attain for the child in his dyadic, imaginary relation with the mother: her desire ("On a question", Ecrits, 200). The paternal metaphor evokes the signification of the phallus, around which centers the symbolic process that completes in both sexes the questioning of the sex by the castration complex. The paternal metaphor bases signification on the essential lack presented for the child by the desire of the mother, by what she does not have and the child cannot complete for
148 her. In this way the phallus as a signifier 'provides the ratio for desire', at the same time that it stands as the pivot of further metaphorical substitutions ("The Signification",
Ecrits, 278-279).
To the extent that the paternal metaphor signifies desire as lack in essence, both in terms of what the child cannot be, and is not allowed to be for the mother, the phallus as the veiled presence of this lack becomes the signifier for that being 'that is alive in the urverdrangt, primally repressed'. Owing to the signifying function of the phallus, Lacan says, the unconscious is language ("The Signification", Ecrits, 278).
The primal registration of desire as alienated need, thus finds its signifier in the repressed phallus. Fallacy, one might say, echoes the pivotal function of the phallus in relation to metaphorical substitution on the one hand and metonymic combinatory on the other, and the respective mechanisms of repression and desire which they construct. Both mechanisms are sustained by fallacy as a form which requires solution, by what fallacy leaves in question. Fallacy has bearing on signification as essentially a falsification of its possibility.
To return again to Maskwell's soliloquies, we notice that in his fallacy of the
Illicit Minor, which treats rivalry absolutely where the premises warrant its treatment only as in 'a certain respect', what undergoes substitution is Love as the universal leveler of mankind. Rivalry, cutting asunder all particular ties of fidelity and gratitude, is a substitutive manner of avoiding the universality of Love and as such, its co- habitation with Death. However, it is the amphiboly of truth as mask/going naked that indicates the substitutive function of fallacy. Fallacy as the constitutive model of the play's signifying mass here manifests the disappearance of this mass's subjective core in the very notion that attracts all its substitutions and displacements, the notion of truth. The amphiboly substitutes mask for truth as a way of instituting truth as
149 impossible to represent. Hence, structurally fallacy is a manifestation of what must be held by signification as 'nostalgia based on not-having [manqué a avoir]' ("The
Signification", Ecrits, 279).
In Congreve's The Way of the World we saw that the enthymeme of genuine reasoning is structurally affiliated with the logic of phantasm not only by its syllogistic manipulation of an object-like ceded term, but also by its formation at the juncture of grammar, logic and rhetoric. A structure that cedes one of its component terms, the genuine enthymeme, perhaps paradoxically, does not concern signification. Instead, it concerns a remainder, the rhetorical object yielded by the intersection of logic and grammar. In this sense, in the examination of The Way of the World the genuine enthymeme was found isomorphic with the structure of the masochistic phantasm. The subject of jouissance, its being, was articulated in the enthymeme in so far as the enthymeme constituted a convergence of the three domains of grammar, logic and rhetoric. The apparent enthymeme, or fallacy, behaves differently with respect to style.
Fallacy maintains a similar inter-dependence between logic and elocution. But fallacy also introduces the dimension of the violation of proper reasoning. It is a violation which prevails on a distortion of the inter-dependence of logic and elocution.
Hence fallacy, by means of violation, raises the question of signification, of what subjection to the signifier means. The very question of its genuineness pertains to the structural inconsistencies of signification, which is a different manner of producing a remainder. In this sense fallacy has a relation to the logic of the signifier, bearing on the subject of desire. With the logic of the signifier fallacy establishes the mechanisms of displacement and substitution that in Lacan's theory form the underpinnings of the subject as an effect of signification produced by the signifier, or the subject as
151 signifying void, represented by a signifier to another signifier (Miller, "The Sinthome",
12).
While not concerned with signification, the genuine enthymeme nevertheless requires unearthing. The genuine enthymeme establishes itself as undetectable, a product of superimposed layers. In contrast, fallacy is the appearance of logic, and as
Aristotle insists, requires unmasking and disentangling (for example, Sophistical, 179b,
25). Thus, fallacy establishes itself as self-contained, a structure whose form constitutes its elusive content. This is especially the case in the fallacies dependent on language, the equivocations of word and syntax (amphiboly), and is manifested in
Maskwell's own assertions about being well masked implying walking naked, about open truth as 'no mask'.
A formal single surface is also the fashion fallacy marks itself by closing the distance between appearance and truth. In The Double-Dealer specifically, it seems that the elocutionary enfolding of fallacy has more bearing on fallacy's strict relation to truth than on its (un)masking. One might say with Lacan, that like the joke, fallacy establishes its foreignness as something immediately recognizable, as truth that throws off its mask so that it might take on another and more deceptive mask, this way making a 'subject's find' that surpasses the individual's intent ("The Function", Ecrits, 60). In this manner fallacy in Congreve's play introduces the question of the status of rhetoric into psychoanalytic thought. The rhetorical status of fallacy concerns its relation to truth rather than to signification. The following discussion will thus center on a conception of the rhetorical function of fallacy as truth beyond the signifier. The evolution of Lacanian thinking regarding lie on the side of the signifier and the subject of desire, towards truth on the side of the letter and jouissance will function as the
151 guideline for an understanding of what fallacy has to offer with regard to the erotics of rhetoric.
F. Fallacy and Truth beyond Castration
The question of truth, Lacan explains in his first seminar, has to do with the arbitrary relation of the signifier and the signified, the adequation of the sign to what it signifies.
The act of speech, which brings the novelty of meaning into the world, introduces the dimension of truth into the real. The Freudian discovery of the unconscious embraces the dialectical status of speech as deception supported by, and affirmed as, truth, in the recognition that error is the register where truth irrupts and the principle of non- contradiction, foreign to the unconscious, is suspended (261-265). The register of error is where speech is revealed in its dialectical movement beyond discourse. Every emission of speech 'is always, up to a certain point, under an inner necessity to err'.
Speech is put in doubt, in brackets, through suspending the law of non-contradiction, a revelation of speech which Lacan says is 'the realization of being' (264, 268, 271).
Fallacy is a logical model that supports the affinity of the register of error with speech.
Furthermore, in so far as it concerns the formations of the unconscious, the register of error modeled by fallacy sustains what must remain foreign, that is neither transparent nor unified, for the subject's 'find' to occur, as Lacan says about the joke in "The
Function" (Ecrits, 60).
The liar paradox has been referred to by Aristotle in relation to arguments that must be solved by 'examining the conclusion in light of its contradictory.' The question whether the same man can say what is at the same time both true and false can be resolved by qualifying it with 'in some respects', that is by restoring the principle of non-contradiction (Sophistical, 180a25, 180b1-10). In contrast, the Freudian discovery
152 requires that the genuine speech analysts are supposed to uncover should obey laws other than those of discourse. Error is the place of truth, and it is not contradiction
(Lacan, SI, 265, 267). In "The Function" Lacan underlies the contribution of the analyst to the function of speech as the location of truth in analysis: 'Psychoanalytic experience has rediscovered in man the imperative of the Word as the law that has shaped him in its image. It exploits the poetic function of language to give his desire its symbolic mediation' (Ecrits, 41, 44, 103).
Speech as the gift of language acquires a different function with respect to truth
– it does not record, it constructs. The hysteric's verbalization of an event is a putting into words which makes an ambiguous revelation of the past. It thus presents us with the birth of truth in speech, and 'brings us up against the reality of what is neither true nor false' (47-48). It is speech that introduces the dimension of truth to the hysteric's verbalization. The poetic function that gives desire its symbolic mediation is where the analyst's intervention echoes the truth of the subject in speech. By scanding (metrically scanning) the subject's speech with his response, by giving this speech dialectical punctuation, the analyst doubles the response already contained in true speech, a speech that constructs rather than records (93).
For psychoanalysis, truth is not an immanent content that is uncovered. Truth is something that irrupts in the register of error. In what the subject in analysis ambiguously constructs through speech, truth takes the form of a question that contains its response. However, lie is given a slightly different turn in psychoanalytic thought through the theorization of the subject in relation to the signifier. Lie is the inevitable locale of the subject as such, the subject being made uncertain 'because he is divided by the effects of language', Lacan says in his eleventh seminar. The subject is 'subject only from being subjected to the field of the Other'. The effects of language imply that
153 the subject finds his desire 'ever more divided, pulverized, in the circumscribable metonymy of speech' (188).
The division of the subject between the statement and the enunciation best articulates the subject's lying position with regard to what is intimately his (not) own.
In the analytic situation, this lying position is inverted by the analyst's response. The deceiving message of the subject receives its true signification through the analyst. The subject proceeding from the field of the Other can hence be approached only by the profound ambiguity of any assertion on his part. It is by a certain lie that a dimension of truth is set up (138, 140). The subject cannot but lie under the alienating effect of the signifier. But his lie is posited in the dimension of truth, the latter constituted as mediated by the Other, never transparent unto itself. This is no longer merely the register of error underlying desire, but the subjection of truth to the profound inevitability of the passage of the drive, of sexuality and satisfaction, through the defiles of the signifier.
In Lacan's later seminar The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst, the function of speech with respect to the lying truth inherent in the generation of the subject as signifier is further elaborated, pointing to yet another shift in the dialectics of truth and lie. The subject of the drive now replaces the subject of desire in Lacan's conception of the subject, and is dubbed the speaking being. The term is paradoxical, for 'it is from being speaking that [the subject] comes to being'. The subject supports its existence by way of the symbol and is hence a 'being without being'. Unlike the subject of desire, however, the speaking being does not exactly lie; it is ignorant, it does not know
(2.12.71, p. 4, 3.3.72, p. 17).
In the 'enjoying substance' which is the speaking being, speech is conditioned by the impossibility to define what is involved in being a man or a woman, and by the
154 incommensurability of sexual enjoyment with sexuality as aimed at copulation and reproduction. If speech as specifying the speaking being defines the place of truth, it does so in conjunction with castration. Psychoanalysis means that 'it is speech that assures the dimension of truth' to the relation of any proposition to enjoyment, and yet it remains no less assured that speech 'cannot in any way say it completely. It can only
… half-say this relation, and forge a semblance of it … the semblance of what is called a man or a woman' (4.11.71, pp. 7, 10, 2.12.71, pp. 8-9).
Castration has a double function. It makes the truth of sexual enjoyment opaque or not given to knowledge, thereby distinguishing human sexuality from the sexual polarity of animals. At the same time, it secures man's belief in enjoyment as aspect of copulation (4.11.71, p. 8, 2.12.71, p. 12, 3.2.72, pp. 10, 20). The lie here is given the dimension of semblance. This new conceptualization of the lie has consequences for the conceptualization of the symptom. The symptom's truth value is established in the form of a 'refusal of the aforesaid truth value'. The symptom as articulated in speech makes truth inseparable from other functions of the word, since the function of truth is not something that can be isolated. Through the symptom, being emerges with no special tropism in relation to truth (2.12.71, p. 4).
Truth, Lacan insists after Aristotle of the Sophistical (178b30, 179a10), does not denote a substance or a positive content. Hence the distinction between truth and semblance has nothing to do with the opposition between the true and the false: 'a semblance is a semblance of truth precisely'. Truth and semblance are one (The
Knowledge, 2.12.71, pp. 4-5). The semblance forged by speech regarding sexual difference, or the sexual relation,50 which is impossible to write by way of representing
50 Sexual enjoyment is not the same as sexual ratio or relation. However, to the extent that the sexual ratio concerns both the real of being a man or a woman and what fails in man-woman relationship, modes of jouissance stand in correlation to the sexual ratio as not given to inscription (see for example SXX, 7-8, 63).
155 its truth, is the manner in which castration inaugurates the 'dark passage' of no- knowledge about the reality of sex. The phallic function, however, finds its support as a function of truth in the necessity of there existing at least One who says no to the phallic function and the castration it implies. We recognize here the primal father in possession of all the females and hence of unlimited enjoyment, constructed by Freud in his Totem and Taboo (1913). In the seminar The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst the primal father is the One who marks the phallic function by his exclusion from it.
This 'saying not' of the primal father to the phallic function is connected with female sexuality, to the extent that for woman castration is operative only partially, 'not all'.
Castration means 'leaving to desire'; starting from the woman, Lacan says, 'it is absolutely necessary that there should be one who has nothing left to desire' (1.6.72, pp. 15, 21, 24).
In other words, for the phallic function to start taking effect, the function of truth represented by the One that is an exception to the phallic function, that is the primal father, posits as necessity the existence of total satisfaction, of unhindered jouissance. Nothing could act as a function of truth were there not such One. It may be said in this respect, that the function of truth closes a circle with respect to desire. The shadows of death that accompany the subject's introduction into language, his historicity, the negativizing effect of the symbol, reveal in speech a center that is outside of language. This is what makes the field of language a field of desire ("The
Function", Ecrits, 100-102). Inversely, the necessity of there being One who has nothing left to desire, one who says no to castration and the phallic function, brings to bear in speech a center that is outside of language. However, it is female sexuality that shifts again the notion of truth as measured by semblance. Female sexuality, introducing a notion of sexual or body jouissance that is other than phallic and as such
156 is of the nature of the sign rather than the signifier, brings us closer to the casting of truth in terms of the real.
Woman is doubled with respect to the phallic function. She absents herself, forming a jouicentre vis-à-vis the Other as the locus of the truth, positing herself 'quite elsewhere' (3.3.72, p. 16, 1.6.72, p. 22). Woman is not-whole in situating herself in the phallic function. Being not-whole 'she has a supplementary jouissance compared to what the phallic function designates by way of jouissance', Lacan says in Encore (71-
72). This supplementary jouissance is hypothetical: it is false that there is any other than phallic jouissance, but 'that doesn't stop what follows from being true' (60). Being not-whole, of a jouissance that 'doesn't exist and doesn't signify anything', woman is not unifying, she is particular and of indeterminate existence (72, 103).
Seminar XX suggests that the status of woman as not wholly situated in the phallic function posits feminine jouissance in a two-fold relation to the truth. As not- whole, woman is barred; woman knows nothing of her Other jouissance and cannot say anything about it. As such, she is forever Other, the Other in the most radical sense.
But in terms of existence, her being not-whole implies indeterminacy between existence and non-existence (in the phallic function), 'between an existence that is found by affirming itself, and woman insofar as she is not found'. In terms of existence,
Lacan seems to imply here as in the seminar on the knowledge of the psychoanalyst, woman as barred and radically the Other, is 'eccentric to the truth' (75, 81, 103).
However, Lacan also says that 'there is only one way to be able to write
Woman without having to bar it – that is at the level at which woman is truth' (103).
Previously Lacan indicates that the true nature of the object a as semblance is that it fails to sustain itself in approaching the real. Before semblance can be an appeal to the truth, 'a strict distinction must be made between the imaginary and the real' (95). Vis-à-
157 vis the real, Woman as not barred is truth. Woman epitomizes the signifier becoming a sign in the co-habitation of pleasure and language in the unconscious. The signifier turned a sign constitutes what Lacan calls 'lalangue': the speaking subject's language of jouissance, a language whose function is neither communication nor dialogue (138,
142). In other words, as truth, Woman is what the sign means for being as jouissance of the body. This is a truth veering from semblance and the signifier towards the impasse of the real, an impasse which is also infinity. It is truth as half-telling, not avowed (93, 103). This is also where the sexual relation retains its impossibility.
Female sexuality brings truth to the real through jouissance conceived as what is closest in nature to the letter – the sign.
For psychoanalysis, the working assumption is that truth voices itself even if half-saying. In terms of Stoic logic, the material implication of woman's Other jouissance means that the true is deduced from the false, which is valid ("The
Function", Ecrits, 50, SXX, 60). The evolvement of Lacan's conception of truth points at the indispensable relation of truth to lie, without shifting the assumption that there is no false without the true.
Fallacy in Congreve's play suggests a different manner of positing the function of truth. By harnessing truth to the function of lie, Maskwell's strategy calls forth the possibility of truth entailing the false, so that we no longer have the logical possibility of 'no true without the false', nor for that matter the psychoanalytic one of 'no false without the true'. Maskwell's logic presents a more radical version of truth/false entailment by denying argumentation its professed function of discerning truth from falsehood, to follow Blundeville's definition (115). Argumentation ceases to be a means of supporting truth as measure for the judgment of lie, but conversely, becomes a way of eradicating any distinguishing element of either truth or lie.
158
If castration implies the inauguration of semblance in order to give the sexual relation a chance, fallacy in the form of Maskwell's 'no mask' offers but a failing semblance to do the phallic function justice. Instead, it points to what the phallic function sustains as a possibility of reaching beyond it. This is also the contribution of fallacy in Congreve's play to the psychoanalytic conception of the status of rhetoric in unconscious thinking. Fallacy becomes a violation of reasoning that establishes its rhetorical function as a surplus quality that averts the signifier by refusing to distinguish truth from lie. Paradoxically, fallacy thus complies with the function of truth admitted by the 'not-whole' of Other-than-phallic jouissance. Other than phallic, fallacy's lying function becomes so indistinct, so inaudible, that only a prominent sound pattern finally marks it: 'if they will not hear the Serpent's hiss, they must be stung into experience', Maskwell hisses about his victims (V.xi.3-5, my emphasis).
G. Intrigue versus Fallacy – The Over-determination of Reasoning
Fallacy as the intriguer's tool of reasoning does not postulate a harmony between plot and style. Rather, fallacious reasoning on the level of style enables us to establish the distinctness of intrigue on the level of plot. The structure of intrigue is revealed in relation to fallacy. It does so in line with the following question: is logic the same as the symbolic? Is reasoning the same as the signifier? A consideration of the status of intrigue on the play's level of plot begins with the differentiation of the function of the signifier from that of reasoning.
Lacan tellingly claims that the conceptual joke is subsumed under the 'the signifying articulation' (SV, 27.11.57, p. 5). This claim is in line with Aristotle's assertion that there is no real distinction between the source of fallacies dependent on thought and that of fallacies dependent on words. And yet Congreve's play suggests
159 that fallacy, though used by the villain and commensurable with the appearance of truth that marks his specific strategy of deception, is not the same as the function of intrigue. The relation between the play's intrigue, intrigue as such, and the intriguer's mode of argumentation, is significant in view of this difference. Fallacy in the play defies both signification and truth. Fallacy's affectedness evokes signifierness, the inevitable failure of signification marked by displacement and substitution. By its structure fallacy evidences the implication of the desiring subject in the domain of language, the gaping of his desire and sexuality in the signifying articulation. At the same time, we have seen that fallacy marks its deceptiveness with regard to the alienating function of the signifier by way of jouissance which does not submit truth, the truth of the subject's sexual enjoyment, to the signifying function.
Intrigue at the level of plot functions differently from fallacy; it introduces a different moment in unconscious thinking. The ramified structure of the play's intrigue is vital here. The play features a major intrigue, played out by the figure of the villain
(Maskwell), and two paralleling love intrigues. The three intrigues are initiated by
Mellefont, the hero of the play, and are causally connected. Mellefont, as his friend
Careless comments, has 'manned his works', assigning his three male friends (Careless,
Brisk and Maskwell) the task of fending off his aunt's revengeful 'ill offices' following his rejection of her sexual advances towards himself. Maskwell is employed by
Mellefont to 'watch his aunt narrowly', and give him notice 'upon any suspicion', disregarding Careless's demur that Maskwell is the 'weakest Guard, where the Enemy is strongest' (I.iii.16-19, 28-29, 83-85, 91-92). However, as the hero is the initiator of the various intrigues, his unsettling dupability by the villain who was to be his instrument, is made more excusable. The overall effect of Mellefont's plans is that of a multiple intrigue and intriguers. In fact, excepting the two betrayed husbands of the
161 minor love intrigues, the intrigues concocted by Mellefont to be executed by his friends Careless and Brisk (I.iii.69-82), every one has his hand dabbled in intrigue, as suggested by Lord Touchwood's remark: 'For once, I'll add my Plot too' (V.xix.23-
24).51
Lord Touchwood's remark also introduces the status of intrigue in the world of the play as coveted for itself. With everyone being intriguers, the limit point of the action is played out by the dupe of one of the love intrigues who slumbers in Lady
Touchwood's 'most inviting Couch' at the same time that he knows nothing of his wife's flirtations (Lord Froth's 'By Heav'ns I have slept an Age' – V.xx.1-5). By thus marking the limit of intrigue, its liability to die to life, the ignorant dupe also casts in relief the function of intrigue as a signifier in motion. Intrigue becomes a pure signifier momentarily detached from the signifying order, thus calling in question the function of intrigue as a 'psychological game' based on intersubjectivity.
It is commonly argued that the intriguer calculates his moves 'through knowledge of human nature'; the Hobbesian rake exercises his will through 'knowledge of self and others' (McCarthy, 410, Traugott, 383). The relation between fallacy, in its function as sophism, and the signifier is pertinent at this point. Maskwell's strategy of deceiving others on account of each man being secretly given to fraud and baseness indeed suggests the Hobbesian rake's knowledge of human nature (II.viii.32-35). And
51 Anthony Gosse has insisted that Congreve's play is an ironic dark comedy 'unified in tone', and that Maskwell's double-dealing by means of truth-telling 'denotes the basic metaphor of the action': Maskwell's deliberate deception 'is paralleled by the self-deception of both serious and comic characters who, ironically, are constantly demanding 'Mathematical Proof' and 'Demonstration' (278, 280). Gosse is intent on showing how Congreve achieves his general goal of subordinating villainy to a comic action, both by separating his villain plots from his comic and by de-emphasizing the basically villainous characterization of Maskwell and of Lady Touchwood (281). My concern is the play's manner of structuring intrigue rather than its manner of preventing the forceful note of villainy from destroying the comic tone (282). Gosse's direction is nevertheless suitable for the purposes of this study, since his insistence on the play's structural unity calls for seeking elsewhere what critics saw as its 'irreconcilable elements', particularly those created by the villains and the verbal ploys of the comic plots (274, 280). I suggest that we may seek the play's irreconcilable elements at the level of action in the sense of the obstacles that thwart the rake's knowledge of self and other, the obstacles by whose means the action translates intrigue as potentially intersubjective into the laws governing the symbolic. This translation, I attempt to show, is manifested in the relation of intrigue to fallacy.
161 the manner in which Maskwell's deceiving sentence openings are voluntarily completed by Mellefont, to the latter's own delight and detriment, renders the interaction of villain and dupe a game of wit played in partnership, which the villain notices: 'You are merry, Sir, but I shall probe your Constitution' (III.iv.31-32).52
But while at the level of action the strategy of telling the truth in order to deceive presents the interplay between a villain who knows and is continually ahead of his unknowing dupe, there is a question of whether intrigue is indeed as simple as that.
Lacan seems to indicate in this respect that where (imaginary) intersubjectivity is involved, the knowledge on the part of the intriguer is bound to come against the obstacle of the signifier. What is at stake in the dual reflective relation, in the subject's assuming the thought of an other, is the insistence of a signifier as essentially displaced, to the effect of indicating that 'signification as such is never where one thinks it must be' (Lacan, SII, 187, 194). An idea of the blindness investing the intersubjective relation to indicate the inevitable subordination of intersubjectivity to the symbolic order which is constitutive of the subject emerges in Lacan's treatment of the game of even and odd in his second seminar and the precipitation of subjectivity in his article "Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty". In both the game of 'odd or even' which Lacan treats in connection with Poe's "The Purloined Letter", and in his "Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty", the subject is made to anticipate the mode of thinking of an other in order to beat the latter.
In "The Logical Time" a disk of unknown color attached to the subject's back, a phenomenalised S1, is to be divined through a temporalized sophism which must take into account moments of suspended action on the part of the others. At a certain point, however, the subject's certainty as to the color of the disk he is unable to see
52 One sample of the repartee transpiring between Maskewell and Mellefont, which leads Maskwell to this remark, is the following: Maskwell: Listen and be dumb, we have been bargaining about the Rate of your Ruin --- Mellefont: Like any two Guardians to an Orphan Heiress --- Well (III.iv.22-24).
162 anticipates his verified knowledge of this color. In fact, the subject is still in error
(convinced that he is black) when asserting his certainty that he is white (Ecrits, 170).
Something similar occurs in the game of 'odd or even'. The player cannot sufficiently count on a mere assessment of the opponent's thinking precisely because it is no game of pure chance.
In the game of even and odd, Lacan explains in his second seminar, 'nothing happens by chance and also … something might come out of it which might pertain to chance at its purest' (295). This duality has to do with the persistence of a signifier, of a symbol that 'from the start, and independently of any attachment to some supposedly causal bond … already plays, and produces by itself, its necessities, its structures, its organizations'. That there is no mere element of chance even in a random signifier has to do with the constructed symbol being 'acephallic', producing effects with no content to support its causality. (193, 185-186). Considered in the light of Lacan's "Logical
Time" and the game of 'odd or even', our intriguer's predictions concerning his victim's thinking hence become dependent on a dialectical movement of deciphering while constructing the syntactic laws of retroaction, so as to come to grips with an over- determined signifier subjected to changes. A dual reflective relation which presupposes the intriguer's ability to assess his victim's capacity for dissimulation is precluded by such laws of retroaction manifesting the over-determination, the representation many times over, of the signifier as dislocated.
In "The Logical Time" Lacan proposes two different temporal organizations marking the advent of the subject: one is protracted, necessarily suspended, the time constituting a sophism that rests on a logical error. The other is contracted, constituting the subject's desubjectification, his becoming one with the sign that represents him.
Contracted temporality is a time in which 'the moment of concluding the time for
163 comprehending' lasts but 'the instant of the glance' (Ecrits, 163, 173). The sophism instituting the subject's emergence as logically, rather than existentially, set apart from an other, appears to couch an instant of certainty that shows the disk to be engendered by the sophism's erroneous precipitation of certainty. The force of doubt and the suspended motion it entails makes the moment of concluding possible for the subject.
At the same time, the protracted time of the sophism indicates the retroactive position of the disk (sign, as Lacan refers to it in SII, 181) with respect to the sophism. Hence the truth of the sophism is presumed, aimed at. Truth manifests itself 'as preceding error and advancing solely in the act that engenders its certainty' (Ecrits, 171, 173).
It is noteworthy however that the sophism supporting the temporal tension which determines the emergence of the subject is a sophism that rests on assertion, on the way the subject formulates his logical assumptions regarding the others. The subject inserts in his assertions what he does not see (black disks), as well as suspension that goes counter to the structure of classical syllogizing, where everything can be seen 'all at once' (166). The subject's assertions thus enable him to 'decant' his subjectified I into the desubjectified 'all' or 'one' that finally verify his coming into being 'a man' (172-174). This 'descent' of the subject into a desubjectified assertion that is marked by the fulguration time of the moment of concluding the time for comprehending suggests that the temporalization of sophistical reasoning concerns its coming into play as signifier (166). And yet, Lacan suggests that sophistical reasoning and the signifier are not the same. Rather, the signifier has a way of interfering with the logical, of subjectifying the logical by its interruption. Sophism would not be what it is for the coming into being of the subject, were it not for the subject's assertion, for the formulation of its certainty in terms of an I.
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The complexity of the relationship between the signifier and faulty logic is suggested by Freud's analysis of the hysterical symptom. In the hysterical proton pseudos rational thoughts have been submitted to abnormal treatment (Interpretation of
Dreams, VII, SE 5, 597) in which 'a repression accompanied by symbol-formation has taken place.' For instance, the false connections that thought operating consciously has made in the material populating Emma's compulsion to avoid being alone in a store, form a symptom that is at base 'quite rationally constructed, so that the symbol (that represents the whole complex – the idea of 'clothes') plays no part in it', Freud indicates in the Project (SE 1, 355). While claiming this to be a peculiarity of the case, Freud seems to suggest that the symbol that enters consciousness is an effect of repression, and is not of the same order as the symptom which is a construction whose basic rationality has been subjected to distortion that leaves a significant portion of it unconscious (355).53
Can we say that in the case of symptom formation as well there are two different psychical times, one contracted in the form of symbol formation marking repression, another protracted in the form of faulty reasoning that makes up the process of symptom formation? If so, are these two times connected in such a way as to suggest that the symbol, the one idea 'clothes' that enters consciousness, is the locus marking the temporalization of the reasoning behind the symptom? The symbol makes the symptom an 'interpolated' pathological process through the displacement of
'assault', which does not enter consciousness, and of sexual release as the assault's traumatic expression (356).
53 Note in this respect Freud's distinction between repression and symptom formation in "Repression" – the mechanism of forming symptoms is not the same as that of repression although symptoms are indications of a return of the repressed (SE 14, 154). Symptom is a compromise formation – it involves negotiating between two parties, the repressing ego and unconscious modes of satisfaction.
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Through displacement symbol formation marks the interference of sexuality in reasoning. The proton pseudos as exemplified by Emma's case thus relates the temporal organization of symbol formation and reasoning to the structure of trauma, where 'a memory is repressed which has only become a trauma by deferred action', as
Freud explains (356). The relation between the symptom and its structural determination is further elaborated in Studies on Hysteria, where Freud points out the difference between the chronological and thematic modes of arrangement of mnemic material in hysteria, and the arrangement of such material according to thought content linked by a logical thread. While the chronological and thematic arrangements are morphological in character and may be represented by a continuous line, curved or straight, the logical thread, being of a dynamic character, is marked by irregularity: 'the course of the logical chain would have to be indicated by a broken line which would pass along the most roundabout paths from the surface to the deepest layers and back'.
The logical chain is not only a zig-zag, twisted line, but a converging line, including nodal points whose threads 'debouch into the nucleus' of memories or trains of thoughts. This structure of the logical chain of mnemic material in relation to the nucleus towards which it is arranged points to the fact that 'a symptom is determined in several ways, is 'overdetermined'' (SE 2, 288-290).
It thus may be again suggested that intrigue functions as a signifier in motion.
The orchestration of intrigue forces us to consider what it bears of its manipulators' unconscious desire at the same time that it affects each and every one of them. Intrigue thus forms a nodal point in the twisted line of fallacious reasoning. The relation of intrigue to fallacy is similar to that of repression to symptom formation as articulated by Freud and in his own manner by Lacan. The symbolic manifestation of intrigue means its conception in terms of the signifier as repetition, an insistence that locates
166 the subject of the unconscious eccentrically, as ex-sistence, to follow Lacan's seminar on the "Purloined Letter" (Ecrits, 6). Sophistical reasoning contrarily translates displacement into suspended motion marked by hesitation, error and anxiety that accompany the advent of the subject. Here the ex-sistence of the subject concerns the assertion of an I that undergoes a desubjectification on its road to verified certainty.
Intrigue in Congreve's play would thus mark repression in terms of an over- determined, insistent signifier that has bearing on protracted sophism. Intrigue is the manner of asserting and enforcing the alienating function of the signifier as a psychical necessity of the playwright behind it. Were he to be the arch-intriguer concerned with
(his own) human nature, like a Dupin 'constantly speculating about the symbol' (SII,
202), he would find his reasoning punctuated, over-determined by a nodal point that remains resistant to any interpretation or assessment: that of intrigue itself. In this way the symbolic structure of the play's action extracts scheming from imaginary intersubjectivity. It brings to bear an ex-sistence that can only support subjectivity as the symbol emerging into the real with a wager, bearing witness to some kind of absence, in Lacan's words (SII, 192).54 At the same time, the inevitable opacity introduced by intrigue as the nodal point of both the action and the playwright's psyche is also the point where the levels of plot and elocution converge to institute a hysterical restitution of castration and symptom formation.
54 In his reading of The Double Dealer, Van Voris, in line with his general view of Congreve's plays and life as staging 'an artificially purified 'state' that is marvelous and titillating and a lie, and a temporal world' waiting just outside, attempting to destroy the image (27), perceives Maskwell as displacing festive time (the party with which the play opens) with natural time (62). Yet by blurring the distinctions between art and nature, 'Maskwell has brought too much chaotic nature into the play and into the aristocracy defined by the theatrical illusions as an artifice', forgetting that to enter the closed society 'he must enter the illusion that he has ruined'. The attempt of Lord Touchwood in the end is to stop this revolution against the artificial (73, 75). Lacan's conception of the logical time of the leap into subjectivity, and Freud's theorization of the relation of symptom generation to the logical chain of mnemic material, allows a different perception of time as functioning in the play. Rather than 'natural time' I suggest thinking of the play's design as staging the logical time of the advent of the subject, specifically the neurotic one. The logical time constructed by the relation of intrigue and sophism is semi-tragically completed by the poetic time that is directly related to the translation of the perverse into the neurotic, concluded by the intriguer's freedom to die and to desire.
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H. Alliteration - Repetition and the Unconscious Repressed
Congreve's play, we notice, raises questions about the soundness of reasoning even as a psychical structure, even within what psychoanalysis considers to be of the symbolic, the language-like structure of the unconscious. The play questions the ability of reasoning to partake of the alienating function of the signifier in the constitution of the subject. Fallacy in the play is imbued with surplus jouissance that bespeaks transgression, countering the playwright's insistence on the play's structural regularity or architecture (in the Epistle Dedicatory, pp.113-114). In a way, fallacy presents one specific lure the symbolic order holds in store. The symbolic emerges as the domain the play in its entirety explores and constructs. In the vicissitudes of the symbolic the play anchors the workings of intrigue as pertaining to the workings of the unconscious.
In "Psychopathic Characters on the Stage" Freud points out the relation of psychopathological drama to the neurotic's struggle with repression: 'in neurotics the repression is on the brinks of failing; it is unstable and needs a constant renewal of expenditure' (SE 7, 309). This struggle is not the subject matter of Congreve's play, but its structure. The appeal of the symbolic concerns this structure in the effort to install, rather than liberate, repression, so as to integrate the allure of perversion into the play's architecture. The 'neurotic' structuration of intrigue thus becomes a necessity, part of the play's regularity, and for our purposes, part of its viability for psychoanalytic concern with the unconscious.
One attempt to counter the waywardness of logic is the construction of the plot around the irreconcilability of an intriguer made a dupe. Intrigue emerges as an itinerant signifier by the possibility of dupability, with which both the hero, who is the official possessor of intrigue, and his double-dealing agent are affected. Mellefont as the one initially in possession of intrigue is as it were castrated by it, its sense
168 possessing him. His unsuspecting credulity, even the feminine innuendos of his name
(mellifluous, mellow), make him the lacking center of the intrigue, the indication that, to use Lacan's words in the "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'", 'the unconscious means that man is inhabited by the signifier' (Ecrits, 25). If paradoxically in the effeminized position of the one dispossessed by intrigue Mellefont supports its founding outside the law, namely in what returns as villainy from Maskwell, the latter's own parenting of treachery that is deadly to himself, feminized in the metaphor of treachery lying in the Womb (in the closing scene of the play), eventually reasserts subjection to the law. The castrating effect of intrigue suggested by dupability unlatches the signifier from its function as plot fomenting, making it a pure signifier that enables speculation about the nature of the symbol.
Furthermore, intrigue detaches the play's irreconcilabilities from specific content and causality.55 The signifier is thus instituted to assert its double status of implicating its manipulators on the one hand and being implicated on the other hand, invested as it is from the point of view of desire. Coveted and utilized by the characters for its own pleasurable sake, not in relation to the hero's master-plan, intrigue becomes a locus of desire marked by an 'unknowing' that finds its mirror image in the slumbering duped husband Lord Froth: 'By Heav'ns I have slept an Age,/ …my Lady's is the most inviting Couch; and a Slumber there, is the prettiest Amusement! But where is all the Company?' (V.xx.1-5). The idea of a slumbering duped husband is suggestive at this point in the play as metaphorically blotting out all intrigue; this
55 Corman notes that the particular way in which the villains are handled in the play helps insure the comedy inasmuch as 'their goals are hardly the most serious in nature'. He further contends that Congreve diminishes the power of his villains to threaten the comedy 'by transferring the focus from the objects of their desire to the desire itself.' Corman means by that Maskwell's 'extraordinary delight in villainy for its own sake' which establishes him not as the "clear-cut" villain of Restoration comedy, but rather as the rogue-hero of a punitive comedy, which is what keeps him a comic character' (362). I suggest that the inconsequential nature of the intrigue implied by Corman, points to the function of intrigue as the locus of the signifier, a signifier in sufferance, whose circuitous path is marked by the effect it has on the characters, and conversely, its overdetermination as institutive of their desire.
169 metaphorical substitution of slumbering for an intense intrigue-plot institutes repression by its very substitutive function. Unconscious desire as repressed is further established as 'impossible to express', to follow Lacan in his first seminar. Repression finds its means of expression in the phonematics of the play's style as apparently disinvested of desire (245).
The unary signifier, Congreve's 'intrigue' in this case, with which the subject emerges in the field of the Other of drama, is thus not where the play's exploration of the symbolic ends. Besides deceptive logic whose strengths imply its failings, the play's style foregrounds alliteration for a stylistic dominant. Alliteration in the play may be described as taking two forms. It bifurcates into the razor-like effect of the cutting edge of the symbolic on the one hand, and into the foam-like effect of enervating repetition. A culminating instance of the first alliterative effect is presented when Maskwell's plot is at its height, in his chain of s wording, which is carried over to his interchange with Mr. Saygrace, the chaplain. Maskwell: 'qui vult decipi decipiatur
– if they will not hear the Serpent's Hiss, they must be stung into Experience … But first I must instruct my little Levite … he promised me to be within at this Hour, - Mr.
Saygrace, Mr. Saygrace.' Mr. Saygrace: 'Sweet Sir…'(V.xi.1-xii.1). The second alliterative effect in the play is suggested by the more prominent alliterative sound units collapsing into a word whose coherent lexical denotation is obscured by its nonsensical sound: The Sillabub, Lady Froth's title for her Heroick Poem, whose subject, Lady Froth says, is her Lord's Love to her. Sillabub (a dish made of cream or milk) goes together well with 'my Lord's Title Froth', Brisk infers, a title Lady Froth has changed in the poem into Spumoso (spume – froth, foam). As for what she calls herself in the poem, Brisk, as it were succumbing to the inevitable sound pattern of the title and its controlling image, suggests it must be Lactilla (of milk). Lady Froth's
171 preference, however, has been her own name, Biddy (chicken), a choice which Brisk finds attesting to Lady Froth's 'art of surprizing'. Yet, though unexpectedly breaking the alliterative and imagistic drift of the title, this choice of a name inadvertently maintains the silliness of the poem's content while staying within the series of consonants which form Sillabub (S, L, B) (II.ii.65-75).
In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud discusses dreams where under the pressure of censorship associations are interrelated in a superficial manner by assonance, for example, so that the concatenation of events is determined merely by a similarity in the sound of words (SE Vol. 4, 59, Vol. 5, 531). Somewhat similarly,
Lady Froth and Brisk, the couple of one of the play's love intrigues, a couple engaged in 'making couplets' (V.xx.25), manufacture words that not only connect by the similarity of sound, but also collect unto themselves the alliterative cadence of the play as a whole.
Alliteration is a figure of repetition. One variety of such repetition, discussed by Peacham, is paroemion, the same letter repeated 'in the beginning of diverse words'
(41). The ornamental value of alliteration lies in its smooth passage through the lips, requiring no 'exchange of ministry and office in the lippes, teeth or palate,' as
Puttenham points out (255). Puttenham quite literally makes alliteration (or iteration) an ornament of oral sensuality whose pleasurable effect stems from its 'foamy' non- alteration. Alliteration is a figure of harmony by virtue of repetition, regardless of the harshness of the sound (15). With alliteration the lure of the symbolic is situated in the materiality of the letter. The letters are the material substance of the word; they are organ-related. This kind of materiality takes us to Lacan's conception of the written in
Encore, where he speaks of the written in terms of the signifier stuffing the signified.
The written implies that the signifier is not subjected to the linguistic separation of
171 signifier-signified, but on the contrary, affords no such readability, enforcing 'reading awry, or no reading at all' (SXX, 37).
What the written introduces into the signifier as functioning for the analyst is oral/aural materiality that has nothing to do with the connotation of the signifier (36).
By contrast, in Congreve's play, the real as the lure of the symbolic persists in sense making; connotation does not cease to play its role. The connection between the words, though clearly subordinated to their sound patterns, retains associative links that flagrantly form semantic clusters, unlike, for example, the associative linking of words by assonance in the dreams referred to by Freud (SE 5, 531).
Alliteration as indexing the real of signification foregrounds the introduction of the bar of the written, of the non-readable, into the dimension of the signifier. But that is not all. Repetition as such has its significance, beginning with Freud's attribution of the compulsion to repeat to the unconscious repressed in "Beyond the Pleasure
Principle". Repetition hence marks for us the relation of repression to the drives.
Repression forms the obstruction to complete satisfaction of the drive, at the same time that the repressed drive 'never ceases to strive for complete satisfaction, which would consist in the repetition of a primary experience of satisfaction'. The obstruction produced by repression in a way ensures the 'difference in amount between the pleasure demanded and that which is actually achieved' which provides the driving force of the drive. This obstruction to satisfaction is indicative of the significance of repression to the efforts of Eros to provide substitution to the unattainable state of perfection implied by the complete satisfaction of the drive (SE 18, 20, 42-43).
However, the compulsion to repeat as economized by repression also institutes the instinctual nucleus of mythical satisfaction and its relation to the inorganic state towards which all drives tend; Freud identifies in the compulsion to repeat the
172 tendency of all drives 'towards the restoration of an earlier state of things' (37). This
'seeking to restore an earlier state of things' that is a universal characteristic of drives, and accounts for the fact that so many processes take place in mental life
'independently of the pleasure principle', is explained by Freud in terms of the fusion of the drives of self preservation and the sexual drives into the death drive (62, 39-41).
While maintaining the dualism of life drives and death drives, Freud removes the opposition between ego drives and sexual drives. Both groups are now subsumed by the narcissistic direction of the drives in primary masochism, that is, by erotogenic masochism which Freud in "The Economic Problem of Masochism" calls 'the taming of the death instinct by the libido'. Primal masochism, where the libido makes the self its object, is hence 'the evidence of, and a remainder from, the phase in development in which the coalescence … between the death instinct and Eros took place' (SE 19, 164,
"Beyond the Pleasure Principle", SE 18, 51-55).
A tendency towards an earlier state of things implied by the death drive is introduced into the stylistics of Congreve's play by the Froths. Their name is indicative of a specific connotation added to alliteration. On the imaginary level of plot, Lord
Froth is the one that sleeps, has no knowledge of his wife's love intrigue, whereas Lady
Froth becomes a mouthpiece of poesis, or poetry making. She places poesis within the notion of foam, of bubbles, worthless matter, idle talk, all of which make up the dictionary/lexical senses of the word 'froth'. If repetition can also be a source of pleasure, as Freud indicates in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle", it might be said that the association of poesis with foam, and of Froth with sleep, conflates repetition as pleasure with the languor and repose of the inanimate state of mythic satisfaction, that is, with the death drive (SE 18, 20, 35-36, 38-39).
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Repetition produced by alliteration maintains at its horizon a beyond of signification. Following Lacan, we read signification as the binding of instinctual excitation reaching the primary process, thereby subordinating it to the dominion of the pleasure principle (SE 18, 34-35). Repetition in the play at the same time institutes the alienation that predominates in the relationship of the subject to the signifier, 'in so far as he is called on to constitute himself in the signifier', in the words of Lacan's fifth seminar. Repetition is the indication of refusal, of the subject refusing to be an element of the chain. But it is a refusal that merely perpetuates the subject's link to the signifying chain. Through the eternal necessity of repeating the same refusal Freud shows us 'the final role of everything which from the unconscious manifests itself in the form of symptomatic reproduction' (12.2.58, p. 15).
In Seminar XI Lacan conceptualizes the opposition of the subject to the signifier that is his first mark by the repetitive essence of the fort-da game of Freud's grandchild. Alienation here is accomplished through the object of the child's game (62,
239). In his earlier seminar, Lacan brings in symptomatic reproduction as a manifestation of the same refusal. Alliteration in Congreve's play posits a mechanism of repetition that converges with word production in a manner of such refusal of the symbolic as suggested by symptomatic reproduction. This is a refusal of the symbolic as failing, as fallacy. Alliteration constitutes a refusal which is at the same time a maneuver towards the perpetuation of the symbolic by the measure and means of subscription to the unconscious, through repression and the aphanisis such subscription entails.
Alliteration thus tallies with Lacan's perception of repetition in terms of thought that, qua thought, always avoids the same thing, the real figuring as that limit.
In traumatic neurosis, the resistance of the subject, manifested in this repeated
174 avoidance, also indicates the psyche to be divided, unsynthesized with respect to trauma. Something of the subject becomes detached in the very symbolic world that he is engaged in integrating, but which remains there, 'spoken'. The unsynthesized nucleus that the mechanism of repetition retroactively produces as a 'missed encounter' and a failure to designate, is the original nucleus with which repression begins (SI, 191, SXI,
49-50, 61).
A nucleus, one might say, that in Freud's "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" is of the nature of a 'before the pleasure principle', pertaining to the 'instinctual' as traumatic
(unbound) and as inherently urging the earlier state of inorganic life (SE 18, 33-36).
Put otherwise, alliterative repetition inscribes the play with repression in its double function, under the pleasure principle and beyond it. Alliteration inscribes the play with repression which functions as an obstruction to satisfaction, and is hence the moving force of the drive, and repression as reconstructing a traumatic, unsynthesized, instinctual nucleus. Alliteration then, at once partakes of the beyond of signification and 'binds'. It subordinates a 'traumatic', unsynthesized, fallacy.
Alliteration in the play engenders what appears to be the play's version of an S1 in the word Sillabub, together with its multiple connotations. However, Lady Froth and her co-couplet maker Brisk drop into their conversation with Lord Froth a name that comes into existence only as being forgotten. Thus Lady Froth: 'Then that t'other great strapping Lady—I can't hit of her Name; …' Brisk: 'I know whom you mean—But duce take me I can't hit of her Name neither' (III.x.91-100). In the song/sonnet/satire
Brisk apparently made upon her, this exorbitantly painted woman of no name, who has a great beard bristling through her paint, is named 'Ancient Phillis', a suggestive inversion of 'Sill(y)(bub)' as a possible designation of a feminized 'phallus' (III.x.110).
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Beyond the dizzying play on names that introduce the foam-like effect of alliterative repetition, names that in their accumulative effect constitute the poetry- making and conversation of the play's delegate poets, there hovers the question of name as such. A proper name finally emerges as the ultimate missing core of any designative praxis, what makes writing a form of elision precisely. But within the general direction of the play's style, the missing name has the function of introducing the repressed. Freud has attributed ample significance to the status of proper name as forgotten in his thorough analysis of his forgetting of the name of the painter
Signorelli. Freud points out that the reason for the name being lost 'is not to be found in anything special about the name itself' (SE 6, 2), although the manner in which a replacement name came into his mind indicates otherwise. The mechanism of false recollection, the substitutive names that thrust themselves on him, enables him to construct the circumstances in which the name has been forgotten and to recognize a motive in the process. The forgetting of the name is explained as motivated by repression, the repressed element getting hold of the missing name by association and drawing it with itself into repression (SE 6, 2, 4, 6). Lacan's treatment of Freud's forgetting of a name takes its point of departure from the metonymic fragments into which the forgotten name decomposes, specifically the fragment Signor, and the effect of its substitution as repressed.
For Lacan of the seminar on the formations of the unconscious the forgotten name which like the joke is of the order of the message with respect to the code, marks the metonymic and metaphoric functions as constituting the mechanism of the signifier. The Signor cannot be recovered, Lacan indicates, because he is implicated. It is the signifier that has undergone repression and is retraced in the metonymic decomposition of the object (or the name). 'Herr', which is called up by Signor, is the
176 word that is underduckt, that falls into the 'nether regions' as something that 'needs only to be done once and for all' as absolute death, where being cannot descend. If Signor is implicated it is for this primally repressed 'Herr', this reprasentanz of death, Signor forming its derivative form of Verdrangung (repression) (SV, 13.11.57, pp. 13-16).
The 'Herr' thus may stand as Vorstellungsreprasentanz in relation to the repressed
Signor; the 'Herr' constitutes the effaced signifier under which the effect of the aphanisis of the subject is produced (SXI, 218, 236). Such a locus of primal repression, the point of attraction that makes all the other repressions possible, is Lady Froth and
Brisk's forgotten name. The forgotten name is a Vorstellungsreprasentanz for their idea of an S1, the Sillabub; it is a point of attraction that makes possible word production as a poesis of Fools.
I. The Hysteric's Secret
A signifier that is negated to the core, a representative of the potential, singular effects the subject produces of the signifier, emerges as a name that never existed and that other names retroact phonemically. Names become the quintessential component of the discourse and poesis that is the work of fools, names that center their sound and imagery on the mouth. Thus the Froths and Brisk make fun of a Lady Whifler (whiffle
– blow lightly) and a Lady Toothless who, always ready to laugh at the 'no jest' of her
'fulsamick Fop' of a nephew, sits 'with her Gums bare, and her Mouth open -- Like an
Oyster at low Ebb'. The recollection of the same lady's mouth when chewing and laughing brings out a 'Foh' from Lady and Lord Froth (III.x.64-86). Sapho or Saph is
Lady Froth's name for her daughter, and finally Phillis is the name taking the place of the name that 'can't be hit'. These names topologically point to a name that fails to emerge. They posit the dominant sound pattern of 'f', an oral labial that involves
177 intense passage of air through approximated lips. Yet they are all insufficient with respect to something else that is there. The lady whose name escapes the memory of
Lady Froth and Brisk has 'a great Beard' that bristles through her paints, making her look 'as if she were plaister'd with Lime and Hair'. This is a repetition of another 'great
Beard', that of another cheated husband, Sir Paul, who is forced into literally curbed sexuality by his wife, his hands and feet 'swath'd down' at night: 'and there he lies with a great Beard, like a Russian Bear upon a drift of Snow' (III.x.80-100, III.v.30-32).
What has fallen 'into the nether regions' and is repeatedly avoided, emerges in metonymic traces of sounds, of letters, indicating the Verdrangung undergone by certain words, their inability to re-enter the circuit of memory other than as invented and senseless configurations of orality.
Sound-image configurations forming a closure-opening of a mouth surrounded by a beard, become mnemic symbols of mnemic residues of affective experiences and acts of thought, such symbols constituting the hysterical symptom, to follow Freud's terminology (SE 2, 297). In his introductory lectures Freud explains that in hysteria there is a regression of the libido to the primary incestuous sexual objects rather than to an earlier stage of the sexual organization, as in obsessional neurosis. To offset such regression, 'the chief part in the mechanism of hysteria is played by repression'. The rejection of the genital organization on the part of the preconscious brings about a picture which has 'certain resemblances to the state of things before genital primacy'
(XXII, SE 16, 343-344).
This relation of regression to repression is maintained in the play by the level of imagery and sound. The imagery suggests a pre-genital fixation of oral nature, further indicated by Maskwell's sententious 'tis such a Pleasure, to angle for fair fac'd Fools!
Then the hungry Gudgeon Credulity, will bite at any thing' (II.viii.24-26). At the level
178 of sound a hysterical conversion of a repressed, non-found name, bears on the phonemic materiality of the text. As Freud indicates in "Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality", the symptomatology of hysteria means that 'repression affects most of all the actual genital zones and these transmit their susceptibility to other erotogenic zones
(normally neglected in adult life), which then behave exactly like genitals' (SE 7, 183-
184). To that extent, the imagery and texture of the play's poesis substitutes orality to curbed genitality.
In the same way that a proper name cannot be recalled, a genre fails to be designated, Brisk's poem described as not exactly a song but as 'a sort of an Epigram, or rather an Epigrammatick Sonnet' and then not as that either but as certainly 'Satire'
(III.x.106-109). The play as a whole similarly invites us to explore intrigue in terms of what the symbolic suspends between representation and its failure or its beyond. The play presents intrigue as structurally affiliated with unconscious thinking by relating intrigue at the level of plot and character to the foolery of poetry making. This relation forms a back-door for the re-entry of fallacy to represent the double-dealing of the signifier where the reality of the unconscious is concerned, a reality which Lacan recognizes as sexual (SXI, 150). Names, phonemes, nonsensically sounding words, fall short at one level of what they overtake at another. Such is Phillis of Brisk's poem, who
'maintaining young Graces by making her own Faces', keeps coming up against a 'great
Beard' that bristles through her exorbitant paint (III.x.98, 110) almost like an anxiety inducing object. The same curbed profusion marked by Brisk's imagery prevails in intrigue as enacting repression. Intrigue introduces the alienating function of the signifier by way of blurring distinctions, be they generic, stylistic or conceptual (lie- truth, mask-naked), so as to whiffle, to puff out, to tube and to sound libidinal energy that is orally fixated, alliteration constituting intrigue's means and locus of
179 symptomatic conversion. Sound patterns offset the blurring function of fallacy as they imagistically converge on a mouth that is toothless at the same time that a bearded fetish neighbors it, an embodiment of disavowed yet retained castration and impotent genital sexuality.
The case for intrigue, Congreve's play suggests, is to be made precisely with respect to its relation to the lures of the symbolic as bordering on perversion. The play's arch-intriguer introduces the dimension of perversion at the level of plot.
Maskwell is 'Wonder of all Falsehood', as Mellefont refers to him in the last scene.
Maskwell is finally dubbed Villain by Lord Touchwood, and in the latter's closing epithet is made both the Viper of Villainy and the Parent in whose Womb Viper-like base Treachery lies: Like Vipers in the Womb, base Treachery lies,
Still gnawing that, whence first it did arise;
No sooner born, but the Vile Parent dies (V.xxiv.5, 24-30).
The image is suggestive: the location of the viper in the womb, its birth deadly to the parent, the viper 'gnawing that, whence first it did arise', in addition to the endowment of the male intriguer with a womb, brings to mind the dual nature of the intriguer.
There emerges here a double function that is attributed to the object in the phantasmatic translation of the relation of the ego to the super ego. This relation is elaborated by Freud in "The Economic Problem of Masochism" and by Lacan in "Kant with Sade". Both introduce a conception of the Kantian Categorical Imperative in light of perversion as indicative of the complex relation of the neurotic subject of desire to the ethical formalism of the law. In the Sadian phantasy which Lacan makes use of to
'torture Kant "with Sade"' (63), to reveal something that is hidden in Kant's "Critique of
Practical Reason", the sadist is the instrument of the Other of the law. The sadist is the object that forces division upon the subject at the same time that it marks the divided
181 subject's jouissant remainder. While the villain in the play appears to act sadistically upon his melliferous victim, his own masochistic position is retained by the imagery that renders his breed lethal to himself.
At the level of plot the villain is finally rejected. He is given up as a ceded object, an instrument that is made unnecessary at the same time that it points to an inescapable core of jouissance. One may remember in this respect Lacan's composed categorical imperative of the subject of the Sadian phantasy. Taking into consideration the multiplicity of intriguers in a multiple intrigue type of plot, the imperative would translate into a Congrevian one as follows: 'I have the right of enjoyment in deceiving you, anyone can say to me' (compare "Kant with Sade", 58). This is an imperative that divides its stating subject by the implied enunciation that comes from the Other, the
'any one can say to me' which makes the "I" a quotation, as Miller points out with regard to the Sadian imperative (Reading, 235). The imperative thus limits the subject's function as the longed-for intriguer and implicates him in this function as its victim.
But even more so, it is an imperative that also points in one and the same movement at the double function of the intriguer as marking the neurotic subject's repressed pathology, repressed desire, as the locus of the law.
The significance of the prototype of the intriguer, the archetypal eighteenth century Lovelace, has been summed up in the notion of "happiness in evil", as Miller notes (Reading, 221). But what is the nature of this happiness? We cannot exhaust the significance of the intriguer prototype without examining its implication in light of
Freud's second topography as a way of understanding the drive. The second topography implies not just the super-ego in which a destructive component is entrenched and hence constitutes 'a pure culture of the death instinct'. There is also implied the desiring, masochistic ego that bypasses the dissolution of the Oedipus
181 complex, and the desexualization of morality it imparts, by making morality sexualized once more ("The Ego and the Id", SE 19, 42-43, 53, "The Economic Problem of
Masochism", SE 19, 169). "Kant with Sade", which Miller sees as Lacan's 'rewriting of
Freud's "The Economic Problem of Masochism"' (Reading, 212), isolates the impact of the law as coming form the Other on the subject's desire. Like the pervert whose immodesty rapes the subject's modesty ("Kant with Sade", 60), so does the law divide the subject, forcing him to renounce his desire, to forego all pathological considerations of pleasure and displeasure, while enticing the subject into enjoyment.
In the same way the desire of the Other determines the desire of the subject, but as the
Other's desire is never transparent or accessible to the subject, it leaves the subject in an alienated state with respect to his desire.
Yet Lacan recognizes that the moral law, which in Kant's philosophy presents itself as devoid of object, 'represents desire' (67). And desire means repression.
Repression bears a dialectical relation to desire: it protects desire from displeasure and satisfies it in the return of the repressed. The law has the same kind of position with respect to desire: 'pleasure's aversion to recognize the law is doubled, by supporting that desire to satisfy it which is defense', Lacan says (71). Desire and jouissance, Lacan shows, converge with respect to the law; but they do so without becoming indistinct because the neurotic subject is only free to desire: 'Desire…suffices to make life have no sense in playing a coward. And when the law is truly there, desire doesn't hold, but that's because the law and repressed desire are one and the same thing; this is even
Freud's discovery' (68, 71).
The freedom from all pathology which the Kantian imperative establishes finally finds its expression beyond the sadistic object of 'pleasure proper to desire' that phantasy constitutes. The freedom from pathology finds its expression in the one
182 freedom masochism epitomizes for the neurotic subject: the freedom to die (62, 69).
This is where the law and the drive converge, in Freud's terms, and as moral masochism implies: 'The sadism of the super-ego and the masochism of the ego supplement each other and unite to produce the same effects', Freud says. Moral masochism constitutes a 'classical piece of evidence for the existence of fusion of instinct': the danger of moral masochism lies in the fact that it 'originates from the death instinct'. It thus corresponds to the part of that instinct that has escaped being turned outwards as an instinct of destruction. However since moral masochism has the significance of an erotic component, 'even the subject's destruction of himself cannot take place without libidinal satisfaction', to use Freud's words ("The Economic", SE 19,
170). In Congreve's play, the villain forcing his victim into complacent passivity, also marks the subject's ambiguous position with respect to the drive, his pleasure in what is beyond pleasure, unknown to himself.
Fallacy remains Congreve's basic micro-structure of intrigue, and not only on account of intrigue's double dealing in the sense that what it presents as lie emerges as repressed. The significance of fallacy also lies in making the distinction between truth and lie tellingly blurred so as to enable the demarcation of an object of pleasure as such at another level, that of character. The logical contribution of fallacious reasoning is to finally demarcate intrigue as internally excluded from the symbolic makeup of the play. Vis-à-vis fallacious reasoning, intrigue functions as the signifier of desire not given to knowledge. It is nevertheless the intriguer who gives body and form to this internally excluded signifier. Fallacy threatens to subvert division, to close the gap between the subject of the statement and the subject of enunciation by reverting to truth no-mask of lie, thereby refusing to distinguish the true from the false. By contrast, the intriguer acts as the agent of the sadistic law whose function it is to divide the
183 subject. At the same time, in the same way that the sadism of the super-ego and the masochism of the ego unite in moral masochism, the intriguer becomes the raw point of repressed desire, the desire for what divides the subject, the pleasure in the law as the freedom to die.
This possibility of crossing beyond the symbolic by following desire to its radical end may be entertained in Congreve's comedy through the raised voice suitable to tragedy, but is never fulfilled. Rather, the inevitable end of the intriguer is sustained by the function of the signifier to re-instate the law, overtaking that which the signifier alienates. If intrigue is the internally excluded signifier that determines the play's action and style while, like the name that never existed, remaining outside both, then the intriguer as its manifested instrument throws himself into inevitable destruction by the fact that his victim is bound to elude him. Intrigue, like the viper inhabiting the intriguer's womb, envelops its own failure by virtue of its impenetrable Otherness.
However, the intriguer's masochistic readiness to give birth to his own ruin manifests the same freedom of the will-to-jouissance of the law. In this respect the intriguer is the best servant of the neurotic subject of the law, proposing for the latter the model of the freedom that makes repressed desire the locus of pleasure in the law: the freedom to desire.
The beyond of pleasure that the intriguer introduces into the intrigue plot of comedy does not come into effect. But this beyond is significantly held at the horizon of comedy as an option, as yet another lure of the symbolic. At the same time desire and jouissance retain a safe distance from one another by the impossibility of intrigue itself, a distance proper to the neurotic subject, sustained by the perverse, double function of the intriguer. Congreve's comedy offers a model of the relation of intrigue to the unconscious. There is no stepping beyond sense, beyond the symbolic, unless to
184 explore the latter's luring, and grotesque, pitfalls. The logical, hence, is present as failing so that rhetoric can emerge as the bar itself - the technique, the letter - that enables the subject's division between desire and jouissance, between sense and non- sense, between the known and the unknown, so that the secret of the criminal can become the unknowable secret of the hysteric.
185
Chapter Three: Figures of Speech and the Body of Suffering Jouissance in Three Late Seventeenth-Century Tragedies (or – Tragedy is not Without an Object)
"—Dying – resolves me." (Rowe, The Ambitious Step-Mother, V. p. 75)
"Libido remains libido." (Freud, "Introductory Lectures" XXVI, SE 16, 420)
Introduction
The present section of this thesis looks into the plot structure centered on intrigue in three tragedies written by Congreve's contemporaries, Nathaniel Lee, John Dryden and
Nicholas Rowe. Since intrigue here, as in the previous sections, is examined through the plays' dominant rhetorical micro-structures, it may be initially pointed out that the stylistic dominants of these tragedies are figures of speech, mostly those called grammatical, or 'schemes of construction' (Joseph, 54). The dominance of figures of speech constitutes one difference between the tragedies and the comedies, whose dominants are figures of argumentation (of genuine and fallacious syllogistic reasoning). The difference between the stylistic dominants in tragedy and comedy featuring intrigue is hence material to the consideration of intrigue in reference to genre.
Intrigue is usually defined in terms of a plot structure that is not genre specific.
Intrigue is minimally perceived as a mode of action devised by a character within the world of the play for a gain of some sort. And yet a generic consideration of intrigue is called for by the fact that there are differences between the intriguer-victim relationship in tragedy and in comedy, and that the action is structured differently in
186 each one.56 A generic differentiation between intrigue in comedy and in tragedy takes its clue from the object of representation which imposes itself through style in the comedies and tragedies at hand. In Congreve's comedies the object of representation which takes the form of an imposed necessity is the concept of wit as a mode of rationality. In the tragedies, style is pitted against an object of representation that is also central for seventeenth century critical theory of tragedy: that of passions at their height.
A generic perception of intrigue thus begins with the object of representation investing the comedies and tragedies of intrigue studied here, and the relation of this object to the rhetorical forms which dominate these plays' style. We may therefore outline a tripartite model for approaching intrigue in tragedy as opposed to comedy.
This model consists of three coordinates. The first of these is intrigue regarded as a set of events and character interrelationships. The second is the object of representation which intrigue interrogates semantically, be that the concept of wit or intense feelings.
The third is the non-signifying rhetorical forms subtending plot and semantemes of wit or passions. My attempt is to define the nature of intrigue in tragedy in terms of the relation among the three coordinates. Such a model seeks to separate the manifest semantic content of intrigue from the activity which forms it, as Freud proposes with regard to the dream ("Introductory Lectures" XIV, SE 15, 223). In tragedy more than in comedy, I suggest, the distance between intrigue and the object of representation
(passions) to a large extent determines the status of intrigue as of the order of the drive.
Passions play a salient role in the construction of intrigue in the tragedies.
Moreover, passions are strikingly different from wit in their manner of engaging us with the object as cause of the drive. Wit sub-served by argumentative forms which
56 Rothstein points out that in Restoration tragedy the villain shares the heroic ideals of his victim and is a friend to him. As for structure, Rothstein indicates that the heroic play is episodic (67, 15, 56).
187 basically obey the law of the signifier maintains a distance from the cause, supporting the metonymic elusiveness of the object. Passions being different from wit in this respect hence emerge as an object of representation that calls for a consideration of the notion of the object as such, as it is conceived by Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. My first endeavor in this chapter is therefore to establish a key to the generic conceptualization of intrigue in relation to the object. We will see that the object functions differently in the comedy as opposed to the tragedy of intrigue. An examination of intrigue in comedy with respect to the object should complement the rhetorical perception of comedic intrigue, presented in the two previous chapters. More cardinally, it would illustrate a fundamental difference between comedic intrigue and intrigue in tragedy, as well as the implications of this difference for a psychoanalytic conception of tragedy.
Isolating two generic mainstays of intrigue such as wit in comedy and passions in tragedy does not in itself propose something new. In his influential book The
Restoration Comedy of Wit, Thomas Fujimura extricated Restoration comedy from the interpretation of 'manners', which was concerned with treatment rather than content and emphasized this comedy's artificiality. Fujimura re-directed critical interest, stressing the intellectual and aesthetic aspects of wit as Restoration comedy's point of departure (38, Hume, The Development, 67-68). However, the chiefly cognitive aspect of wit and judgment emphasized by Hobbes, the rationalism involved in the notion of wit and the naturalness of decorum highlighted by Fujimura are undermined by what is betrayed in the wit of Congreve's comedies when considered psychoanalytically
(Fujimura, 18, 21, 27, 30, 59-65). Yet, what is betrayed by Congreve's comedies to belie the intellectual and aesthetic ideals of the Restoration comedy of wit marked by
Fujimura is inextricably bound with the psychoanalytic conception of the act of
188 interpretation. The psychoanalytic conception of interpretation directs us to the playwright's choice of stylistic forms as the core object of the act of interpretation, an act that pivots, that is, on the function of these forms as attempted solutions to playwright's particular mode of enjoyment.
Psychoanalytic interpretation rests on the assumption that no signification wholly captures the subject's unconscious desire, which is always particular and escapes signification. Still more, psychoanalytic interpretation recognizes that the signs chosen by the subject are productions of jouissance. The particular way in which unconscious jouissance necessarily imposes itself on the material choice of signs is also what makes these signs resistant to sense. The effects of unconscious jouissance disrupt the regular concatenation of signs, and this is where language reveals the real of the subject's mode of enjoyment, or the real of the object of representation (Ronen,
Representing, 82-84).
An 'act in the domain of the real' (84), the psychoanalytic conception of interpretation could re-orientate generic conception of intrigue. Relying on this conception I will show that in both comedy and tragedy intrigue stages a sado- masochistic phantasm through theme and character interrelationship. Intrigue fashions itself in the plays' symbolic domain as inquiry into the consequences of treachery and the allotment of pleasure. At the coherent and hence imaginary level of action intrigue lends itself to a phantasmatic representation of interrelation wherein the structure of sado-masochistic drives, their reversal of aim and object occurs (Freud, ''Instincts and their Vicissitudes'', SE 14, 126-127).
However, a phantasmatic conception of the mise-en-scène of intrigue seems more in line with the hermeneutic drift of the majority of critical approaches to seventeenth-century drama. It suggests the same kind of picture of language as
189
'efficiently coming across our way in order to represent us', in Ronen's words (84), on which these approaches rely. Critical approaches to intrigue perceive it as a structure positing an intentional object. Intrigue is meant to replicate and critique historical or political events, or is a form reflecting generic evolution, again with respect to changing socio-political sensibilities.57 By contrast, a psychoanalytic approach to intrigue, engaged as it is with the real of the subject's (the playwright's) jouissance, conceives intrigue as veiling an anterior, unknowable object-cause that is not given to representation.
The object that is resistant to signification nevertheless affects the imaginary as well as stylistic construction of intrigue, pointing to what is psychically at the cause of intrigue rather than to its aims. Freud conceives the object in relation to the drive to be
'not originally connected' with the drive, but 'assigned to it only in consequence of being peculiarly fitted to make satisfaction possible' (''Instincts", SE 14, 122).
Retroaction is indeed the peculiarity of the object's anteriority as cause; in Freudian terms the object can be reconstructed rather than interpreted. A perception of intrigue in line with such causality as produced by the unconscious aims at wresting intrigue from the imaginary story it tells through signifiers. Such perception seeks to reconstruct the cause of intrigue by stylistic micro-structures that offer no sense themselves but make signification possible.
In Freudian terms, the object as cause of a particular subject's desire is a lost object. In the artistic product the object persists as 'waste', 'evoking the beginning of
57 Braverman's strictly political view of The Way of the World as a Whig narrative of the Glorious Revolution (Plots, 215, 217), and Gill's reading of Caesar Borgia in light of the developing conception of a bourgeois individual ("Pathetic Passions", 195-196,205-206), are an example of the first trend. Brown's reading of wit in The Way of the World as a means of challenging the stereotypes of dramatic satire (Dramatic Form, 134) is an example of the second. Shepherd and Womack, though more attentive to the pleasure inducing function of comedic intrigue, posit the same kind of intentional representation when speaking of it as an extensive double entendre sub serving desire by prolonging its sexual aim (131).
191 generation', as Lacan says of the signifier signified by a pair of abandoned shoes outside a hotel room door, which Lacan associates with Van Gogh's painting (SVII,
297). With respect to a generic conception of intrigue, the object as cause of desire is generally conceived as anterior rather than intentional. However, it is the manner in which the real of the object emerges in the opaque materiality of the text that concerns the effects of the real in each play. In the comedies of Congreve the real of the elusive object cause of (the playwright's) desire reveals itself through analysis of these comedies' core stylistics.
Treating Congreve's intrigue plots as having their bulwark in the concept of wit has indicated first and foremost how such wit is subverted by its essential rhetorical and logical tools, the genuine and fallacious enthymemes. The argumentative schemata of the plays evoke the logic of phantasm and the structure of the symptom. Isolating these argumentative micro-structures has enabled me to approach the drive and the object-cause it effectuates as the cause of intrigue. Component drives are perverse by definition. If according to Freud drama turns psychopathological when enacting the neurotic's conflict with repressed impulses ("Psychopathic Characters on the Stage",
SE 7, 309), comedic intrigue is engaged with the translation of the constitutively perverse drives into formations proper to neurosis. The homeomorphism of the genuine enthymeme with phantasm and of fallacy with symptom formation is also constitutive of this reinstallation of the neurotic in the constitutively perverse core of intrigue.
A generic conceptualization of intrigue inquires more specifically into the psychoanalytic conception of the object as the cause of desire, the element that designates what in formations of the unconscious can neither be unraveled nor removed (Ronen, Rep. 96), and as such constituting a route to the drive. We note in this respect that in Congreve's comedic intrigue the status of the object as cause of
191 desire is sustained by the structures of the phantasm and the symptom. The phantasm specifically and the symptom in its own way enable a reinstitution of the neurotic in
Congreve's comedic intrigue by maintaining the subject's being as an I am not. In the comedy of intrigue the argumentative forms indicate the object as veiled in the same way that they constitute the subject's being as negated. By contrast, the figures of speech predominating in the tragedy of intrigue manifest the object as positivized. It is my main claim in this chapter that in the tragedy of intrigue, as opposed to the comedy of intrigue, the auto-erotic cause of the drive is not under erasure. No I am not thinking can sustain the subject of passions or efface the subject of passions' subjection to the drive. It is in the manner in which intrigue in seventeenth-century tragedy subverts the phantasmatic veiling of the object that this tragedy more readily presents itself as
'genre', as the study of the three tragedies will show.58
The generic status of intrigue in tragedy will be examined in light of Lacan's exploration of classical tragedy in his seventh seminar. Late seventeenth-century tragedy distinguishes itself from classical tragedy both conceptually and stylistically. It revisits Lacan's notion of the second death, or beyond the pleasure principle, which is also the end of signification. This beyond of signification is designated by the object a.
In late seventeenth-century tragedy, I suggest preliminarily, intrigue posits a different perception of this beyond and may thus be situated within the aesthetics of anxiety rather than within the ethics of desire. What becomes the defining element and effect of intrigue in tragedy is hence the object-cause.59
58 The question of what makes any group of dramatic works answerable to the concept of 'genre' is beyond the scope of this discussion and is not its aim. The term is used crudely to indicate the existence of something 'characteristic', or conceptually definable. The problem of generic definition of Restoration tragedy is made evident in such books as Rothstein's and Hume's. The difficulty is a telling one, considering Dryden's idea that tragedy should be divided diachronically or into subgenres. Dryden is quoted by Fowler to indicate the problematics of defining genre (40), but his idea also manifests his contemporary tragedians' perception of their distinct contribution to tragedy. 59 Broad-scale studies of Restoration tragedy, such as Rothstein's and Hume's, take care to break it up into its constitutive individual sub-categories and plays. Tragedy, Rothstein says, remains a sole
192
In the sections below I trace intrigue's implication in the object in comedy and in tragedy. I begin by examining comedic intrigue in relation to the object, mainly indicating the contribution of inhibition to the effacement of the object. I then examine
Lacan's conception of classical tragedy and its manner of averting the beyond of the
Thing. I then turn to seventeenth-century theorization of the tragedy of the moderns, especially their treatment of the passions and style, to indicate the objectal manifestation of the object. I finally discuss the intrigue in three tragedies in relation to the object manifested by their stylistics. Each tragedy in its way elicits anxiety by the indissoluble presence of the masochistic object cause of intrigue.
A. Inhibition and the Comic
A generic conception of intrigue in comedy takes its lead from Freud's theorization of the comic. Freud shows how the comic, while being produced in a situation involving two persons (or egos), creates a surplus of cathectic expenditure through ideation or thinking, or 'trying to understand' the person who is being observed (Jokes, SE 8, 186,
191-192). The unusable surplus which is free for discharge by laughter builds on a
'trying to understand' that gives way to 'disregarding the person' observed. The viewer then behaves as though he himself wanted to reach the aim of the movement. These two possibilities in the viewer's imagination amount to a comparison between the observed movement and one's own. Freud's words here are crucial to an understanding of the comic: if the other person's movement is exaggerated and inexpedient, 'my
melodious mermaid, tempting the passionate critic into abstract generalization (p. ix). Bearing this caveat in mind, we nevertheless note that psychoanalysis has a different purpose in view in grappling with drama and other forms of art. As Regnault says, art organizes psychoanalysis and its concepts at the same time that it organizes the hole in the Thing, art perceives what theory still misapprehends, and the analytic theorist receives its message in an inverse form (55-56). Drama interprets us rather than the other way around.
193 increased expenditure in order to understand it is inhibited in statu nascendi' (194). The pleasure in the comic is thus predicated on inhibition.
Freud emphasizes that the source of comic pleasure is the comparison between two expenditures which must be ascribed to the preconscious, while the joke is the contribution made to the comic from the realm of the unconscious (208). Still, there is a difference in the economy of pleasure involved. In a footnote Freud hence points out that the 'difference between the two expenditures must in essence come down to the inhibitory expenditure that is saved. The lack of this economy in inhibition in the case of the comic, and the absence of quantitative contrast in the case of jokes, would determine the distinction between the comic feeling and the impression of a joke'. In the comic there is an economy in expenditure upon ideation (cathexis) which is instituted by inhibition, whereas the pleasure in jokes arises from an economy in expenditure upon inhibition (234-236).
Lacan's treatment of the joke and the comic in his fifth seminar introduces inhibition in two different functions, but both take their clue from the joke. With respect to the joke, inhibition is concomitant with the joke's façade. Inhibition refers to the preparation of the other, the solidification of the other through opposition and lure for the passage of something else. The other captivated by the joke's façade, homologates the joke as message and authenticates it as a joke. Inhibition is captivation of the other to guarantee the communion that will introduce the Other of metonymies, enabling the effect of the joke as sense which always lags behind the complete satisfaction of demand (18.12.57, pp. 2-4).
With respect to the comic, inhibition pertains to the seduction of the other at the personal level of relationship which the comical involves. In a comical relationship, satisfaction of demand is given stability and constancy through a particular other. The
194 mechanism of seduction is a mode of preparation that involves opposition, a comical opposition because it concerns a desired object of love. Comical opposition is retained in love, which for Lacan is the center of the comic. Comical opposition manifests itself in the necessity of preparing the object of lust (within the world of the play) to accept the full word (the "You are my wife") by which the demand for love is satisfied in the comical relationship (18.12.57, pp. 11-12).
Inhibition in the sense of metonymical captivation of the other persists in
Lacan's perception of comedy even if the historical evolution of comedy foregrounds different psychical elements (need in the elementary form of the old comedy, love in the new one). In the old comedy, the relationship of self to need in its most elementary from may be less dependent on the captivation of the other, for the dialectic of desire is not prevalent in this comedy. But to the extent that 'man's self is entirely engaged in the dialectic of language', inhibition as captivation of the other is operative there as well.
The new comedy centers on love and the metonymic object of desire; inhibition there sustains desire through seduction and opposition (18.12.57, pp. 13-18). The comical is hence not entirely different from the joke in suggesting a juncture of the imaginary other and the symbolic Other (18.12.57, pp. 4, 12).
Lacan seems to embark on a direction that is different from Freud's. Freud specifically deals with the comic, not with comedy. He also deals with the comic as a situation involving two subjects where one is the performer and the other a spectator.
Between the two, through inhibitory retrieval of energy made un-utilizable, comic pleasure lies (Jokes, SE 8, 218). The process entails a certain renunciation of this other, whose presence enables a difference in cathectic expenditure to be established. By contrast, Lacan seems to apply the structure of the joke, especially the way inhibition is constituted in it, to both the comical and comedy. Inhibition constituted in the joke is
195 used to point out something that takes place at the level of the comical relationship within the world of the play. This is so because both the joke and the comic are forms that indicate the metonymic essence of the mechanism of language with respect to demand. Inhibition points at the place where the imaginary order intersects with the symbolic, or the imaginary comes into play so that symbolic understanding can take place. In the comedy of love such intersection occurs when wit has come to the ignorant object of love (SV, 18.12.57, pp. 4, 16-17).
Inhibition partaking of the imaginary indicates captation rather than renunciation: 'the image of the other is very profoundly connected to this tension… that is always evoked by the object that one's attention is drawn to'. The tension evoked by the object is related to the very base of the formation of the ego, the ambiguity which means that one's unity is outside oneself, his narcissistic being taking its stand in reference to his fellow-man. Laughter, which comes into play in both wit and the comic, is what explodes through liberation from the image (18.12.57, p. 10).
In inhibition perceived as the imaginary solidification/seduction of the other, the object is made both the object of desire, the product of a metonymy, and what opposes such metonymy as a kind of lure which paves the way for a satisfying message
(18.12.57, p. 5). However, Lacan's later engagement with the imaginary captation of the subject in his seminar on anxiety adds another aspect to the metonymical nature of the object. This aspect concerns the neurotic's interest in preserving the lack of the object. Inhibition hence becomes a mode of disengagement from the Other. Freud's conception of the comic as predicating renunciation, I suggest, anticipates Lacan's treatment of the imaginary in his seminar on anxiety (Seminar X). While inhibition indicates narcissistic capture or the subject caught in his own narcissistic image
(14.11.62, p. 7), this capture already introduces a residue, a broken fragment that does
196 not manage to invest itself in the image and is articulated by the symbolic order as castration. A residue which cuts the Other into slices, this otherness of the Other is the object a (21.11.62, p. 10).
The inassimilable residue in the imaginary capture of the subject is a narcissistic remainder that the neurotic subject retains at the level of imaginary castration. The subject refuses to give it up as a sign for the non-signifiable jouissance of the Other; the neurotic comes to a halt before dedicating his castration to the guarantee of the Other (5.12.62, p. 4). As Freud already indicated in "The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex" may be suggested in this connection: the subject gives up on an object of love for a narcissistic reason of maintaining his 'organ', a manner of renunciation rather than of giving (SE 19, 176).
It may be suggested that the function of inhibition in Freud's theory of the comic is to ensure this 'nothing' that the neurotic wants to give (SX, 5.12.62, p. 9).
Lacan's conception of the object as remainder (with respect to the realm of the imaginary), combined with Freud's conception of the comic suggest that the comic renunciation of the object through inhibition is a point where the subject encounters castration without having to dedicate it to the Other's jouissance. Inhibition here functions as the antidote to anxiety, just as castration still guarantees that narcissistic libidinal investment remains non-specularizable and the visual field not destabilized
(Miller, "Introduction to Seminar X" II, 27-28). In Congreve's comedies the object is expelled for the sake of maintaining its unthreatening pleasure. This is evoked by the characters that sleep during the most significant part of the action or emerge towards its end to declare their complete ignorance and incomprehension of what has taken
197 place.60 Cathectic expenditure on ideation is declared superfluous at the same time that the spectators' enjoyment, along with that of the main characters, is safeguarded.
It may be further suggested that comedic intrigue has a role to play in this retaining of castration by way of de-cathecting the object.61 Lacan's discussion of
Moliere's L'Ecole des Femmes indicates that much: deception tunnels under the truth the girl tells, forming the route by which her desire escapes beyond the metonymic present imposed on her, beyond words (SV, 18.12.57, p. 18). Even in its innocent manifestation, intrigue coincides with the imaginary solidification of the other as opposition. Intrigue introduces a heterogeneous element into the imaginary captivation of the other, be that the desired object of love in the play's world or the spectator, to secure their escape.
In comedy, intrigue punctures the metonymical present so that desire can escape to the beyond of words and not be trapped with the object. The intriguer serves a similar function of escape. Comedic intrigue finally drops the intriguer in the form of a ceded object of perverse enjoyment to achieve precisely that: to break open the path of desire rather than choke it with desire's object cause. This means that on the level of the action, the drive, like the un-yielded imaginary castration of the neurotic, gestures towards an object of satisfaction without producing anxiety in the spectator. Inhibition is at work so that pleasure might securely efface an elsewhere of jouissance that is desire's constitutive cause.
60 These are Lord Froth in The Double-Dealer, who 'has slept an Age' (V.xx.1-5), and Petulant who declares 'I'll go sleep' in about the middle of the fourth act in The Way of the World (IV.i.324). Towards the end of the same comedy, Witwoud expresses his bewilderment at the anticipatory resolution of the action, provided by Mirabell's prior-to-the-action act of precaution: 'Egad I understand nothing of the matter; I'm in a maze yet, like a dog in a dancing school' (V.i.533-534). 61 Although the object as connected with the comic seems to be of the imaginary, specular type, an object perceived in the Other, and hence an aimed-for object rather than an anterior object cause that is perceived to belong to the order of the real, it is an object that already partakes of the real to the extent that it is subjected to an act of renunciation, a way of recasting it as un-knowable. As is suggested by the first lessons of Lacan's seminar on anxiety, the object at the scopic level disturbs the field of vision which is in the Other with the non-specularizable. (And see also Miller, "Introduction. to Seminar X" II, 32-33).
198
B. Lacan's Concept of Tragedy – The Splendor of the Thing
The metonymic object which Lacan says preoccupies the world of characters in the new comedy (18.12.57, 14-15) is the object produced by the metonymy of their desire.
In comedy, the engagement with the metonymic object of desire is not so irreducible as to resist displacement, either at the imaginary level of plot or by the stylistics of argumentation. Captation of the other does not arrest the metonymic sliding of the object. On the contrary, captation is a manner of acknowledging the inevitable metonymy of the object under the mechanism of language. However, in tragedy the status of the object is different. Tragedy is discussed by Lacan in Seminar VII to interrogate the ethics of psychoanalysis. Lacan refers predominantly to classical tragedy. A tragedy such as Antigone marks a horizon for desire that renders impossible a dialectization of desire by way of dislodging the object or subjecting it to any metonymy. Das Ding is the lost object that abolishes a distinction between anterior cause and something aimed for. It is the object outside symbolization and imagining.
Das Ding is conceived and presented by means of the drama's spectacle, in the beautiful image of passion produced by the tragic figure of Antigone herself. Antigone is specular (and spectacular) in the sense that she is a figure of dazzling beauty, at the same time attractive and unbearable to the eye (SVII, 247-248, 252, 273).
The figure of Antigone traces the object in relation to desire as impossibility.
She traverses the zone of desire, a zone that is the crossing of some invisible line where desire becomes extinct. This is a point where desire's excitement is most real, but 'there is no longer any object' (249). Attention is thus placed on the notion of beauty, the beauty of the image of Antigone. Beauty determines the nature of the object as disrupted, in line with Kantian aesthetics, since its judgment as beautiful cannot locate its pleasurable effect in any specific feature of the object itself. The fate of desire is
199 similarly determined. Lacan speaks of desire in terms of a beam that beauty, marking the Thing, both refracts and intimidates. The one object the beam of desire approaches escapes desire (238, 248-249).
The beauty effected by Antigone is linked with her fierce presence, her inhumanity (263, 265). The fact that she goes beyond the limits of the human indicates the direction of her desire, to the beyond of Até, a word resonating in the English
'atrocious' (263). Até for Lacan is not the same as a 'blind mistake' or 'blunder'. Até concerns the field of the Other in the same manner that the image of passion is produced like an anamorphosis by the spectacle of tragedy, that is as exceeding or excessive to the law. Até concerns the unwritten in the order of the law: 'involved here is an invocation of something that is of the order of the law, but which is not developed in any signifying chain or in anything else' (277-278, 300).
Antigone's unshakeable, unyielding position is fixed to the radical limit that affirms the unique value of her dead brother's being, without reference to any content, to whatever good or evil he had done. The unique value involved here is essentially that of language, Lacan says: 'that purity, that separation of being from the characteristics of the historical drama he has lived through, is precisely the limit or the ex nihilo to which Antigone is attached' (279). This ex nihilo can only be instituted with respect to language, or the order of the law. The limit zone where Antigone is situated traces the impossibility in which we recognize the topology of our desire: the place occupied by desire is the 'void', which is the horizon indicated by language and the moral imperative (315). Tragedy, Ronen explains, dramatizes and reveals 'the limit of language as a symbolic order, the place where all symbolization and understanding fails' (Rep., 116). The void also points at the unattainable saturation of desire.
Harmony of desire with its object is non- realizable (SVII, 316).
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In tragedy, the limit of the symbolic order is marked by a zone where desire is made visible precisely as crossing a limit (268, 306, 309). This is the zone between life and death: Antigone is eliminated from the world of the living although she is not yet dead. Her punishment to be buried alive in a tomb enfolds what has been there from the start, it is a life approached and lived as already lost (280). The heroes of tragedy,
Lacan says, are characters who find themselves right away in a limit zone, between life and death (272). What Lacan calls the limit of the second death is where 'the false metaphors of being can be distinguished from the position of Being itself' (248). This is where the beautiful object is limited to a form of suffering, as seen in the Sadean scenario, a stasis affirming 'that that which is cannot return to the void from which it emerged' (261). The limit zone between life and death is also a 'space of freedom' where any claims on the part of life in the symbolic social order are rejected. This is the notion of the subject's disappearance from the signifying chain of what he is (295), and the point where desire is conceived in its radical form as death drive.
The limit zone of symbolic death encapsulates two aspects that are related to the Thing. The first concerns the effect of the play's action. The narrativization of
Antigone's death in life presents a process in which the object is first given and is later lost. Narrativized, her death in life occludes the paradoxical nature of the object, its emergence as being lost. The tragic narrative is bound up with the limit zone indicated by language, in a paradoxical manner that is of the nature of the object a. The sequence of events effectively conceals the constitution of the object as a lack, a lack produced by the insoluble conflict besetting the tragedy. At the same time, the ultimate ethical act of the tragic figure is revealed: 'to realize a symbolic death means to realize the lack which inheres in the symbolic' (Ronen, Rep., 116, 114). Desire in its ethical cast takes the form of a fixed position not given to signification. Such is Antigone's insistence on
211 one right that is a pure law of no sense (SVII, 279). The second aspect related to the
Thing concerns the effect of beauty. The object is supported by the image of beauty, the image lends it form, yet the object itself is not involved (261).
Antigone's splendor is derived from the zone of death in life (248). Lacan defines the phenomenon of the beautiful as the limit of the second death, a beyond that is also of the nature of transgression (260). In the tragic hero 'the glow of beauty coincides with the moment of transgression or of the realization of Antigone's Até'
(281). Beauty coincides with the desire of death she incarnates in guarding the being of the criminal as such, the fruit of criminal desire (283). And yet, beauty also separates us from the death indicated by Antigone's desire. Beauty is a barrier whose effect is a blinding effect: 'something else is going on on the other side that cannot be observed',
Lacan says. The 'outrage' of desire, implacable and raw, the true nature of the beyond desire crosses over to, is established by beauty which at the same time dazzles us and screens it from view (SVII, 281).62
Tragedy thus encircles a zone of rupture, of lack, in the symbolic order while drawing the line of sight towards the irrecoverable ruptured object it holds in view, the line of sight which defines the direction of desire towards its non-dialectizable voiding.
In aesthetic terms, the ethics of desire fundamentally concerns the disruption of the object. If the ultimate ethical act is one that acknowledges death, then this point where desire feels most its excitement as real, coincides with beauty that, in Ronen's words, is
'there within the object, although the object itself is not involved in its beauty' (Rep.,
62 The beautiful, Ronen explains in her book on the aesthetics of anxiety, is the object most related to the death-drive, since beauty refers to what cannot be articulated in symbolic terms. As such it is agonizing at the same time that it is desirable. And yet, in tragedy the beautiful is predicated 'in a way that marks it both as a form of protection from death, and as a limit impeding the access to death' (Aesth., 36).
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114, Aesth., 40). The object beyond the limit of the symbolic is hidden, sustained by the structure of tragedy and the image of beauty at its heart, as lost.
Lacan significantly opens his discussion of tragedy with what tragedy has as its aim, catharsis, the purgation of the emotions of pity and fear. Catharsis is approached from the perspective imposed by the 'proper place of desire in the economy of the
Freudian Thing' (SVII, 247). This means that catharsis, like beauty, bears a relation to the Thing, to the beyond which is the goal of desire. And it is again the image of the tragic figure in which this relation is anchored.
We note that structurally the tragic hero is borne by a desire that is destructive, a desire that has its origin in the desire of the mother, which Lacan sees as the origin of tragedy. Antigone, Lacan says, 'sacrifices her own being in order to maintain that essential being which is the family Até', the criminal fruit of incestuous union (283). At the same time, beauty is harnessed to a single image, that of the tragic figure, to make it a mode of regulating the spectator's affective response, to purge it of the order of the imaginary (248). The tragic figure thus constitutes an image which is functionally cathartic, as it eludes imaginary and symbolic codification. Located beyond human emotions and transcending whatever human subjects can decipher, the tragic figure pushes aside the emotional excitation involved in the encounter with this image
(Ronen, Aesth., 71).
Lacan points out an affinity between catharsis and the beauty effect, the latter deriving from the relationship of the hero to the limit, which is defined on the occasion of Antigone by a certain Até (SVII, 286). Catharsis or the purgation of the spectator's negative feelings of pity and fear thus concerns a crossing of a limit in the direction taken by desire. 'Catharsis has the sense of purification of desire. Purification cannot be accomplished, … unless one has at least established the crossing of its limits that we
213 call fear and pity' (323). Structurally and aesthetically, Lacan seems to imply that the cathartic effect of tragedy concerns the line of sight defining desire in its direction beyond the pleasure principle, hence beyond signification. Yet catharsis keeps in sight
'what it costs to go forward in a given direction' (323), that is, there is no breaking from the reins of the pleasure principle.
Catharsis elicits the beyond of the pleasure principle yet is not agonizing in the same way that the experience of the beautiful can be. Two things Lacan says with respect to catharsis serve to elaborate its double function as invoking jouissance while fundamentally accommodating the pleasure principle. First, the pleasure felt by the purification of negative feelings is a pleasure that functions 'previous to that apparatus where desire's formidable center sucks us in' (246). Desire destabilizes pleasure by its gravitational pull and uncertain satisfaction. As 'the metonymy of our being' (321), desire defers signification and its object is indeterminate. One cannot identify with such an object, whereas the satisfaction attained in catharsis depends on identification with the suffering hero. Catharsis is thus 'straightforward pleasure before we know anything about the beyond of the pleasure principle' (Ronen, Aesth., 69). Hence
Lacan's situating the affect of catharsis prior to the law of desire.
Second, Lacan stresses the fact that the function of pity and fear is not in the action itself; the one protagonist who right through to the end feels neither pity nor fear is Antigone (SVII, 258). It is the spectator who feels pity and fear 'when facing this tragic yet assertive Other who acts decisively, appearing to lack nothing', Ronen says.
The tragic figure, located beyond the human pleasing and displeasing feelings, 'places these displeasing feelings so that they constantly function psychically as reminders of the jouissance of the Other, of the possibility of absolute enjoyment. Catharsis thus
214 buffers and purges negative feelings, while maintaining in view the possibility of unlimited jouissance' (Aesth., 70).
Unlike other commentators on Aristotelian catharsis, Ronen points out, Lacan
'stresses the split between the appeasing effect of catharsis on negative feelings, and the ecstasy that plays a role in accounting for the pleasure concerned', ecstasy that has its model in the Dionysian frenzy stimulated by music (71, 67). The two aspects are not transformational; displeasure associated with transgressive jouissance is not transformed into pleasure. Cathartic pleasure and its negative source are not reconciled, as is implied by Lacan's association of the direction of catharsis with that of desire.
And yet catharsis is not split in the same way that desire is in respect of the object of satisfaction. Thus, Ronen claims, catharsis should be understood 'as a mode of relieving anxiety; a mode of alleviating pressure and various negative feelings that, within the domain of the pleasure principle, impress too much tension'. Pleasure in relation to ethics, to the domain of the good and the law within which tragedy symbolizes dramatic action, is hence no contradiction.
Catharsis sustains the ethical dimension of tragedy by its double nature: 'the moral dramatic event is complemented by the spectator in that the catharsis reveals what the moral act always camouflages, that is, the other side of morality that has to do with excess, with an overwhelming enjoyment that cannot be controlled' (Aesth., 73). It is the quota of pleasure produced in the spectator as a measure of the revelation of the concealed side of moral action that keeps the overwhelming power of jouissance, of what is beyond the pleasure principle, under control. It may be further suggested that by thus controlling jouissance, catharsis, like beauty, constitutes a barrier before the
Thing, maintaining the spectator's pleasure by way of disrupting the object.
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In effecting catharsis as a limit before the Thing classical tragedy is essentially different from late seventeenth-century tragedy, where neither beauty nor catharsis functions as barrier before the object. Late seventeenth-century tragedy, especially as theorized by Dryden, is predominantly affective. For this tragedy, Rothstein indicates,
"moving the passions" 'means precisely what it says; it is not a shorthand for Aristotle's entire process of excitement and catharsis'. Rothstein points out that 'Dryden interprets the Aristotelian purpose as evocative rather than purgative' (14). In the terms of the affective tragedy of the late seventeenth-century jouissance is not kept sufficiently under control by catharsis. As I will attempt to show in the sections below, the stylistics of the tragedies considered in this thesis enables a casting of the evocative perception of catharsis in terms of libidinal surplus that elicits the spectators' anxiety rather than alleviating pity and fear, even as the end of tragedy as conceived by Dryden is to 'reform Manners' and 'bring us to Virtue' ("Heads of an Answer to Rymer", The
Works of John Dryden, Vol. XVII, 186, 191).
C. Late Seventeenth-Century Tragedy – Not Without an Object
Starting from the ethics and aesthetics defined by Lacan with regard to classical tragedy we note the first crucial difference between classical tragedy and late seventeenth-century tragedy. Late seventeenth-century tragedy, I claim, is not concerned with the ethics of desire vis-à-vis the law but with the spectator's emotional response. Intrigue as well as the status of the hero must be considered in light of this redirection of aesthetic aim. Intrigue measures the imposition of the affectivity tragedy is made to rouse on the one hand, and a libidinal surplus that is never disrupted on the other. This libidinal surplus is manifested in figures of grammatical construction.
Intrigue in tragedy elicits anxiety in the spectator through suffering jouissance
216 manifested in the figures of language. Suffering jouissance manifested in figures of language bears on the status of the tragic hero in a tragedy whose aesthetic aim is the spectator's affectivity. In late seventeenth-century tragedy, I claim further, there is only one death. The hero, carried by passions rather than desire, pays with a pound of flesh, in so far as the symbolic, sustained by the plays' action, effects but a limited call for suspending the control of the Other.
Dryden's critical work on drama, on serious drama in particular, provides an analytical basis for perceiving tragedy's mode of encountering the real of the object of representation. Starting with the definition of a play in his "Essay of Dramatic Poesy"
(1668), late seventeenth-century drama is seen to assert its commitment to the imaginary: a play ought to be 'a just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind' (Ker I, 36). The pictorial connotation of the definition has been pointed out by Hume (Dryden's Criticism, 192). Its tableau-like orientation lays stress on human nature, on passions and humours rather than action, and on the effect of their representation on the spectator.
However, the pictorial, imagistic import of Dryden's definition of the tragedy cannot be conceived in any other way but through the symbolic, that is, through language. The function of language is forcefully advanced in Dryden's "Defense of the
Essay of Dramatic Poesy" (1668). Regarding the faithfulness of representation to the nature of the thing represented, Dryden insists on three points: first, what is considered
'natural' is not demonstrable; second, it is enough that the representation delights the spectator, seeing that 'poesy only instructs as it delights'; and third, 'to affect the soul, and excite the passions, and, above all, to move admiration (which is the delight of serious plays), a bare imitation will not serve' (Ker I, 112, 113). For imitation to be
217 effective it must recruit the arts and ornaments of poesy. Hence Dryden advocates rhyme, which paradoxically appears least natural of all ornamentation, as 'most natural for a serious subject' (113).
The coordinates of serious drama identified by Dryden appear to be incompatible with one another. While the objective of tragedy is to stir up in the spectator a pleasing admiration and concernment, the object of representation with which the spectator's concernment is inextricably bound defies representation: 'Any sudden gust of passion (as an ecstasy of love in an unexpected meeting) cannot better be expressed than in a word and a sigh, breaking one another. Nature is dumb on such occasions; and to make her speak, would be to represent her unlike herself' ("An Essay of Dramatic Poesy", Ker I, 53-54, 94). The poet who aims at imaging for the audience the movements of the characters' minds thus confronts a formidable obstacle. Love, a passion which is properly the object of attention of modern as opposed to ancient tragedy (54), is perhaps the gauge of the capacity of poesy. Other concernments of lovers such as jealousies, complaints, contrivances, are representable. However, the thing in itself, passion in its essence as pure movement of the soul ('a sudden gust') is something nature is dumb about, and is hence inimitable. This is an object of representation that is condemned to elude the poet unless captured as foreign to itself.
Passions are tragedy's professed object of representation, and the manner of their imaging is the dramatist's concern. Herein we see the difference between
Dryden's conception of tragedy and the one proposed by Lacan through classical tragedy. In Dryden's conception of tragedy the splendor of the protagonist as an image
- an image precisely because of the object not being involved in the splendor produced
- is dimmed, along with the desire this image both incarnates and arouses, desire in its chthonic attire, driven under the constraints of an irrevocable Até. Dimmed but not
218 eradicated. The protagonists of the tragedies examined here are faced right from the start with a choice (for example between love and glory) whose impossibility is too transparent to sustain a well-constructed narrative veiling. Narrative and the limit of the symbolic it gestures are dispensed with, enabling the dramatist to explore other shades of the psyche by means of passions in their plurality rather than passion in the singular. In the late seventeenth-century tragedies examined here the transparency of impossible desire acts as a directive for the exploration of affectivity as such.
Paradoxically, while a play is defined by Dryden as an image of human nature, imaging is not accomplished by means of the spectacle. Rather, tragedy of the moderns as conceived by Dryden launches its symbolic predilection through the imaginary order it is committed to. Tragedy opts specifically for the artificial as the best manner of perceiving the natural in its just proportion ("An Essay", Ker I, 102). By so doing, tragedy mediates an unknowable joy in the form of suffering jouissance less by disrupting the object than by giving it body. By insisting on a distance between the passions represented and their manner of representation, the tragedy of the moderns as exemplified by the tragedies concerned here seeks to delight the spectator not through accurate imitation but by way of producing a surplus of its effect.
Affectivity and its surplus effect are conceived by Dryden along three veins.
Dryden is concerned with the plurality of the passions, their difference from the cathartic emotions moved in the audience, and the priority of diction over action when it comes to the representation of passions. It may be preliminarily suggested that put together, these three aspects of the object of tragedy as defined by Dryden collude to propose the anxiety-ridden status of seventeenth-century tragedy, and its anxiety- eliciting effect on the spectator.
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Regarding the passions that are the concern of tragedy, Dryden says in "The
Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy" (1679): 'I speak not of pity and terror, which are to be moved in the audience by the plot; but of anger, hatred, love, ambition, jealousy, revenge, etc., as they are shown in this or that of the play' (Ker I, 220). Passions thus interweave to form the action. As Licideius of "An Essay of Dramatic Poesy" points out: 'every new-sprung passion, and turn of it, is a part of the action, and much the noblest'. The painting of the hero's mind rather than the strength of his body is more properly the poet's work, according to Dryden (Ker I, 64).
As for pity and terror, Dryden implies in his "Heads of an Answer to Rymer"
(1677) that they fall behind the aesthetic ends of tragedy because the raising of passions cannot be disconnected from the genius for writing. This is where diction takes priority over the action. While the fable is enough to move pity and fear, the excellence of words and thoughts is indispensable to the operation of tragedy on our affections (Works, Vol. XVII, 185, 190).63 Pity and terror, to which ends the fable is contrived, though properly moral, are not now 'the only Springs on which Tragedies move' because the 'Operations from the Writing are much stronger'. This means that on the one hand, the raising of passions (as in the case of Shakespeare) is more from the excellence of words and thoughts than from the justness of the occasion (190), and on the other hand, that pity and terror are not sufficient for carrying the aesthetic import of writing. For the full effect of poetry in tragedy to come to pass, and precisely in so far as 'the Encouragement of Virtue, and Discouragement of Vice, be the proper End of
Poetry in Tragedy', 'all the passions in their turns are to be set in a Ferment; as Joy,
Anger, Love, Fear, are to be used in the Poets' common Places' (186). In "The Grounds
63 Dryden makes passions the suitable end and product of writing: 'the plays of the Ancients are more correctly plotted, ours are more beautifully written; and if we can raise Passions as high on worse Foundations, it shows our Genius in Tragedy is greater' (Works, Vol. XIV, 189).
211 of Criticism of Tragedy" Dryden asserts that 'to describe [the passions] naturally, and to move them artfully, is one of the greatest commendations which can be given to poet'. In the "Heads" he implies that moving all the passions does not only gauge poetic fancy tempered by judgment, but is indispensable for the raising of the audience's 'Concernment for the principal Actors' (Ker I, 220, Works, Vol. XVII, 187, respectively).
There is thus no representation of passions in vacuum. Their representation, perhaps even more than that of the changes of the hero's fortune, places a special demand on the poet regarding his audience: 'He who would raise the passion of a judicious audience … must be sure to take his hearers along with him … he must move them by degrees and kindle with 'em' ("The Grounds", Ker I, 221). The theater thus becomes the action that is the passion of the spectator, the agent that acts on the soul to make action and passion a single thing, to use Descartes' introductory notion of passion in his essay "The Passions of the Soul" (I, At. 1). The passions shown in a character are hence inseparable from those excited in the spectator.
Given that the definition of a play in ''An Essay of Dramatic Poesy" underscores an imagistic aspect of the play's construction, passions, even if essentially considered 'operations from writing', are not exhausted as such. The imaginary dimension of the theater affecting the soul persists as the efficacy of representation.
Once passions are organically woven into the plot, and their poetic affecting is declared a necessity, the question still remains how passions are to be recognized as properly raised. Rapin's dictum in this regard is compelling: 'For by a passion that is imperfect and abortive the soul of the spectator may be shaken, but this is not enough;
211 it must be ravished' (The Continental, 295).64 The imaginary perception of passion, its reflected quality and degree, hence comes into play. But even more so, the imperative of affecting the soul suggests that tragedy is born in anxiety. Late seventeenth-century serious drama poses before a Cartesian soul an image of itself raising passions, thus encountering the intellectual joy of an Other whose immanence suggests itself in the plays' concern as to what they do in front of this specular surface which is meant to reflect their affectivity by its agitation.65
The predicament of serious drama as theorized by Dryden and Rapin, then, concerns what psychoanalysis conceptualizes as the imaginary order of psychic life. As such it may be addressed with a view to Lacan's re-examination of the imaginary and the specular in his seminar on anxiety. In this seminar, the specular space of the ego betrays libido invested in the body, libido cast in terms of the object that disrupts this space, so as to eventually find its articulation in the organic body of organs. Tragedy as professedly imagistic encounters something it does not bargain for in the mirrored space it forms for itself through raising the passions of the spectators' soul. What tragedy encounters may be put in Lacan's words in his "Presentation on Psychical
Causality": the 'passions of the body', a noteworthy turn on Descartes' 'passions of the soul'.
64 Rapin cites Quintilian, saying that 'without the passions all is cold and flat in the discourse' (The Continental, 294, Quintilian, Inst. Ora., VI.ii.7-8, Vol. II, 421). His interpretation of the Poetics suggests a Cartesian influence when saying about the art involved that its end is to delight, which is why it labors to move the passions, 'all whose motions are delightful, because nothing is more sweet to the soul than agitation' (281). The stirring of the passions of pity and fear is necessary to shake the soul, so that 'all the impressions it feels become delightful', the proper condition for its casting into 'a sweet and profound meditation' (301). 65 Descartes connects intellectual joy with the experience of the theater: along with the passions excited in us by the adventures represented in the theater 'we have pleasure in feeling them excited in us, and this pleasure is an intellectual joy which may easily take its origin from sadness as from any of the other passions' (Passions of the Soul, II, At. 147). Yet the independence of the interior of the soul from the senses qualifies the sadness of pity: the soul 'has yet the satisfaction of thinking that it does its duty in compassionating the afflicted', Descartes says about the pity caused by the tragic action (Passions III, At. 158). The primacy of volitional soul over the impingements of extended substance suggested by intellectual joy, I suggest, inadvertently turns the tables on tragedy vis-à-vis the spectator. An Other that appears to lack nothing is now invoked not by the tragic hero but by the (spectator's) soul which tragedy has to ravish.
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Much more than to all the ''passions of the body" in the Cartesian sense, Lacan says, man is slave to the fundamental illusion, 'the passion of being a man. It is … the passion of the soul par excellence, narcissism, that imposes its structure on all his desires, even the loftiest ones' (Ecrits, 153). Yet narcissism as the passion of the soul is the passion of the body in Freudian teaching. Lacan after a manner subverts the
Cartesian soul with the notion of the body, connecting the question of being (the passion of being a man) with the passions of the body in the notion of narcissism. The tragedy of passions presents a similar subversion. The fundamental illusion of the passion of being a man, in the sense of being the man of passions, is perceived by the tragedy of passions in the fundamental gap between what it seeks to invoke in its imagistic endeavor, and what is embodied through it as libido that brings to the fore the body of jouissance.66
It has been suggested so far that passions and their mode of representation place serious drama in a unique position. Both present the encumbrance of affectivity in terms of a soul that must be agitated. And both concern the residual effect of the specular which such agitation entails. The unique position of serious drama effected through passions and their mode of representation thus concerns an immanent Other and an indissoluble residue which translate affectivity into anxiety. It is now necessary to see how passions and their mode of representation concern the tragedies' intrigue.
Intrigue is bipolar with respect to passions. Passions form the content of intrigue; they are betrayed by character interdependencies as a topic of contemplation, or a tool of
66 It is interesting to note that in his discussion on narcissism in his first seminar Lacan subordinates libido to the image, the real image which is the foundation of the narcissistic ego: 'The essence of the image is to be invested by the libido' (141). At this point, the libidinal drive 'is centered on the function of the imaginary' (122). In Lacan's tenth seminar the image has a libidinal reserve 'which is not projected, … not cathected at the level of the specular image, for the reason that it remains profoundly cathected, irreducible at the level of one's own body, at the level of primary narcissism, … what is called erotism, … an autistic jouissance' (5.12.62, p. 3). There no longer seems to be such subordination. Libido as an 'elsewhere' not perceived in the image, but there nonetheless, will be what the image of passions best embodies.
213 manipulation by the intriguer. Passions emerge in the pathos of characters victimized by the set of events constructed as intrigue. But at the same time intrigue has little to do with passions. It is possible to say that in tragedy as well as in comedy, intrigue (not to be confused with Rapin's definition of it as the complication of the fable, p. 287), is the imaginary scene of the drive, constructed at the level of plot and the play's semantics in the relationship between the intriguer and his victim. Yet in tragedy it is precisely the passions that accentuate intrigue as the scene of the drive by suggesting the distance between the material of intrigue and the activity of its making (its poesis).
Intrigue in tragedy is where passions are voided of their affective content, reduced as it were so as to reinstate their relation to the extended (not of the soul) substance itself.
In the plays examined in this chapter, intrigue, passions and passions' mode of representation, the three coordinates of tragedy knot to form a topology of waste or refuse: in order to agitate the spectator's soul, intrigue on the side of plot and artificiality on the side of style, are made to effect and support an affective excess that is at the same time subject to their emptying function. The real of the drive thus suggests itself in passions 'tormented' by intrigue and artificiality of style. In these plays passions gesture towards their cause in something as intimate to and alienated from them as the drive is: a locatable object cause whose presence is not disrupted.
They do so through the emptying effect of intrigue and the artificiality of style.
Intrigue empty of passion is bound with the ever insoluble function of the intriguer. No articulation in terms of motivation or goal can fully resolve the enigma of the intriguer. The insoluble function of the intriguer is resolved elsewhere. What eludes the construction of intrigue as a phantasmatic sado-masochistic scene is the drive in its quintessential structure of masochism and the waste-like object it marks. Masochism which resolves the elusive function of the intriguer emerges at the level of style,
214 dislodging passions in their plurality, translating them, as surplus libido would, into the affect of all affects: anxiety (Freud, ''Introductory Lectures" XXV, SE 16, 403-404).
The tragedy of passions subjected to artificiality of style, and here to intrigue, arouses anxiety in the spectator. The tragedy of passions has been the source of anxiety no less in the time of Dryden and Rapin (as indicated by their critical effort to justify it) than in our time (as suggested by critical work grappling with the problem of style in late seventeenth-century serious drama, attempting to account for its pathos and rant).67
Late seventeenth-century tragedy, then, is not without an object, in the sense that in its effort to ravish a soul that is too immanent a presence, it produces a surplus affect that is resistant to the regulation and binding function of signification. Rhetorical micro-structures embody this excess in detachable elements, in component parts that retain their separability and dispensability, at the same time that they are made to meet
Rapin's prescriptive demand for 'simplicity, sustained with greatness and majesty', necessary to give force to the passions (The Continental, 291-292).68
In classical as well as Renaissance rhetorical theory, figures of speech are schemes of grammatical construction that would have been considered erroneous in non-poetic language, as Puttenham as well as Quintilian assert (128, IX.iii.3, Vol. III,
443, respectively). The imitative suitability of such figures of speech for the invocation of passions is arbitrary. Figures of construction are not the same as figures of thought, or logic. They produce no argument; their function is strictly ornamental. In
Puttenham's words, 'they reach no further than the ear' (136). These figures display
67 The question of style was dealt with in depth by such critics as Rothstein and Marshall in the late sixties and mid seventies of the previous century. Marshall claims that 'ironically, it is those speeches intended to convey passion that are the least effective for us' (157), and that in this drama, what creates our responses is 'the failure, according to our conventions, to match device and context, style and substance, or matter and manner' (179). Hume says heroic drama, whose effect on Restoration tragedy is studied by Rothstein, is 'full of rant and bombast' (The Development, 187, Rothstein, 56). 68 For Rapin, 'all the emotions of the soul become fervent and passionate' by figures of speech, figures of eloquence (The Continental, 291-292).
215 their sense-exceeding substance in their very structure, stringing together elements for no sense-producing end.
What then is the function of the figures of speech in the plays studied here with regard to catharsis, in so far as for Dryden pity and fear as the ends of the fable in tragedy depend for their effect on 'the Operations from the Writing' ("Heads", Works
Vol. XVII, 190)? Dryden concedes that pity and fear are pleasurable: 'when the soul becomes agitated with fear for one character, or hope for another, then it is that we are pleased in Tragedy' ("Grounds", Ker I, 211). Yet Dryden also expresses his reservation about the sufficiency of pity and fear as the ends of tragedy, promoting instead the notion of concernment which suggests the evocation of emotions rather than their purgation ("Heads", Works, Vol. XVII, 185-187). The affective end of tragedy as conceived by Dryden thus seems to veer from the pleasure controlled by catharsis, pleasure controlled by the domain of morality and the law it holds in view, to the totality of jouissance, the pleasure of/in pleasure, of ravishment, that renders the rectifying effect of catharsis negligible. I would like to suggest that figures of speech as they function in the tragedies of intrigue examined in this chapter are conducive to the same jouissance tapped by the notion of concernment but in a way that introduces affectivity of a different quality: they tint concernment with the affect of anxiety.
In Greek tragedy, the guardian of a family Até invokes the line of sight of desire by following in the path of desire to its non-dialectizable beyond. The tragic figure erects a last barrier of beauty and splendor before desire's non-attainable object- cause by thus crossing over the limit of life, and renders catharsis operative in averting the horror of such crossing. Late seventeenth-century tragedy supports no such beyond of the symbolic, no such constitution of the object as lack. The totality it seeks is that of affect, an indeterminate body-psyche category, whose image is hard to produce.
216
While qualifying the route of desire by positing no sufficient obstacle in its way (the fable is less significant compared to the diction, as Dryden insists), late seventeenth- century tragedy also fails to erect an image of splendor or the barrier of beauty to indicate and avert the beyond of desire. Nor does it allow catharsis its appeasing effect.
In late seventeenth-century tragedy, totality sought elsewhere, in and through maximum affectivity, is thus guaranteed no last barrier before the horror of the object cause of the drive.
The horror of the object, the apogee sought by passions to stop melancholy, as
Caesar Borgia in his agony implies (V.i.239-240), persists through figures of grammatical construction. These figures give body to the object, perceived as the suffering jouissance of the body, rather than veiling its horror. Anxiety, produced in the spectator through the pathos of characters, is hence tragedy's most profitable tool in the face of the unyielding soul. This is so not only because anxiety is an undeceiving affect. It is also in these plays because style is thus granted priority as the anxiety- inducing manifestation of residual affectivity. Anxiety is where tragedy aiming at the soul as its object of intention, and presenting itself to the soul as an object of representation, encounters the object as cause. Anxiety is tragedy's means of encountering and producing the surplus effect of passions. This surplus effect finds its objectal manifestation in the figures of grammatical construction.
Late seventeenth-century tragedy posits a relation between passions constituting its major object of representation, style, and intrigue whereby excess and voiding intersect. Excess and voiding enmesh to produce a disturbing quality which gestures towards psychical causality. It is the claim of this chapter that this disturbing quality pertains to the body of jouissance with respect to the soul. Rather than being constituted as a lack, in the plays examined in this chapter psychical causality is
217 embodied in figures of speech that are palpably combinatory, yet 'the mind for any novelty of sense be little or nothing affected' by them (Puttenham, 136).
In each of the three tragedies that will be examined below different figures of speech form stylistic dominants. Hence, in each play the object constituted as the object of the drive is encountered differently, as gaze, voice, or, finally, as anal object.
Passions of the soul are thus tormented by their libidinal extended substance. By means of stylistic excess and grandiloquence, an extended libidinal substance emerges in the plays, purging the spectator of the imaginary effectuation of passions, and eliciting anxiety instead.
218
D. Lee's Caesar Borgia – The Jouissance of the Eye
Lee's Caesar Borgia (1679) will serve as the model of a tragedy that combines intrigue, passions and figures of grammatical construction so as to effectuate the double move of arousing anxiety in the spectator while pressing upon the spectator the horror of the object as bodily fragmentation. In the following analysis of the play I will attempt to show how the play's poesis, by means of a privileged signifier and figures of style, becomes the unveiled locale of the non-lacking object in the guise of a body fragment. The fragment as an effect of the cut is the play's hallmark of the aesthetics of anxiety. This is a cut arising from the workings of the play's style, and is emphatically not the cut established under the law of the signifier.
The three levels of the drama of intrigue that have been engaging us thus far - the levels of plot, semantic content and rhetorical forms - will be studied below to show the pertinence of the play's intrigue and style to Freud's theorization of anxiety both with respect to a repressed phantasy of castration (the uncanny), and to masochism or the drive. The structuralism of the dream as conceived by Freud will be my means of establishing the relation between elements of plot, theme and style, so as to indicate the uncanny effect of style. It is at the level of style that the masochistic function of the intriguer is materialized, thus presenting the position of the subject of passions as opposed to the subject of desire.
Lee's Caesar Borgia is classified by Hume as horror tragedy (Dev., 201, 342).
According to Van Lennep, it is a play that displays how completely Lee had renounced the heroic drama and turned to the Elizabethans, especially Shakespeare, for inspiration
(378, Stroup and Cooke, Introd., 69).69 The play has no motto to suggest a guiding
69 Van Lennep indicates the influence of Dryden's preface to All for Love (1678) on Lee's tendency to break with the tradition of heroic tragedy and to model his tragedies upon the great tragedies of the Elizabethans. Lee's dedication of his tragedy Mithridates (1678) (where he claims to have endeavored to mix Shakespeare with Fletcher and his desire to be found a refiner on those admirable writers) bespeaks
219 principle for its reading. The title of the play seems to constitute a sufficient paratext in itself, giving the name of the hero and his identity: Caesar Borgia; son of Pope
Alexander the Sixth.70 Yet the absence of a motto is conspicuous for a drama of the time. This absence is intra-textually compensated for by Machiavel, the play's villain or intriguer, who produces a peculiarly visual, artist-like depiction of his plan:
Thus have I drawn the platform of their Fates; As oft I have beheld, by Masters hands, A tale in painting admirably told; Here a soft Dido stabb'd into the brest, A Hero there thrown headlong from a Window, To meet her Lover wrack'd upon the Shore: So have I formed in more than Brass or Marble, The Deaths of those whom I intend to hush (I.i.75-82)
the influence of Dryden's preface and is a manifesto of future policy (209). In Caesar Borgia (1679) Lee borrows extensively from Shakespeare's tragedies Othello, King Henry VI Part II and King John. The borrowings are significant in a number of ways. From Othello he borrows the play's main intrigue, Machiavel's Iago-like fashion of incensing Borgia against Bellamira, his newly wedded wife, for supposedly committing adultery with his brother, leading Borgia to murdering both. Machiavel, however, acts with a view to releasing Borgia from the weakening influence of love and marriage on the mental acuteness and prowess of a ruler. But Lee also borrows Shakespeare's words. Regarding one scene in the play that Lee has plagiarized from King Henry VI Part II, Van Lennep comments that it has been often quoted as an example of how Lee allowed his passions to run away with him and lead him to sheer extravagance, while the words are in fact Shakespeare's, slightly adulterated (366). Nonetheless, it is interesting to note that both King Henry VI Part II and King John occasion for Lee Machiavellian concerns of political intrigue and scheming that are bound with ruling, such concerns as are introduced by two other sources of Lee, Machiavelli's The Prince and the so called Sinigallia Tract or Description of the Methods Adopted by The Duke Valentino when Murdering Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto Da Fermo etc.(1502). The problem of Popish usurpation (King John) would additionally be pertinent to Caesar Borgia, a play written in the wake of the Popish Plot and intending to capitalize upon the current of anti- Catholic feeling it stirred (Introduction, Stroup and Cooke, 67). More important still is the stylistic modification Shakespeare's words undergo, to suggest that the passion and the style are unmistakably Lee's. 70 The play in effect ingeniously knits together two famous events in the life of the historical Duke Valentino (Caesar Borgia), with a fictional female character, Bellamira, as their center: Caesar's murder of his brother, the Duke of Gandia, and his treacherous murder of the Orsini and Vitelli, leaders of the forces Borgia was dependent on but turning against him. As Machiavelli states in the Sinigallia Tract, he was sent by the Florentines to aid the Duke against these new enemies. Van Lennep points out that the idea of connecting Machiavelli with the plot and introducing him into the play in Iago's role was suggested to Lee by these lines of the Sinigallia Tract (349). Bellamira of Lee's play is the object of jealousy and adversity between Borgia and his brother, and is the daughter of Paul Orsini, Borgia's enemy made a friend through Bellamira and drawn thus into Borgia's trap. Borgia in the play, like the historical one, plans to murder Orsino: 'were Bellamira dearer, Her Father bleeds, and all the Rebel- Race;' (I.i.437). But Lee has made the downfall of the Orsini an integral part of the play's intrigue: through Machiavel's machinations Borgia is wrongly convinced that Bellamira is unfaithful and murders first Gandia, then the Orsini, and finally his bride.
221
The images cited by Machiavel have thematic value, especially the allusion to
Hero and Leander, Musaeus's (fifth or sixth centuries A.D.) as well as Marlowe's and
Chapman's. Just as suggestive is the allusion to Dido, who was an obstacle to Aeneas' calling as ruler of Rome, and in Marlowe's Tragedy of Dido sees herself as dying truest to a living false Aeneas. Machiavel nevertheless plans to accomplish tyranny of the old
Roman style for his prince (Borgia) by using 'more than Brass or Marble'. The prefatory picture he draws alludes only indirectly to the role he plays in obstructing
Borgia's Leander-like advance towards a Hero, and misrepresents the heroine's fate
(Hero and Dido took their own life for love, Bellamira dies Desdemona-like, although she has renounced her true love to Borgia's brother and vows fidelity and obedience to
Borgia, the man she is forced to marry). Thus while pointing to Machiavel's intent upon the actual death of those who stand in his way, the image as it were defeats its hermeneutic end.71
No less than for the themes it calls to mind, Machiavel's opening tableau is marked by its visual quality. The image is addressed to the spectator's eye, like a painting. Structurally, the image produces a field of vision. At the level of signifiers vision is assailed through numerous references to the eyes and their activation. The space of the play's world is defined by Machiavel's image as visual. The field of vision as such is sustained by a chain of signifiers alluding to the eye. Allusions to the eye commence with Cardinal Sforza who 'with a Pocket-Glass/ Surveys the gloating Image'
(of little American boys with boxes of jewels in their hands meant to bribe Machiavel to betray Borgia), and his admiration of Bellamira's eyes, and the way she 'roul ém
71 That the opening image created by Machiavel is not a replication of his plot is further suggested by Borgia's own reference to Machiavel's artistic hand at the end, when he is dying of the poisoned wine he was served by mistake along with Cardinal Ascanio Sforza his enemy, for whom it was intended: 'and yet methinks 'twas hard/ That this Elaborate Scheme of mighty man/ This Parchment, where the Lines of Roman greatness/ By thee [Machiavel] so well were drawn, should by the hand/ Of scribling Chance be blotted thus forever' (V.iii.228-231). Borgia thus supplies the goal and raison d'etre of Machiavel's opening image of plan of action, emphasizing the foreignness of its allusions.
221 round;/ As thus, and thus…/ And wink and gloat, and turn 'em to the corners---' (I.i.33-
35).
More ocular images ensue: Alonzo tells Ascanio how Machiavel 'with an eye, swift as the Sun and piercing' ran his letter over, and Machiavel says he 'pierc'd the
Charmer [Bellamira] with a narrow eye (I.i.57, 133). Orsino threatens to 'stare his daughter [Bellamira] into Frenzy' while she is in her husband's [Borgia's] arms (II.i.76-
77). Borgia as it were remembers with his eyes the love exchanges he has witnessed between Bellamira and Palante, his brother the Duke of Gandia: 'these cursed
Remembrancers,/ These eyes have seen it. O! she dotes on him, / Feeds on his looks--- eyes him, as pregnant Women/ Gaze at the precious thing their Souls are set on'
(II.i.281-283). Ascanio urges Alonzo to pull out the eyes of Borgia's son: 'Away, away! Come, come, pull out his eyes' (III.i.29). Palante calls off the tears from his eyes as he remonstrates with Borgia on taking Bellamira from him: 'O, foolish eyes! but these are your last tears,/ And I must mend your course with blood' (III.i.123). Borgia vows to dry all pity from his 'weak Eyes', and 'gaze till Southern Fury steels [his] Soul'
(III.i.436-438). Borgia calls upon Bellamira to feast her eyes with his bleeding wound, inflicted by Palante: 'come glut thy Eyes,/ Glut them with Blood' (III.i.495-496).
Machiavel will further Borgia's vengeance with a proof of Bellamira's adultery 'where you shall see, even with those eyes behold/ and gaze upon their curst incestuous loves', using a pleonasm combined with hysteron proteron (IV.i.231-232). Alonzo is lauded by Machiavel as being his 'glance of Death' (V.i.3), a praise which is rendered ironic at this point with Alonzo having cut out Seraphino's eyes, unbeknown to Machiavel
(III.i.30). Borgia literally has Bellamira's eyes 'glut with the Death' of her father and his party, himself raging to such a degree he 'could wade up to the eyes with blood'
(V.i.150, 152). Towards the play's end, Machiavel meets with a 'steadfast gaze' a
222 vision of Borgia 'Swoln black, and bloated, while your inclos'd eyes,/ All blood-shot, fixt on mine their dreadful beams'(V.iii.45). A final example is Seraphino, who 'with his eyes out' as the stage instructions state, says to Borgia: 'oft-times have you held me… And call'd me little Eyes, little indeed,/ For now they're out, and all my Face is cut' (V.iii.260-264).
Thematically, the eye is accorded various epithets: Borgia's is weak,
Machiavel's narrow and piercing, Gandia's foolish, Bellamira's melting, Seraphino's little. But functioning as an epithet, the eye also loosens its signifying capacity (it is not actually clear why Seraphino's eyes are little, while Borgia's 'weak eyes' are epithetic of his state of mind, weakened by love and jealousy), and takes on a life of its own.
The eye is pulled out of its organic function at the same time that its designative function becomes more salient. Verbal allusions to the eye, such as 'rouling' and turning, and those pertaining to raising one's emotions, Machiavel's 'shall rise', 'I'll raise', 'I must rouze him' (I.i.86, 109 ,212), Borgia's 'thou hast rouz'd the Lion', 'thou hast awak'd my love' (I.i.535, 565), similarly suggest the eye's function as an organ that opens, wakes and sees. At the same time, verbal allusions obfuscate the eye's organic function by its metaphorical displacement into the domain of emotions.72 Such obfuscation of the eye's organic function (in Freud's terms, ego-function) is furthered by the specific verbs used, which bring up the notion of bulging out, or wrenching.
72 This is best exemplified by the proximity of the metaphorical association of a horrible sight with gorging the eye, as when Borgia reveals before Bellamira the dead bodies of the Orsini: 'glut her eyes with Death', and the idiomatic use of the eye in an expression referring to making one's way by massacre: 'I could wade up to the eyes in blood' (V.i.150, 152). Such proximity occurs quite often in references to the eye to suggest that it is doubly removed from its organic function. A comparison with Shakespeare's use of the eye in King Henry VI Part II suggests a difference in style where the emotional pitch is the same: 'Upon thy eye-balls murderous Tyranny/ Sits in grim majesty to fright the world./ Look not upon me, for thine eyes are wounding' (King Henry says to his wife after his uncle Gloucester has been murdered – III.ii.48-50). It may be said that the metaphorical allusion to the eyes in Shakespeare's text is more subdued, in the sense that they are used as expressing something, which is one of their conventional functions. Another source of inspiration for the motif of the eye would be Shakespeare's King John, where Arthur pleads with Hubert not to put out his eyes. But Arthur begs Hubert to spare his eyes even if for the minimal use of looking on him (IV.i.100-103); these are looking and seeing eyes.
223
Thematically and semantically, the congestion of allusions to the eye accentuates the function of the eye as an organ of vision. At the same time, these allusions divest the eye of any such organic functioning. This is an eye that does not see, no matter how intensely it gazes.
Stylistically in this play, the eye is made an artifact. This is especially noticeable where the eyes are apostrophized as personified abstractions. The speaker is separated from its seeing, weeping, organ. Eyes are apostrophized in the play as though not submitted to the speaker's agency (Bellamira's 'weep eyes, and bleed, O heart!', for example, IV.i.447). Such apostrophes are perhaps one of the play's cumbersome manifestations of artificiality of style. However, this artificiality is not without fascinating effects. The eye, rather than the hero, becomes one element among others that fascinates us. Fascination with the eye as an effect of style is necessary to purge the spectator of the imaginary invocation of the eye as actually seeing, paving the way for the conception of the eye as other than itself, an organ imbued with an elsewhere of jouissance.
Another invocation of the eye, as wrenched or fallen, is suggested by
Machiavel's picture of Hero 'thrown headlong from a window'. This is Lee's wording, or rather Machiavel's, not found in either Musaeus or Marlowe and Chapman.73 The image invokes another eye: Leander's looking, seeing eye in its relation to Hero's lamp.
Leander's is an eye directed at a substitute aimed for object of love. He becomes
'Love's vessel' when seeing the lamp, at the same time that he strives 'in his course straight' under its guidance (Musaeus, 210, p. 373, 254, p. 377). The image of Leander striving in his course towards Hero looms thematically in Borgia's striving for
Bellamira. The transposition of the eye into an organ severed from its organic capacity
73 A Hero 'thrown', like a Dido 'stabbed', underlies the presence of an artist's hand that has created these images, as seen by another would-be artist such as Machiavel. But the picture of Hero remains powerfully indigestible; Dido could still be stabbed by her own hand.
224 is hence notable. The eye emerging in the play is not a vessel but is already filled up, glutted with its own charms. It seems closer in character to the scopophilic eye, the eye that in the hysteric is wholly at the disposal of the repressed sexual instinct and hence blind (Freud, "Psychogenic disturbance of Vision", SE 11, 216).74
The eye suffused with erotic pleasure, the blind spot of vision produced by an increased erotogenic role of its organ, is in Caesar Borgia the eye that is an artifact of style, encountered at the level of signifiers through persistent collocations. But there is yet another aspect of style, where little is offered to signification. Here similar erotogenic suffusion is produced by the artificiality which permeates the play's dominant figures of grammatical construction. Organ-bound pleasure accrues visibility by the structure of such figures as parenthesis, polysyndeton, asyndeton and brachylogia.
Figures of speech which are artfully varied from common usage have suggested for Quintilian the various attitudes of the body. Quintilian draws an analogy between figures and bodily attitudes when he explains the nature of figures of speech and advocates their variation: a figure in its special sense, in which it is called a schema, means a rational change in meaning or language from the ordinary and simple form,
74 The prevalence of the theme of Hero and Leander in Caesar Borgia received no attention in the critical literature on the play. An allusion to Hero and Leander is made explicitly by Borgia, in reference to his forthcoming marriage: 'Methinks I see the Taper in the Window,/ The Busie Nurse unveils the weeping Maid,/ And I must naked pass through the Seas to reach her./ O fatal Marriage! O thou dismal Gulph!/ Which like the Hellespont do'st rore between/ Me and my Joys' (I.i.580-585). Armistead has interpreted the pervasive use of sea imagery in terms of the degeneration Borgia's feelings undergo, from a glorious trial of his devotion in the quest for Bellamira/Eve in her paradisiacal New World, to the violent, self-destructive passion caused by jealousy: 'Machiavel's "start of Nature" has become a natural disaster, and the way to Bellamira's New World has become the tempestuous sea of Borgia's own insanity and depravity'. Armistead emphasizes Borgia's depravity and the connection between insanity and depravity, and of both to Providence: Borgia's delirium 'reveals what providence has in store: a sea of fire, emerging from which "The Master Devil" (V.iii.305) offers full pardon in exchange for gold' (Nathaniel Lee, 118-119). Armistead's interpretation suggests that the imagery of tempestuous seas reflects both Borgia's character and the theme of Fortune. I suggest that the significance of the Hero and Leander theme begins with the inassimilable nature of the imagery it introduces. The reference to Hero and Leander foregrounds a self-suffused element that is opaque rather than reflective. The poetics of the play's intrigue, I argue, has its bearings in the resistance of theme, imagery and figures of style to integration.
225 that is to say 'a change analogous to that involved by sitting, lying down on something or looking back.' When applied to 'certain attitudes, or … gestures of language', a schema means that 'which is poetically or rhetorically altered from the simple and obvious method of expression' (Inst. Orat., IX.i.11-14, Vol. III, pp. 353-355).75
With regard to figures of logic we saw that logic is the road to the unconscious as a thinking that does not know itself, a thinking that points to something that retreats from it. Put otherwise, figures pertaining to logic directly concern the real of unconscious thinking of the subject implicated by the signifier (Lacan, SXIV, 18.1.67, p. 2, Miller, "Introduction to Seminar X" II, 36). Figures of grammatical construction, on the other hand, are figures whose ornamental function, whose art, subsists in their deviation from ordinary use, an alteration that is significant by virtue of the changed attitude or gesture it implies.
Furthermore, the definition of figures of speech is aesthetically vague. A figure means 'a form of expression to which a new aspect is given by art', concludes
Quintilian (IX.1.14, Vol. III, p. 355). What can these figures offer to psychoanalytic thought regarding the subject implicated by the body, where 'the body, and more precisely the object separated from the body, [is] involved in the construction of the subject' (Miller, "Introduction to Seminar X" II, 36)? While figures of logic, highlighted by comedy of intrigue, support the function of the signifier, figures of speech, highlighted by the tragedy of intrigue, direct us to the imposition of the object of the drive, an imposition that the signifier cannot withstand and therefore is uncanny, arousing anxiety.
75 The difference between tropes and figures merits reminding at this point. As Quintilian explains, a trope concerns a change in signification. The term figure is employed when 'we give our language a conformation other than the obvious and ordinary.' A figure does not necessarily involve 'any alteration either of the order or the strict sense of words' (IX.i.4-7, Vol. III, pp. 349-350). Figures of speech concern 'words, diction, expression, language or style', as opposed to figures of thought that are 'of the mind, feeling or conceptions' (IX.i.16-18, Vol. III, p. 357).
226
Figures of construction as used by Lee in Caesar Borgia manifest their connection to the passions in a manner that evokes a sense of the uncanny. This has to do with the non-expressive function of figures.76 Quintilian holds that 'a figure in its strict, not its general sense, is not simply the expression of anything you choose to select.' Conceding the employment of special figures in 'expressing anger, in entreating for mercy, or appealing to pity' he insists that 'it does not follow that expressions of anger, appeals to pity or entreaties for mercy are in themselves figures' (IX.i.22-25,
Vol. III, pp. 359-363). In Lee's play, the representation of characters' passions hinges on the same non-expressiveness of figures posited by Quintilian. By being as irreducible as Quintilian insists on making them, figures of construction in the play cancel any differential gap that informs signification, or expression in words, of passions. They become the erotogenic surplus of passions, their organic manifestation, by virtue of this very irreducibility.77
The figure or scheme of grammatical construction that Lee's Caesar Borgia opens with is parenthesis. Parenthesis as defined by Quitilian 'consists in the interruption of the continuous flow of our language by the insertion of some remark'
(IX. iii. 23-24, Vol. III, 459). However, Fraunce in his Arcadian Rhetoric, seems to capture the residual, dispensable nature of parenthesis when introducing this figure in combination with figures of repetition: 'Sometimes there is a parenthesis put between but the thing is all one as if there had nothing been inserted' (unpaginated). The
76 A connection of figures to the passions is alluded to by Quintilian in relation to Cicero. According to Quintilian, Cicero does not restrict the term figures to those expressions whose form varies from ordinary use. He regards figurative all those expressions which are especially striking and most effective in stirring the emotions of the audience (IX.i.25, Vol. III, pp. 361-363). 77 It is nevertheless not easy to separate figures from their qualitative, aesthetic impediments. For example, brachylogia for Sherry is a figure of obscurity, where through the fault of words, or of putting them together, 'a certain darkness is brought in' (Folvii, p. 21), whereas Puttenham treats it as rhetorical, namely both auricular (tunable to the ear) and sensible (stirring the mind) (178, 163). Figures are embellishments, in Cicero's words (De Oratore III.xxv.96, Vol. IV, p. 77), 'habillamants' in Puttenham's (114). Their poetic function should nevertheless be distinguished from mimesis of emotion even if they impart 'celerity and vehemence through brevity' as Miriam Joseph says in relation to brachylogia (297).
227 example Fraunce gives also indicates that the inserted phrase is parenthetic whether enclosed within parentheses or commas. The opening question of the play has this interjection: 'Are these the presents, say'st thou, of the late New Cardinal Ascanio
Sforza?' (I.i.1-2). More instances of parenthetic insertions follow. One instance is epergesis, the interposition of a word in apposition as an added interpretation (Joseph,
295): 'If the great Cardinal, meaning you, my Lord,' (I.i.60). Another is the insertion of a reporting clause in quotation, noticeably stressed: 'Receive, he cry'd, receive him as a
Husband' (I.i.240). Another is the insertion of direct address, in a diacope or the repetition of a word with one or few between (Joseph, 307): 'fly, Palante, fly!'
(II.i.113). Unmarked interjection is another form: 'but oh those flattering hopes were vain' (II.i.131). Others are actual parentheses as in Palante's parting words to
Bellamira: 'When I am gone, and thou …Enjoy'st the Change thy Father forc'd thee to,
(For sure I cannot think it all thy doing!)' (II.i.143); or when Borgia says to Palante before they fight each other over Bellamira: 'If by thy hand I fall (as who e're div'd/ So deep in Fate, but sometimes was deceiv'd?)'; Palante replying 'If vanquish'd by thy
Arm (though Death, I hope, / Will, more than Oath, confirm the fatal bargain)'
(III.i.163-164, 172-173). Bellamira vows to Borgia 'never to see, /Nor speak, no, nor (if possible) to think' about Palante (III.i.536). Machiavel drives in the possibility of
Bellamira's unfaithful thoughts with 'I say not (pardon me!) she does, or will' (IV.i.75); and Alonso apprises Machiavel of Borgia's leave taking from Palante with a verifying insertion, 'Duke Valentine … Being call'd (as Fame reports) to Sinigallia' (V.i.9).
Finally, parenthetical insertion appears in the form of the exclamatory 'Ha—as I live, just from Palante now', when Machiavel indicates to Borgia the emergence of Adorna,
Palante and Bellamira's 'emissary' (IV.i.167). It is important to note that the actual parentheses, those insertions enclosed by typo half moons, even when short, are no
228 mere supplements of content but also syntactically salient. They stand out, a point not stressed by Fraunce for example. For our purposes, their significance lies in this syntactic protrusion.
The play makes ample use of the figures of asyndeton, polysyndeton and brachylogia. These figures are not considered syntactical in the sense that parenthesis and epergesis are, but share with them the physical property of detachability. However, if parenthesis is an insertion dispensable as a whole, as suggested by Fraunce, in the figures of asyndeton, polysyndeton and brachylogia it is the components they string together that are detachable or exchangeable with other possible lexical items (within the same semantic field). Such exchangeability of items would nevertheless leave intact the chain as such.
The most common forms of asyndeton (omission of conjunctions between clauses) and polysyndeton (employing many conjunctions) in the play are tripartite.
Polysyndetons appear at the play's opening scene: 'What does the World report of this
Creation,/ Does it not rail, and grin, and bite the Pope?' (I.i.6-7), 'Then such a way she had to roul 'em round;/ As thus, and thus… /And wink and gloat, and turn 'em to the corners' (I.i.33-35). Other polysyndetons emerge, as when Borgia determines to marry
Bellamira: 'Tis fixt; I'll plunge, or perish, or enjoy her' (I.i.588); in combination with parenthetic interjection and a zeugma when he expresses his intention 'To follow
Nature;/ For so do Flames that burn, and Seas that drown;/ Yes, Machiavel, and care not what comes on't', (II.i.325), or in combination with diazeugma when Bellamira says to Borgia after he has killed Palante: 'and I will rage,/ and weep, and rage, and show thee to the world', (V.i.122-123).
Asyndetons in the play, apart from generally being tripartite, are both of single words, as exemplified in Poole, and of clauses, as shown in Peacham and Sherry: 'A
229 fine effeminate Villain, bred in Brothels,/ Senseless, illiterate, the Jear of Rome, / A blot to the whole See!', Don Michael says about Cardinal Ascanio Sforza (I.i.13-15);
Ascanio enthuses about Machiavel 'Would he were Pope… and I his Engine,/ His particular member, to bring, to cast,/ To throw, disperse, convey the warmest/
Sprinklings of his benediction' (I.i.51-55); Machiavel chastises Borgia for his weakness: 'You'd best / Go to the Wars, be shot, and leave this Brother/ The Heir of all'
(II.i.288-289); Palante spurs his defiance of Borgia with 'The word is Conquest, Death, or Bellamira' (III.i.109); when informed by Machiavel that Palante is wounded,
Bellamira says 'I'll renounce my Vows,/ Forgo, forswear all comforts in this life,/ And fly the world' (III.i.306-308); Borgia calls to the assassin Alonzo 'Go, draw the curtain; glut her eyes with Death,/ And strangle her' (V.i.150-151); Bellamira vows her faithfulness to Borgia before Alonzo strangles her: 'If I in thought, in word, in private act/ Have yielded up this body' (V.i.175-176); and Borgia entreats Machiavel to torment him no more: 'But if you hit the Cause that hurt his Brain,/ Then his teeth gnash, he foams, he shakes his Chain,/ His Eye-balls rowl, and he is mad again'
(V.i.266-268).
Finally, we come to the figure of brachylogia, which is the omission of conjunctions between single words, and in Sherry's exempla between phrases as well:
Orsino rails at Cardinal Sforza 'thou scandal to the Altar,/ Thy Front, thy Eyes, thy
Lips, each part of thee…' (I.i.327); Borgia gnawed by suspicion of Bellamira and
Palante's love, says 'Yet I, as if my flames were fire in Frost,/ The more she cools, scorch, rage, and burn the more---' (I.i.529-530); he fervently exclaims to Machiavel
'Thou art my Oracle, my Heav'n, my Genius' (I.i.575); and says he will not be roused only to threaten since 'that's a sleeping Borgia,/ A loving, dreaming, Conscientious
Borgia;' (I.i.602-603); Orsino rages at his daughter's refusal to be married to Borgia:
231
'Say, declare, haste, answer,/ Thou most ungrateful wretch' (II.i.32-33). We find brachylogia in combination with asyndeton in Ascanio's anti-Catholic comment: 'there are Rogues in Orders,/ Monks, Fryers, Jesuits, that would kill their Fathers,/ Ravish their Mothers, eat their Brothers and Sisters/ For half the sum' (III.i.25-27); Borgia is made anxious by Machiavel's dispassionate reaction to his enthusiasm about Bellamira:
'I fall at once, split, ruin'd, dash'd for ever' (III.i.371); he will be bloody, bringing down
'Orsino, Vitellozo, Duke Gravina,/ Oliverotto too; all, all at once' (IV.i.213-214).
Brachylogia is used in combination with exclamation when Bellamira witnesses the torturing of Palante by Borgia: 'O Monster, rocky Villain, Tyger, Hell-hound'
(V.i.108); and upon seeing the bodies of the Orsini she calls Borgia 'Gorgon, Medusa,
Horror;' (V.i.153); herself she declares 'A lying, foolish, vext, outrageous Woman!' to have set Borgia's wrath against her father (V.i.138); and Borgia poisoned howls 'Hoa,
Satan! Belzebub!/ Belial, and Baal' (V.iii.317-318). Machiavel has a vision of the
Pope, Borgia's father, 'Strecht on the Floor, pale, ghastly, cold, and dead' (V.iii.40);
Ascanio claims that under the same Pope, 'a man cannot speak his mind of/ State
Affairs, ---but he must straight be Dogg'd by Hell-hounds, Blood-suckers, Decoyers,/
Rascals' (V.iii.160); and the dying Borgia similarly hurls into a Limbo the ills of the church: 'Indulgences, Dispences, Pardons, Bulls, see yonder!' (V.iii.329).
Instances of brachylogia, like those of the other figures enumerated above, indicate the indifferent nature of the figure as such. Brachylogia, intense as it is, serves a variety of shades of passions, as well as dispassion. It is used by all characters, on different occasions and for various purposes.78 Moreover, we note that brachylogic
78 A compelling example of this point would be occasions where the form is used in echoing repetition, as when Machiavel says to Borgia: 'she shall be yours,/ Truly, religiously, devoutly yours' (I.i.559-560), which the indignant disappointed Borgia repeats: 'Where all thy Depositions, Promises,/ Warrants, Ingagements that she should be mine; chastely, religiously, devoutly mine?' (II.i.253-255). It is true, however, that Borgia as it were compensates for the vacuity of the figure as rendered by Machiavel's use by refreshing it with another brachylogic list.
231 constructions in the play often consist in a series of names. The paradigmatic instance of a brachylogic chaining of names appears at the beginning of the play, in Ascanio
Sforza's self-indulgent play with Bellamira's name: 'Ah, Bella, Bella, Bella, Bella,
Bellamira!' (I.i.26). Sforza's is a model brachylogia because the repetition of the same word underscores its nonsensical function, but not as a joke or irony. Redundancy is invoked to indicate that the number and even nature of the items are immaterial.
Instead, the form calls attention to the manner of combining the elements, their being held together by 'cutting' commas. Puttenham says of brachylogia: 'This figure for pleasure may be called… cutted comma' since there is no shorter division than at every word's end' (178). Cut chaining, or elements hanging together as cut, hence constitutes this figure's irreducible materiality.
One last stylistic dominant in Lee's play is strictly grammatical, and not considered a figure of construction. This is the loosely attached relative clause. For example, Machiavel might be referring to either Florence or to himself when he says:
'Thus I should prove indeed a friend to Florence,/ Who hate Orsino's Race' (I.i.147-
148). In so far as Machiavel refers to himself, the ambiguity resulting from the distance of the modifying clause from its pronominal referent is avoided by the verb 'hate'. A similar grammatical phenomenon is encountered in the following instances: 'How dares he thus provoke me?/ Who knows, yet urges me…' (I.i.333-334); 'Thou proper
Son of that old cursed Serpent,/ Who daubs the holy Chair with blood and Murders'
(V.i.127-128). While in the first of these two instances 'Who knows' probably refers to the farther referent 'he', in the second 'Who daubs' is probably meant by Bellamira to refer to the Serpent, Borgia's father the Pope, but could just as well be ambiguous between both Borgia and the Pope. For the sake of comparison, an instance of no such ambiguity would be 'Do those, who on the Rack for Heav'n expire,…' (I.i.458).
232
Distancing of the relative clause from its antecedent is not considered an erroneous deviation from common use according to most grammar books of the time. Lane
(1700) is unusual in articulating a specific rule about antecedent and relative clause being close together (109). Since ambiguity of reference is avoided by the verbs, there is no violation here of the rules of agreement concerning relative clauses. However, such distancing emphasizes the detachment of the modifying clause from its antecedent, or at least renders their connection difficult to establish. Syntactically, loose relative clause structures produce a double cutting, adding a cut at the level of signification that fails to overlap with the syntactic one.
Polysyndetons, asyndetons and brachylogies, the latter two often indistinguishable, as well as hypozeuxis, combination of clauses each one having its own verb, unlike zeugma (Joseph, 296) and figures of repetition such as epizeuxis, and diacope, support intensification of tempo, short-breath and vehemence. At the same time they exhibit their loose structure, the apparent dispensability of their component parts and the liability of such parts to drop without being missed. The prevalent triple amalgamation of components is a manner of asserting this looseness while arresting the components' caducity. In the same way, the detachability of parenthetic clauses is accentuated through the arresting presence of their inclosing.
At the level of style, figures of grammatical construction and the syntactic construction of relative clause attest to the looseness of their component parts, affecting these parts' detachability. Figures of construction in the play thus tally with the persistence of the eye at the level of signifiers. They structurally dovetail with the play's overvaluation of the eye as an organ of pleasure wrenched from its organic, mythic love-related function. Both cases are effects of a cut. Structurally the eye and figures of style concur as effects of the cut, at the same time that they constitute
233 distinct elements that do not harmonize. In both cases, however, the organs of language emerge as separable, invoking anxiety as the moment of the impingement of the libidinal organic body on the ego. The play's intrigue action produces a similar anxiety effect by the relationship between Borgia and Machiavel, the intriguer whose picture- like plan of action to secure the tyranny of Borgia, also directs the evolvement of the plot. At the level of plot, the manipulation of Borgia's affects evokes the libidinal body as disintegrating, and as such, as eliciting anxiety.
Borgia and Machiavel's relationship manifests two aspects that typify the phantasmatic scene of the drive at the level of the play's action: Machiavel's interference in the course of Borgia's love on the one hand, and his manipulation of
Borgia's affects in the direction of political glory on the other. These two moves are complementary for Machiavel first encourages Borgia to marry Bellamira, then obstructs their married life, using each course in its turn as a means to a single end, the creation of the ultimate Roman tyrant, nourished and driven by the right kind of passion, or the right sort of fury. But there is yet another side to the Borgia-Machiavel relationship: the manipulation is not merely on the side of the intriguer. There is interdependence between the prince and the secretary of Florence that is stated right from the start by Machiavel himself: 'O, Caesar Borgia! Such a Name and Nature!/
That is my second self; a Machiavel!/ A Prince!' (I.i.83-85). In other words, Machiavel is implicated in the tyrant who is his creation in a manner that is not simply justified by his pronounced self-love: 'I love myself; and for my self, I love/ Borgia my prince'
(III.i.243-244).79
79 A very different critical perspective of the play, as has already been mentioned, is that of Armistead who reads it in terms of clashing worldviews, a pagan versus Christian, where Machiavellian fortune turns out to be Providence. The play's psychological dimension rests in the relation insanity and depravity bear to Providence, and in the supernatural transformed into psychic reality through figured and allusive language (''Occultism", 64, "Lee, Renaissance Conventions", 163-164, 169, 171, reproduced in Nathaniel Lee). In this perception, the moral implications of the vices of Machiavellianism take
234
That Machiavel's rationalization is insufficient to account for the interdependence marking his relation to Borgia is suggested by Machiavel's strategy.
He attempts to raise Borgia by 'Ambition, not by Love', by heightening one passion at the expense of another, since love lulls ambition to inglorious rest (I.i.135-136). What is at stake in the art-like creation of a tyrant is the subjection of his passions to negotiation in the effort to bring about their distillation, their intensification towards a purified yet governed rage that will insure the prince's political ambition. Borgia and
Machiavel's interdependence thus concentrates on the scale of emotions Borgia is susceptible to, starting with his 'softness and effeminate mourning' (I.i.511) through his
'mildness' (I.i.538, 590), and ending with his boiling, and his fury (I.i.539). It is a scale of emotions which Machiavel both stimulates and prevails on for his purposes.
Borgia and Machiavel seem to coincide in their purpose, yet the plan of the intriguer actually clashes with the destiny of the hero. Machiavel's opening tableau of the fate of Hero thus holds Borgia and Machiavel together in a split position, the painter of the image appearing in it in the arresting function that the Marlowe-
Chapman version assigns to the sea-god (Neptune) with respect to a Leander. The killing embrace of the sea-god, whose homoerotic side is underwritten in Marlowe-
Chapman's Hero and Leander, is evoked at the level of plot in yet another split that the controlling image imparts. The painter is implicated in his work in a manner not known to himself, where the scales of passion-weighing tip to subvert the manipulative agency of the intriguer and make him an object of masochistic pleasure.
Preoccupation with feelings makes up the greater part of Machiavel's engagement with Borgia, and this is where the manipulator is made to serve his
precedence and Machiavel's obsession to mold another's destiny turns out disastrous since he leaves out of consideration fortune's subservience to God's cosmic design.
235 prince.80 A dispassionate stance, such as seen in Machiavel's question to Borgia, 'Are you incens'd indeed? Or do you, Sir,/ Put on this jealous Fit to make you sport?'
(IV.i.120), is only one shade of this engagement. Borgia, driven to a 'blind, ungovern'd rage' by Bellamira's supposed infidelity and struggling to turn his tears of pain into
'tears of vengeance', covets emotional inducement and support: 'Ha! Methinks thou dost not share in my resentment, Machiavel, as thou ought'st:… Relieve my weari'd fury, bate my Vengeance,/ Call up a friendly rage', and when complied with, he calls for more: 'Excellent, Machiavel! more, more, to lull me' (IV.i.223, 245, 258-260, 272).
The two finally conjoin in cursing Bellamira and Palante, becoming interwoven by the structure of zeugma (one verb serving a number of clauses):
Mach.: Poyson be their drink
Borg.: Gall, Gall and Wormwood! Hemlock! Hemlock! Quench 'em.
Mach.: Their sweetest Shade, a Dell of duskish Adders.
Borg.: Their fairest Prospect, Fields of Basilisks; (etc.) which is culminated in
Borgia's, 'No more; thou art one piece with myself' and 'Henceforth, be thou the
Mistress of my Heart' (IV.i.277-285, 294). The splitting effect of the play's controlling image, reaches here its peak of interchange of masochistic jouissance, with the instigator becoming his beloved victim's object of pleasure.81
80 That the emphasis of the scene of intrigue is on Borgia's emotional susceptibility is further suggested by the manner the play's action neutralizes Borgia's dependence on Machiavel's political cunning. Lee manages to stay accurate historically, remembering that it was Borgia who was a model for Machiavelli in The Prince for example. Thus, although it is Machiavel who sets the play's plot, as suggested by his opening tableau, and by his claim that the 'whole race of Orsin and Vitelli/ Is fixt by Fate and me' (I.i.113-114), Borgia, stripping his heart's 'bed of vices and vertues' to Machiavel, says: 'Think me not over-frail/ Because I love: were Bellamira dearer/ Her Father bleeds, and all the Rebel-Race;/ I'll first insnare the Fools: then preach Fate to 'em' (I.i.434-438). Politically, Machiavel and Borgia are equals; there is no telling who masterminds Borgia'a stratagem to trap the Orsins, Borgia or Machiavel (Machiavel says he was Borgia's 'Legate and solicited/The parents of the beauteous Bellamira' – I.i.140- 141). At the same time, it is the murder of the Orsini and the Vitelli that will turn a mischief that is 'but young, an infant Fury', a 'Brood of Hell', into the 'Devil's Manhood', as Machiavel says (III.i.452-456). 81 Two points should be made about this foundational scene of mutual cursing, which Van Lennep has identified as indebted to Shakespeare's King Henry VI Part II (Act III.ii.306-337) (366). First, while in previous such exchanges it is Machivel who supplies uncalled for affect stimulating scenes, specifically of love-making such as 'Now stealing to her Lips, dissolv'd in Tears,/ And pressing close, but softly to
236
In the phantasmatic terms of an intrigue that relies on the strategy of the manipulation of affects, the implication of subjecting the passions to negotiation is an affective intensification that hits upon a dispensation of the drive. Passions in their imaginary cast as the play-thing of intrigue bind intriguer and victim in a gridlock that is subject to the movement of stimulation, or charge, and discharge. Charge and discharge expose the primal nature of passions themselves; their unobservable yet impelling relation to the life of the body, of the drive. Towards the fifth act of the play the negotiation of feeling becomes increasingly unsettling in the measure that it points at the resistance of passions to any such negotiation. The manipulation of passions in its successful manifestation means distilled emotion beyond pleasure, very much as the drive in its essence, as is conceived by Freud, leads beyond, or prior to, the life and body of the individual human being.
The scene constituted by intrigue whereby the masochist has played his part in leaving the one enjoying him overwhelmed by incertitude regarding his own emotions takes its support from love, one passion that resists suppression. This is also where
Machiavel for the last time attempts to manipulate Borgia's emotions, or range of passions.82 Borgia, growing in love with death (V.i.202), refuses to part with the
her side;…/Then with a sudden start let loose your love' (II.i.357-360), in this case it is Borgia who inflames the scene with 'This hoary Hair should start, and stand an end,/ And all thy shaking jyonts should seem to curse 'em', to the effect of changing Machiavel's Suffolk's like conditional mode of cursing ('If that my Breath were sulph'rous…then I would curse 'em') into an actual exclamatory one (IV.i.275-276). There is a change of roles suggested here, where Borgia is not manipulated but manipulates Machiavel, and having been satisfied can now take a pride in his revenge (IV.i.286). In other words, it is in his masochistic role that Machiavel gains better hold of Borgia's affects. Another point that should be made is the difference between Lee's style and Shakespeare's. Lee breaks up the cursing and orchestrates it between Borgia and Machiavel to effect the subordination of the latter to the pleasure of the former, making Machiavel the mistress of Borgia's heart, whereas in Shakespeare's play the cursing is indeed invoked by the queen but is performed in its entirety by Suffolk her lover, at a point where they are actually made to part with each other. 82 It should be clarified that what is meant by passions, in the Cartesian sense of the various passions that are discussed in The Passions of the Soul, and affects, is a psychic structure, whose nature is discussed here in relation to the aesthetic aspects of intrigue drama. 'Feelings' and 'emotions' in this context would not be different from affects, that is, they are not psychological sentiments or states, but are accounted for in the terms of the psychic structure of affects as emerging from the aesthetics of the drama. I suggest that the aesthetics of the play point in the direction of affect at its state beyond the pleasure
237 strangled Bellamira, and having railed at Machiavel for his 'policy' (V.1.224), begs
Machiavel: 'Say any thing to make me mad, and lose/ This Melancholly, which will else destroy me'(V.i.239-240). Machiavel then enjoining 'No doubt, Sir, but among your glorious Plunder,/ You'll find some Woman---'(V.i.254-255), Borgia rejects this last attempt on his soul: 'Ha! No more, I charge thee./ I swear I was at ease, and had forgot her:/ Why did'st thou wake me then, to make me wild,/ And rouze the slumbering Orders of my Soul?' (V.i.256-269) Borgia then compares this rousing caused by the mention of a woman to the change undergone by the lunatic, who for a time 'beguiles the lookers on; He reasons well; his eyes their wildness lose', but if you hit 'the Cause that hurt his Brain,/ Then his teeth gnash, he foams, he shakes his Chain,/
His Eye-ball rowl, and he is mad again' (V.i.266-268).
What choices are left Borgia once Machiavel's policy has succeeded and death replaces love? Either melancholy, which the play seems to identify with self- destruction, the depletion of all desire and urge for life, or madness, in the sense of a highly charged rage; madness rather than lunacy, as lunacy is associated with the cause that hurts the brain which in this context is love. Rage and lunacy however seem closer in nature as far as the notion of heightening passion to a point of purification is concerned. At its peak, rage can only be conceived metaphorically as fire, and it is in such 'fit of rage' that Borgia's life is finally consumed. His bowels and flesh burn with the poisoned wine he was given by mistake, burning so that Borgia asks to be sunk in the Tyber, then swaddled in an Oxe hide 'Till all [his] poison'd flesh like bark peels
principle, a state that, in the play's context, surpasses its intrigue or moral message and even Machiavellian notions of resolution and fortitude. Borgia's final stage of rage is juxtaposed with his initial composed bearing of the pangs of violent poison, on the one hand, and with Ascanio's uncontrolled screams in the same situation, on the other (V.iii.231-236). This is a rage that has crossed the bounds of heroic resolution but is not base like Ascanio's. The question of the right kind of fury encountered by Machiavel (as for example in I.i.539, III.i.452-456, IV.i.223 or V.i.76 – 'Now like a Grey-hound barking in the slips, /Death struggles for a loose') suggests at the play's conclusion to be unanswerable in terms of any logical, coherent political theory.
238 off'' (V.iii.288). Being 'enrag'd to that degree' as Borgia says he is (V.iii.279) means disintegrating into 'bowels', 'spleen' and bark-like 'flesh'.83
Lunacy as form of madness equivalent in degree to purified rage would symbolically metabolize indescribable passion: passion is in fact not conceivable other than by transferring it to some extreme state of the mind. In contrast, the disintegration of the body into an assemblage of organs, anticipated by the pile of bodies whose flesh will have to be consumed in quick lime and their bones burn into dust and ashes
(V.i.213-215), and the entrance of Seraphino with his 'little Eyes' out (V.iii.262), offers no such assimilation. The real of the body, staged in gory allusions to flesh and blood, threatens to take over while the 'mighty soul forces her furious passage' and plunges in deep Eternity (V.iii.360-361). Passion in its essence, the hero's furious passage into the beyond of life, challenges the notion of symbolic death by assaulting the spectator's soul with dismembering organic death. The sententious lines of the intriguer at the end, unlike the enigmatic dumbness of a Iago, emphasize the lameness of any attempt to bring surplus enjoyment under control, of rendering catharsis operative.84 The tragedy induces anxiety, indeed concernment in Dryden's terms, rather than bring about its appeasement.
How is the imaginary mold of passions by means of intrigue related to the blank eye as the product of style, and to figures of construction that combine separable
83 Such a somatic cast of non-symbolized affectivity must have emerged from something very real in Lee's own life, intriguing in itself and not just because he was confined in Bethlem in November, 1684, where he was kept on a special milk diet for four years. Van Lennep points out that Lee's steady drinking gave him a red face, and, according to Oldys MS notes to Langbaine, his intemperate habits also caused pimples or carbuncles to break up upon his face (60-61). Otherwise a handsome man of an excellent voice, Lee so it seems, knew something about living violently through one's flesh. 84 Machiavel's closing lines are: No Power is safe, nor no Religion is good, Whose Principles of growth are laid in Blood (V.iii.371-372) Van Lennep has pointed out King John's words: There is no sure foundation set on blood, No certain life achiev'd by others' death (IV.ii.104-105) as Lee's source (364). However, the occasion for King John's words is noteworthy: the indignation of the lords who request the enfranchisement of Arthur, his hated youthful enemy, and the news of Arthur's death, whose blinding he has ordered. King John does not seem to repent his crime and that casts in doubt his repentance of his policy. Lee must have been aware of the irony suggested by King John's words at this point in the play.
239 components? It may be suggested that the visual field which Machiavel's tableau imagistically defines assembles the same symbolic and material elements marked as cadaverously separable, and that it is this separability that stands in the way of cathartic appeasement. This is not merely an imaginary effect of the play's controlling image, but an effect of its poesis, the equivalent of the dream's dream-work. Starting from the play's structuralism of separateness, I would like to suggest that the way plot (intrigue), style and passions intersect in the play is of pertinence to two modes of approaching the aesthetics of anxiety. The distinct aspects discussed so far can be brought into a more comprehensive relation by means of these modes. The first mode concerns anxiety in its relation to the uncanny, or a repressed infantile complex. The second concerns anxiety in its relation to the cut/caesura of birth, or the repression of the drive.
The two modes do not exclude one another but are rather interrelated. In fact, put together, they form a complete logic of the play's aesthetics of the passions.
To approach the uncanny in its relation to the play, it is necessary to draw on
Freud's structural conception of dreams. I have shown so far that the distinct elements of Machiavel's opening tableau, the eye, figures of style and the intrigue constitute the play's poesis. They relate to the praxis involved in forming the manifest content of the play, in effecting the possibility of anxiety. I would like to proceed by showing that the picture drawn by Machiavel at the beginning of the play, the eye conceived semantically, the figures of speech dominating the play's stylistics, and the construction of intrigue, are of the nature of the dream-work. As Freud explains in his introductory lecture XIV of 1916, the dream-work is 'the psychical process which forms the manifest dream out of the latent dream-thoughts' (SE 15, 223).
The dream-work, as has been noticed about the joke-work, influences the thought-material. The dream-work takes possession of something else, and it works in
241 the service of satisfaction (SE 15, 223, 224-225). The parallel to the play is the manner in which the four elements mentioned above interrelate. The new artificial texture created in this interrelation effects a surplus that cannot be otherwise recognized but as opening an elsewhere. The play's poesis thus signals the possibility of displeasure, the elsewhere with which Leguil identifies anxiety as cause, as bound with the psychic real
(Ronen, Aesth., 89-91).
Passions in their variety, what the tragedian in Dryden's dialogic essay on dramatic poesy strives to image, can be compared to the manifest content of the dream.
However, passions are affected by the poesis of the play; they are no more amenable to imaging or representation than the dream-work is to complete interpretation. That is to say, the fact that the poesis involved overflows the manifest content it produces does not make either more approachable. It may be this very fact, however, that enables the play's manifest content to induce anxiety by indicating a latent thought that lies concealed and superimposes itself on the situation of satisfaction, in Freud's words
(Lecture XIV, SE 15, 225). Such latent thought might be a primal phantasy, or the phantasy of castration.85
The image of Hero 'thrown headlong from a window' and the centrality of the eye wrenched from its organic function of vision concern such a latent dream-thought.
The eye in question is neither receptive nor reflective but engrossed to blindness by its object of satisfaction. Only as thus erotogenically suffused does the eye become the symbolical site of action on/of the body. As suggested by Borgia's call to glut
Bellamira's eyes with blood and death (murder her), Seraphino's cut out eyes, and the
85 It is important to note that considering representation through the formalism of dreams does not alter the formulation of the interrelation of the play's three aspects of intrigue, passions and style. The formalism of dreams introduces the notion of the latent thought, which is indeterminately conceived to be the product of the dream-work, something constructed by its means, and what induces the dream- work.
241 image of the thrown/wrenched Hero, the eye introduces the notion of a phantasy of castration as the play's concealed, latent thought. The primal phantasy of castration is discussed by Freud in his essay on the Uncanny, in relation to the theme of the Sand-
Man who tears out children's eyes in Hoffmann's story, "The Sand-Man" (SE 17, 227).
Castration is connected with anxiety about one's eyes, and the giving up of one's eyes as expression of the hero's feminine attitude towards his father in his infancy (231-
232).86
Freud significantly discusses the anxiety about the eyes and its relation to the phantasy of castration in the context of the uncanny. He deals with the uncanny as an aesthetic category that has been neglected in the literature of aesthetics (219). And while turning to literature, particularly fictional techniques, to formulate his theory of the uncanny, he points out that an uncanny feeling is not produced by just any fictional reality imposed on us by the writer (250). Freud looks specifically at fiction and its modes of transposition of events and content as presenting more opportunities for creating uncanny feelings than are possible in real life (251). But he also sets another limitation with regard to affecting the uncanny by distinguishing between two classes of the uncanny. One class proceeds from forms of thought that have been surmounted
(such as the possibility of supernatural apparitions), and another proceeds from repressed complexes (249, 251). It seems that the uncanny proceeding from repressed infantile complexes, from the castration complex or womb phantasies (248) would be more difficult to effect. This is so because where the uncanny comes from infantile complexes the question of material reality does not arise; its place is taken by psychical reality (249).
86 Van Lennep points out that Lee's father, who was a clergyman, died shortly after Lee's admission to Bedlam. Lee's father was disappointed that his son had not entered the clergy and did not approve of his choice of profession. Van Lennep refers to Thiophilus Cibber's Lives of the Poets as the source of the fact that Lee's father 'never assisted him in his frequent and pressing necessity, which he was able to do' (45).
242
As an infantile complex that has been repressed and is revived by some impression, the phantasy of castration conceived in terms of robbing one's eyes is enough to elicit an uncanny feeling (Freud, "The Uncanny" SE 17, 233, 249). In
Caesar Borgia, plot and imagery suggest a coherent metaphorical signification in the same direction of such an ocular phantasy of castration. Machiavel, like Neptune in relation to Leander, deprives Borgia of his love-directed eyes, and replaces them with himself, leading Borgia to his doom. Yet neither plot nor imagery enables us to account for the uncanny as a particular form of anxiety induced by an encounter with the object of art, especially in a play meant to arouse concernment for the hero, an affective response whose quality is different from the uncanny.
In fact, the notion of the uncanny should help us avoid metaphorical constructions of the play's meaning. Freud's comment that literature is a much more fertile province than the uncanny in real life 'for it contains the whole of the latter and something more besides' (249), redirects attention to the contribution of the play's structural elements to the experience of displeasure, called forth by their unsettling quality (219). We note then that it is not the plays' events, nor their signification, that produces an uncanny impression, but rather the indissolubility of the elements constituting the play's 'dream-work', their manner of displaying their propensity to become dislocated, their disharmonizing nature.
Hence, a quality different from the sense of concernment Dryden speaks of is added by Machiavel's opening image, an image which never quite integrates with the scheme it is supposed to foreshadow. This is the quality of peculiarity. The figure of parenthesis, where the parenthetic component constitutes an enclosure that opens outwards as a cedable protuberance, and even more so, figures of construction whose components are not markedly cedable but indicate their liability to cede themselves at
243 any point, are contributory of the same effect. The identification of Borgia's son with
'little eyes' and finally the appendage of Machiavel to Borgia produce similar peculiarity. Unlike the uncanny effect described by Freud, which is the product of inanimate elements becoming animate at the level of plot (such as the introduction of the automatic doll, who becomes Nathaniel's 'dissociated complex' in the story of the
Sand-Man – SE 17, 232), the quality of peculiarity introduced by the resistance of the elements mentioned above to integration is the strict product of artificiality of style. It is the artificiality of style rather than animism at the level of plot that invokes the uncanny. The artificiality investing these elements renders them the inert objectal debris of inassimilable, uninhibited rage, a surplus of passion that can only be conceived in terms of bodily fragmentation.
The play's poesis in its relation to a concealed thought has been seen to produce an uncanny effect by virtue of the insolubility of its elements, the effect of artificiality of style. The particular nature of this artificiality has been recognized as structurally constitutive of cuts. As such, the poesis of the play supports affectivity that Freud connects with the repression of the drive, or anxiety in its relation to the drive. Hence, the masochistic pleasure affected on the imaginary level by the interdependence of
Borgia and Machiavel finds its real core in the cuts produced by style. Rhetorical forms materialize the relation of the intriguer and his prince in the object as an organ-like indissoluble presence that suffering jouissance sustains as bodily dissolution. If we follow Freud's line of theorization of anxiety we can see the materialization of masochistic pleasure in the idea of libido as death drive, or the compulsion to repeat.
Further materialization of masochistic pleasure is seen in Lacan's notion of the object of anxiety as the organ separated from the body, thus presenting itself in a positive form (SX, 6.3.63, pp. 6-7, 13.3.63, p. 7). Conceived on the level of style, the bodily
244 dissolution of a raging Borgia and an appended, finally detached Machiavel, make intrigue the scene of the implication of the subject of passions in the body rather than in the signifier.
Two aspects in Freud's complex theorization of anxiety, then, need to be examined before a conception of the aesthetics of anxiety in Caesar Borgia can be completed. These are the relation of anxiety to the drive's compulsion to repeat, and the relation of anxiety to a traumatic moment whose prototype is the moment of birth. In
Freud's later conception of anxiety, the affect, or anxiety, is the cause of repression
("New Introductory Lectures", XXXII, SE 22, 83, 86). Anxiety precedes repression, since an internal instinctual danger (the boy's libidinal cathexis of his mother) turns out to be a determinant and preparation for an external danger (castration) (86, 89).
The relation of anxiety to repression has two essential aspects. The first regards the ego's employment of the signal of anxiety in anticipation of danger coming from repressed impulses (89). The ego exercises influence on the id by putting into action the pleasure-unpleasure principle, by means of the signal of anxiety. But by the act of repression the ego 'renounces a portion of its organization, and has to allow the repressed instinctual impulse to remain permanently withdrawn from its influence'
(93). The compulsion to repeat, which Freud in ''The Uncanny" (1919) notes is inherent in the very nature of the instincts, 'a compulsion powerful enough to overrule the pleasure principle' (SE 17, 238), is then brought into play in the life of the drive. A new impulse will follow the same path as the earlier, repressed impulse, as though the danger-situation that had been over-come still existed. The fixating factor in repression is thus the id's compulsion to repeat ("Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety", SE 20,
153-155). The second aspect concerns the danger itself: what is actually dangerous and actually feared is a traumatic moment whose prototype is the moment of birth, a
245 moment that 'calls up in mental experience a state of highly tense excitation, which is felt as unpleasure and which one is not able to master by discharging it' (SE 22, 93).
In all forms of anxiety, Freud says, 'what is feared, what is the object of anxiety, is invariably the emergence of a traumatic moment, which cannot be dealt with by the normal rules of the pleasure principle' (SE 22, 94). This leads Freud to speak of two forms of anxiety: one in which anxiety is awakened as a signal of an earlier situation of danger, and another in which anxiety is not aroused as a signal but is generated anew by traumatic moments in mental life that have no reference to hypothetical situations of danger (94). The significant final move Freud makes with respect to neurotic anxiety and its relation to repression brings libido in as the cause of the cause which anxiety is: the object of anxiety, an indefinite one, what is feared, is a traumatic moment of helplessness, a psychical helplessness experienced as realistic one, whose source is instinctual, the danger arising from one's own libido. Anxiety is therefore both an expectation of a trauma and a repetition of it in a mitigated form (SE
22, 84, SE 20, 166).
Anxiety as signal and as a direct consequence of a traumatic moment is explained thus: anxiety is awakened as a signal of an earlier situation of danger in later repressions, whereas 'the first and original repressions arise directly from traumatic moments, when the ego meets with an excessively great libidinal demand; they construct their anxiety afresh … on the model of birth' (SE 22, 94, SE 20, 141). There is stress here on libido as traumatic. Anxiety neurosis is fundamentally internal but modeled on a trauma that predates fear of castration, and is enacted prior to and outside the domain of the pleasure principle. The affective state of anxiety thus concerns the beyond of the pleasure principle. The trauma of birth indicates this beyond not as a real moment of psychical trauma, the registration of the danger to life involved in birth
246 taking no effect at this early stage, but as a form of a cut. Freud uses a term derived from classical prosody to refer to the act of birth, calling it 'the impressive caesura of the act of birth', albeit stressing that this cut effects no separation that has not been there in the first place. The anxiety involved in it is actually conceived retroactively in the infant's psychical object-relation to its mother (SE 20, 138).
The psychical caesura that has its origin in birth suggests that structurally anxiety, set upon a moment of trauma, is intrinsically linked with the function of the cut in the creation of life. Freud indirectly makes this connection in the section on the drives in his lecture on anxiety and instinctual life (Lecture XXXII). 'If it is true that … life once proceeded out of inorganic matter, then … an instinct must have arisen which ought to do away with life once more and to establish the inorganic state', he says (SE
22, 107). The most archaic state or expression of the compulsion to restore the inorganic state is found in masochism, in self-destructiveness as an expression of a death instinct 'which cannot fail to be present in every vital process' (107).
Masochism refers back to anxiety as related to the causes of neurosis. Anxiety's relation to libidinal danger is circular; its generation is renewed with respect to the fixating factor in repression, namely the unconscious id's compulsion to repeat. The id's compulsion to repeat is a danger situation the ego is less effectively able to protect itself against than against a piece of reality that is not part of itself (SE 20, 153, 156).
Masochism embodies the id's compulsion to repeat, then. Anxiety in its traumatic, indefinite nature of helplessness, a situation that is anticipated and repeated in a mitigated form in a danger situation, is directly linked with the id as activating danger situations for the ego (SE 20, 166, 140-141). Masochism conceived in these terms is drive in its pure manifestation; it exceeds the position of the masochist aiming to arouse anxiety in the Other, exceeds the imaginary construction of sado-masochistic
247 interchange displayed in the play. The relation between masochism and anxiety is established only indirectly, and not regarding the perception in the mind of death itself.
Furthermore, 'anxiety arises directly out of libido' (141), libido by definition not being the same as the death drive.
Masochism and anxiety are related structurally. Masochism concerns the nature of the drive as such, which the affective state calls forth both as a residue of the drive and as a reaction to its pressure. Drive in its raw, banished, repressed state, carries a mark of the life of the individual body by pointing beyond it. The affective state of anxiety, as Freud seems to indicate in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle", has to do with the unbound condition of excitatory processes, a condition that is more primitive than the purpose of gaining pleasure and avoiding unpleasure (SE 18, 31-33, 63), a limit point that gives life to the body as body at the site of its dissolution. The cut reinstates masochism as the ultimate state of pre-natal unlimited jouissance, a state anxiety elicits as the persistent life-towards-death of the drive.
The dissolution of rage in Borgia's poisoned body is a point where affect in excess finds its bodily cut. Figures of construction, like the gestures and attitudes of language, constitute the play's topology of the body. Figures of construction form cuts within enclosures that have no metonymical, meaning deferring value. These cuts affect concatenation but cannot amount to producing sense. Hence they are not answerable to the subject's quest for sense in search of the true object at the cause of his desire. In these figures the symbolic produces its substance through cuts made in the real for no signifying purpose. As such they are better formed to account for libido which passions as body-soul constructions inevitably encounter as their real. Figures of construction are bodily manifestations of passions not simply in the imaginary, mimetic sense of traumatic asphyxiation, which they vocally invoke. Figures of
248 construction are the elsewhere of passions in the organic and organ-like sense of that which is at the origin of passions: the instinctual life of the body precisely where its life takes the form of its relation to death, the point where the sexual drives and the death drive share the same regressive archaic character, formulated by Freud as the compulsion to repeat ("Beyond", SE 18, 57). It is the structure of these figures as chained cuts that institutes this moment in the life of the drive, effecting this moment as imbued with anxiety.
The image depicted by Machiavel at the beginning of the play, an image which opens up a field of vision where various elements engage the spectator by their resistance to thematic assimilation, is finally reduced to micro-structures of style that are nonspecularizable in the sense that they produce no imaginary content but organic separateness as such. Machiavel's closing statement, a detached judgment produced by the instigating power behind passions, suggests something essential about the subject of passions: his being trapped in the symbolic. The subjection of passions to negotiation, exploited by Machiavel, the oscillation between the options of glory and potency on the one hand and love and impotence on the other, and conversely of ambition running to waste in love and jealousy overriding in ruling, point to this trap of the subject of passions in the symbolic. The conflict is there, veiling no hole.
Figures of construction supporting pathos do not hollow the symbolic entrapment of the subject, nor do they hollow, for that matter, the surplus jouissance that passions invoke. Rather, they are figurations of a cut that hollows nothing. At the level of intrigue we see something similar to the subjection of language to the organic cut in the detached intriguer himself. The symbolic is a trap that the subject of passions cannot escape unless producing a body organ that is a remainder of a signifier, not a signifier. The detached intriguer is such an organ – a dying out pound of flesh paid by
249 passionate subjectivity in the face of what it cannot attain by way of the signifier, by the lack the signifier produces that will orientate desire.
Note that this pound of flesh is not the same as the lizard's tail jettisoned in distress, which is Lacan's way of symbolizing the relation of desire to the drive. The jettisoned tail signifies the manner in which the subject preserves desire by means of the lost object rather than being engulfed in the jouissance imbuing the drive ("On
Freud's 'Trieb''', Reading, pp. 419, 424). The subject of passions is not the subject of desire; his supplementary objects, erogenous objects of the body, are his support of jouissance. The object's caducity is his guaranteed passage out of the symbolic order not by the route of desire. This passage is indexed by anxiety: anxiety in its relation to the object of the drive as non-assimilable, as traumatic (SE 22, 94). Borgia's call for intense maddened passion to avert melancholy is materialized by the intriguer's function as an anxiety generating presence of the object where its lack should remain ungraspable. It is a non-signifiable presence of the organ of jouissance rather than the lack induced by desire. Anxiety as cause, as trauma, is the state of helplessness that for the subject trapped in the symbolic becomes an elsewhere of jouissance in its pure state of masochism as self-destruction – this is what the intriguer finally points to in his own detachability.
251
E. Lee and Dryden's The Duke of Guise – The Presence of the Unknown
Lee's Caesar Borgia may be considered a paradigm of the tragedy of passions and intrigue. The play stages the distillation of passion to the apogee of bodily diffusion, a distillation induced by the intriguer, and implicating him in its self-destructive pleasure. The play does so by a certain deployment of its stylistics which creates a visual field and introduces the object as disruptive of this field. As the aim of this thesis is to trace the object cause of intrigue through the micro-structures of the plays' style, we note that the play's stylistic dominants do not veil the object. Figures of grammatical construction empty passion of its signifying content precisely by their inassimilable quality. A visual field is imagistically called forth to indicate the object as not lacking. Libidinal subjectivity this way induces anxiety. By the same token, intrigue ceases to be but a scene of interrelationship. Like figures of style, it empties passion of its imaginary excess and functions as the remainder of passion, the locus of the drive. In Caesar Borgia, however, passion or affects play a role in the intrigue; manipulation of affects is the intriguer's manner of attaining his goal. It is therefore difficult to set intrigue apart from the passion it in a way reduces.
The tragedy The Duke of Guise (1682), which is Lee's work in collaboration with Dryden, is different from Caesar Borgia in its manner of eliciting the spectator's anxiety while introducing the real of the object or cause of intrigue. In the play, the events at the level of plot induce a state of anxiety in the characters themselves. But as the events unfold the anxiety is as it were elided. Affect is accentuated in a state of omission. It persists as a burdening presence yet is set apart from the intrigue. In effect, intrigue becomes the inauthentic scene, or the guise of anxiety. At the level of style, figures of speech which are essentially elliptical, such as the ellipsis and syllepsis, and the micro-structures of question and quotation which function as forms of omission,
251 produce the same burdening presence through the invocatory object they institute. The invocatory object as theorized by Lacan in his seminar on anxiety is an object that emerges through elision in the phatic function of language.87 The object voice is fundamentally connected with anxiety as the locus of commandment, or the superego.
The Duke of Guise is essentially different from Caesar Borgia, as I will attempt to show, in the manner in which intrigue, passion and style collaborate to institute the masochistic cause of intrigue. They collaborate precisely in a parallel manner to create a stasis at the level of plot that is dynamically voided by the invocatory object at the level of style, and the vicissitudes of the drive on the imaginary level of intriguer- victim relationship. The dimensions of intrigue, affect and style in The Duke of Guise thus create a topology of extimacy that simultaneously evokes suffering jouissance and the missing law that will effect its regulating voiding. Undiffused anxiety arising through plot events and the invocatory object emerging through style become a way of lingering on the body while suspending the word that will take its place, the kingly word that fails to arise until the last scene of the play. The intrigue is made the site of the masochistic drive under the immanence of the (missing) law of the king. Like
Caesar Borgia, The Duke of Guise indicates the plight of the hero of the tragedy of passions: his being trapped in the symbolic order to the effect of forcing him to pay with his organs, or a pound of flesh, this way arousing the spectator's anxiety. Here, it is the force of the breaking of the law that proclaims the subjection of the hero of the tragedy of passions to the symbolic order.
To further illustrate the points which mark the uniqueness of Lee and Dryden's tragedy for a conception of the poetics of intrigue we should take note of its
87 The phatic function of language concerns the 'physical channel and psychological connection between the addresser and the addressee, enabling both of them to enter and stay in communication', as Jakobson defines this function (The Framework of Language, 81, 84). Lacan in his seminar on anxiety refers to the phatic function as 'something else', not simply 'making contact' (5.6.63, p. 8).
252 background and motto. Unlike the two other tragedies studied in this thesis, The Duke of Guise is a political tragedy whose topical reference is professed in the prologue, written by Dryden: 'Our play's a Parallel: The Holy League/ Begot our Cov'nant:
Guisards got the Whigg/ What'er our hot-brained Sheriffs did advance,/ Was, like our
Fashions, first produced in France' (Prologue, Lines 1-4). In the vindication of the play, which Dryden was prompted to write in reaction to the fierce response it provoked from affronted Whig partisans such as Shadwell, Dryden asserts that his own and Lee's intention was 'to make the Play a Parallel, betwixt the Holy League plotted by the
House of Guise and its Adherents, with the Covenant plotted by the Rebels in the time of King Charles the First, and those of the new Association, which was the Spawn of the old Covenant' (The Vindication of The Duke of Guise in Dearing and Roper, Vol.
XIV, 314).88
Contrary to the accusations made by the reflectors on the play that it makes libelous reference to King Charles the Second and his illegitimate son the Duke of
Monmouth, Dryden insists that the play is not a parallel of the men, 'but of the Times, a parallel of the Factions, and of the Leaguers' (The Vindication, 314). The play thus sets a historical parallel between the plotting faction of the House of Guise in France of
1588 against King Henry the Third,89 and the rebels plotting against King Charles the
First in England (1641). The parallel is extended to the Association of Whig plotters
88 Hume points out that The Duke of Guise is a pure example of the particular genre of parallel plays, a form that was political rather than historical, and according to R. E. Brown, better geared than the heroic drama for the conspicuous topicality that was made necessary by the impact of the Popish Plot and the Catholic scare it brewed in the second half of Charles II's reign (Hume, The Development, 221-222, Brown, "Nathaniel Lee's Political Dramas, 1679-1683", 49). Note that Dryden emphasizes the historical nature of the parallel without denying that the play 'openly discovers the Original and Root of the Practices and Principles' of the Whig party and their cause (The Vindication, Dearing and Roper, Vol. XIV, 312). 89 This year, about fourteen years after the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, is described by Maimbourg, whose History of the League Dryden translated at the request of King Charles II, as eclipsed with 'palpable darkness' (The Works of John Dryden, Eds. Roper and Dearing, Vol. XVIII, 183). It was the year in which the turmoil over religion in France reached one of its peaks as the Duke of Guise, leader of the French Catholic League, heading an uprising in Paris, attempted to usurp the authority of the King and have the Bourbon King of Navarre excluded from the throne.
253 who attempted to force King Charles the Second to accept the Exclusion Bill, a bill excluding his Catholic brother James from the succession (1681). The play's intrigue is hence of the nature of a political plotting or insurrection yet is set like a court intrigue.
This is significant both structurally and thematically, for above and beyond emphasizing a historical parallel between factions the play constructs the relation of two figures, the rebel Duke of Guise and King Henry III whom he opposes.90 A parallel of factions, less than the historical significance of the paralleling situations, underscores the position of the Guise and the king as factions posited one against the other. Theirs is an opposition that supports a fragile dualism in which the plotter and his victim fail to maintain a distinction between them, and attacker and attacked interchange. Each in his turn, and often simultaneously, is a victimized aggressor. Thus
Guise, who is the initial attacker, betrays an implicit identification with the late
Francis, the king's brother, when he invokes Francis's mortifying death to vow his own vengeance on the king's men at the end of the first act: 'For me, I wish that mine
[hands] may both rot off---/ That Vermin may devour my Limbs/ That I may die like
90 In this respect, Dryden's insistence in his vindication of the play that the parallel is one of factions rather than of persons is noteworthy, not merely as a political disclaimer but as a structural blueprint of the play. In fact, the importance of The Duke of Guise for my thesis on intrigue begins with the challenge of reading the play beyond its political topicality. The play's production was for some time prohibited, because it was construed as an attack on Monmouth, King Charles's illegitimate, beloved son, and the hope of the Protestant-republican Whigs as an answer to the king's Catholic brother, the legitimate heir to the throne. From the very beginning the play was hence 'long expected, and so much talk'd of', as stated in Some Reflections upon the Pretended Parallel in the Play called The duke of Guise, written according to Dryden by a Templar and the poet Shadwell (in Dearing and Roper, Vol. XIV, 611). The first attack on the play's representation of the English royal family as the French (to the discredit not only of Monmouth as paralleled by Guise but of King Charles as represented by King Henry the Third) coming from Thomas Hunt's A Defence of the Charter, and Municipal Rights of the City of London, placed The Duke of Guise at the heart of a political pamphlet debate, dooming it to never being properly recovered for critical discourse, as the editors of the California Edition of Dryden's Works note (Vol. XIV, 497). Modern readings of the play have similarly emphasized the political implications of the historical parallelism. This parallel play, Bachorik insists, was meant by Dryden and Lee to be understood in political terms (212). Other critical studies of the play have mostly centered on its political and historical circumstances, reading parts of it as 'political allegory' (Miller R., 212, 217- 218), or seeking to assess Lee's political leanings by it (Brown R., "Lee's Political Dramas", 46, 50). Another focus of critical study of the play has been the stylistic differences between the play's very different co-authors, pointing to Lee's relatively subdued poetry and its effective combination with Dryden's irony. The play's style and atmosphere of frustrated inaction are interpreted in terms of its political argumentation and portraiture (Brown R., "The Dryden-Lee Collaboration", 20).
254 the late puling Francis,/ Under the Barbers Hands, Imposthumes choak me,/ If while alive I cease to chew their Ruine' (I.i.355-260). Since Guise chokes on his own blood when murdered – 'but my own blood choaks me' (V.iv.35) – the premonitory invocation of the sickly Francis reinforces the interchangeability of the king and the rebel duke by projecting the ailment of the monarchic body onto the latter. The putrefying body of the monarchy is embodied in Guise.91 Lee and Dryden seem to have taken their clue from Guise's name and place as much emphasis on manner or form as on content.92
The indefinite plotter-victim position, which is supported by intrigue as a rule, is suggested by the paratextual motto of the play, the quote from Plutarch's Lives. The quote refers to Plutarch's remark about Lysander and Agesilaus: 'Thus ambitious natures in a commonwealth, if they do not observe due bounds, work greater harm than good' (VIII.4, Vol. V, p. 21). The choice of the quote for a paratext is a telling one for the Spartan king's relations with Lysander, predicating love turned to, merged in hate.93
91 Lee's co-authorship of the play consisted largely of parts taken from his Massacre of Paris, a play based on the St. Bartholomew's Eve Massacre in 1572. The play was refused a license because it was deemed politically inflammatory, and for its part, has led readers such as Hume to see a categorical shift in Lee's political views, from the Protestant-republican in the Massacre to the Catholic-royalist in The Duke of Guise ("The Satiric Design of Nat. Lee's The Princess of Cleve"). Guise's reference to the puling young King Francis II, taken from The Massacre of Paris is hence doubly effective, because in The Massacre the fierceness of the Catholic Guise's vengeance is directed at the Protestant admiral Coligny, whereas here it is directed against Henry and his royal camp. Since Guise now is against the Valois, as he claims after his victorious rebellion against the king in Paris ('That when Valois consum'd in Ashes lies,/ The Phoenix Race of Charlemain may rise' – IV.ii.444-445), his suggestive identification with Francis II may seem displaced in terms of camps or factions, and in this sense is more resonant in terms of the attacker-attacked relationship the play stages. At the same time, Guise's invocation of Francis remains historically proper for according to Dryden's translation of the History of the League Guise demanded of Henry to declare him his Lieutenant General, with the same authority which his father had under the Reign of Francis the Second. According to the same source Henry's men stabbed Guise in the throat, 'which hindered him from speaking one single word' (in Roper and Dearing, Vol. XVIII, 201, 221). 92 Etymologically, Guise, a word of Germanic origin, relates to wise, weid, wisa, manner. But as we will see, the guise also comes into play in the positioning of affect with repect to the events of the plot. This is the double effect of omission, something is there which persists as not there. Anxiety as cause thus takes its inauthentic guise. 93 Lysander was Agesilaus's lover in his youth (II.1, pp. 3-4), his prompter to the throne (VI.3, p. 15), and finally his envied rival and enemy, when Agesilaus was a king (VII.3, p. 19, all references are to Plutarch's Lives, Vol. V). Similarly, King Henry says of Guise: 'He was my friend when young, and might be still' (II.ii.150, if not stated otherwise, all quotes are from the Stroup and Cooke edition of Lee's
255
Furthermore, Plutarch's disparagement is ambiguous and could refer to both figures.
The motto thus sets a pattern for the positioning of the Duke of Guise with respect to
Henry. It is not without significance that Dryden and Lee placed a woman between
Guise and Henry, a failing go-between who inadvertently finally encourages Guise into the trap set for him by Henry. However, the motto indicates that while they were well aware of the historical Henry's homosexuality, they also ingeniously introduced into it the father-son relationship proposed by Charles the Second and the Duke of
Monmouth.94 The homoerotic aspect apart, what is important here is the calling in question of the Guise and Henry's opposition, in a situation that highlights their opposition in political terms.
The structurally ambiguous position of the Guise and the king, or of plotter and victim, has its plot core in Guise's movement to and from the court, and the effect of his strategy on the king. The play's action is organized around three major movements of Guise to Henry's court: the first one, stated as a plan of action, is for the purpose of leave-taking, which when carried out, Henry is already aware of Guise's plan to act against him (especially for the purpose of 'grafting succession on a worthier choice' than the Protestant King of Navarre – I.i.127-128).95 Marmoutier, the woman loved by both Guise and the king, at this point discourages Guise from leaving the court, while works). Plutarch's remark could be addressed to both Agesilaus and Lysander, because, as Plutarch says, Agesilaus badly handled Lysander's wrath (VIII.4, Vol. V, p. 21). 94 The severest criticism leveled at Dryden and Lee concerned the parallel of Charles II with the French Henry III. Henry III was not only notoriously dissolute, effeminate and faithless but was also the designer of the St. Bartholomew massacre. He made one of the worst parallels to the best of Kings, according to the reflectors on The Duke of Guise. See in this respect commentary on the play in the California Edition of Dryden's Works, Vol. XIV, pp. 488, 507, and Some Reflections in the same volume, pp. 616-617. 95 At the conclusion of the first meeting of the Council of Sixteen, with their 'Dark Designs' against the King all set, Guise says: 'I will myself to Court: Pay Formal Duty;/ Take leave, and to my Government retire' (I.i.145-146). That he is not welcome there is suggested by Guise's answer to Marmoutier's question: 'Why do you leave the Court?', 'The Court leaves me' (I.i.243-244). Guise's leave-taking is further reverberated by Marmoutier: 'But if I hear you go to take your leave,/ I'll meet you there, before the Throne I'll stand' (I.i.336-337), and then again at the Louvre: 'I see, my Lord, you are here to take your leave' (II.ii.22). We can already get a taste of the way the Guise's moves re-emerge in echoing ripples, just as the contra pointed responses of the Devil and Marmoutier to them suggest. The effect of this echoing technique on the oppressive atmosphere of the play is crucial.
256 the Devil in the Malicorne-Melanax sub-plot supports this move: 'Let Guise by Blood resolve to mount to Pow'r' (I.i.168). Indeed, this leave-taking only sets in action an inevitable return, this time Guise's return to Paris in spite of the king's strict order that he should stay out of the city. This return results in a popular uprising headed by the
Guise in the Day of the Barricades. Marmoutier this time pleads with Guise to leave
Paris, while the Devil at first similarly warning against Guise's going to see the king upon his return, then spurs the uprising: 'First seize the King, and after murder him'
(IV.ii.5). The king flees to Blois. The final movement of the Guise is to Blois where the Estates meet to proclaim him Lieutenant General, this way stopping 'this headlong torrent of Succession' (V.i.243-244). This final move is rendered expressly fatal by the
Devil: 'If he goes/ To Council when he next is call'd, he dyes' (V.ii.87-88) yet is encouraged by Marmoutier who sees it as a proof of Guise's obedience: 'But go to
Council, Sir, there shew your truth,/ If you are innocent you're safe' (V.ii.206-207).
This is also the point where Henry becomes the aggressor.
The question of Guise leaving the court, in effect Paris, or his coming there, constitutes a plot element that engenders a sense of furtively growing infringement on the king's sovereignty. Indeed, the conspiracy is spelt out by the Queen-Mother in the menacing terms of a lurking presence: 'Guise gives it out he Journeys to Champagn,/
But lurks indeed at Lagny, hard by Paris,/ Where every Hour he hears, and gives
Instructions' (II.ii.2-4). A 'sneaking Brutus', as the king calls Guise (II.i.59), this lurking produces a state of anxiety in the king. Thus the king gasps to his mother, 'Oh,
Madam', 'Oh Mother', 'But O', unable to articulate something, 'but I cannot make it way'. Guise's provocation is then pronounced by the Queen-Mother: 'You see the Plot directly on your Person' (II.i.68, 69, 76, 85). The pleonasm 'directly', made to signify the proximity of plotter and victim, only syntactically maintains some distance
257 between 'plot' and the king's body. It intensifies a physical proximity that is crucial since both Guise and Henry are determined not to hurt one another's person. Thus
Guise says: 'His person must be safe' (I.i.260), and Henry charges Grillon not to fight
Guise (II.i.130). But the immanence of Guise's approach, figured in his return to Paris against the king's edict, is cast as a physical encroachment on the king's body. A rebel in our court, so to speak, plotting on the king's life, is initially met with panic: 'Stay
Madam, stay, come back, forgive my fears', the king says to the Queen-Mother
(II.i.90).96
At the level of plot and theme, Lee and Dryden's play stages the ultimate affective state, the affect of all affects, anxiety in its undeceiving manifestation of anticipation and sense of encumbrance. Anxious anticipation is imaged by the King's reference to his suffocation and failed articulation in the terms of 'Chaos and Shades, tis huddl'd up in Night' (II.i.70) and is reinforced by orchestrated echoes of echoes of
Guise's moves away from and towards the King. Even more so, on the level of plot, a state of anxiety is effectuated for characters and spectators alike by holding in suspense plotter and victim in a situation that fails to be resolved almost to the very end of the play. Yet this state of anxiety is marked precisely as syncopated. After the danger has been acknowledged, the king is reticent about his fears while strategically 'taking the
Guise into his heart', as the Queen Mother's counter-plot prescribes, until the Guise can be met 'with the same Arts he brings' (II.i.76, IV.i.127). Under the guise of the king's
96 Guise's coming, like his leaving, is reiterated, but to a different effect. If his leaving indicates his presence, his coming embodies his absence. Thus, the opening scene prepares for his approach: 'what turn the Tapers dim,/ When glorious Guise … makes approach?' (I.i.1-3). Similarly, the echoes of his return to Paris precede him: Polin informs Grillon: 'The Guise my Master will be here to day' and Grillon sends him to the King with 'Fly to the King, warn him of Guise's coming', which is again reverberated first by the King: 'Tis said the Guise will come in spight of me', then by Marmoutier: 'By these whispering Councils,/ My Soul presages that the Guise is coming' (III.i.21, 27, 322, 349). It is again this reverberation that makes Guise's approach ominous, rendering him present when absent. Indeed, this absent presence that is so conducive to the arousal of anxiety on and off the stage has its climax in Guise's own reflection on his part in the uprising: 'So slight a Victory requir'd not me:/ I but sate still, and Nodded like a God/ My World into Creation' (IV.ii.253-255).
258 forced restraint and acquiescence anxiety persists as a certainty not given to knowledge. The indication of this state reappears at the end in a reversed form when
Guise senses that his end by the king's hand is close. Not only does his nose bleed three drops, as an ill omen, but he says: 'Agen my heart, there is a weight upon thee'
(V.ii.288, iii.14).
While the essence of both Guise's and eventually Henry's plot is each other's person, the action of the play produces a prolonged gridlock where what fails to be eliminated is the body. If anxiety is indexed by intrigue as syncopated affectivity, the drive is manifested in the plotter and his victim's mode of action. The king adopts a studied inaction while the Guise is impetuous yet tenacious and as such they share between them one pair of opposites that constitute the vicissitudes of the drive: the reversal of the drive from activity to passivity, discussed by Freud in ''Instincts and their Vicissitudes" (SE 14, 127).
Anxiety related to Guise's encroachment on the king, and the polarity of activity-passivity marking the two characters' actions, are not two separate effects of intrigue in the play. Rather, the intrigue collects unto itself the libidinal residue of the affect it produces while functioning as the inauthentic garb of this affect. Under persistent pressure that hovers all along, the subversive activity of both plotter and victim continues, in its final stage guised as 'kindness' between the King and the Guise as the King appears to 'yield up every thing to his Loyal Subjects': 'They are dear to one another, as an old Usurer, and a rich young Heir upon a Mortgage' Grillon informs
Alphonso Corso of the seeming kindness between the king and the Duke of Guise
(V.i.26-29). Plot and imagery condense the polarity of activity-passivity in a situation of indefinite standstill that concerns a plotter compared by the King to a 'sneaking
259
Brutus' and his victim, compared to a Caesar, a 'Father', about to be stabbed (II.i.58-
62). It is this standstill that awaits bodily punctuation.97
At the level of plot, then, a presumed stasis is constituted (for it is active- passive throughout) that posits a chiasmic conspiracy on one's person. The Guise's encroachment on the king's person aims in effect at divesting this monarchic body of its political capacity: 'I'le seize him first, then make him a led Monarch; …So let him reign my Tenant during life' (IV.ii.425, 430), while the king seeks to reestablish his monarchic authority by physically eliminating Guise: 'To morrow Guise is made
Lieutenant-General,/ Why then tomorrow I no more am King;/ 'Tis time to push my
Slack'nd vengeance home',/ To be a King, or not to be at all;' (V.i.243-251).
Starting from the stasis produced by plotter and victim's refrain from concluding the plot on each other's person, we may consider the function of the figures of construction employed at the play's elocutionary substrate. These figures are predominantly schemes of omission. As such, they puncture the stasis on the level of action not only by their structure, that is, by materially marking voided signification.
Forms of omission as it were conclude the plot on the body by structurally precipitating the anxiety-eliciting presence of the voice, the invocatory object which
Lacan connects with the superego and sadism-masochism. Forms of omission at once invoke anxiety as cause omitted from knowledge and institute the object that sustains anxiety through its function as 'modeling our void': the voice (Lacan, SX, 5.6.63, p. 9).
Topologically, forms of omission thus sustain the plot on one's person as folding back on itself: the plot is indicated as voided, a manner of separating it from one's person,
97 Note that the imagery evokes the suffering body. The king says, 'Come, Guise, come cardinal… Sheath all your Daggers in Curst Henry's Heart', and later, 'I'm clear by Nature, as a Rockless Stream,/ But they dig through the Gravel of my Heart' (III.i.300-301, 319-320). When getting closer to eliminating Guise the king claims that under strong necessity 'Kings are Justice', 'And, like sworn Surgeons, lop the gangren'd Limb' (V.i.124, 126-127). The precursor of evoked bodily suffering is however Guise's allusion to Francis II, choking on the corrupted matter that fell into his throat from the Impostume in his head (I.i.359).
261 and supplemented with the law. This is the kind of holing-while-supplementing that figures of style create in the stasis produced by the play's action.
One figure that is predominant in the play's stylistics is the figure of omission called eclipsis, or ellipsis. Ellipsis is a figure of grammatical construction that according to Puttenham is auricular (reaching no further than the ear, as he says), and works by defect. The form calls for supplementation; in Puttenham's words, 'if but one word or some little portion of speech be wanting it may be supplied by ordinary understanding' (136). The first instance of ellipsis appears in the opening scene of the play: Bussy, one of the Council of Sixteen led by Guise, says to the Curate of St.
Eustace 'To borrow Arguments from Heretic Books/ Me thinks was not so prudent' to which the Curate replies with 'Yes; from the Devil' (I.i.22-24). Another instance is when Mayenne asks Guise 'But sir, how come it you should be so warm/ Still pushing
Councils when among your Friends;/ Yet at Court Cautious and cold as Age,/ Your
Voice, your Eyes, your Meen so different/ You seem to me two Men' (I.i.190-194).98
The play's stylistics also presents a few instances of another figure of construction, syllepsis, or the 'double supply', as Puttenham dubs it. Syllepsis is the figure where one grammatical element serves two masters although it is accurate only for one (137).
Examples from the play begin with Bussy's words to Guise: 'The King, like Saul, is
Heaven's repented Choice;/ You his Anointed one' (I.i.74-75); Malicorne says to
Grillon 'All I have said is true, as thou art honest,/ Or I a Villain' (III.i.138-139); and a
98 Other instances of this figure in the play are: 'She dazzles, walks mere Angel upon Earth' (I.i.234), 'And if you go from Paris, I'll to court' (I.i.321), 'Shall I fight him? …/ If he provokes me, strike him?' (II.i.128, 130), 'I court you for my friend,/ Tho Grillon wou'd not' (II.ii.142-143), (King about Guise) 'He was my friend when young, and might be still' (II.ii.150), 'To hear…what the king's a doing,/ And what the cabinet-council, then to th' City' (III.i.66-67), 'Passion o'both sides./ His thou meanest./ On hers' (III.i.404-406), 'I'le on and meet 'em' (III.i.435), 'He was a Fool to come; if so, then they/ Who let him go, were somewhat'(IV.i.85-86), 'When ever they have more power to Depose, than he has to Oppose' (IV.ii.284-285), 'They ease His Majesty of all the Spiritual/ business, and the Guise of all the Temporal' (V.i.33-34), 'Yes, we [are made] for them,/ And they for us, the Benefits are mutual,/ And so the Tyes are too'(V.i.181-183), 'Stay till I lead you to that dismal Den/ Of Virgins, buried quick, and stay for Ever' (V.ii.239-240).
261 syllepsis appears ambiguously with ellipsis in the exchange between Malicorne, one of
Guise's advisors, and Melanax the Devil, about the King and Guise: Mel. He cannot be depos'd: …But at his Birth there shone a Regal star. Mal. My Master had a stronger.
Mel. No, not a stronger, but more popular./ Their Births were full oppos'd, the Guise now strongest;' (IV.i.40-43).
In syllepsis, one copula expressed but once lacks grammatical congruence with at least one subject with which it is understood. That is, the copula inaccurately invokes the completion of one of the subjects. The figure of syllepsis well underscores its auricular function. Figures of omission invoke a part of speech as a missing element that echoes an absence for the ear. Such figures do not produce sense; they create rhythm. They syncopate the sentence metrically without affecting its meaning. Figures of the omission of words have a markedly different effect compared to figures of the omission of conjunctions such as asyndeton and brachylogia. According to Puttenham, figures of omission of words are strictly auricular, whereas asyndeton is more attuned to serve meter (145). Brachylogia, for its part, is rhetorical in Puttenham's classification, that is, both 'auricular' and 'sensable' (163, 178). However, I suggest that the effect of figures of the omission of words lies elsewhere. Their being auricular suggests a different manner of invoking, make present, the object, or anxiety as cause.
Anxiety as cause epitomizes the notion of cause for psychoanalytic thought. In his introductory lecture on anxiety (1917) Freud attempts to define the origin of neurotic anxiety (Lecture XXV, SE 16, 404). Not only is anxiety a subjective state that is self referentially called 'an affect' (395) whose existence cannot be asserted in the same manner as that of unconscious ideas (409). Anxiety is an affect that is constructed in a particular manner that is not presupposed, at the same time that it is 'placed in the prehistory not of the individual but of the species' (444). Furthermore, by locating the
262 origin of anxiety in the libido, by calling neurotic anxiety 'libido put to abnormal employment' (404), Freud seems to indicate the difficulty of thinking a cause from anxiety. The ego flees from its libido; the anxiety which signifies a flight of the ego derives 'from that of libido itself' (405). Anxiety is nevertheless a certainty even if the
'patients cannot say what it is they are afraid of' (403). The function of anxiety as cause begins with this inexplicable certainty. As elaborated by Leguil, anxiety is the cause of truth. Truth emerges from anxiety itself, making it a truth that 'does not pass by way of knowledge' (Ronen, Aesth., 94).
Anxiety as cause means that cause, Lacan says in his seminar on anxiety,
'always arises in correlation with the fact that something is omitted in the consideration of knowledge, something which is precisely the desire that animates the function of knowledge' (SX, 8.5.63, p. 4). Anxiety as cause is a certainty that persists outside the domain of knowledge, prior to any symbolization, and is dependent on an imaging that connects the subject to the real, Ronen explains. Anxiety is therefore theatrical, or inauthentic. It is through theatricality that anxiety becomes a manner of interrogating a phantasmatic junction.
Imaging, in a scene or a picture, demonstrates the shadowlike character of anxiety as cause, shadowlike in the sense that every object escapes it, that it reveals an elsewhere that is ultimately a danger associated with sexual drives. As implied by
Leguil, the subject restricts a danger from the libido to a single scene of danger which he further eroticizes by his anxiety, not knowing the sexual source of his fascination.
Ronen points out that the relations between anxiety and truth indicate that anxiety in its inauthentic theatricality 'shows itself to be extensively related to the visual order, or to scopic structure' (Aesth., 95).
263
However, in The Duke of Guise the imaginary domain of plot and character interrelation interrogates the phantasmatic junction of the danger to one's person in the face of an intolerable encroachment of the person of another. It is a phantasmatic junction that the imagery of the play precisely fails to absorb. No imagery can account for such an idea as the Abbot's counsel to the king to kill Guise: 'Cut off the Head, and let the Body walk' (III.ii.20). The Abbot's peculiar turn of phrase suspends the imagistic safeguard of the common metaphorical conception of, possibly, a political entity in terms of Head and Body.99 The evocation of anxiety as cause, as a mode of erotization and straight libidinal transformation is hence emphatically not visual.
Figures of omission of words evoke anxiety as cause within the domain of the aural.
They do so by impinging on the communicative function which they are made to support. The spectator is called upon to supply a missing element that objects to the communicative flow with no visual anchorage. What the spectator encounters is not the visual stain but the auditory void.
The Duke of Guise erects the real of anxiety, the certainty with which it agitates subjectivity before knowledge can encounter it, by means of figures of speech that are essentially invocatory. Figures of omission of words give us a first measure of the invocatory object by suspending comprehension syntactically, yet as Puttenham says, ordinary understanding can correct the defect by which these figures work. More radical forms of omission in the play are not among the figures of construction. These
99 The historical account of this juncture, in both Davila's history of the religious wars in sixteen-century France, the source Dryden and Lee used, and Maimbourg's History of the League, translated by Dryden, testifies to a different image used by the Abbot: 'It is written I will strike the Shepherd, and the Flock shall be scattered' (The History of the League, in Roper and Dearing, Vol. XVIII, 195-196). In The History of the League the idea of Head and Body emerges at a later stage, when the King is in Blois, debating the murder of Guise: 'But the rest… thought that the Head being once cut off, the Body of the League wou'd immediately fall like a dead body' (218). Here it may be significant to know that the third act of The Duke was written by Lee, as Dryden informs in the Vindication (in Dearing and Roper, Vol. XIV, p. 311). The idea of the body walking without a head seems to be called forth not by the League as a political body but by Grillon's preceding report that the Guise is come 'with thirty thousand Rebels at his heels' (III.ii.13).
264 are dominant stylistic forms whose isomorphism with the invocatory object stems from the fact that what they suspend cannot be supplied by understanding. Such forms are the question and the quotation.
A question presents itself in the play's opening scene, coupled with brachylogia: 'Lights there! More Lights: what burn the Tapers dim,/ When glorious
Guise, the Moses, Gideon, David,/ The Saviour of the Nation, makes approach?' (I.i.1-
3). A Yes/No question to all appearances, with an exclamatory 'what' that is not marked by a separating comma in the Stroup and Cooke edition of Lee's plays, but does have a comma in the California edition of Dryden's Works (Vol. XIV, p.217), the question accompanies a call for more light, and is more of an expression of indignation. While laying the ground for the imagery of light and dark that persists in relation to the plotters' designs (referred to by Guise as Dark Designs on which Day- light must not peep – I.i.143) as well as in the king's forebodings about the approach of
Guise, the question receives no answer other than, supposedly, lighting up the room where the Council of the Sixteen are seated. Each of the first three acts opens with a series of questions. In the fourth act, where the king and Guise meet, no such questions appear, but the interrogative function is allocated to the Malincorne/Melanax scene, and in the fifth act a series of questions begins in the sixth line.100 This is not just to indicate the prevalence of the interrogative form. As we see right from the start, the form arrests our attention by its indefinite function and vocal notation. The question form in the play harps on the auditory by not affording a conclusive supplementation of what it functionally and aurally suspends.
100 In Act II, the opening statement of the Queen Mother is concluded with a tag question: 'Is it not so, Polin?' (II.i.7). Act III opens with an informative question directed by Grillon, the Colonel of the king's Guards, to Polin, an informer to the king: 'Have then this Pious Council of Sixteen/ Scented your late Discovery of the Plot?' (III.i.1-2). In Act IV questions predominate in the Malicorne-Melanax scene, starting with 'What shall the Guise do next?' (IV.ii.3). In Act V an informative question presented by Alphonso Corso, one of the king's colonels, to Grillon, directs an expository narration of events supplied by the latter: 'Who lookt for an Assembly of the States?' (V.i.6).
265
Thus, the opening question of the play is notable for its ambiguity between an exclamation and a question. According to rhetorical rules that are concerned with the inflexion of voice, questions with interrogative words (as the 'what' ambiguously suggests when not marked with a comma) are considered to be purely declarative
(Walker, 1785, 87-88). A more peculiar fact is that question-marks appear in the text where there is not exactly a question. As an example we may compare the straight- forward 'What could they find t' object?' with 'I hope you set ém right?' The latter is an expression of a hope involving interrogation only indirectly, to find out whether what is hoped has actually been the case (I.i.13, I.i.15). Moreover, there are differences in the version set by Stroup and Cooke (Lee's Works) and the one set by Dearing and
Roper (Dryden's Works) and Scott and Saintsbury (Dryden's Dramatic Works) especially in the punctuation with question-marks. For example, Guise responds to
Marmoutier's assertion that nothing but his stay will hinder her from seeing the king with 'Possible!' which is exclamatory in both Stroup and Cooke (I.i.334) and Scott and
Saintsbury (Vol. VII, p. 36), but is a question 'Possible?' in Dearing and Roper (Vol.
XIV, I.ii.187, p. 228).101
Questions in the play also range from informational, such as 'But, Father, why so late?' (I.i.10) to rhetorical, such as 'Are you a member of the League, and ask that
Question?' (I.i.59), to pseudo questions which are reported and receive their
101 Since The Duke of Guise is a collaborative work of Lee and Dryden, the text appears in different collections, the one conspicuously absent here is Montague Summers' Dryden, The Dramatic Works (Vol. V). Stroup and Cooke give precise information about the copy-text they have used (the first quarto, 1683) which they compared with five other copies for corrections made by the authors or the printers. The comparison reveals variations among the copies which indicate 'a few printer's but no authors', changes as the play went through the press' (Introduction, 393). It is important to note that Stroup and Cooke do not relate to differences in punctuation, nor do they point out such differences in their editorial references to the versions of Montague Summers and Scott and Saintsbury along the text. It is therefore inconclusive whether ambiguous punctuation is the authors' or the printers'. But just like I view the play as one whole, which the use of figures of speech enables because they hardly indicate differences between the two authors' style, I also look at the punctuation as marking the play's stylistics as a whole. The differences between the versions provide a fertile ground for perceiving the implications of the play's punctuation.
266 interrogative status from the rhetorical question following them, as in Polin's slightly sarcastic 'Since we are prov'd to be above the King; I wou'd gladly understand whom we are to obey; or whether we are to be all Kings together?' (I.i.57-58).102 There are also self-debating questions. For instance, the king asks: 'Is my Revenge unjust, or
Tyrannous?/ Heaven knows, I love no Blood' (V.i.305-306). Given Grillon's answer,
'No, for your Mercy is your onely Vice', this is not a rhetorical question.103
The question mark as well as interrogative words appear in various places where there is no actual interrogation. It is this peculiarity that suggests the prop-like function of interrogatives as invocatory, as bearers of voice. The question mark seems to guide voice inflexion in the production of the sentence, thus invoking tonality and the existence of voice as such. For instance, the duet of the shepherdess and the shepherd in the Malincorne/Melanax scene (V.ii.14-33), sung to a tune by Captain
Henry Pack, sets voice in a melodious presentation, where the rising and falling tonality of the shepherdess's part is indexical of the question/demand/complaint she addresses to the shepherd. The demand the shepherdess makes to the shepherd, 'Tell me Thirsis, tell your Anguish', enfolds a reported question, 'Why you Sigh, and why you Languish;', and a rhetorical question, 'What can Love and I do more?'.104 The whole sentence is set to a gradually rising tune with the rhetorical question sung twice,
102 This one is not a question in the Dearing and Roper edition. 103 Similarly Guise says: 'What when I feel his council on my Neck,/ Shall I not cast 'em backwards if I can;/ And at his Feet make known their villainy?' (I.i.254-256). Again, this is not a rhetorical question, judging by the answer. Noticebly, the 'What' in the Stroup and Cooke edition is not separated with a comma, albeit exclamatory. In contrast, in both Dryden editions the 'What' is separated by a comma (Scott and Saintsbury, p. 34, and Dearing and Roper, p. 225). 104 The song was written by Dryden, and is sung in a scene where Malicorne has an annual feast to mark the twelfth year of his contract with the Devil, to whom he bartered his soul for 'Honours, Wealth and Pleasure' (V.ii.3-4). The song seems so foreign in its subject matter to both the scene and the play, that it merits special attention as a stylistic directive. The first verse of this dialogic song between the shepherd and the shepherdess is the latter's: Tell me Thirsis, tell your Anguish, Why you Sigh, and why you Languish; When the Nymph whom you Adore, Grants the Blessing of Possessing, What can Love and I do more? (V.ii.14-18).
267 the first time marked as the peak of the rising tune while the second time ('What can
Love' repeated twice) is given a falling tonality to mark the closure of the tonal line.
This last question underlines the elusive function of the interrogation as such, since it is more of a complaint following the plaintive shepherdess's demand to know the cause of the shepherd's sighs and languor. The song thus moulds the function of voice in melody by presenting a question while displacing its strict interrogative function. The melody finally sets the question in the falling inflexion of a declarative, just as the rules of inflexion prescribe where questions are formed by the interrogative pronouns or adverbs rather than by inversion of the common word order (Walker, 87). A question hence is but a mark, it has neither tonal nor functional indication. The presence of the interrogative in the form of a strictly grammatical marker all the more suggests the invocation of the voice by what is expected vocally of punctuation, regardless of content.
Another form supporting the invocatory function which predominates in the play's stylistics is mimesis, the imitation of utterance (Joseph, 127), or quotation. With respect to the mimesis of speech, we are concerned with the formal features of the quotation as specified by Sternberg (111). As quotation involves two discourse events, the quoting and the quoted event, the formal features of quotation consist in an inset
(the quoted event) and its framing (the quoting). The relation between them indicates a direct, indirect or free indirect style of the mimesis.105 The question and the quotation present different formal angles to approach the invocation of the voice. Preliminarily it
105 Sternberg also specifies the representational features of quotation, which concern the Platonian distinction between mimesis (where 'the poet speaks in the person of another') and diegesis (where the poet never tries 'to assume another person') (111). In a play, which is a form of mimesis predominantly, quotation thus initially indicates a convolution of quoting events. The universals of quotation as presented by Sternberg are representational bond (the fact that quotation is but a representation of an original act of speech or thought), structural framing (quotation forms an inset within the surrounding frame of the context of quotation), communicative subordination (the part or inset is subordinated to the whole that encloses it, inset thus mediated), and perspectival montage or ambiguity (the inset is essentially ambiguous, there is a montage between quotee and quoter, reportee and reporter, represented and representing voice) (107-109).
268 may be suggested that the question functions as a form of omission by what it suspends in terms of function and tonality. The quotation is a form of omission through its peculiar structure of embedding quoted events. In either case the omission has little to do with signification; the effect of omission is structural and concerns the communicative dimension of language.
An examination of quotation in the play may begin with the shepherdess's question to the shepherd, because of its frame-inset structure: 'Tell me Thirsis', forms the frame, 'Why you Sigh…', forms the inset, which is a prospective quotation of what he should tell. The question 'What can Love and I do more?' is simultaneously outside and part of the inset – 'Tell me what can love'. Another embedded structure appears in the shepherdess's demand, 'But confess… Men are false, and so are you' – the shepherdess's address is ambiguously set between a frame-inset structure of a mimesis of what the shepherd ought to confess, and what the shepherdess claims to be the case and the shepherd is asked to affirm. There may also be no connection between the parts, 'confess' referring to the reasons for his languor (IV.ii.14-18, 25-26).106
Other instances of speech mimesis in the play show a number of variations.
Guise produces a direct quotation of D'Alva: 'I hear him Croak too to the Gaping
Council;/ Fish for the great Fish, take no care for Frogs,/ Cut off the Poppy-Heads, Sir;
Madam, charm/ The winds but fast, the Billows will be still' (I.i.186-189). Marmoutier reports the manner Guise's Writers style him: 'You have your Writers too, that cant your Battles,/ That stile you the New David, Second Moses', and then produces a direct quotation of their incitements: 'Then cry, The King, The King's a Hugonot,/ And,
106 This is the second verse sung by the Shepherdess: Thirsis, how can I believe you? But confess, and I'le forgive you; Men are false, and so are you; Never Nature fram'd a Creature To enjoy, and yet be true' (V.ii.24-28)
269 spight of us, will have Navarre succeed,/ Spight of the laws, and spight of our religion:/
But we will pull 'em down, down with 'em, down' (I.i.280-281, 286-289). The Queen-
Mother reports to the Abbot her own speech to the king: 'I …Told him Necessity cry'd out to take/ A resolution to preserve his Life', and mimics the king's reply: 'But thro the
Natural Sweetness of his Temper,/ And dangerous Mercy, coldly he reply'd,/ Madam, I will consider what you say' (II.i.34-35, 37-39).
The Queen-Mother also produces a kind of dialogismus, which means engaging in counterfeit dialogue with a feigned person (Joseph, 321), when planning aloud to the king his moves to counter Guise: 'Take Guise into your Heart, and drive your Friends,/
Let Knaves in Shops prescribe you how to sway,/ And when they read your Acts with their vile Breath,/ Proclaim aloud, they like not this or that,/ Then in a drove come
Lowing to the Louvre,/ And cry they'l have it mended, that they will;/ Or you shall be no King' (II.i.78-84). Here, like in the previous instances of quotation, typographical transformers like quotation marks are conspicuously absent, so the inset is barely set apart from the framing context and the reporting clause (thus the 'And' in Marmoutier's quotation could be hers or the quoted Writers). In the Queen's dialogismus, as in the song, there is a montage of two prospective quotations, what Sternberg calls
'preproductive' (137-138): the complaining crowd's and the king's. It is either that the queen pre-produces indirectly the crowd's complaint or the king's words to them when pretending to take the Guise into his heart. 'Proclaim aloud' proposes a deictic ambiguity between the mother's instruction (in the form of an imperative), and the framing of the King's or the Knaves' words. Similarly, her last remark is ambiguously her own warning to the king, or a continuation, in an indirect form, of his promise to
271 the crowd.107 Another instance of similar complexity is when Guise produces a prospective quotation coupling directness with reproductiveness of his own speech, in a question form: 'Is't possible/ That Guise should say, in this he must refuse you?'
(I.i.315-316).108
Every act of quotation, Sternberg says, 'serves two masters. One is the original speech or thought that it represents, pulling in a direction of maximal accuracy. The other is the frame that encloses and regulates it, pulling in the direction of maximal efficacy'. Reported discourse thus presents a case of divided allegiance 'between original-oriented representation (with its face to the world) and frame-oriented communication (with its face to the reader)' (152). However, the formalism of double function of quotation may be extended to its frame-oriented communication. The double function would then take its cue from the disruptive effect of framing to mean that the embedding itself, or the assimilation of speech acts, implies a division between the enfolded representation and its non-communicative effect. The non-communicative effect of the frame is the effect of structure: it concerns what is lost to the original speech by its mediation, thereby producing the evocative quality of quotation.109
107 This quote Lee has taken from his Massacre of Paris, where the Queen-Mother advices King Charles IX how to deal with the Huguenots. In The Massacre, we note, the Queen's words impress no ambiguity: 'Let Knaves in Shops prescribe you how to Sway,/ They read your Acts, and with their hardened Thumbs/ Erase them out, or with their stinking Breath/ Proclaim aloud they like not this or that;/ Then in a drove come lowing to the Louvre,/ And say, they'l have it mended, that they will,/ Or you shall be no King' (I.ii.90-95, in Stroup and Cooke, Vol. II). It is clear here that 'Proclaim' refers to Knaves thanks to the preceding deixis their in 'with their stinking breath'. The ambiguous 'Proclaim' in the Queen's words in The Duke of Guise is instantly resolved, but its momentary effect of unsettling indefiniteness is significant, this is what gives the quote its invocatory quality. 108 Note also the following instances: Polin reproduces the rebels' original plan to seize the king in a form of direct quotation: 'Whereon immediately there runs a Cry/ Of, Seize him on the next Procession, seise him' (similar to Marmoutier's mimesis). He concludes with an indirect quotation, or a direct inset that maintains an indirect grammatical person, coupling directness with reproductiveness (Sternberg, 125): 'But when… they perceiv'd/ The King absented, straight the Rebels met,/ And roar'd, they were undone' (III.i.5-6, 10-11). Another instance of a direct quotation comes from Melanax, whose quoted inset is a mimesis of a repetitive exclamation that is an identifying mark of the second citizen, who is one of the rabble: 'You, Neighbour,…and you Friend, that cry, Look you Gentlemen,…' (IV.ii.310-315). 109 Sternberg in fact touches upon this point in relation to the representational bond of quotation: 'even if the original could be copied down to the last detail, its transplanting and framing in a new environment would impose on it a new mode of existence' (108). For the purposes of this thesis, it is not the reversal
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To elucidate how quotation may become a form of omission by structurally holing its frame-oriented communication, we may compare quotation in Caesar Borgia to quotation in The Duke of Guise. Noticeably, in Caesar Borgia there is more stress on the reporting clause than on the inset. The inset is often interrupted to let in a reporting clause, so that the framing is at the service of the reporting clause. The frame envelops the reported clause convexly, to the effect of setting itself apart as a projection. Projected reporting clauses are part of the graphics of cuts that prevail in the play's stylistics.110 By contrast, in The Duke of Guise, the inset is hardly separated from the frame. The frame is at the service of the incorporated quote, the inset, enveloping it concavely. It is the embedding of the quote that gains importance, to the effect of making the inset an enclosed hole. The embedding of the inset is marked not just by formal features but by its ambiguity; the inset is ambiguously situated between quotation and non-quotation and between quoter and quotee as well as between quotees. Thus there appear to be quotations within quotations, as in the instance of
Guise quoting himself quoting himself prospectively, or the shepherds' song, itself a quoted event of prospective quoting. The involution of the inset lays stress not on the signifying-communicative effect of the quotation but on its purely formal effect, on its topology of concavity that opens inwards, shell-like, to invoke something that can only be conceived in respect of the aural, or the voice. As Sternberg indicates, the incorporated quote and the framing context of quotation have a structural relation of part-whole (108). In Caesar Borgia this relation is disrupted to set apart the part,
of meaning and significance involved in this new mode of existence that is important but the holes in signification effected by the part-hole relation essential to quotation. 110 Instances of projected reporting clauses in Caesar Borgia are for example Don Michael's 'Are these the Presents, say'st thou, of the late / New Cardinal Ascanio Sforza?' or Alonso's 'Borgia, he cry'd again, to whom the Lords/ Of Florence sent me their Ambassadour', or Ascania's 'Has he receiv'd --- stay, I say, has he?' (I.i.1-2, 63-64, 66) (my emphasis).
272 whereas in The Duke of Guise this relation becomes further convoluted to form a w/hole.
At the level of action the Malicorne (one of the followers of Guise) and
Melanax (the devil) subplot, allegorical as it may be, stages the power of invocation in its imaginary garb as the summons of death, or the call from the world of the dead. It is hence no coincidence that when the devil (Melanax) comes for Malicorne's soul,
Malicorne is in the middle of rousing his spirits with the pastoral love song of the shepherdess and shepherd. The pastoral song appears to be part of Malicorne's feast, and is as it were an antidote to his inescapable day of payment to the devil. But there is an affinity between the song and the devil both in relation to sound and to its emergence. The question-answer and frame-inset structures set to a tune anticipate, or parallel, the devil appearing always 'uncalled' (IV.ii.6), his voice 'hoarse' (V.ii.35), knocking loudly at the door (V.ii. at the end of the song), and preaching rebellion and schism (IV.ii.14-16). Melanax enters in the form of a spirit with a flash of lightning
(IV.ii.3-4), but is associated with sound and its various manners of production. As the subplot is visibly allegorical, the domain of sound inscribing the presence of the devil does not lend itself to uncanniness. However, there is nothing uncanny about the devil precisely because the micro-structures of style harmonize to produce an effect of anxiety by what they call forth and by so doing, render missing.
The unhinged position of question with respect to its interrogative function and the concavity of quotation, much like the elliptical figures of omission, are not conducive to the production and communication of sense. Figures of omission create gaps that can readily be filled on the level of signification. But through their grammatical and syntactical ambiguity, these figures introduce the invocatory object as the non-signifying dimension of the ellipsis. The structures of question and quotation
273 suggest the invocatory in a way that altogether opposes resolution by way of sense production, for they do not hamper sense in the first place. They materially produce the invocatory object by their form, and as such more radically invoke the object of the voice as otherness of what is said (Lacan, SX, 5.6.63, p. 8).
If the structures of question, quotation and ellipsis support the anxiety elicited by the plot through the direct yet creeping threat to the king by Guise, and the slow yet persistently ripening one to the Guise by the king, they do so as forms that do not allay the ear by screening the possibility of the void of the Other as such. They maintain what is elided from the phatic function. The object of the voice, which Lacan adds, along with the gaze, to the objects of the drive discussed by Freud, is firstly differentiated from the specular relation of the subject to the Other. Whereas the image of the subject in the Other is without a remainder, and what the subject loses there is elided from the image, the object of the voice emerges unveiled in a separated form in the Other (22.5.63, pp. 9-10). The Other conceived linguistically in relation to the voice, is specifically the field where the instruments of communication are situated.
The subject receives his own message from this Other. The object of the voice is what marks this message as interrupted even if not formless. The object of the voice designates the phatic function as resonating a void: 'If the voice has any importance, it is in so far as the elision in what is called linguistically its phatic function… resonates in a void which is the void of the Other as such, the ex nihilo properly speaking. The voice responds to what is said but cannot answer for it' (5.6.63, pp. 5, 8).
The object a, Lacan teaches in his seminar on anxiety, must be located by 'this something which must be detached from the phonematicisation as such,...from the system of opposition' that is constituted by language. Lacan thus isolates the voice from the system of signifiers (22.5.63, p. 7). In every utterance the vocal dimension
274 emerges corporally in isolation, apart from the system of oppositions which make signification possible through substitution and displacement or metaphor and metonymy. Lacan establishes the nature of the voice as supporting the void of the
Other through the physiology of the organ of hearing. The ear is an apparatus that resonates, a resonator which is a kind of a tube. Unlike a musical instrument, the ear resonates something it does not produce. It is the apparatus as such which resonates, and only to its own note and frequency. That is why the voice is essentially an object incorporated by the subject. In order for the voice to respond, 'we have to incorporate the voice as otherness of what is said'. The structure of the Other in itself, says Lacan,
'constitutes a certain void, the void of its lack of guarantee'. The truth which enters the world with the signifier is only experienced in its echoes in the real. In this void the voice resonates as distinct from sonorities and specifically not as modulated, but as articulated (5.6.63, pp. 7-9).
The voice is hence distinguished from sound; it is not the modulated but the articulated voice that resonates. The voice that is distinct from sonorities is the 'voice qua imperative, in so far as it calls for obedience or conviction.' It situates itself not with respect to music but with respect to the word. The totemic shofar, like the orator, has the function of the voice in that they both provide an articulation of the Other as word; the shofar in particular provides an articulation of commandment. By contrast, music is anchored in signifiers; it lacks the void sustained by the word or commandment (5.6.63, p. 9).
The corporal dimension of the utterance, which is the voice as a separated form attached to nothing in the Other, refers back to the difference of the voice from the object emerging in the visual field. At the level of the eye, the object is sustained by the perception of one's body in space; because of its relationship with the eye, space is
275 apparently homogeneous. Perception bears on an imaginary Gestalt or good form through the elision of the object, so that desire locates itself in what disturbs this
Gestalt (22.5.63, pp. 9-10). Unlike the object at the level of the eye, the voice is separated and not elided in the sense that it lacks a spatial Gestalt. The voice finds its bearings in something that is more primordial than the subject's relation to the specular
Other. The voice must be distinguished, separated, because it concerns the Other as such. The voice concerns the original crime, the myth of the murder of the father and what is inscribed in it concerning the economy of desire. Original desire in its most fundamental form is constituted with the establishment of a prohibition that is impossible to transgress (22.5.63, pp. 12-13). The voice unveils the Other as the lack constituted by desire.
There is, then, a paradoxical aspect to the voice: it resonates in the ear, as if it were produced in there (5.6.63, p. 7), and at the same time it appears strange to itself, as though coming from nowhere. The paradoxical status of the voice, its manner of mediating the Other with respect to the subject, is what makes the voice a model of a distinct form of identification which Lacan calls 'incorporation', identification based on
Otherness (5.6.63, p. 9). Lacan here turns to zoological phenomena to construct the relation between the voice as ex nihilo, as void, and the constitution of the superego: the superego is a manner of incorporating the voice in the form of commandment. The stripped Daphnia plugs with tiny grains of sand its ear-like hollow to maintain its equilibrium. The constitution of the superego is similarly 'rather distant'. A voice is incorporated rather than assimilated; this is what gives it a function in 'modeling our void'. The shofar, which produces a musical sound wrenched from all harmony and is a substitute for the word, fills this void with the content of guilt. It does so, however,
276 only after the desire of the Other has taken the form of a commandment (5.6.63, pp. 9-
10).
The shofar sounds the clamor of guilt that resolves anxiety, and gives content to the 'primordial fault' of desire, the lack desire inherently implies. For our purposes, the shofar indicates a unique relation between sound and voice; it is where a sound becomes pure voice once it articulates the void of commandment, the lack commandment implies. The shofar models the locus of anxiety, the 'not without an object' which is the desire of the Other, imparting anxiety's garb of guilt as the measure of the incorporation of commandment.
The dominant micro-structures of style in The Duke of Guise institute the object of the voice with all its resonances as conceived by Lacan. The micro-structures of ellipsis, question and quotation invoke the voice in what slips from the sound they call forth by their gaps. However, as I attempt to show, these micro-structures support the dimension of the voice as specifically corporeal. These structures thus become the real of bodily encumbrance, of plot in its equivocal sense of intrigue qua plot or conspiracy on and of the body. The plot of the body is sensed imaginarily as an infringement of boundaries, as transgression: the material body of the complotter is in this sense indistinguishable from the political one of the monarch. Invocatory micro-structures are not mimetic of this burdening sensation. They are the surplus effect of the imaginary sensation of the body suffering under its plot. By their sound effect the micro-structures introduce the invocatory object as a void, as something that fails to emerge. Topologically, invocatory micro-structures sustain the plot of the body perversely, that is to say, in the way of the vacuole which demarcates a forbidden zone of enjoyment. This way the plot on one's person becomes simultaneously a locus of jouissance and of the prohibition that marks the body's annihilation.
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The invocatory micro-structures of style are functionally relatable to the passive-active stasis at the level of plot in two ways: the first concerns the drive in its circular movement back to its own zones of satisfaction, the second concerns the function of passivity with respect to what echoes in the invocatory object, the law of the king/father that the intrigue suspends. Put otherwise, the relation of the invocatory micro-structures to the plot sustains the same chiasmic nature of the conspiracy on the body to the effect of subverting the impinging material body of the complotter by the word it is made to dissolve. The king's prolonged inaction, the inverse side of Guise's encroachment, much like the Malincore/Melanax subplot with respect to the plot, sustains anxiety precisely as the shadow which makes anxiety a cause, while also invoking the body as an organ whose persistence indicates the necessity of its elimination. Invocatory micro-structures pertain to both these aspects of the intrigue but in a way that requires elaboration of Lacan's conception of the invocatory object in relation to sadism-masochism on the one hand, and Freud's conception of activity- passivity on the other.
In Lacan's sixteenth seminar "From an Other to the other", the perverse function of the voice qua support of signifying articulation is modeled by the constitution of the superego as incorporated. Incorporation as essentially perverse looms in Lacan's formulation of the sado-masochistic drive in relation to the voice
(lesson of 26.3.69). The voice as such is of particular importance to the masochist, but not just as what he 'would give the guarantee of answering like a dog'. There is something in the voice that is more topologically specified, Lacan says, for 'nowhere is the subject more interested in the Other than through this a object' (p. 12). Hence, moral masochism can only be founded on the impact of the voice of the Other, 'not in the ear of the subject but at the level of the Other that [the subject] establishes as being
278 completed with a voice'. The masochist steals enjoyment by the remitting of the function of the voice to the Other, especially when the Other is less valorized, has less authority (p. 13).
It is by means of the voice that masochism as one form of perversion fills the locus evacuated of enjoyment in the Other that is by structural concomitance also the locus of the drive (p. 6). In other words, masochism, specifically moral masochism, marks the topology of the drive and the object of the drive as extimate and supplemented, thus indicating perversion. Masochism marks this topology in its relation to the object voice: the object that epitomizes the topology of the drive by its formulation in terms of separation and incorporation.
Extimacy, which means both interiority and radical exteriority of the voice, points to the drive's mode of enjoyment in the locus of the Other as the treasury of signifiers. The locus evacuated of enjoyment by the incidence of the signifier introduces into its lack the hole that the object of enjoyment constitutes (SXVI,
26.3.69, pp. 2, 6). Two lacks coalesce here: the lack of satisfaction, marking a primary object of satisfaction lost forever, and the lack of being which is caused by the signifier. Masochism points at the extimacy of the object by the voice it remits to the
Other, a manner of rendering the Other at the same time incomplete. And in the constitution of the superego, the remitting of the voice to the Other is conceived as its
Daphnia–like incorporation. Lacan says that the masochist supplies the Other with a voice through his dumbness (p. 11). The masochist's dumbness indicates moral masochism as the incorporation of the superego.
In contrast to the masochist, the sadist tries to complete the Other by removing the word from him and by imposing his voice on him (13). In sadism at its extreme, the operation of the voice finds its full register. However, enjoyment escapes here. The
279 place of enjoyment is masked by the astonishing domination of the a-object, Lacan says, but enjoyment for its part is nowhere. The sadist qua voice is only an instrument of something that is called a supplement given to the Other. In this case the Other does not want the supplement, yet gives in to it all the same (p. 13).
In Seminar XVI, Lacan discusses the object of the voice as a means of unfolding the topology of the drive and the capture of enjoyment in the subject caught up in the signifying incidence. Specifically, as discussed in Seminar XVI, the voice concerns the capture of enjoyment by way of perversion as opposed to neurosis.
Perversion consists in providing the Other with a supplementary object, neurosis in the inevitable 'slipping away' of the object. It may be suggested that the topology of the voice as object of the drive is relevant to Freud's theorization of the relation of masochism to sadism in "Instincts and their Vicissitudes". Lacan insists on the two types of perversion as distinct from one another. However, it seems that Freud does not offer a simple reversibility between the one and the other. Especially passivity indicates that the auto-erotic source of the drive is disrupted by the other, as Lacan has indeed emphasized in his eleventh seminar (183-185). Yet masochism as formulated by Freud in "Instincts and their Vicissitudes", although experienced through another subject (agent), still projects this auto-erotic cause (SE 14, 132). This is seen in the relation of the aim of the drive to its object.
What Freud indicates about the change of aim from active to passive is significant in the sense that the perverse function is perceived in terms of vicissitudes that interweave change of aim with change of object of identification, that is, through another person. Hence in obsession the desire to torture has turned into self-torture but not into masochism. This is a reflexive change of object, whereas in masochism the
281 turning around upon the subject's self is coupled with an attitude of passivity towards another person. This is a change of the aim of the drive (SE 14, 128).
In masochism and sadism the passive-active aim of the drive is attained through vicarious identification with the tormenting agent (in masochism) and the tormented object (in sadism). Masochism in the sense of sadism turned round upon the subject's own ego includes an introduction of an extraneous person 'which is once more sought as object; this person, in consequence of the alteration which has taken place in the instinctual aim, has to take over the role of the subject [agent]' (SE 14, 127).
Masochism is a situation of maintaining inverse modes of enjoyment as the masochist shares in the enjoyment of the assault upon himself: in masochism, Freud says,
'satisfaction follows along the path of the original sadism, the passive ego placing itself back in phantasy in its first role, which has now in fact been taken over by the extraneous subject' (128). An inverse kind of identification similarly takes place in the sadistic infliction of pain. The sensation of pain is very well fitted to provide a passive masochistic aim, especially as pain trenches upon sexual excitation. The masochistic aim of inflicting pain arises then retrogressively: 'while these pains are being inflicted on other people, they are enjoyed masochistically by the subject through his identification of himself with the suffering object' (129).
To become an instinctual aim, masochistic enjoyment of pain must converge with the sadistic position which is also more convenient for the infliction of pain
(change of object). This is not the topology of extimacy Lacan conceives in relation to the object as a residue of enjoyment formed by the relationship of the signifier representing the subject, and the Other as treasury of signifiers. The topology suggested by the vicissitudes of the drive in Freud's theory represents the relation between opposing original aims (activity-passivity) and effects their conflation through
281 the change of an object (represented by another person). But Freud also indicates that the transformation of sadism into masochism implies a return to the narcissistic object.
Even if at this point in his thinking there is still no conception of primary masochism, and even if he indicates that in sadism the organic source points at an object other than itself, the auto-erotic aim of the drive is not discarded (128, 132). Freud's later formulations of the relation of the ego to the superego as erotic indeed maintain the erotogenic aspect of moral masochism.
Freud's conception of the vicissitudes of sadism and masochism, then, conflates opposing aims attained through the exchange of object and subject. Lacan's conception of the object voice, we have seen, conflates interiority with exteriority in various ways: in the relation of the voice to the ear, of the voice to the ego, of the object of captured enjoyment to the field of signifiers, and finally, of the voice to the communicative function, its otherness of what is said. What the plot and elocutionary micro-structures of ellipsis, question and quotation in The Duke of Guise can offer in relation to these conceptions of Freud and Lacan concerns primarily a combination of the extimacy of the voice as commandment and the passive aim of the drive. I suggest that only by combining the invocatory function of stylistic dominants with the passive subjection to the assault upon one's person at the level of plot can we perceive forms of omission in the play as the site of the masochistic body at once awaiting and suspending the word of its elimination. Both plot and style register the persistence of the plot on one's person, and the presence of its core, the living body as such. The lingering on the body at the level of plot has its substance in forms of omission which aurally subvert signification.111 It is here that the passive aim of the drive and the invocatory object
111 The lingering on the living body through the dimension of passivity is in fact introduced at the level of plot not only through the plotter and his victim's modes of action but with equal acuteness through their relation to Marmoutier. Thus the king seems to suggest that she embodies the encumbrance he suffers from Guise when he unburdens himself to the Queen-Mother: 'yet, O yet, there's more,/
282 combine: forms of omission institute the voice as a way of at once registering the body and the primordial law or lack it calls to mind. A 'gangren'd Limb' has to be lopped, as the king says (V.i.127) before the law can emerge.
With the topologies of object and aim of the drive for coordinates, the construction of interchangeability and alternation of the aim of the drive is seen at the level of action in the prolonged grip in which Guise and the King are held. As the king delays any action to oppose Guise, and Guise, though returned to Paris, refrains from harming the King, they both originally appear to be active and sadistic (the Guise is after all the aggressor, and the King is a student of Machiavellian arts – IV.i.125-132).
However, an attitude of passivity and suffering agony looms in their stagnation. The interchangeability of object and aim takes a more intricate form in the manner in which the action takes its support from micro-structures of style. In what they keep elided, these structures invoke an elsewhere that elicits anxiety and is inextricable from the void which they interminably evoke, the voice as lack. Micro-structures of style point to what at the level of plot fails to emerge, a commandment that will form a limit, a cut between the plot and the King's person.
Micro-structures of style invoke a twofold void through the object of the voice.
First, the voice as the void imposed by the paternal commandment itself, a void that in a way is conceived in the play in terms of uncurbed jouissance, or unhindered sadomasochistic pleasurability. Yet micro-structures also invoke the anxiety involved in the absence of voice, or in the voice as unveiling the ex nihilo of the Other. The play thus produces anxiety not in relation to the impending danger to the king on the phantasmatic level, but in relation to what is sadistically imposed on him in the form of
Something upon my heart', referring to Marmoutier' (II.i.137-138), while Guise experiences Marmoutier's decision to go to the king unless he abandons his ambition as a plot upon himself: 'She does but try me: Ha!/ This is the Mother-Queen and Espernon,/ … All packt to plot, and turn me to Madness' (I.i.339-342). In both cases a sensation of assault takes a displaced effect through the woman both men are in love with.
283 an order not his own which he nevertheless obeys. The sadism implied is immediately qualified, seeing that the king withholds his commandment, withholds any voice, thus forcing his tormentor into a masochistic position of remitting a voice to him which he refuses to own. In the absence of such a voice, a residual waste-like version of the voice appears in Malicorne's dealings with the devil. The song that furnishes his last scene, where he pays the devil with his soul, is not the voice articulating a word.
What the plot with its surplus meaning on the one hand and the elocutionary micro-structures that oppose meaning on the other both query is nevertheless the location of the sadistic aim of the drive. It is not clear where this aim is to be located, and who exactly its agent is. Intrigue here, as has been shown all along, turns upon itself. Much like in Caesar Borgia, in The Duke of Guise plot and style negotiate something that cannot be negotiated. In the latter, the paternal, regal commandment itself is negotiated through the object of the voice. Hence the plot on/of one's person, constructed by the invocatory micro-structures of style, is the plot of suffering passion of the body, its behest of no sublimation and no regulation in the absence of the word.
For the word to become a voice one's person has to finally be destroyed. Guise, the instructions say, is stabbed in all parts, 'but most in the head' (V.iv.30-35), at the same time that symbolically the rebel King of Paris dies for the King of France to rise in the person of the lawful monarch (V.iv.41-42).
The significance of The Duke of Guise for a conception of intrigue as the site of the drive resides in the way the play recruits micro-structures of style to subvert an imaginary effectuation of the plot on the king's person. The equivocation of Guise- guise (disguise, outward form) becomes operative precisely in the idea that no metaphorical reference to the body functions metaphorically. That is also what makes anxiety a cause. The inauthentic scene which intrigue provides for anxiety is where the
284 real of the impinged on gangrened body forces itself on the spectator, in the mode of the voice that petrifies it. Passivity, masochistic dumbness, takes effect through style as well as intrigue to remit a voice to the kingly Other while maintaining the void of commandment and body alike.
For psychoanalysis The Duke of Guise offers a unique example of the way eroticized stylistics effects perversion: figures of speech taking over to denude metaphor superimpose fetish-like the object voice on the looping passivity involved in the notion of a plot on the king's person. Eroticized stylistics points this way to the sadistic aim of the drive, made dubious in this play, as an aim whose agency is suggestively authorial: by means of eroticized stylistics the object voice is superimposed as a supplement on a gangrened regal body, supplanting while holing a monarchic commandment. The object-cause of the plot on one's person materializes thus fetish-like through the play's style.
At the same time, it may be noticed that the plot on one's person is not rid of its organic cause. This is suggested by a typographical omission in the king's final statement (in the Stroup and Cooke version) which creates a strange grammatical ordering, and proffers thus to the very end the function of style in the construction of the plot on one's person: 'He's gone, no more disperse', the king, looking at the dead
Guise, says to the counselors and the others present (V.iv.55). In Dearing and Roper,
Vol. XIV, 304, and in Scott and Saintsbury, Vol. VII, 131, 'no more' and 'disperse' are separated by a comma or a dash. This omission of a punctuation mark is probably meant to indicate a certain intensity of voice. This is a perceptibly baffling remainder not given to resolution which retains to the last the immanence of the voice of the
285
Other, the voice of commandment, as an insufferable ex-nihilo. But the plot on one's person is thus punctuated by/into a mark.112
112 The function of the punctuative mass in the play points at the difference between forms invoking the object in tragedy and those in comedy. The erotic relation of the ego to the superego has been noticed in the comedies of intrigue through the enthymeme and the fallacy. But in their case, there is no such punctuation of this erotism as corporeal.
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F. Rowe's The Ambitious Step-Mother – The Ceding of Subjectivity to Libidinal Fixation
In both Caesar Borgia and The Duke of Guise the relation of intrigue to dominant stylistic forms and to passions arouses anxiety, since by means of their stylistics the object is effectuated as present rather than lacking. Through figures of style, libido is defined in these tragedies in terms of the object as the remainder of passions which are evoked semantically. Anxiety thus becomes the state enabling access to the real, in this case, the real of the organic body. The object locates the cause of intrigue at the same time that it indicates an essential aspect of late seventeenth-century tragedy which distinguishes this tragedy from classical tragedy: the blocked path of desire to the beyond of the symbolic order. Where passions and style prevail, the tragic figure is the subject of libido whose only passage beyond the symbolic is his non-symbolic death.
Intrigue in the tragedies studied so far is entangled with the same object manifested at the level of style. The mechanisms of plotting and manipulation at the heart of these intrigues and the character relationship they inform share something of the libido defined through style. However, in each play the object manifests itself differently. In Caesar Borgia, the gaze becomes the anxiety-provoking object, constituted by figures of construction that emphasize the cut, as well as a signifier cut from its ordinary metaphorical function. Stylistic elements combine to manifest an eye suffused to blindness with erotogenic pleasure, by wrenching the organ from its anatomic role, conceived symbolically. In The Duke of Guise forms that mark omission institute the invocatory object. As the real of the body is accessed through the object, style becomes the site of the body, again marking the body in different manners. Thus, in Caesar Borgia intrigue and forms of style point in the direction of the dissolution of the body, whereas in The Duke of Guise forms of style collude to invoke its non-
287 dissolution. In each play, a metaphorical conception of the organic cause of the drive is subverted by forms of style.
Nicholas Rowe's The Ambitious Step-Mother (1700) concludes my discussion of intrigue in tragedy because it accentuates the relation between intrigue, style and passions by undermining some of the constitutive aspects of intrigue. If in The Duke of
Guise intrigue is the site of the drive while the affect emerges in a state of omission, in
The Ambitious Step-Mother the intrigue as content, thinned considerably as ostentatiously cerebral, cedes to the real of passion as instituted at the level of style.
Furthermore, the play's style presents mostly syntactic forms which are not considered figures of speech. Through its syntactic dominants, the play's style confronts us with the problem of binding elocutionary surplus, or the anxiety involved in writing as such.
Rowe's tragedy is hence an apt conclusion for this section, as it posits intrigue at its very limit, at the point where intrigue collapses before its object cause, an object yielded by the very profusion of writing.113
113 The Ambitious Step-Mother (1700), produced in the year of Dryden's death, is Rowe's first play whose interest lies not just in its generic transitional status between the drama of the late seventeenth century and the beginning of the first, being an affective tragedy in the old near-heroic style (Brown L., English Dramatic Form, 148), but because Rowe emerges at a declined stage in the history of English drama as, in Sutherland's words, 'a young man who was alive to the peculiar requirements of his generation, and who could provide just that novelty of theme and treatment which it was looking for without introducing too sudden and disturbing an innovation' (17). This means specifically the dramatist's reliance for his effects far less on the heroic than on the pathetic and the sentimental (21). Yet, while Nicoll, for example, acknowledges that Rowe is a dramatist whose works must fully be mastered before any true appreciation of eighteenth century tragic development can be possible, he concludes that his genius for the theater notwithstanding, Rowe 'failed to stamp any personality into his works' (98, 102). If the poetic quality of Lee and Congreve received recognition from the authority of Dryden (Congreve, for example in Dryden's prologue to The Double-Dealer, Lee, in Dryden's appreciative words on his unique style: 'Where Nature Triumphs over wretched Art:/ We only warm the Head, but you the Heart' in the epistle To Mr. Lee, on His Alexander, printed in Lee's The Rival Queens – The Works of John Dryden, Vol. I, 106-107), Rowe's poetic genius has been controversial. Congreve, in a letter, indeed says of The Ambitious Step-Mother that it is 'a very good [play]' but refrains from granting it the likelihood of 'having a run' (The Complete Works of William Congreve, Vol. I, 69). Charles Gildon, in his vicious attack on Rowe's plays, would not even allow him the credit of his style, accusing him of being loquacious but not eloquent (Remarks on Mr. Rowe's Tragedy (1715), 36). Samuel Johnson praises 'the elegance of his diction and the suavity of his verse' but says 'his author's sense is sometimes a little diluted by additional infusion, and sometimes weakened by too much expansion' (326). Even the critic's conclusive applause of Rowe in A Comparison between the Two Stages (1702) is slightly qualified: 'for indeed, considering the degeneracy of our present Poets, Mr. Roe has the fairest Pretence to succeed Dryden in Tragedy of any of his Brethren' (190). For the purposes of
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At this end point, the object manifested through style is the object whose primal status has been pointed out by Freud, especially in the case of the Wolf Man, and by
Lacan in his seminar on anxiety: the anal object. It is the object which in the form of the meconium (excreta) precedes the subject, retroacting the subject's psychic life to its very beginning (''Introductory Lectures" XXV, SE 16, 397, "From the History of an
Infantile Neurosis" ["Wolf Man"], SE 17, 102). As I will attempt to show, this ultimate object cause points the way to the conception of intrigue in terms of its fundamental answerability to the masochism inherent in the tortuous structures of language. More specifically, the dominant syntactic structures of Rowe's style point to an isomorphism with the cedable object which the anal object embodies, as they invoke the question of retaining relinquished components of the complex sentence itself. At the level of plot, the failing intriguer, much like the excrement-baby introduced by the Wolf Man, finally cedes to his libidinal death. This to an extent marks the resolution of intrigue by micro-structures of style.
Three points which Rowe raises in his dedicatory appeal for patronage and in the prologue of the play ought to be taken into account before examining the play's intrigue and style. In his dedication Rowe proclaims his intension to produce the tragic effects advocated by 'the great master and father of criticism' at the cost of poetic justice. Yet he further advances his own preference for the elicitation of pity predominantly, for although pity is 'uneasiness', it is 'not altogether disagreeable to the person who feels it' (Dedication, 4-5). Another point which concerns Rowe's intention to reform tragedy is presented in his prologue to the play. Here the opening line indeed stresses the elements made to 'try the soft accesses of [the female spectators'] souls', such as 'dying lovers' or 'a sad story of a maid's despair', conducive to the elicitation of my thesis, however, Nicoll's remark provides a profitable cue. The notion of literature as symptom and the conception of the poetic function as the locus of the drive, teach us to tune our ear to those artistic manifestations where the drive is indeed mute to such a degree that it speaks.
289 pity. Yet through such effects Rowe urges a rectification of a flaw in the representation of heroines. He calls on 'Majestic Tragedy' to 'once again/ In purple pomp adorn the swelling scene', and on 'this bold age' to do what Shakespeare durst not, 'And famous
Greek and Latin beauties shew' (unpaginated).
One more point made by Rowe provides a guideline to the stylistics of his play.
In the dedication Rowe alludes to the play as 'a piece of poetry'. He claims the play is 'a much more perfect poem than it is in the representation on the stage'. Rowe then confesses he was led into an error in the writing of it 'by thinking that it would be easier to retrench than to add'. The play that he offers to his patron's judgment is not the version presented on the stage, which had about six hundred lines cut off. The
'extra' lines, whose omission Rowe feels maimed the play (Dedication, 4), are thus marked by inverted commas, alerting the reader to their being simultaneously retained and retrenched.
If we return to the prologue, Rowe's confessed error suggests another turn to his invocation of 'famous Greek and Latin beauties'. The ensuing lines seem to imply that
'beauties' concerns the dramatic portrayal of 'ancient heroines' (Rowe criticizing
Shakespeare for failing to give due place to women in his plays or to portray ancient heroines). Yet the call for the reinstallation of Greek and Latin beauties may also be taken to indicate the same kind of self-conscious style that led Rowe to be in error, the poetic error of excessiveness when writing for the stage.114 'Latin beauties', I suggest,
114 Critical interest in this heroic tragedy, by contrast, centered on its significance as setting the essential affective foundations for Rowe's moral she-tragedies (Brown L., Dramatic Form, 149). Critics like Laura Brown and Dammers have responded to Rowe's own assertion that heroines should move the audience's concern, and examine his generic contribution in line of his portrayal of the female character. Yet the importance of this tragedy for an examination of intrigue lies in its generic status of intermediary between the highly decorous heroic drama on the one hand and the pathetic one on the other. Brown sees this early affective tragedy as closer in form and ideology to aristocratic heroic drama, Dammers emphasizes Rowe's indebtedness to Dryden's heroic drama for his portrayal of the virtuous female character (Brown L., ''The Defenseless Woman", 426, Dammers, "The Female Experience", 29, "Female Characterization", 35). Straddling two generic forms, the core of which, ideology apart, concerns affectivity, The Ambitious Step-Mother confronts us with the fate of passions as we have come to know
291 emerge in Rowe's stylistic preference for loose syntactic structures that echo the Latin ablative case.115 It is this kind of ablative style that also institutes the object as cut, separated by the formal machine of language. Lacan's conception of the object as cause in his seminar on anxiety begins with the object as ceded both from the body and from the metonymy of desire that gives consistency to the object. Such is the anal object, slipping from anal desire to emerge as anal dismay, the object produced by anxiety.
The play's ablative syntax, as I will attempt to show, becomes the objectal manifestation of passion professedly rejected at the level of theme and plot. It is in this way that the anal object is instituted as the cause of failing intrigue, but with the libidinal, masochistic import that Freud's teaching has established in the case of the
Wolf Man.
The motto of the play is just as telling for a consideration of the play's intrigue as the dedication and prologue are regarding its style. It consists of three quotes, the first of which is taken from Book IX of Ovid's Metamorphoses, where Hercules, boiling in the poison-soaked tunic sent him by his jealous wife (who was incited into the deed by Rumour, Juno's messenger), appeals to Juno, his hating step-mother, to put an end to his torment by taking 'this hateful life': 'This will be a boon to me, surely a fitting boon for a stepmother to bestow!' (line 181, Vol. II, pp. 15-16). The other two
them in the tragedies of Lee and Dryden and Lee, studied above, in relation to the effect of pathos, calculated to assure that the audience, having been struck with terror in several parts of the play, 'always conclude and go away with pity' (Dedication, 4). As Rothstein has claimed, the pathetic style tends towards prose for attaining 'accurate mimesis' [of affects] and the decorum of a poem which marks the heroic play is abandoned (167, 169). A concern with the pathos of pathetic tragedy, which became predominant towards the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, is beyond the scope of this thesis. But Rowe's play suggests that the tendency towards prose is not necessarily either more natural or more mimetic than the decorum-abiding heroic style. There is nevertheless a question whether pathos and passions are the same and the play in fact suggests that this very question is at the heart of processing the psychic cause of intrigue through its relation to style and affectivity. 115 Dr. Welwood, Rowe's doctor and first biographer, quoted by Johnson, says Rowe 'was master of most parts of polite learning, especially the classical authors, both Greek and Latin' and that 'He had likewise read most of the Greek and Roman histories in their original languages' and most that are written in other languages (323). For twenty years he was engaged in the translation of Lucan's Pharsalia (into heroic couplets), which Johnson praises as 'one of the greatest productions of English poetry' (Sutherland, 6, 12, Johnson, 326).
291 quotes are taken from Virgil's The Aeneid, Book XI, where Camilla the Amazon, fighting the Tuscans (Aeneas's men) also drives home to her slain victims the lesson of her strength: 'You thought this, Tuscan, a boar hunt in the woods?/ The words your people spoke: a woman's hand/ today has proved them false' (lines 686-688, p. 256).
And then, to the Ligurian who attempted to trick her into a fight on foot then mounted his horse and tried to escape: 'Ligurian idiot! Proud of your foolish trick!/ Your slippery native wiles will do no good' (lines 715-716, p. 257). Virgil compares the
Amazon ripping the Ligurian to a goshawk with 'curved talons' (lines 721-723).
It is Rowe's choice of quotes of what the Ovidian and Virgilian characters say rather than the graphic descriptions of the stepson's physical agony and the Amazon's ferocity that points at his manner of harnessing spectacle to words, of translating the graphic into theme. At the same time, the quotes introduce into the world of the play the elements so elaborated by the two poets, the suffering of the stepson, and, as it were unrelated to it, Amazonian fierceness. As the Virgilian Amazon adds reasoning to her prowess, the two poles of suffering passion (on the side of Hercules) and cool reason (presented by the admonition delivered by the Amazon to her victims) form the two symbolic axes of the play's intrigue.116
While the motto is a telling one concerning the play's intrigue and character representation, Rowe's professed error has something to do with the beauties of the
116 In the prologue Rowe, pointing to the distractions serious tragedy of his time had to contend with, says tragedy should ransack 'all the ancients store' 'And famous Greek and Latin beauties shew' (unpaginated). Interestingly, these beauties are invoked by the motto and in the play by a combination of Juno and Camilla in the figure of Artemisa, who centers her political ambition on her son Artaban, but is also a loving mother to him, in addition to being a cruel one to her stepson Artaxerxes. This central figure to a large extent determines the polarized categorization of the other characters as wise/strong/active/cunning/brutal on one side and on the other, passionate- pathetic/weak/passive/virtuous/heroic. While not altogether fitting the heroic model, this polarization is toppled at least in some of its elements. Such poles that, however, do not attempt to cancel one another present themselves in Rowe's dedication in relation to his own work, his view of it as a trifle, a piece of poetry on the one hand, and his intentions for it as a generic venture on the other.
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Latin language, suggested by his style. Caesar Borgia marked for us the relation between an intensified passion and figures of speech that structurally slash passion to its body-like particles, the hero/subject of passions' only way to enact his jouissance, given the inefficacy of the metonymic chain of desire where surplus libido reigns supreme. The Ambitious Step-Mother forms the same relation but in a different manner. Passions are called into question and subjected to negotiation by the intriguer's arguments in favor of clear thinking. However, the debate in favor of reason is belied by the intriguer's surrender to passion in the final act. Further still, profession of reason is belied by the elocutionary support of this same debate. The play's elocutionary substratum presents a syntax of loose government where rhetorical forms of surplusage do not highlight the logic of the intriguer's claims but produce a texture of particles, of organs, that embody the intriguer's subject of passions-like 'dying'.
The play's intriguer is the first minister of state Mirza, who weaves his scheme in the interest of Artemisa, wife of the dying King of Persia, and her son by the king,
Artaban, against Artaxerxes, the king's elder son by a former queen, whose eldership claims him the lawful heir to the throne. Mirza declares from the start, relating specifically to the tempestuous Memnon, the king's former general, now disgraced, and a friend to Artaxerxes, that those governed by their temper 'tho bold', want 'that faculty of thinking' that should direct their anger. For Mirza, heroes are 'valiant fools …made by Nature for the wise to work with;/ They are their tools, and 'tis the sport of statesmen,/ When heroes knock their knotty heads together/ And fall by one another'.
While such passionate faithfulness to the lawful heir and his cause seems to hold
Artaxerxes and Memnon 'secur'd [from reach of open force], by being join'd', the same lack of the faculty of thinking in Memnon gives the occasion for the first step of a plot, conceived by Mirza. Though skeptical of its success he considers it 'a master-piece/
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Worthy a thinking head, to sow division/ And seeds of jealousy, to loose those bonds/
Which knit and hold them up' (I. pp. 13, 16, no line numbers).
At the level of signifiers Mirza's words highlight the play on 'knitting', (uniting or holding together) and the 'knotty' (awkward, complicated) heads of heroes given to passion. The queen adds another inflection to this word-play: 'every day of our continu'd lives/ Be witness of my gratitude, to draw/ The knot, which holds our common interest, closer', she says to Mirza (I. p. 16) (my emphasis). Thematically, this
'knot' that knits the interest of Mirza with the queen's is liable to become 'knotty', to turn into a 'No' (III. p. 46) on the level of plot. Mirza is indeed devoted to a contemplative perception of intrigue as the work of an active forming brain, so much so that his scheme is slow to emerge. Only at the end of the second act does it come to his mind: 'A lucky thought/ Is in my mind at once completely form'd,/ Like Grecian
Pallas in the head of Jove'. The grand idea is nevertheless simple: to seize Artaxerxes and Memnon inside the temple when 'in obedience to the holy rites' of the sun they 'at the altars bow unarm'd' (II. p. 32). The plot is not only 'an act of outrageous profanation', as Magas perceives, but also defies the heroic code of gaining a glorious prize such as an empire by 'daring greatly', as Artaban contends (II. p. 33, IV. p. 52).
Privileged as a product of the mind, the plot mocks religious piety and heroic virtue, both considered by Mirza as follies, yet is base, precipitating further baseness that involves the intriguer in the execution of his plan. Mirza secretly determines to rape Memnon's daughter Amestris as a way of assisting his vengeance on Memnon for the murder of his brother (III. p. 50). Intrigue thus begins as an object of contemplation whose importance lies in its reflective potential, what renders intrigue worthy of active thinking, but degenerates into 'politic lewdness', still perceived within the province of
'the faculty of thinking', and culminates in enervated sexuality and 'being caught so
294 poorly' in one's folly, a 'shame of wisdom' (III. p. 50, V. pp. 72-73). But it is not just a weakened plot that averts Mirza's disdain for 'valiant fools' or passionate heroes.
Mirza's boasted wisdom is from the very beginning far from being clear of passions, plagued as he is with single-minded vengefulness aimed at Memnon for murdering his brother: 'whilst I am, that [revenge] ever will remain,/ And in my latest spirits still survive', he declares to his accomplice, the priest Magas (I. p. 14). And while belittling love as 'the passion of a boy/ That spends his time in laziness and sonnets', he finally falls prey to his uncontrolled attraction to the young Amestris, Memnon's daughter and
Artaxerxes' beloved, whose 'fatal beauty' and its 'malignant influence' on his ambition for his own daughter he mentions in the first act (I. pp. 10-11, III. pp. 46, 49-50).
In contrast to Mirza's praised faculty of thinking, it is the queen's Amazonian spirit that is highlighted yet brought to a similar downfall. Amazonian spirit is suggested by the queen's defiance of a debased form of bondage: 'Could fate e'er mean/
Me for a wife, a slave, to Tiribasus! [her former husband] …Therefore in just assertion of myself,/ I shook him off, and pass'd those narrow limits,/ Which laws contrive in vain for souls born great./ There is not, must not be, a bond for greatness!' (I. p. 15).
The same boldness echoes in pastiche reproductions of the Virgilian Amazon's reproach to her victims. One such case is when the queen, referring to Artaxerxes and his friend Memnon, says: 'but let them rail,/ A woman's vengeance waits them' (II. p.
27). A more perceptible pastiche appears where the queen reproaches her own son:
'Know, fool, that vaunt'st thyself upon thy manhood,/ The greatest he thy rougher kind e'er had,/ Must have confess'd woman's superior wit,/ And own'd our sex's just prerogative' (IV. p. 55). All Amazonian reverberations, though maintained to the end, are nevertheless turned to naught at the level of plot by the son for whom the queen's
'thoughtful soul' and ambition labor.
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In theme and plot the play thus renders questionable the dichotomy of passions and laboring thought. Such dichotomy is made doubtful not just by the fact that both
Mirza and the queen are governed by a single passion (vengeance in the former, ambition in the latter) at the same time that they make a claim for the faculty of thinking, but by the abortive end of thinking or passion in their own fate. The rational support of the intrigue hence proves insufficient and with it the passions as such lose their hold as the mainstay of the tragedy, specifically as relics of the heroic drama.
Against the persistent subordination of uncontrolled passion to its categorical repulsion as an 'unthinking' there is staged the 'sad story of a maid's despair', in the figures of
Mirza's daughter, Cleone, who despairs in her unrequited love for Ataxerxes, and in
Amestris, Memnon's daughter, whose heart presages dangers upon entering her nuptials with Artaxerxes. By content and sense much better designed to 'try the soft accesses' of the 'pitying fair' among the audience, these representations of pathos seem to further undermine the function of the passions as pointing towards any psychic causality of the intrigue, precisely because they are constitutive of a 'sad story'. Pathos then seems to veil the object cause of intrigue by its very amenability to narrative construction.
However, in contrast to the lame support of the claim for thought at the level of plot and theme, the real of passions emerges through the play's particularities of style.
These particularities that have rendered Rowe's style problematic to the critical sensibility of some of his own age, as suggested by a close perusal of the stylistics of his Tamerlane in the anonymous A Comparison between the Two Stages, indicate to my mind that passions and pathos as treated in The Ambitious Step-Mother are not two vying ways of dealing with affectivity. Elements of style reduce both to the same objectal core, this way reestablishing the logic of intrigue in the drive.
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The kind of inner logic I derive here from the play's action renders relevant
Rothstein's theory of Restoration tragedy as essentially affective rather than fabulist.
This means an emotional serial drama, a drama concerned with the emotional situation rather than the total order of the play. Rothstein further contends that serial construction geared for the arrangement of moving circumstances also 'bludgeoned the sense of providential whole [typical of fabulist construction] out of recognition' (7-8,
118). Canfield, in his (probably one of the few modern ones) close analysis of The
Ambitious Step-Mother, stresses his profound disagreement with Rothstein, claiming that Rothstein illogically shifts ground between formal and affective concerns, and that sensationalism must not necessarily destroy overall design (Nicholas Rowe and
Christian Tragedy, 18).
However, Rowe himself adds a difficulty by the claim he makes in his dedication that he has strictly observed 'poetical justice' by punishing the two principal contrivers of evil, while purposely showing the innocent characters 'unfortunate' (5).
This, Gildon says in 1715, moves horror rather than fear and pity and 'every where endeavors to abolish the notion of particular Providence and so is Impious' (Remarks on Mr. Rowe's Tragedy, 34). Canfield nevertheless attempts to show that the play does image a providential universe in its design, precisely by means of the suffering of the innocent, and that this way the play reconciles affective concerns with formal design
(30, 40). I would like to suggest with Rothstein, that formal design apart, there is indeed a sense of an almost studied over-blowing of intrigue and the intriguer ('a typical Satan-Machiavel' according to Canfield, 22) to skeletal proportions, while the pathetic scene is developed as subject matter in its own right, even if in connection with the intrigue, through character, in Cleone and Amestris, and such motifs as grief and soft complaining, alongside self sacrifice and courage which they represent. For
297 my purposes, the dichotomies staged by the play between thinking and passions and pathos, suggest another route for a conception of its design. This design manifests the
"pathos about the cut": what is lost to the subject incarnated in the body. This is the cut forced upon the hero of affective tragedy by the symbolic meagerness this tragedy effects through its plot (Lacan SX, 8.5.63, p. 2, Miller, "Introduction to Reading
Lacan's Seminar on Anxiety", II, 59).
The particularities of style as manifesting the play's design emerge in the extended description with which the play opens. This is a description of the dying king and his lodging, a hypotyposis or picturesque description of a sort. While made to convey Magas's attested sense of universal horror at the scene, the description also creates an affective preparation for the expositional statement of facts that follows it, much in line with Quintilian's mention of hypotyposis in relation to the exordium
(IV.ii.4, i.5, Vol. II, pp. 51, 9).
Though clearly poetic, the play's opening hypotyposis seems to be syntactically unmarked for any of the more problematic constructions that hamper one's reading later on, yet it posits some of the play's stylistic dominants. First among these is the use, and occasionally ambiguous positioning, of participial supplements or predicatives (adjectival constructions implying the verb to be, Jespersen, Modern
English, pt. 2, 1.51, p. 8, or predicate adjectives): 'while those that waited/ In solemn sorrow, mixed with wild amazement,/ Observ'd a dreadful silence' (I. p. 9), 'The balls of sight, dim and deprived of motion,/ Sparkled no more' (I. p. 10, my emphasis).
In the first case, the second participle behaves like a loosely belonging, unattached clause (Jespersen, Modern., Part V, 22.5.10, p. 425), without there being an actual ambiguity as to the relation of 'mixed' to the core it belongs to ('sorrow'). The peculiarity arises from the separated positioning of the predicative, which stresses its
298 supplemental function as doubly subordinating 'sorrow' within 'those that waited'. The second case presents a predicative that is not appositive, since it is not specifying, and although placed in the middle of the sentence could just as well be extrapositioned.
Again the peculiarity results from the positioning of the clause as though an added, separate utterance (Jespersen, Modern., Part III, 17.1.2, p. 357, Huddleston, 1359).
The play's second stylistic dominant tallies with the supplemental character of the descriptive insertions, although not in the sense of these insertions' positioning. It is a kind of lexical redundancy that foreshadows later occurrences of pleonasms of pronouns: 'The balls of sight, dim…sparkled no more' (I. p. 10). There is finally a transposition of word order: 'tho' sure it must be happier far to quit a wretched being'
(I. p. 9, my emphasis).
The dominants of Rowe's style in The Ambitious Step-Mother are mostly syntactic. They include appended clauses which show lack of integration into the syntactic structure (Huddleston, 1350). Such are the absolute and participle constructions as well as the predicatives. Other dominants are the figures of epithet, pleonasm and hyperbaton. As we shall see, these figures add to the peculiar stylistic texture of the play, which is marked by loose government (of clauses) on the one hand and a tight packaging of added information on the other. It is the predominance of loose government that connects Rowe's style to Latin case-structures. And these syntactic installations of Latin also mark the play's style as retardatory and objectal, materially exposing the organs of language as dismembered or tortured.117
117 Regarding the history of the absolute participle, Jespersen says it was introduced into the English language at an early period in imitation of the Latin construction, but was rare or in limited use. 'But after 1660, when English prose style developed a new phase, which was saturated with classical elements, the construction rapidly gained ground and was finally naturalized in the language' (Modern, Part V, 6.1.2, pp. 45-46).
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In the discussion of Rowe's plays in A Comparison between the Two Stages, the critic proposes to examine the truth concerning this author's reputed style to 'try if he be so infallible as we believe him'. Turning to Rowe's dedication of Tamerlane the critic expresses his dissatisfaction with the sentence 'I can hardly run back to his having sav'd his own country'. That 'Participle having', the critic says, 'makes the sentence rough and ungrammatical; it either shews the author very lazy or very unknowing; when with as little trouble he might have said the same thing another way-
-- as, 'I can hardly run back to the safety he gave his own Country' --- that Substantive had made it smooth and strenuous' (185-186). I quote here at length to indicate that a critical essay of Rowe's own time shows more alertness to his syntax than any modern reader of his plays has, and that it calls forth the relation of his style to Latin since the critic goes on to prove that the sentence is ungrammatical by its untranslatability to
Latin: a literal translation of an English phrase into Latin, he claims, is the best way to fix our 'English Concords, Moods and Tenses: Allowing this --- Pray translate that sentence, and try how it will run'. To this one of the characters in the dialogue answers that while not translating elegantly into Latin, such use 'has always been allow'd' (186-
187). When the critic further relates to Rowe's pleonasms as again not given to rendering in Latin, his interlocutor replies they are 'Anglicisms, a common way of speaking', to which the critic retorts with 'A very improper manner it is' (187-188). As the participants indicate, Rowe does not introduce unknown syntactic structures, yet it might be that what renders Rowe's stylistics an Anglicism is precisely the relation it bears to Latin. This does not mean translatability into Latin but the use of structures in a manner that makes them sensed as blemishes, as marring the smoothness of the syntax.
311
If the predominance of Latinized structuring in Rowe's English marks his contribution to the transformation of dramatic poetry (which Rowe claims his play to be) into novelistic prose, it still is essential for the poetic representation of passions in tragedy. What is significant about the loosely connected, detached predicatives and participles is that they are not necessarily absolute in the strict grammatical sense of this structure, but that they behave as though they were. The following instances from the play will indicate the range of loosely connected dependents, from the strictly absolute structures to the participle and participle-like dependents, and the extraposed predicatives.
Absolute constructions in the play are seen in such instances as Mirza's 'Twas on a day of public festival,/ When beauteous Artemisa stood to view…/The King and court returning from the temple'(I. p. 12), and Magas's 'Could you afford him such a bribe as that,/ A brother's blood yet unaton'd?' (I. p. 14). This one is an absolute construction combined with a hysteron proteron, 'when that is last said, that was first done', as Peacham defines it.118 Noteworthy instances of the absolute constructions are those using 'like': Mirza says, 'After some faint resistance, like a bride/ That strives awhile, tho' eager for the bliss,/ The furious King enjoy'd her' (I. p. 12). The looseness of 'like a bride' results from 'The furious King' (rather than 'she was enjoyed by the king'), so that 'the king' hangs ambiguously between enjoying 'like a bride' and
'enjoying her'. Two other instances are Mirza's 'The thoughts of princes dwell in sacred privacy…/And like a temple's innermost recesses,/ None enter to behold the hallow'd
118 One of Peacham's examples of the hysteron proteron is in effect an absolute construction: 'the castle was made very high, the foundation layd ful deepe' (unpaginated). Other instances of absolute constructions include: 'Then, Memnon, (at an hour when few are villains,/ The sprightly juice infusing gentler thoughts,…)/ Stole on Cleander…' (II. p. 29 – again, a hysteron proteron), 'renouncing all the gods,/ Thyself of them renounced'; 'Defenseless in myself, you were my refuge' (III. p 48), 'Here on the marble pavement will we sit, Thy head upon my breast' (III. p. 49), 'Amidst the steely squadrons will I seek/ This haughty brother, by his friends surrounded' (IV. p. 53, hysteron, and ambiguous), 'Thus groveling, prostrate upon the earth,/ Let me conjure you…'(V. p. 71).
311 mysteries' (I. p. 15), and Artaban's 'I dare like thee/ All that is great and glorious. Like thine,/ Immortal thirst of empire fires my soul' (II. p. 31). In all three cases the primary term in the comparison is not expressed by the subject of the clause, and in that sense the 'like' clauses are dangling.119
Participle constructions are amply used in the play. They are often ambiguous, either structurally or semantically. Memnon says to Artaxerxes, 'In you they see him, such as oft they did/ Returning from his wars' (I. p. 17), referring to the people (they) and the dying king (him), yet on account of the 'they', 'returning' is ambiguously absolute ('they returning'). Without contextual reference to Amestris's fears,
Artaxerxes's ensuring words to her suggest ambiguity: 'And when I press thee trembling to my bosom' (III. p. 40), for 'trembling' could refer to either 'I' or 'thee'. In this instance as well as in the two following ones, we have a gerund participial as a depictive adjunct, giving descriptive information (Huddleston, 1265): Memnon says,
'But I am roughly bred, in words unknowing', and Artaxerxes answers with promised glory, 'Athens and Sparta wond'ring, shall behold us…' (III. p. 42).120
Noticeably, the participial phrases, whether or not loosely attached, whether complements or supplements, append details; they expand the syntactic descriptive or informative frame. This way participial constructions function as retardatory elements.
However, participial constructions are important for what they by definition do not do.
119 In Huddleston and Pullum we read: 'Such examples are widely condemned in style manuals, and would generally be avoided in careful writing. This can be done by reformulating the clause so that the primary term is expressed by the subject or by using a construction with as+ Preposition Phrase' (1156) (for example, as with a temple's innermost recesses, the thoughts of princes dwell in secret privacy). 120 Other instances of participle constructions include: 'Even he…/ Lamenting that there had been cause of enmity,/…Will often wish fate had ordain'd you friends' (II. p. 23) 'our Father, press'd by age,…/ Languishes' (II. p. 32), 'And when o'er labour'd with pleasing toil,/ Strech'd on the verdant soil had slept together' (III. p. 37), 'Assisted by the friendly veil of night,/ We may conduct him…/ There undistinguished…he may retire' (IV. p. 58), 'Why rather was I not a peasant slave,/ Bred from my birth a drudge to your creation' (IV. p. 59), 'Careless of an offended father's rage,/ For you alone concern'd, she charged me guide you' (IV. p. 64), 'their differing clamors,/ Together join'd, compose one deafening sound' (V. p. 67), 'Death like a brutal victor,/ Already enter'd, with rude haste defaces/ The lovely frame he'as master'd' (V. p. 78), 'And now, assisted by the furious rabble,/ On every side they charge…' (V. p. 79).
312
Participles span two parts of speech: they are verbs which function like adjectives. But as Gildon and Brightland explain, the essential reason why a participle is not a verb is that it does not signify 'Affirmation', which is properly 'the Action of the Mind, which affirms the Attribute of the Subject'. Verbs are such words that mark and denote
Affirmation, 'which is the principal manner of our Thoughts', indicating that the discourse used if 'of a Man, who not only conceives Things, but Judges, and affirms something of them'. Participles then require, as the Port Royal Grammar explains, the addition of a verb to 'restore that which has been taken away, by turning the verb into the participle' (Grammar 1711, 93, 95). The Port Royal explanation aptly articulates what is at stake in participial formations: the participle is a defective verb inasmuch as it cannot form a proposition. Rather, it marks something 'taken away', and furthermore, it indicates the suspension of judgment.121 And yet, it is their defectiveness that makes participial phrases 'absolute' and allows them to hang loosely, at the same time that they tighten the packaging of information and description in the text. And even more so they allow for a certain lingering on syntactic construction before committing oneself to the limits of affirmation.
Predicatives constitute another form of loosely attached elements that tighten amplitude. Instances of these abound in the play, and only choice ones will be presented here: Mirza says, 'The thought that labours in forming brain,/ Yet crude and immature, demands more time' (I. p. 10), then about Memnon and Artaxerxes,
121 The fact that the Gildon-Brightland grammar relies on the Port-Royal Grammaire generale et raissonee (1660) is not as inconsistent as it may seem in a chapter like this one, that gives attention to Ciceronian, Ramist and Neo-Ciceronian rhetoricians, if we follow Howell's classification of the groups representing the history of logic and rhetoric in England up to 1700. The Port Royalists' theory of logic precisely questions and rejects the scholastic focus on argumentation and presentation, rather than on thinking and scientific inquiry (351, 359). However, Rowe's play presents relatively few figures of speech, and displays the aesthetic effect of syntax. This is the play's contribution to the notion of art and artificiality, which while not in the spirit of the Port Royal grammar, is consistent with the course taken by the tragedy of passions: a course towards countering the signifier by means of the object cause of the drive. While the different historical phases of logic and rhetoric are significant, it is also their manner of illuminating the points presented here that is important, and this is what the grammar of the period provides.
313
'Memnon was banish'd, and the prince, disgrac'd, went into exile with him' and about
Artimesa, 'I have been amaz'd/ To see her more than manly strength of soul,/ Cautious in good success, in bad unshaken' (I. p. 11).122 Certain instances of predicatives are of special interest for other reasons, in addition to their extraposition. The first concerns the use of 'impatient', both in extrapostion as in most cases of predicatives in the play, and also in different meaning: Artemisa asks Artaxerxes: 'Dost thou not come,/
Impatient of delay, to hasten fate?' ('impatient' in the sense of 'intolerant'), while
Artaban challenges Artaxerxes with ''My soul, which of superior power impatient,/
Disdains thy eldership' ('impatient' in the sense of 'intolerant' but could also stand as
'desirous'). In this last case the adjective functions as a verb, or at least this is the impression it gives – II, pp. 30-31, respectively). Other instances are notable because they are also transpositions: Artemisa dissuades her son Artaban from fighting
Artaxerxes, arguing that 'Occasions great and glorious will remain/ Worthy thy arms and courage' (II. p. 27), Artaxerxes reacts to Artaban's challenge with 'Oh, energy divine of great ambition/ That can inform the souls of beardless boys' (II. p. 31) and
Artaban rejecting Cleone's idea to become Diana's virgin votary, says 'To every power divine I will appeal' (III. p. 39). Quality put after the name is most commonly in a
122 Other instances of predicatives in the text are: 'Ev'n Memnon's temper seems to give th' occasion;/ Of wrong impatient, headlong to revenge' (I. p. 13), 'If Artemisa had not by her charms…/ wrought the King,/ Old, obvious to her arts, decay'd in greatness' (I. p. 18), 'And though I went not from Persepolis/ Companion of your exile'(II. p. 22 – a quasi-predicative combined with a verb of motion, Jespersen, Part III, 17.2.2, p. 358), 'A prince the joy and honour of mankind,/ As much superior to the rest of kings (II. p. 25), (in this case we have substantives in addition to an adjective, however it seems to be a predicative in which the relative pronoun has been omitted – Jespersen, Part III, 18.9, p. 403, and compare: 'Some fury more than mortal seiz'd the crowd', V. p. 81), 'Upon a shady bank repos'd,/ Philanthe, amorous, young, and fair,/ Sighing' (III. p. 34; a song in the play. There are here predicatives and a participle), 'Love shall survive, immortal as our beings' (III. p. 41), 'See where the master-villain stands! Unmov'd/ And harden'd in impiety' (III. p. 47), 'my own innate virtue/ Arms me against your rage, unjust and impotent' (IV. p. 56), 'Shall my old soldier's outside, rough and hardy,…/ Be cag'd for public scorn!' (IV. p. 59), 'leave me to myself,/ Nor by thy presence, hideous to my soul,…/strive to add/ To my full woes' (V. p. 69), 'My jaded age and weak enervate limbs,/ Falter and shrink, unequal to their office' (V. p. 72).
314 poetic diction, Gildon and Brightland say (145).123 Two last instances will take us to a further point that concerns the use and positioning of predicatives: Mirza says of his daughter Cleone, 'A melancholy girl;/ Such in her infancy her temper was,/ Soft, even beyond her sex's tenderness;/ By nature pitiful, and apt to grieve' (I. p. 16), and Cleone pleads with Artaban, 'Pity the temper of the wretched maid,/ By nature sad, and born the child of sorrow' (III. p. 38).
Predicatives in the play as a rule stand as supplements, and hence form discrete units, even if not always separated by commas. These structures gain significance if further examined through Latin minded grammar books, such as the R. R., An English
Grammar 1641. Thus 'energy divine of great ambition', and 'maid, by nature sad, and born the child of sorrow', suit the construction of adjectives in the ablative case, in relation to the form of things. The rule for such a construction is 'the form or manner of a thing is put after Nouns'. The example provided by the book is translated from Latin:
'a face pale after a wonderful manner' (119). The same instances from the play would also suit the construction of a participle in the ablative case, specifically relating to being born or begotten. The English translation of the example in Latin is 'a good daughter, borne of good parents' (R. R., p. 143).124 Something of the nature of the ablative case seems to dominate the stylistics of the play, specifically in terms of a syntax that makes ample use of supplemental clauses and extraposition of predicatives.
123 The rule is that when there are more qualities than one come together, or one quality with its depending words, it generally comes after the name (Brightland and Gildon, 89-90). Rowe's use of 'divine' does not exactly comply with the rule and especially in the first case the adjective-adjunct (divine) ambiguously becomes a phrase ('energy divine of') as the adjective is made transitive (energy fond of, for example) or licenses a complement headed by a preposition (energy desirous of, for example) (Huddleston, 527, 543). A simple exclamation thus introduces an extra phrase. 124 The Latin of the adjective construction in the Ablative case is in fact much more treacherous for English translation: Facies miris modis pallida (119). The participle construction translates 'prognata', which is supposed to mean 'begotten' as 'born': Bona bonis prognata parentibus (143). In contrast to the critic in A Comparison between the Two Stages, I contend that the point in looking at these examples is to see what translation they lend themselves into in English. It is not my claim that these particular formations in English necessarily sprang from the Latin, but the fact is that such models were easier to locate in English Latinized grammar books.
315
The definition of the ablative case is of consequence as well: 'The ablative case is that by which we signify any thing to be taken from any body' (R. R., p. 9). And in Gildon and Brightland: 'Besides the five Cases… the Latins have a sixth, which was not invented to express alone any particular Relation, but to be joined with some of the particles, call'd Prepositions… from which it is inseparable in Sense' (87).
Similarly, the absolute construction of sentence is in the ablative case absolute:
'The construction of the cases has hitherto been shewed to depend upon and to be governed of some word or other; but there is a case, which the Latin Grammarians call'd the Ablative (in Greek, the Genitive) Absolute, because, as they pretend, it stands by itself without being governed by anything', we read in Maittaire's English Grammar
1712, p. 155. According to the R. R. Grammar, the case called Absolute has 'no settled place in the sentence, which it affects in general' (189), an affecting that is understood without there being a grammatical link with the sentence, or a word whereof it may be governed (the example there, translated from Latin is: 'The king coming, the enemies fled', 132). This non-government of the ablative absolute, and the 'of', 'from', 'with', 'by' of the ablative case that signify its relation to any thing or any body through a preposition, a slim yet indispensable cord, define for us the syntactic body of the play's knotty points.
Participial, predicative and absolute constructions, it should be remembered, are syntactic structures that appear in the stylistics of other playwrights, however, as the following comparison shows, not to the effect of becoming stylistic dominants. The indebtedness of The Ambitious Step-Mother to other plays in terms of characterization and style has been pointed out by Dammers and Sutherland. Dammers has indicated the influence of Dryden's Aureng-Zebe on the characterization of women ("The Female
Experience", 28-29) and Sutherland suggests the influence of Beaumont and Fletcher
316 on style (22). It may be interesting to look at some differences in the stylistics of Rowe compared to Dryden's and Beaumont and Fletcher's especially in the use of predicative and participial constructions. Note then Dryden's use of these constructions in Aureng-
Zebe, his last rhymed heroic tragedy, compared to Rowe's. Dryden's Aureng-Zebe says:
With all th' Assurance Innocence can bring, Fearless without, because secure within, Arm'd with my Courage, unconcern'd I see This Pomp; a Shame to you, a Pride to me. (III.i., Five Heroic Plays, ed. Bonamy Dobree, p. 367).
Rowe's Artaxerxes says:
Curs'd be the means by which these ills arose, Fatal alike to me as to my country; Which my great soul, unable to revenge, Has yet with indignation only seen, Cut off, by arts of coward priests and statesmen, (Whom I disdain'd with servile smiles to court,) From the great right which God and Nature gave, My birthright to the throne.' (I. p. 17)
As a close analysis of these quotes might be too long, suffice it to point out the number of subjective cores and their distance from their related phrases. In the quote from Dryden, there are two such cores: 'Innocence', 'I', but there is clear subordination of the first clause, headed by 'Innocence' to the one headed by 'I' and both 'I' and the objective 'Pomp' are packed very closely with their related predicatives and participial phrases; in the case of the 'I', they are in front position, in the case of the 'Pomp', in post position, very much in the logic of the main clause: I see this pomp. In the quote from Rowe there are four subjective cores: 'ills', 'soul', 'I' and 'God and Nature'. To 'ills' there is related one predicative and is itself the core of a relative clause whose
317 antecedent is the object 'means'. 'Ills' then becomes the objective antecedent of a relative clause whose core is 'soul', to which there are additionally attached one predicative and one participial phrase ('cut off'), which is already distant from its core and is further divorced from its objective complement with the introduction of another subjective core, 'I'. The object of 'cut off' finally becomes the antecedent of another relative clause whose core is 'God and Nature'. This concatenation of relative clauses through bi-functional substantive nodes and the supplementation of their subjective cores with predicatives and participial phrases impede subordination and a determination of one main clause.
A similar case is suggested in a comparison with Beaumont and Fletcher's
Philaster. Beaumont and Fletcher's Bellario says:
My father oft would speake Your worth and vertue, and as I did grow More and more apprehensive, I did thirst To see the man so rais'd: but yet all this Was but a Mayden longing to be lost As soone as found, till sitting in my Window Printing my thoughts in Lawne, I saw a God I thought, but it was you, enter our gates. (V.v.152-159, The Dramatic Works of
Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers, Vol. I). Compare with Rowe's
Mirza's
A melancholy girl; Such in her infancy her temper was, Soft, even beyond her sex's tenderness; By nature pitiful, and apt to grieve For the mishaps of others, and so make The sorrows of the wretched world her own: (I. p. 16). Even if Bellario refers to herself and additionally to her father and Philaster, her narrative is much more
318 tightly packed than Mirza's description of his daughter, since the core in his description is ambiguous and could be either 'girl' or 'temper' and 'by nature pitiful', a predicative added upon another predicative, 'soft', is distant and apparently detached from the core.
What this comparison demonstrates is that the same structures can be embedded in such a way as to be unobtrusive, and hence less suitable for indications of the poet's stylistic cores or holes of jouissance, as in these specific plays of Dryden and
Beaumont and Fletcher, whereas in Rowe's play they are disrupted and disruptive enough to merit their status as such cores.
Another kind of loose yet condensed structuring is found in the use of epithet and pleonasm. The epithet, Quintilian says, is a trope employed only to adorn and enhance style 'without any reference to the meaning'. It is an ornament that in oratory is
'redundant unless it has some point' (VIII.vi.40, Vol. III, pp.323-325). Instances of epithet in the play suggest the curious connection between redundancy and loosely welded syntax: Artemisa says in reference to Cleone's sadness: 'That eating canker, grief' (I. p. 16), Artaxerxes says, 'Ambition! The desire of active souls' (I. p. 18), and of the sun, 'Our glorious Sun, the source of light and heat' (I. p. 21), Memnon rejects
Magas with 'Flattery, the meanest kind of base dissembling!' (II. p. 21).125 Quintilian points out that there are some writers who refuse to regard an epithet as a trope (trope being the 'artistic alteration of a word or phrase from its proper meaning to another' –
VIII.vi.1, Vol. III, p. 301) 'on the ground that it involves no change' (VIII.vi.43, Vol.
III, p. 325). It is noticeable that, as Puttenham sees this figure, it is not merely
125 Other instances of the use of epithets are: 'Our God, the Sun, shall sooner change his course' (II. p. 23), 'Oh! Name not love, the worst of all misfortunes' (III. P. 38), 'Hail, Mithras, mighty deity!', 'Hail, Orosmades, power divine!', 'O thou bright Sun,/ That roll'st above, the object of our worship!' (III. pp. 44, 45, 47), 'The spoiler, Grief,/ Defaces every feature' (III. p. 48), 'The Queen your mother,…' (IV. p. 55), 'a husband,/ The proudest title of that tyrant man' (IV. p. 56), 'How foolish is the coward's fear of death!/ Of death, the greatest---- surest way for peace' (V. p. 78), 'Dost thou, the creature of my forming hand?' (V. p. 80).
319 auricular, but serves also to alter and enforce sense' (152), as seems to be the case in the play. However, the epithet, or appositum, as Quintilian translates it, is according to the R. R. English Grammar a figure of construction (apposition) that also serves for
'the restraining of a generality', in addition to the attribution of some property (152). In the play, appositive constructions form enclaves of sententious remarks which are attributive rather than strictly argumentative, whose function in addition is restrictive; they are made to restrain, specifically, while amplifying.
Figures consisting in change, addition, omission, and the order of words,
Quintilian says, 'derive something of their charm from their very resemblance to blemishes' (IX.iii.27, Vol. III, p. 461). Pleonasm according to Quintilian would be the
'doubling and repetition of words and all forms of addition' (IX.iii.47, Vol. III, p. 473).
More perceptibly than any other figure in the play's stylistics, pleonasm has the character of a 'blemish' in the use of pronouns. Pleonasmus adds, which means according to Mattaire that the pronoun is frequently repeated, or 'the Pronoun is emphatically added to the Noun, whose room it does supply' (210). In the play we find more of the latter case: Mirza says, 'Thou know'st the faith of courtiers, and their oaths,/ Like those of lovers, the Gods laugh at 'em' (I. p. 14). Artemisa the queen says to Mirza, 'My hopes of greatness, do thou guide 'em all' (II. p. 26), Cleanthes says to
Artaban, 'The Queen, your mother, Sir, she will expect…'(in combination with apposition, IV. p. 51), Mirza says to Amestris, 'Nor shall one she of all thy tow'ring sex/ Out-rival thee (thou lovely fair) in power' (V. p. 69, my emphasis).126 There are also similar cases with a copula supporting a pronoun so as to replace it, such as 'A
126 Other instances of pronominal pleonasms, though not problematic, will be: 'I took him at his word, and (with my sowrd/ Drawn…)/ I kill'd him while it lasted' (II. p. 29), 'But more I fear the superstitious vulgar,/ Who, tho' unknowing what religion means,/ Yet nothing moves them more than jealous rage' (II. p. 33), 'Like a lion,/ Who long has reign'd…/ Till catche'd at length…/With foaming jaws he bites' (II. p. 34), 'And my Amestris now is my own' (III. p. 40), 'Can life…come/ From him, or ought that has an interest in him?' (IV. p. 62), 'For this mad rout…/ Indulge 'em in their fancy for religion' (an imperative here, V. p. 67).
311 prince the joy and honour of mankind…/And is the very image of the gods' (II. p. 25)
(my emphasis).
While clearly within the necessities of good syntax, the addition of pronouns and copula punctuate the text, forming junctures where the reading tackles projections that appear superfluous. And if the epithets or appositions restrict and restrain, the pleonasms protrude as non-regulated. By protrusion pleonasms share in the ablative texture of the style to suggest that sentence construction takes full advantage of what
Gildon and Brightland point to when saying that 'The construction of government… is entirely Arbitrary, and for that very Reason is different in all Languages' (142). The construction of words is generally distinguished into Concord, and Government; 'the first, by which the Words ought to agree among themselves, and the second, when one causes any Alteration in another' (141). Rowe takes advantage of forming Government or Regimen by cases in a language whose syntax is not amenable to it. A century earlier, Samuel Daniel says of Latin verse that its 'scattered limbs we are faine to look out and ioyne together, to discerne the image of what they represent unto us'. The
Latines show 'strange crueltie, in torturing and dismembering of wordes in the middest, or dioyning such as naturally should be married and march together, by setting them as farre asunder, as they can possibly stand' (14).
The arbitrariness which Daniel critiques as a form of cruelty is according to him an impediment to both representation and the versification in Latin. Verse is in danger of falling down into flat prose unless the 'kind reader, out of his own good nature, will stay them up by their measure' (14). This same linguistic cruelty may be the key to the question of the passions, to an intrigue that gets caught between an imaginary conception of thinking and by implication, what this imaginary clinging consistently posits as failing - the real of passion. Hence words which are the province
311 of the queen and Mirza, as Artaban says (II. p. 27), words which thematically, avowedly, sustain the intriguer, prove immaterial in light of their syntactic 'torturing'.
Syntactically words form an order of a different character. One last instance of this different order concerns syntactic transposition.
According to Quintilian, since a figure does not necessarily involve any alteration either of order or the strict sense of words, hyperbaton, a change of order, or the elegant transposition of words, should be considered a trope, seeing that it 'transfers a word from its own place to another' (IX.i.6-7, IX.iii.91-92, Vol. III, pp. 351, 501).
Hyperbaton is nevertheless one of the figures of construction for Peacham and
Puttenham. Quintilian himself stresses the ornamental function of disorder by comparing words to 'unhewn stones': 'we are like those who build a wall of unhewn stone: we cannot hew or polish our words in order to make them fit more compactly, and so we must take them as they are and choose suitable positions for them'
(VIII.vi.63, Vol. III, p. 337). Quintilian limits anastrophe, a reversal of order, to the transposition of two words only, hyperbaton to the 'transposition of a word to some distance from its original place' in order to secure an ornamental effect (VIII.vi.65,
Vol. III, pp.337-339). Puttenham does not refer to anastrophe at all and says some of the transpositions are proper to Greek and Latin, and are intolerable in English (140).
Walker's Rhetorical Grammar (1785) takes the beginning of Milton's Paradise
Lost as an example of anastrophe: an inversion, where the 'object of the verb, with all its concomitants, are placed before the verb' (164). Early eighteenth century grammar books such as Greenwood's (1711) and Maittaire's (1712), while quoting Milton's invocation and stressing its melodiousness which does not obscure sense, also present transpositions that are not at all poetic, including some where the natural order is not self-evident (Greenwood, 217- 219). Maittaire indicates adverbial transpositions in
312
Latin, and the tendency of the verb in Latin and Greek to 'shut up the Period, Sentence or Clause' (181-183). Maittaire asserts that in relation to the Dative, Absolute
Government, that which particularizes and determines the Action, goes before the
Respective, that for whose sake the action is thus determined, unless the Absolute
Government 'has something more belonging to it than the other, and then it rather goes last' (184). This rule, though referring to the positioning of the Dative, specifies the condition entailing transposition: having something more belonging to the Absolute
Government.
Transpositions in Rowe's play are more prominently of the adverbial type: an adverbial clause is placed prior to the verb. At the same time transpositions actually fulfill the rule of fronting the adverb as more belonging to what determines the action.
The more striking instances of this would be Mirza's 'That fatal beauty,/ With most malignant influence, has crost/ My first and great ambition' (I. pp.10-11), and about
Artimesa, 'Since that, she still has by successful arts/ Maintain'd that pow'r' (I. p. 12).
Cleone says to Artaban, 'My thoughts are all to chaste Diana vow'd' (III. p. 39), the queen invokes the gods to assert thelimit of her patience with her son Artaban, ' Tho' they [gods] with long forbearance view man's folly' (IV. p. 55), and rails at herself who disdained subjection to a husband, 'cans't thou yield t' a boy, a son, by nature/ And grateful duty to obedience bound?' (IV. p. 56).127 Two last quintessential instances of
127 Other instances of adverbial fronting are: 'And to secure their joys, a snare was laid', 'Let him with pendants hunt for praise in books' (I. p. 18),'Unto your care I leave our common charge' (I. p.19), 'Where all my vows shall for my prince be offer'd' (I. p. 20), 'but those who with incessant hate/ Pursue my life…/ May in the universal ruin burn' (II. p. 22), 'With fierce disdain they view'd the gazing crowd' (II. p. 26), 'In his own drunken brawl/ The boaster fell' (II.p.29), 'Appeal to them, to them relate thy wrongs' (II. p. 30), 'When at thy feet I kneel…/Or justly of thy cold regards complain' (III. p. 37), 'From thee their origin derive,/ Motion and Form from thee receive' (III. p. 44), 'Had we not been by just degrees to happiness/ Rais'd?' (IV. p. 59), 'Forth from my heart the crimson river flows' (V. p. 76), 'Death…/ with rude haste defaces/ The lovely frame' (V. p. 78) 'The warrior to the woman's wit gave way' (V. p. 80), '[my kingly word] But ever sacred with my foes remain./ On these foundations shall my empire stand' (V. p. 81). This last instance shows the transposition often forced by the requirements of rhyme, which is prevalent in the rhymed heroic tragedy.
313 word order transposition encapsulate the flexibility it can allow: Artaban says to
Artaxerxes, 'I will/ To death dispute with thee the throne of Cyrus' (III. p. 31),
Amestris struggling with Mirza says, 'To my last gasp, to death, I will resist' (V. p.72), and Artaban rails at his mother and woman-kind, 'Ill are your feeble souls for greatness suited' (IV. p. 55). In the first two instances the state locative 'to death', an adverbial marking goal, is a complement, a verb dependent, given front position (Huddleston,
259). In the second, we have an anastrophe that separates the adverbial 'ill' from the verb 'suited', a transposition that marks the subjunct as such (Jespersen, Philosophy,
99), or the adverbial status of the 'Ill' with respect to 'suited' (the order should be 'your feeble souls are ill-suited for greatness').
Rowe's preferable mode of granting adverbial complements a front position in a way works in the same manner that extraposition does for predicatives. While harming neither sense, nor the principle of cohesion, front positioning of adverbials, much like the extra-positioning of predicatives, suggests Quintilian's metaphor of the writer building his verse or oration with unhewn stones. Here specifically, they present the playwright's manner of compensating with syntactic arrangement that is markedly artificial for the renouncement of many flexional endings which in a more highly inflected language render a free word order possible, a renouncement which led the
English language towards a fixed word-order (Jespersen, Modern, Part 7, 2.18, p. 59).
What is important about a word order which preserves forfeited inflection is that syntax, or figures of grammatical construction, yield loose profusion in tight packaging. Tight looseness is produced through government, relying mostly on supplements. The supplements relate semantically to the anchor but are not integrated in the syntactic structure as dependent (Huddleston, 66). Tight looseness is further produced by means of pleonasms that break from government, again rendering
314 government problematic, and through transposition of complements. Pre-position of complements adds a retardatory effect to the effects of looseness and protuberance produced by supplements and pleonasms.
Thus, between retardation of cadence and looseness, or isolation, of syntactic elements, the play's syntax subverts any attempt to construct at the level of style the antithesis of passion and rationality, an antithesis that informs the play's semantic, signifying level. Syntax redirects this antithesis into a dimension whose ready collapsibility, in the anatomical sense of the word, divests such dichotomy of its imaginary content. Syntax lays bare the obverse side of content and sense, what objects and is objectionable to them, thus arousing in the reader more than just the pleasant regret Rowe strives for.
A syntax that displays the supplemental nature of sentence components bears on the object that gives body to jouissance, rather than on the object marked by a lack.
Such syntax does not indicate the point where passion is surpassed. It does not translate the passion (sexual attraction) which undermines the plotting ability of the intriguer, and the passion (ambition) which subverts the scheming motherliness of the queen, into a void that annuls passion. Rather, the play's syntax reconstructs passion in an objectal configuration. Structurally, what is implied here is the separated object, the object that anxiety detaches as surplus-jouissance, or surplus-jouir, a term in Lacan's later teaching which Miller uses for the object that emerges in Lacan's seminar on anxiety. In his introduction to the seminar, Miller says that in Freud's "Inhibitions,
Symptoms and Anxiety" and in Lacan's seminar, anxiety is active: according to Freud, anxiety of castration is the driving force of repression. Lacan translates this anxiety into the term 'object cause', implying causality. Lacanian anxiety is productive: anxiety is not directly the cause, it produces the cause. 'Anxiety is the operator which, from the
315 demand of the drive, constructs the object cause of desire'. This is a separated organ/object which condensates jouissance resistant to the homeostasis of the pleasure principle, a structure functionally distinct from that of signifier (Miller, "Introduction to Seminar X" I, 63-64, II, 24, 28).
In what follows, I trace Lacan's and Freud's conception of the anal object so as to point out the possibility of constructing such an object cause through a style that foregrounds a supplemental or loosely governed syntax. It should be noticed that loose government is not the same as the chain of cuts which prevails in the stylistic dominants of Caesar Borgia, as these chains do not subvert syntactic government. The stylistic dominants of The Duke of Guise, being forms of omission, create ambiguity of a different kind, again not in relation to syntactic government. Similarly, the objects yielded by these two plays' stylistics, the gaze and the voice, are different in their nature from the anal object, especially in relation to the organs they are connected with.
If as Lacan says in his eleventh seminar the 'object a is something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ', the object serving as a symbol of the lack of the phallus (103), then the gaze gaining dominance over the eye in Caesar Borgia and the voice incorporated in the sonority of The Duke of Guise to some extent point to the function of the object a as separable and related to the lack at the level of desire. However, the anal object, precisely as the cedable object by its very nature, and in Freud's theorization as the object subjected to symbolic vicissitudes, maintains a different relation to the organ, the anal zone. In Freud's teaching it is an object that carries the erotogenic significance of this part of the body.
While the anal object is not reducible to the anal zone as such its eroticism is the eroticism of the organ, and this is perhaps what calls for the idea of the 'excrement-
316 baby' the Wolf Man becomes, the subject re-born in the object (SE 17, 100). What I trace then is the relation of the anal object to the drive manifested in the organ, thereby indicating the cause of intrigue in Rowe's play as re-born in the style, more distinctly so than in the two other tragedies because of this play's particular syntax.
The object cause, Miller explains, is inscribed in a body of jouissance, the body of mythic totality, when subjected to anatomical separation. The primacy of the symbolic phallus is here superceded by 'the natural separations of the object imposed on the body without the intervention of an agent who is the Other' (the paternal, maternal Other). The separation of objects, of organs, is precisely not the same as castration. Castration is conceived in this seminar as of the order of the imaginary, signified phallus, which, Miller says, Lacan seeks to go beyond. In place of the signifier the organ is introduced, just as the unitary specular form of the body is left aside 'in order to take up the particularities of the organism'. This separation of objects has its paradigm in the anal object ("Introduction" I, 36-37, 46, 48, 51, II, 24-25).
In pursuing the function of the object a in his seminar on anxiety, Lacan turns to the phenomenology of obsession as tangibly illustrating the relation of the object to desire on the one hand and to anxiety on the other. The symptoms of the obsessional point to the object as cause of desire through their relation to anal desire, made perceptible as anal dismay. Dismay is where the notion of cause begins because it is a
'without cause'; it is determined by anxiety. Anal dismay is the primary form in which the object a intervenes; it is the origin of everything pointing to its effect (SX, 26.6.63, pp. 2-3).
Anal dismay is paradigmatically known to us through the case of the Wolf
Man, where dismay persists in the symptomatic disturbances of the Wolf Man's intestinal function. Freud ascribes the origin of these disturbances to the Wolf Man's
317 congenital sexual constitution, first shown in the child indicating his sexual excitement in the face of the primal scene, where he 'finally interrupted his parents' intercourse by passing a stool' ("Wolf Man", SE 17, 74, 80). The traumatic unveiling of the primal scene in the Wolf Man's wolf dream at the age of four, Lacan says, is where 'anxiety reveals that it is indeed what does not deceive at the moment that the field of the
Other… is rent and opens out onto its foundations' (SX, 26.6.63, p. 3, 29.5.63, p. 4).
The dream is a moment where the real of causality emerges in all its horror, not just in terms of the manifest content of the dream itself, but in the transposition or reversal it envelops. The child being watched by the motionless wolves constitutes the reversal of the child watching a scene of violent movement (SE 17, 34-35). The object a can thus be glimpsed at the moment of its original production. The dream is an anxiety provoking confrontation enveloping an original moment that shows forth the final reality of the Wolf Man's neurosis. The dream gives us a notion of what the obsessional seeks and is doubtful about, the authentic cause of the process of desire, a search that is suspended indefinitely, Lacan says, since this cause 'is nothing other than this final, abject and derisory object' (SX, 26.6.63, pp. 3, 10).
The anal object is the first object that enables an articulation of the function of the object a since it is the cedable object in essence. As cedable, the anal object is the most natural one (26.6.63, p. 6) that, as in the case of the Wolf Man, anxiety constructs as an object cause: an object which precedes the whole phenomenology of the obsessional. The anal object is the object that is evacuated, that is ceded, 'a portion of the body one is ready to part with', Freud says (SE 17, 81). Yet, in the way Lacan develops the notion of cause, the ceding of the object in anal dismay cannot be perceived without the relation of this separable fragment to the metonymic consistency
318 granted the object by desire at the level of the signifying chain (SX, 26.6.63, p. 6,
3.7.63, p. 7).
The relation of the object to desire is significant because, Lacan says, without the cause being part of our flesh logical formalism would be absolutely nothing for us
(8.5.63, p. 3). The torn piece of flesh as such is what gives cause its authentic substratum, its body, but only as caught up in the machine of logical formalism, as that which the machine can neither recuperate nor integrate nor reduce. It is the object as lost at different levels of the corporal experience of the cut that gives cause its bodily substance. Cause is objectal, it is body, and, produced by the corporal cut, it is essentially partial. At the same time, the function of the cause indexes the disappearance of the object. The final functioning of cause has its foundation in the hidden object qua syncopated, either in the phantasm or in anxiety. In anxiety the shadow-like character of the object is marked by a fundamental certainty. Anxiety
'precisely in so far as every object escapes it' is linked to the approach to the object
(8.5.63, p. 5).
Anal dismay nevertheless suggests that the shadow of something else encountered through anxiety concerns a qualification of the desire that constitutes the object. The anal object is cedable in respect of oblativity, the subject's readiness to part with the object as a gift to the Other. The object a is the first support of subjectivation in the relationship to the Other. It is what the subject is required by the Other to give to manifest himself as a subject. But appended to this object is the desire that opposes the function of giving; it is the desire to retain. Anal desire presents the cause as 'another desire': a desire that retains the object. Thus the object demanded by the Other is already produced, as suggested by the meconium. The retained object indicates the
319 introduction of the demand through something which is prior, 'it was already there as a product of anxiety' (3.7.63, p. 7).
As syncopated, the anal object attests to the object as cause of desire rather than the aim of desire by its relation to the phallic hole, and the privileged value this hole gives to castration anxiety. The excremental object bears a symbolic relation to the phallus: to its disappearance or aphanisis (19.6.63, pp. 8-9). Anal desire thus liberates cause with respect to the phallic hole. The relation of the anal object to the genital gap, to genital desire and the impossibility of being satisfied at its level, points to cause as coming from elsewhere, as having its foundation in the hidden, syncopated object: 'It is because there is the appeal of the genital, with its phallic hole at the center, that everything that can happen at the level of the anal comes into play because it takes on its meaning', Lacan says (SX, 26.6.63, p. 12).
Anal desire circumvents, skirts around this other desire by its double function of retaining the object and ceding the object as a gift, in oblativity. Anal desire marks the traumatic advent of the phallic gap by retaining the object; the subject is thus brought to a halt with the realization of the gap. Oblativity is similarly designed to hold back the subject on the edge of the castrating hole (26.6.63, pp. 11-12). In the case of the Wolf Man the anal object also exemplifies causality by traversing the origin of the neurosis and its final reality. The cedable object can thus maintain causality as held in abeyance, supporting the non-effective nature of desire, desire being constituted on the function of lack.
But the cedable object also directly concerns the demand of the drive. Miller, more than Lacan himself, emphasizes the involvement of the drive in the construction of the object cause as cedable, by anxiety. Anxiety constructs the object-cause of desire from the demand of the drive ("Introduction" II, 48-49). The cedable object has its
321 significance as anal dismay for anal erotism, and the specific relation of anal erotism to masochism. Anal erotism as the obverse side of symptomatic anal dismay is what
Freud brings to the fore in his analysis of the Wolf Man.
The Wolf Man's anal erotism concerns the relocation of the receptive passive function of the oral zone to the anal zone. Anal erotism, specifically experienced by the
Wolf Man in the resulting effect of an enema as 'tearing open the veil' that 'cut him off from the world', constituted the Wolf Man's identification with women by means of the bowl, the older and regressive mode of longing for sexual satisfaction obtained from his father. 'The wish to be born of his father… the wish to be sexually satisfied by him, the wish to present him with a child… all of this [was] expressed in the language of anal erotism' (SE 17, 75, 78, 99-101). The sexual aim which had put the traumatic wolf dream in the child's head was a passive, feminine attitude towards his father, an attitude which, following the dream and based on a correct sexual knowledge, succumbed to repression, drawing back into intestinal symptoms (46, 80).
Passivity, Freud indicates was congenital, already seen in the child's behavior when he was a witness of his parents' intercourse (94). Passivity or feminine attitude suggests a different conception of oblativity. Oblativity, in the Freudian sense, would be an aspect of this repressed passive attitude, where feces and baby are the means of expressing feminine satisfaction. Anal dismay in Freud's terms would not indicate a countering of oblativity. Rather oblativity indicated by evacuation of the bowels, or the tearing of the birth-veil, becomes coeval with passivity and feminine attitude in anal erotism. Freud, as it were, locates the cause for us in the drive through oblativity.
'Feces' and 'baby' joined by 'penis', nevertheless form a unity, an unconscious concept of castration. Freud indicates that fear of castration and identification with women by means of the bowel existed in the child side by side (79).
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With respect to the Wolf Man's anal erotism Freud says that during the process of the wolf dream, the child realized that women are castrated, that castration is the necessary condition of femininity. The threat of this loss induced him to repress his feminine attitude towards men, and 'he awoke from his homosexual enthusiasm in anxiety' (78, 108). Following the dream, his homosexual (feminine) attitude towards his father, understood in the genital sense, underwent repression while the earlier sadistic and predominantly masochistic sexual current persisted, virtually in the conscious (112). 'A portion of the homosexual impulse was retained by the organ concerned with it', Freud says, and from then on, 'his bowel behaved like a hysterically affected organ', that is like disturbed and impeded (74, 113). An intestinal disorder of the mode of retaining had now put itself at the service of the homosexual current, and gave expression to his feminine attitude towards his father (84). A dominant masochistic sexual current, and a repressed homosexual one, both retained in a bowel behaving like a hysterically affected organ (113-114), are part of the complicated structure of obsessional neurosis as seen in the Wolf Man.
While it seems that Freud's analysis of the case of the Wolf Man reverses the causal relation between anal retaining and giving of the object, it is possible to locate anal jouissance in one crucial moment of this history which for Freud is essentially bound with the Oedipus complex. For Freud, the Oedipus complex is one of the phylogenetically inherited schemata, a schema that in the boy's reaction to the primal scene indicated some sort of hardly definable knowledge, preparatory to an understanding. The phylogenetic inheritance, the independent existence of the schema, has reference to an instinctive knowledge concerned with the processes of sexual life.
Freud calls this knowledge an instinctive factor that is the nucleus of the unconscious,
322 a primitive kind of mental activity that when dethroned and overlaid by human reason, repression would be the return to (119-120).
In Lacan's seminar on anxiety the prescient nucleus which Freud implies is related to phylogenetically inherited schemata seems to emerge through the notion of the object as separable. The primal moment indicated by Freud concerns the object as conceived in relation to the state of the dreamer in the wolf dream. The dream is a moment of a radical, traumatic confrontation, where the subject 'cedes to the situation': a ceding marked by immobilization, an arrested state of jouissance. Lacan says: 'a jouissance going beyond any possible mapping out by the subject, here presentified in this erect form, the subject is no longer anything but erection in this grip which makes of him a phallus, makes a tree of him, horrifies him…which completely immobilizes him' (SX, 26.6.63, p. 3, 29.5.63, p. 5). It is in this mode of fixation that subjective ceding (in its double sense of the subject ceded and the subject ceding an object) reveals its libidinal anchor. In the arrested state of the dream, we see that the fixation points of the libido are always around 'one of these moments which nature presents for this eventual structure of subjective ceding' (26.6.63, p. 3).
Subjective ceding in the form of erection is the manner in which an instinctive factor that is the nucleus of the unconscious takes its shape. Libidinal fixation points at the genital phase while bearing witness to the existence of earlier, preliminary stages.
This reactivation of the primal scene in the dream where subjectivity cedes to libidinal fixation may also be seen as coeval with the point where anxiety constructs the object as the subject's 'first indication of his subjectivity, his irreducible remainder with respect to what is imposed on him in terms of a symbolic imprint' (3.7.63, p. 4).
Libidinal fixation is where subjectivity marks its cause by ceding from the Other, ceding from the symbolic and the imaginary.
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The anal object as the paradigmatic cedable object thus is modeled after subjective ceding. In the case of the Wolf Man, subjective yielding conflates the boy dreaming, ceding himself to the scene, and the object he had ceded in reaction to the primal scene. Subjective ceding, one might say, persists in the desire to retain the object. The desire of the obsessional to retain, much like his oblativity, functions as defense against the realization of the phallic hole, the hole which bespeaks castration and impossibility of satisfaction. But the obssessional desire to retain also manifests the manner in which anal erotism closes the distance between desire and jouissance.
The anal object manifests this in its very stiffness, in its cork-like function in relation to the phallic hole, which is its way of responding to this hole. The jouissance involved is outlined by anxiety. In Freud's terms, the hysterically affected bowel points at a repressed, genitally perceived homosexual attachment which persists in a masochistic sexual current, the repressed portion impinging itself on the sublimations it was cut off from (SE 17, 116-117).
Subjective ceding in fixation points of the libido, perceived through the cedable object, indicates the hole of phallic desire through the portion of the body one parts with. At the same time, the a cause of the desire to retain the object brings in the libidinal cathexes attached to the anal object: the passive, feminine and masochistic ones. The libidinal economy of the obsessional affirms the corporeality of the object by the subject ceding to libidinal fixation. In its turn, this same fixation imbued with jouissance indicates anxiety as productive of cause.
The notion of separability and causality as most clearly fashioned by the anal object reverberates in the function of style in Rowe's play. Put otherwise, the way syntax functions in the play seems applicable to the notion of the object as cedable.
Syntax particularly pertains to the anal object when conceived as cause: an object that
324 retains the erotogenic, masochistic cause of the drive as perceived by Freud. Syntax in
Rowe's play, I suggest, marks the same primal moment of subjectivity which is arrived at by Freud at the end of his analysis of the case of the Wolf Man, as though retrieved from the history as its very beginning, a prescient phylogenetic nucleus that like the separate organ/object of surplus-jouissance bears directly on the Wolf Man's life of the drive. Cause as such. The penultimate point where syntax indicates its function as cause in relation to its signifying product is where the intriguer faces his end. At the level of plot, the fall of Mirza, the queen's plotting agent, begins with his passionate attraction to Amestris. An old man facing young and blooming femininity, he finally forces himself on her and is stabbed by her. Having managed to stab her, he at the point of death says:
----Death! ---- What is death!
Tis a vast disquisition: priests and scholars
Enquire whole ages, and are yet in doubt.
My head turns round--- I cannot form one thought
That pleases me about it. -----Dying ---- must resolve me (V. p. 75).
The intriguer, who is an advocate of the reason-passion dichotomy, asks a major philosophical question for which, as he says, no answer has been found through scholarly or theological inquiry. The answer to the question is produced at the level of sentence structure: 'Dying---- must resolve me!'. It is an answer which is no answer, the answer to the question rests in the act itself. 'Dying' thus maintains the ambiguous function of a gerund which can be read as a noun or as a participle, 'dying' as the topic in question or 'dying' as what he is in the process of doing. This unresolved function of
'Dying' that is further echoed by the participial adjectives in the phrases uttered by
Artaxerxes at the sight of the dying Amestris, 'Oh! killing spectacle!' and 'Oh, thou soft
325 dying sweetness' (V. p. 76), is marked typographically. 'Dying' is isolated between long dashes, which, referring back to the isolated 'Death', stress its status as a topic for thought while presenting it as an act. Even more so, the dashes isolate 'Dying' as a moment of subjective ceding: it is a form of dying precisely as caducity, a falling off from syntactic government and semantic resolution.
At a moment of intellectual stiffness, where the intriguer as it were rises to the challenge of discovering the cause of all being, his very being is resolved by this falling, at the same time that nothing is resolved mentally. Syntactic caducity manifests this resolution of being through falling by underscoring the libidinal surplus involved in it. The dashes and the ambiguity of the structure carry something of the feebleness of the jaded statesman when confronted with young, genitally marked femininity. A feebleness is suggested by his very folly, as he says: 'Feeble Mirza!/ Canst thou give way to dotage, and become/ The jest of fools? No!' (III. p. 46). Mirza's 'jaded age and enervate limbs' falter and shrink before the woman he calls 'royal Juno' (V. p. 72), who
'rises uppermost' in all his thoughts (III. p. 46), long before his dying. If there is a manner of subjective ceding to passion at its height, then the sexual excitation implied is signaled by the ceded syntactic organ, a ceding that is imbued with jouissance where genital sexuality has failed.
The fate of the queen is different. At the level of plot and theme her Amazonian spirit lasts to the end, as suggested by her reproachful address to her son at the end, a reproach that echoes the Virgilian model: 'Ungrateful rebel! Do thy impious arms/
Pursue me for my too indulgent fondness/ And care for thee?' (V. p. 80). She does not fall, but rather stays defiant. It is her son who, like the step-son that has actually killed himself, detaches himself from her at the point when she declares 'I stand secure of all
I wish already' (V. p. 79). However, the passive underside of scheming is suggested by
326 a syntax that slows down its signifying drift by the insertion of an apposition and the fronting of the preposition and complement of a verbal idiom: 'Thy father, once the hero of his age,/ Was proud to be the subject of my sway;/ The warrior to the woman's wit gave way' (V. p. 80). This is a syntax which with respect to the queen adds the projection of a syntactical organ to the function of retardation, in the manner that the title of the play does: "The Ambitious Step-Mother". The title is a tripartite construct that isolates the prefix indicating the status of the mother in question, in the lexical definition of the prefix 'step'. 'Step' denotes 'holding nominal relationship analogous to that specified owing to death of one and remarriage of the other of the married pair'
(Oxford Dictionary). The isolated prefix, like the apposition ('once the hero of his age') and the transposed verbal idiom ('to the woman's wit gave way'), is a protrusion whose isolation also declares its retaining.
The queen's step-mothering is suggestive of the death Freud reads in the third woman (the third sister) in "The Theme of the Three Caskets" (SE 12, 296). Step- mothering is also a mode of syntactic retaining, or is projected as such. The 'step' of mothering is a retained element that at the level of plot is rejected and contained by the queen's real son Artaban, when her plan for him has been fulfilled and he becomes king: 'Well has that care been shewn;/ Have you not foully stain'd my sacred fame?/
Look on that scene of blood; the dire effects/ Of cruel female arts' (V. p. 80). A mother who lacks nothing, who masochistically sustains her defiance, is syntactically projected as a stiffness that cedes something as not hers. Ceded by the projected 'step' is the mother's cause precisely as foreign to her ambition and scheming, her own son who declares he will not 'wear again her chains', ripping himself from her (V. p. 80).
Ablative syntax retains its syntactical components at the same time that it prospectively retrenches them, displaying their detachability. Hence, the knot formed
327 by the queen and her co-intriguer fails. It collapses at the level of plot, but is not voided at the level of syntax. The phallic hole is rejected at this level in favor of objectality that takes form through syntax, giving organic and organ-like cast to passion and pathos. Passion imposes itself. Both feeble masculinity and fierce femininity fall short of resisting passion which they oppose at the level of signifiers and significations. The tragedy of passions erects by its syntax an organic configuration of its pressing affective profusion, displaying its syntactic organs in the process. The effect of this organic cast is not one of pity sensed as 'a sort of regret proceeding from good nature'
(Rowe, Dedication, 4), but one of perturbation and agitation, the effect sought and professed by the playwright of late seventeenth-century drama in the first place.
G. Conclusion
I now come to the conclusion of my discussion of the tragedies of intrigue examined in this thesis. It has been my attempt to show that the tragedy of passions points the way to the cause of intrigue as the auto-erotic cause of the drive. The object-cause as conceived by Lacan emphasizes the difficulty of logically establishing the auto-erotic cause of the drive. The tragedy of passions, as I have shown throughout this chapter, calls for a consideration of Lacan's topological perception of the object, as well as a logical conception of its function, that takes into account Freud's insistence on the masochistic aim of the drive. Intrigue in its relation to passions on the one hand, and to style on the other, can be conceptualized in light of both Freud's and Lacan's approaches to the object at the cause of the drive.
The pertinence of intrigue in tragedy to the drive and its cause refers back to the enigmatic function of the intriguer. Intrigue in tragedy, much like intrigue in comedy, stages an imaginary scene for this function in the intriguer-victim interrelationship.
328
Hence, in tragedy and comedy alike, what appears to the eye as inexplicable evil or sadism is qualified by a masochistic, passive underside to the intriguer which is bound to affect the fate of the scheme even if it succeeds. But the tragedy of passions renders this pattern more elusive by making intrigue the point of voiding passion of its pathos.
What takes place at the level of intrigue, while essentially veiling the real of the drive, still reduces pathos to its elsewhere of libidinal points of fixation, marking the inevitable, tragic doom of passion where satisfaction is concerned. If libidinal surplus is what passions sustain, then intrigue is at the service of the pleasure principle.
Intrigue affects the lizard's self mutilation to maintain the object as lost, to contain jouissance and to keep it within limits, at the same time that it stages its unlimited possibility.
It is nevertheless not the purpose of the tragedy of passions to limit jouissance.
The theorization of the tragedy of passions professes otherwise. The tragedy of passions has been seen to be of the order of the drive rather than desire, if we follow
Lacan's distinction between the two orders in his article "On Freud's Drive and the
Desire of the Analyst". Being on the side of the drive, the tragedy of passions encounters affect at the level of style with unremitting artificiality. Metonymy of desire places the object of desire in what flows underneath the signifying chain, as Lacan says in Seminar VII, beneath all the significations, thus rendering the object for ever indeterminate (321-322). By contrast, the stylistics of the tragedy of passions subverts metonymy as it displays its figures of construction, dissecting affect into its bodily organs. This stylistics opts for the objectal as ornamental tool and the effect of its artificiality.
Affectivity represented as objectal in the tragedy of passions has something to offer to the conception of anxiety by Lacan. Miller says of Lacan's seminar on anxiety
329 that it has two movements. In the first, the object a that makes anxiety not without an object, is a libidinal remainder cut from the imaginary that has the sense of the
Unhiemlich. This is the anxiogenic object appearing in the place where the object a is normally subtracted, extracted. However, there is another mechanism of intrusion of the object a which has an erogenous, not anxiogenic, value. These are objects of another type; they are anterior to the imaginary community of specular and symbolizable objects, and are not regulated but are filled with Triebregung
("Introduction to Seminar X" II, 50-51). This is the object that is not subject to the debt of castration. The object is topologically identified with organs, with parts of the organism of the subject and also with parts of the organism of the Other
("Introduction" II, 38).128
The tragedy of passions captures this movement from the object cut from the imaginary, visual field, to the erogenous, organic object that is anterior to the imaginary and the symbolic. The tragedy of passions gives extra value to micro- structures of style, affecting a countering of the symbolic ruptures implied by the signifier; and it does so not for the sake of reviving desire but to account for libido.
Desire which is constituted metonymically, dialectically, through the signifying chain produces no more than dead desire, and cannot account for libido (Miller,
"Introduction" I, 37-38, Ronen, Aesth., 102). Style is the tragedy of passions' mechanism of making 'objectality the correlate of the pathos about the cut'. In opposition to 'objectivity' which is the correlate of the pure reason of logical formalism, objectality concerns the body hewn out of formalism. The cause is identical to the part of our flesh that is caught up in the formal machine, cut by it (Lacan, SX,
128 Miller says that in the Seminar on Anxiety the object a 'is elaborated as a pure and simple corporal imposition'. But he insists: 'even there one cannot forget that the physiology of the objet petit a is developed under the signifier of topology, that is to say that the objet petit a has a topological consistency' (''Introduction" II, 39).
331
8.5.63, pp. 2-3, Miller, "Introduction" II, 51). Style is thus tragedy's mechanism of rendering objectal the surplus-jouissance that is implied by the Freudian Triebregung.
Style supports the imaginary, phantasmatic, scene of the drive by the tortured figures and cruel attitudes of language itself, materially, organically, positing the risk of ceding to masochistic pleasure, making the organic object anxiety-inducing after all.
A style that opts for the objectal, taking us as close as can be to the real of the drive, provokes anxiety in the spectator by the danger it implies of unveiling the cause as such, the danger of not letting the erogenized object be sufficiently separated so that its loss be secured. Masochism as the drive par-excellence is finally the manner in which style, supporting intrigue, divests the real of passion of the splendor of beauty, embarrassing the spectator with the horrifying surplus-jouissance that is the object.
331
Conclusion
Intrigue is a prominent plot form in comedy and tragedy, and yet to date, it has not been studied in depth. Restoration drama makes ample and explicit use of intrigue and with its self-conscious artistic bent, offers fertile ground for its study. However, within generic scholarship intrigue has been studied neither in isolation, nor outside ideological consideration of form and style. Yet the intrigue drama of late seventeenth century needs no special pleading, to use Rothstein's words about Restoration tragedy
(181). A Maskwell, a Machiavell, a Mirza, a Guise and a Mirabell, no matter how reminiscent of an arch-intriguer stock character, variously and ingeniously invest the world of the plays in which they are presented with the proud sense of their being shapers of fate through their machinations. And the plots they weave, bespeaking the aesthetic and critical consciousness of the playwrights whose surrogates they are, do not cease to baffle us as to their motive force. Critical studies of Restoration drama, more than often pleading its cause nonetheless, have neglected the enigmatic potentiality of intrigue. Moreover, the approaches these studies use subordinate intrigue to other concerns. Descriptive analysis of character and plot sub-serving a formal study of generic development, or anthropological preconceptions regarding the trickster and villainy, or the thematics of libertine philosophy and politics, all helpful to an understanding of the function of intrigue, still offer little to a grasp of the enigmas informing this plot form. Psychoanalysis opens a different avenue to these enigmas particularly by its unique way of tackling the notion of causality: the stress Freud places on the quantitative factor of the drives as an obstacle to cure in "Analysis
Terminable and Interminable" (SE 23, 226-229), and Lacan's own way of conceptualizing cause as enjoyment not falsified by semblants even if glimpsed by their means. By locating the cause of intrigue as an 'elsewhere' cut from knowledge
332 and significations, a psychoanalytic study of intrigue illuminates the nature of intrigue while establishing the generic independence of the intrigue plot-form.
Theoretically, this dissertation indexes some of the dilemmas pertaining to the relation of literary texts to psychoanalysis. The psychoanalytic conception of literature as symptom is significant in rethinking psychoanalysis as a critical practice. Yet the conception of literature as symptom also presents some impasses for both literature and psychoanalysis. Specifically, Lacanian theorists, though recognizing the psychic materiality of signs, do not pursue the possibility of regarding form as the real dimension of language. In its turn, clinical practice tends to valorize the letter as the limit of linguistic unraveling of psychic life.
The conception of literature as symptom bars psychoanalysis from one of literature's most vital cores, the utilization of rhetorical forms. A psychoanalytic study of intrigue does not seek to use intrigue as an illustration of a possible way of remedying this drawback. Rather, such a study proposes as source material for psychoanalysis the relationship between the literary form of intrigue and masochistic drive structures whose effects are carried in signifiers, and more particularly, in signifiers' formal, real dimension, at the same time that it explores intrigue in itself.
Two principal questions have thus been considered in this thesis. What is intrigue? In what way does a conception of the intrigue plot-form have something to contribute to the question of interpretation, specifically in light of the challenge psychoanalytic view of interpretation poses to traditional hermeneutic interpretation?
In psychoanalytic terms, interpretation is indispensable. Yet it is indispensable precisely as what counters sense-production, in reverse direction to the interpretations of the unconscious. This essentially paradoxical view of interpretation needs to be addressed first in order for the question regarding intrigue to be answered. Lacan in his
333
"Lituraterre" says psychoanalysis is 'on the receiving end from literature' yet indicates that psychoanalysis is unable to tackle literature 'without showing its failure'. Literature helps Lacan demonstrate 'where the hole is in psychoanalysis', suggesting to literary criticism in return the measuring of texts against the riddle which persists on psychoanalysis' side (SXVIII, 12.5.71, pp. 5-6).
Psychoanalysis, then, does not undertake to close its own lacunas through literary interpretation. Nor does it attempt to motivate literary judgment. At the same time, Lacan proposes a justified intrusion of psychoanalysis into literary criticism in a redefinition of the literary and literature starting from the function of semblance. He calls forth the 'writing effect' of literature as the condition for its becoming a lituraterre, a realm marking the 'furrowing of the signified' in the real, the voiding of semblance. Lacan is after the literal as the 'litura pure', the erasure the letter produces to reproduce the subject's jouissance, yet the letter, the furrowing of enjoyment in the real, breaks through the clouds of semblance. The letter is hence conditioned on semblance; it needs the semblance in order to emerge (p. 13).
The 'writing effect' of literature tilts interpretation from the domain of knowledge and semantization to that of enjoyment. Lacan seems to imply that interpretation thus registers the enjoyment of the artist as well as the analyst (pp. 14,
19). Furthermore, the kind of dialectics Lacan proposes between psychoanalysis and literary criticism consists in the formulation of the voided strand the letter and the literal mark as literature's zone of jouissance beyond metaphor. In a way, the notion of lituraterre suggests that the literary work should be treated like the subject in analysis.
This means an isolation of a unary signifier while dispensing with the delusion of hermeneutic interpretation, bearing in mind that this cannot be attained without a reconstruction which extricates from delusion an element of historical truth. There is
334 nevertheless a question whether the litura pure, the literal as the furrowing of the signified, whose correlative in Lacan's later teaching is the S1 cut from any possible elaboration, the 'a-semantic unit returning the subject to the opacity of his jouissance'
(Miller, "Interpretation in Reverse", 15), can encapsulate the essence of an artistic form, become the artistic form's mode of traversing its endless ciphering and deciphering so as to be named. Put otherwise, can the 'writing effect' Lacan isolates answer intrigue's hysteric-like demand of psychoanalysis to tell her who she is
(Badiou, 1)?
Intrigue in effect knows something about its unnamability. This is suggested by
Machiavel, in Lee's Caesar Borgia: "Mischief… like a God, none knows her but her self" (III.i.240). The final note of intrigue is this mystery which is equivocal; like a
God, no one knows her except herself, or no one knows her yet she is real, like a God.
But intrigue's powerless truth, the point where it cannot be named, is inscribed in the
'none' at the heart of the phrase quoted above. Freud, however, suggests to us that though the elusiveness of the form remains interminable, some bedrock can be reached. The unknowable of intrigue can be indexed, if not named.
Through theme and character interrelationships, intrigue indicates the intriguer's function as the sadist who inadvertently occupies the place of the object to the benefit of his victim. The intriguer's action is thus exercised for his victim's jouissance. But what late seventeenth-century drama of intrigue renders transparent at the level of signifiers it casts opaquely through its stylistics. Beyond the signifying chain, and hence beyond the pleasure principle, the stylistics of intrigue enables a construction of the psychic cause which intrigue inscribes as 'none'. While the theme and content of intrigue suggest what Freud designates as moral masochism, or the need
335 for punishment, the stylistics of intrigue points towards erotogenic masochism as intrigue's psychic cause.
Erotogenic masochism lies at the bottom of moral masochism; masochism in
"The Economic Problem of Masochism'' is specifically a fusion of the death drive and libido, 'a remainder from the phase of development in which the coalescence, which is so important to life, between the death instinct and Eros took place' (SE 19, 164). Yet the distinction between the types of masochism is helpful for establishing the generic independence of intrigue. Thus, the enthymematic forms of rhetoric in The Way of the
World, enabling the construction of a 'second phase' of the perverse underside of phantasm can indicate the dual nature of masochism as Freud conceives it: 'the death instinct which is operative in the organism – primal sadism – is identical with masochism' ("The Economic Problem of Masochism'', SE 19, 164). In 'A Child Is
Being Beaten' masochism subsumes punishment and a sadistic regression from the genital organization, a mixture which sexualizes morality while distorting the wish to have a passive (feminine) sexual relation to the father (SE 17, 189, 194, "The
Economic", SE 19, 169). With the in-mixing of subject and object of pleasure which masochism implies, perversion becomes the ground for the conception of the subject's being, alienated by his subjection to the signifier.
In The Double-Dealer, fallacy on the one hand, and alliteration on the other combine to reinstate neurotic repression while translating moral sadism into masochistic subjection as desire for the law. In the three tragedies, figures of speech have been seen to introduce feminine masochism, which concerns infantile castration phantasies, along with passivity and anal erotism, presenting anxiety-inducing libido in excess. Excessiveness which elicits anxiety is what distinguishes intrigue in tragedy from comedic intrigue. But even more so, intrigue in comedy seems more in line with
336 moral masochism while intrigue in tragedy is of the order of erotogenic masochism.
However, intrigue as such, though formally originating from comedy, takes its generic stamp from tragedy.
Freud's notion of the fusion of drives lays stress on the erotic component of suffering. The unconscious wish for punishment which masochism implies when its aggressive alloy gains prominence over the erotic one, and which is also a stumbling block to cure, might resolve the mystery of intrigue in a way that suits an imaginary concept of it as evil. Yet in neither tragedy nor comedy can we say that 'Intrigue – thy name is masochism' concerns the self-destructive, aggressive aspect of masochism perceived through the need for punishment. The workings of style seem more in tune with the autoerotism involved in masochistic pleasure in pain. Style registers perversion as drive mingling, rather than soldering, instinctual components, deviated thus from its procreative function (Freud, "Analysis Terminable and Interminable", SE
23, 246).129 Along the same line, in both comedy and tragedy perversion is sustained by intrigue as disavowal of castration; in comedy rhetorical forms of logic function as
'scars' of the Oedipus complex, in tragedy figures of speech invoke anxiety generated from traumatic moments which predate fear of castration.
So intrigue not only points to the after all mythical nature of the drive, to the drive being one and the same through its components, unfolding the psychical biology of the death of the body as the body's only life. Intrigue also indicates that its inherent status as contrary to good composition cannot be resolved through its significations.
For the real of intrigue takes shape as the writing effect of the plays featuring intrigue.
129 Eros and destructiveness, Freud says, are two primal drives similar to Empedocles' principles of love and strife. However, there are certain alterations enforced by modern thinking which indicate its difference from that of Empedocles: 'we no longer think of the mingling and separation of particles of substance, but of the soldering together and defusion of instinctual components' (SE 23, 246). Masochism supported by intrigue, I suggest, is more of a mingling of such components, as I take erotogenic masochism to be.
337
The perverse side of intrigue, as the plays show through their style, is the writing effect of rhetorical forms which manifest the anatomical extension of sexuality as subjected to the psychic causality particular to every subject (Sharon-Zisser, "Rhetorical
Erotogenicity'', 15).
All bodily organs can be sources of sexual excitation, Freud says in "Three
Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" (SE 7, 217). The same kind of perverseness that is constitutive of sexuality in general also invests the violations of norm on which poetry depends. 'Sexuality is poetic; insofar as it is always already perverse', and inversely the poetic function is sexual, predicated as it is on othering (Sharon-Zisser, "The Poetic
Function", 284). This does not mean that intrigue is perverse because perversion already subsists in the poetry shaping it, for in this sense intrigue is no different from any other product of rhetoric. Rather, rhetorical forms carrying the imprints of the subject's jouissance enable a reconstruction of intrigue's particular psychic cause, which in the case of intrigue is specifically masochistic.
The fact that the psychic cause of intrigue can be read as the plays' writing effect which coincides with the perverse aspect of rhetorical forms suggests what may be answered from the side of psychoanalysis to the question of intrigue. Badiou says the unnamable of poetry is poetry's presumed guarantee of 'language understood as order or syntax'. 'But syntax cannot be poeticized … It operates without presenting itself' (25). While it is essential to remember that the lost object of desire emerges in the work of art subtractively, thus indicating the blockage of the symbolic by the real, as Badiou indicates with regard to the relation of psychoanalysis to art (7), and the conception of art as symptom would to some extent support, it is also important to view Badiou's claim in light of Lacan's search for the litura pure, or the writing effect of literature. Style perhaps indicates that syntax is poeticized, in the same manner that
338 the auto-erotic economy of the drive is sustained through the death drive, that the poetic function is sexual, and that the being intrigue erects is that which can only come into being through rhetorical forms: micro-structural vortices singular in their function as the playwright's mode of enjoyment.
The unnamable of intrigue, its unthinkable thought, is formulated as such through poeticized syntax, or style. This way intrigue's being is marked as that which is of the real, not given to imaginary ciphering and deciphering. The unnamable of intrigue cannot be dissociated from the object that is its cause, and both cannot emerge unless we isolate the litura pure of texts that present an intrigue plot. Unless we isolate, that is, a stylistic dominant that is the text's very S1. The act of interpretation in relation to the text of intrigue is to circumscribe, to isolate the forms which in each and every case would be intrigue's single note of unnamable truth: intrigue's S1 in articulation with the object a that is intrigue's cause. That is intrigue's contribution to a further nuancing of the paradoxical nature of interpretation psychoanalysis gestures towards.
339
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אוניברסיטת תל-אביב הפקולטה למדעי הרוח ע"ש לסטר וסאלי פורטר בית הספר למדעי התרבות ע"ש שירלי ולסלי פורטר
אינטריגה והקשר שלה לדחף בדרמת האינטריגה של המאה השבע-עשרה המאוחרת
חיבור לשם קבלת התואר "דוקטור לפילוסופיה"
מאת
צפרה דן
הוגש לסנאט של אוניברסיטת תל-אביב
אוקטובר 2111
עבודה זו נעשתה בהדרכת פרופסור שירלי שרון-זיסר מאוניברסיטת תל-אביב ופרופסור קרן אלקלעי-גוט מאוניברסיטת תל-אביב
תוכן העניינים
הקדמה 1
א. מטרות ומסגרת מושגית 1
ב. התיאוריה הפסיכואנליטית של הדחף 4
ג. עלילת האינטריגה 9
ד. מתודולוגיה – גישה פסיכו-רטורית לאינטריגה 21
פרק ראשון: הדקדוק של המזוכיזם בדרכו של עולם מאת וויליאם קונגריב 33
הקדמה 33
א. האנתיממה 48
ב. לוגיקה ודקדוק בעבודתו של פרויד 54
ג. רטוריקה בעבודתו של פרויד – הבדיחה והסתמי של הדקדוק 64
ד. לוגיקה והנפש – הסתמי של הדקדוק ושל הלוגיקה אצל לקאן 72
ה. האנתיממה במחזהו של קונגריב 79
ו. הפונקציה הרטורית של האנתיממה ואינטריגת המחזה 96
פרק שני: הטיעון הכוזב ורטוריקת ההדחקה בנוכל הדו פרצופי מאת קונגריב 116
הקדמה 116
א. הטיעון הכוזב בתיאוריה של אריסטו 127
ב. הטיעון הכוזב ביחסו לתאוריה של פרויד על הסימפטום 129
ג. מסכת הסימפטום אצל לקאן 133
ד. הטיעון הכוזב – הכשל הסמלי של קונגריב 135
ה. הטיעון הכוזב של קונגריב – עם הלוגיקה של המסמן 141
ו. הטיעון הכוזב ואמת מעבר לסרוס 152
ז. אינטריגה לעומת הטיעון הכוזב – מוכרעותה המוקדמת של טיעוניות 159
ח. אליטרציה – חזרה והמודחק הלא מודע 168
ט. סודו של ההיסטרי 177
פרק שלישי: פיגורות דיבור והתענגות הגוף הסובל בשלוש טרגדיות של המאה השבע-עשרה המאוחרת – או טרגדיה היא לא ללא אובייקט 186
הקדמה 186
א. אינהיביציה והקומי 193
ב. מושג הטרגדיה אצל לקאן – זוהר הדבר 199
ג. טרגדיה של המאה השבע-עשרה המאוחרת – לא ללא אובייקט 216
ד. סזר בורג'יה מאת לי – התענגות העין 219
ה. הדוכס של גיז מאת לי ודריידן – נוכחות הבלתי נודע 251
ו. האם החורגת השאפתנית מאת ניקולס רוו – נפילת הסובייקטיבי אל פיקסציה ליבידינלית 287
ז. סיכום 328
סיכום התיזה 332
ביביליוגרפיה 341
תקציר בעברית
תקציר
תיזה זו עוסקת בצורה הספרותית של האינטריגה ביחסה אל הקטגוריות הפסיכואנליטיות של הדחפים הבלתי מודעים ואובייקט הסיבה שלהם. הקטגוריות הללו נוגעות לממשי שקורא תגר על הייצוג. שתי שאלות עומדות במרכזה של התיזה. האחת היא מה עלילת האינטריגה יכולה לומר לנו על הדחפים שהם הסיבה שלה. והשניה היא מה הם מבני המיקרו והמקרו בטקסטים שנבחנים כאן שנוגעים לדחף וכיצד המבנים הללו נוגעים לטקסטים שמציגים אינטריגה. שתי השאלות מעידות על התפיסה הפרשנית המיוחדת שתיזה זו נדרשת לה. הפסיכואנליזה על פי תפיסתו של ז'אק לקאן לא נועדה להיות מיושמת על טקסטים ספרותיים כמסגרת הרמנויטית שתכליתה להפיק פרשנויות
סמנטיות חדשות. לקאן כמו גם פרויד תופסים את הספרות כחומר מקור לפסיכואנליזה. הפסיכואנליזה מגלה משהו מן החידות המעסיקות אותה דרך הספרות. מצד שני, אין הכוונה כאן להשתמש בטקסטים כאילוסטרציות למושגים פסיכואנליטיים. הפסיכואנליזה מכוונת אותנו לבחון אחרת את האובייקט, שהיא תופסת כיוצר אפקטים במישור הסימבולי אבל כחיצוני לו, כבלתי ניתן לסימבוליזציה. היא מחייבת אותנו לבחון את היחס בין אובייקט הסיבה שאינו ניתן לידיעה לבין המימדים השונים של המסמנים שהם האפקטים שלו, ואשר מצידם מכוננים את קיומו. הטקסטים שאני בוחנת מהווים חומר מקור לפסיכואנליזה במובן הזה: הם מלמדים אותנו
משהו על היחס בין מיקרוסטרוקטורות רטוריות ולשוניות, מה שהוא המימד הפורמלי והממשי של השפה, לאובייקט הסיבה של הדחפים, ביחס לצורה ספרותית ספציפית שהיא האינטריגה. הטקסטים באמצעותם אני חוקרת את האינטריגה כוללים חמישה מחזות מתוך קורפוס הדרמה האנגלית של המחצית השניה של המאה השבע-עשרה: שתי קומדיות של וויליאם קונגריב, ושלוש טרגדיות, האחת של נתניאל לי, השנייה של ג'ון דריידן במשותף עם נתניאל לי, והשלישית של ניקולס רוו. המחזות בנויים כעלילות אינטריגה, כלומר כעלילות שנבנות על ידי הפעולות של דמות מרכזית אחת על דמויות אחרות. בצד הכוונה לחקור את הפואטיקה של האינטריגה כפי
שהיא מתגלמת במחזות, קיימת גם המטרה לקרוא את הפואטיקה של האינטריגה כאפקט של
דחפים בלתי מודעים והאובייקט האניגמטי שהוא סיבתם. חשיבותה של בחינה מסוג כזה היא כפולה. ראשית, היא נועדה לפצות על העדר בולט במחקר הספרותי של נסיון לחקור את האינטריגה כמבנה בזכות עצמו. שנית, היא מציעה נתיב אחר להמשגה של האינטריגה, נתיב שאינו זה של פואטיקה תאורית וגם לא של הרמנויטיקה פסיכואנליטית, אלא כזה שדבק בא-סמנטי, ובכך מתמודד עם האתגר שהפסיכואנליזה מציבה בפני המחקר הספרותי. הטענה של מחקר זה היא שמה שאינו ניתן לשיום באינטריגה, אותו דבר שביחס אליו הפרשנות הספרותית עומדת בחסרונה,
א
מבקש צורה של פרשנות אנליטית שהיא אקט בתחום הממשי, התערבות שמכוונת לצמצום הרובד
הפנטזמטי ולא להרחבתו על ידי הוספה של משמעויות. בהתייחס למבנה העלילה של המחזות אני טוענת, לכן, שקיים יחס בין צורות רטוריות, לוגיות ודקדודיות, כמו גם ארועים ויחסים בין דמויות, לבין מבני דחף שמהווים את הסיבה הנפשית של צורות אלה, וכן שניתן לעשות קונסטרוקציה רטרואקטיבית של קונסטלציות דחפיות מן המסמנים שמהווים אפקטים של אותן קונסטלציות. האימפליקציות הפסיכואנליטיות של הצורה הספרותית שאני מכנה 'אינטריגה' נוגעות בראש ובראשונה לדחף. הדחף מהווה מושג מורכב בתאוריה הפרוידיאנית והלקאנינית. בהרצאה
ה23- שלו מתוך הרצאות המבוא החדשות לפסיכואנליזה מדבר פרויד על הדחפים כעל ישויות מיתיות, מרהיבות באי-המוגדרות שלהן. ב"דחפים וגורלותיהם" מתייחס פרויד לדחף כאל מושג שהוא ממקם בגבול שבין המנטלי והסומטי, מיקום בלתי מוגדר שממשיך להדהד ככזה בתיאורטיזציות הבאות של הדחף. במחשבה הלקניאנית, בסמינר האחד עשר, הדחף נוגע לממשי
בהיותו קשור במייצג של העדר הייצוג, ה-Vorstellungsreprasentanz. אך הדחף נוגע לממשי
ביחוד דרך התנועה המתמידה והעיוורת שלו סביב אובייקט אינדיפרנטי, אובייקט שהוא לנצח אובייקט חסר. התיאורטיזציה הפרוידיאנית של הדחף קשורה בזו של הפרוורסיה. הסיבה
הנרציסיסטית של הדחף מקבלת חשיבות עליונה. כך, ב"דחפים וגורלותיהם" פרויד אומר שסיבת הדחף אינה זהה לאובייקט המשתנה שהדחף משיג באמצעותו את מטרתו: לבוא לידי סיפוק. הפרוורסיות שעולות כזוגות של הפכים, באופן ספציפי הסקופופיליה-אקסהיביציוניזם והסדיזם- מזוכיזם, לא רק מייצגות את התנועה הסיבובית של הדחף, התנועה שלקאן מדגיש כמייצרת את האובייקט כאבוד. סקופופיליה פסיבית ומזוכיזם קשורים בארגון הנרציסיסטי של האגו ופירושם חזרה אל האובייקט הנרציסיסטי. סקופופילה פסיבית ומזוכיזם מצביעים כך על הסיבה האוטו- ארוטית של הדחף, גם אם האובייקט שלהם אינו זהה למקורם האורגני, ובשניהם הסובייקט הנרציסיסטי מוחלף על ידי אגו אחר, חיצוני, דרך הזדהות.
בהרצאה ה23- של הרצאות המבוא החדשות, פרויד, במבט רטרוספקטיבי על השלבים המרכזיים בהתפתחות תאוריית הדחפים שלו, מצהיר שסדיזם וביחוד מזוכיזם שהיוו אבן נגף לתיאוריית הליבידו הראשונית, תיאוריה שהבחינה בין דחפי מין ודחפי אגו והדגישה את הפונקציה של עקרון העונג, מהווים אבני יסוד בתאוריה שמחליפה אותה, תיאוריה שמתמקדת בשתי קבוצות דחפים: הדחפים המיניים והאגרסיביים. עם ההכרה באינהרנטיות של הדחף האגרסיבי מצד אחד,
ב
ועם 'כפיית החזרה' של דחף המוות מצד שני, יכול עתה פרויד להסביר את המזוכיזם, דחף מוזר,
כפי שהוא אומר, שמכוון להרס של הבית האורגני שלו עצמו. סדיזם ומזוכיזם מדגימים את האיחוד של דחפים אגרסיביים עם דחפי מין. במיוחד המזוכיזם הארוטוגני, אותו מגדיר פרויד ב"בעייה האקונומית של מזוכיזם", מאפשר תיאורטיזציה של הדחף שחוזרת אל הסיבה האוטו-ארוטית שלו. הפעם הזאת, הסיבה האוטו-ארוטית של הדחף אינה מנוסחת במושגי ההזדהות הנרציסיסטית כי אם במושגי ראשוניות דחף המוות של החומר החי. כמו כל ארוע חשוב אחר שמתרחש באורגניזם גם מתח שנגרם בשל כאב ואי-עונג תורם לאקסיטציה של הדחף המיני, אומר פרויד ב"בעייה האקונומית של מזוכיזם". מזוכיזם ארוטוגני
הינו שארית של דחף המוות שהפכה למרכיב של ליבידו אך מחזיקה באגו כאובייקט שלה. ניתן לומר שהמזוכיזם הארוטוגני מהווה מעין מענה לדהסקסואליזציה של האגו בסובלימציה ולהפרדה של הדחף ממרכיבו הסקסואלי שמשתמעת מן הסובלימציה, כפי שפרויד דן בה ב"אני והסתמי". עבור לקאן בסמינר שלו על האתיקה של הפסיכואנליזה דווקא הסובלימציה היא זו שחושפת את מהותו של הדחף. אך הפרוורסיה, שבדומה לסובלימציה מצביעה על אופני הסיפוק הפרדוקסליים של הדחף מעבר לעקרון העונג, הופכת מרכזית יותר בעיצוב התיאוריה של הדחף בסמינר של לקאן על ארבעת מושגי היסוד של הפסיכואנליזה. הדקדוק של הפרוורסיה מצביע על מקומו של
הסובייקט בלולאת הדחף. בעוד שהדחף, שלקאן מבחין מן הפרוורסיה, מותק תדיר מן האוטוארוטיות של האזור הארוגני תודות לחסרונו הנצחי של האובייקט, פרוורסיה הולכת בכיוון הפוך ל'סובייקטיפיקציה נטולת הראש' שמהווה הדחף. פרוורסיה מסמנת את מעבר ההתענגות, מעבר לגבול שנכפה על ידי עקרון העונג, כשהסובייקט ממקם עצמו בקצה לולאת הדחף כאובייקט של מישהו אחר. כאובייקט של פעולת האחר הפרוורט הוא סובייקט של הדחף, וכך גם מתאפשרת חווית הכאב. מן הפוזיציה הזאת כאובייקט, יאמר לקאן בסמינר ה41- שלו, חוקר הפרוורט את ההתענגות. המזוכיסט באופן מיוחד יודע משהו על התענגות שאיננה תחת הניכור המסמני אלא
ממוקמת מצידו של האובייקט.
מה הן אותן קונסטלציות דחפיות שניתן לחלץ מן המחזות שנבחנים כאן? האינטריגה עשויה להזכיר לנו דחף לשליטה ולהרס, או סדיזם לשמו, כפי שפרויד דן בו בין השאר ב"בעייה האקונומית של מזוכיזם". אך הטרגדיות הנבחנות כאן מצביעות על גורל אחר של הדחף: פסיביות בניגוד לאקטיביות, כזו שפרויד מתאר ב"דחפים וגורלותיהם". הפסיביות, כך נראה, היא של הגיבור, קורבנו של האינטריגר. תמונה אחרת עולה כשבוחנים את הצורות הרטוריות והגרמטיות של הטקסטים הנבחנים כאן. הצורות הללו מעלות את המושג המורכב של מזוכיזם ראשוני או
ג
ארוטוגני, שמתואר על ידי פרויד ב"בעיה האקונומית של מזוכיזם" כ'אילוף דחף המוות על ידי
הליבידו'. נראה אם כן שפסיביות, מזוכיזם ודחף המוות הם האושיות הנפשיות של האינטריגה, אותה אינטריגה שאנחנו נוטים לזהות כסצינה האולטימטיבית של האקטיביות. בכל אחד מן המחזות התמונה שנוצרת ברמת המסמנים, הארועים ויחסים בין דמויות היא זו של חורש מזימות שמניע דמויות אחרות לצרכיו. לעומת זאת, מבנים רטוריים ודקדוקיים מפריעים את התמונה הזאת כמעידים על מזוכיזם ודחף המוות. הסיבה הפסיכית של האינטריגה נבנית באמצעות המבנים הרטוריים והדקדוקיים הפרדומיננטיים בטקסטים שמציגים אותה. המשגה של האינטריגה כעלילה פרטיקולרית וכמבנה נפשי מסויים עולה מהבנייה )במובנה
הפרוידיאני( של קונסטלציות דחפיות בטקסטים שמציגים אינטריגה. אבל בחירת טקסטים מן הסוג הזה מחייבת שיקולים פורמליים מקדימים שקשורים בין השאר בעובדה שלמונח 'אינטריגה' יש שימושים ז'אנריים מסויימים בתיאוריה המחקרית, וכן בעובדה שלא נעשה נסיון להתמודד עם האינטריגה כהטרוגנית למבנה העלילה הדרמטית שבתוכה היא מתרחשת. כל נסיון להגדיר את עלילת האינטריגה חייב לקחת בחשבון את ההיסטוריה הארוכה שלה. עם זאת, הגדרה כזו נתקלת בקושי להציג את האינטריגה כצורה עצמאית. לבסוף, הגדרת האינטריגה דורשת בחינה של סוכן, האינטריגר המעצב את עלילת האינטריגה. הגדרה של האינטריגה מתחילה מסוכנות זו: 'עלילת
אינטריגה' פירושה עלילה שנבנית כל ידי דמות במחזה, בדרך כלל למטרה מסויימת. זוהי דמות הפועלת במובן הפסיכואנליטי, כלומר שנוקטת תימרונים במישור הסימבולי על מנת ליצור אפקט ממשי בחיי דמויות אחרות. במקרה של האינטריגה, בשונה מן האקט האנליטי, תימרונים כאלה הם תמיד מודעים. בטרגדיה סוכן מתמרן כזה מובחן מן הגיבור אשר הפגם ההרואי שלו יוצר סוג אחר של כוח מניע של העלילה. בקומדיה לעומת זאת האינטריגר הוא לעיתים קרובות הגיבור עצמו, וקשה יותר לבודד את האינטריגה מן המבנה הדרמטי בכללו. הסטורית, מוצאה של האינטריגה הוא מן הקומדיה הישנה של יוון הקלסית. בקומדיה
היוונית והרומאית החדשה עוצבה האינטריגה לכלל נוסחה וכך גם הגיעה אל הקומדיה של
הרנסנס. נוסחת האינטריגה היתה חביבה במיוחד על הקומדיה האיטלקית המלומדת של המאה השש-עשרה. הקומדיה היוונית והרומאית החדשה שילבה שתי צורות של תחבולנות והטעייה: האירוניה של הטריקסטר, גונב הדעת, שהיא שאלה מן הקומדיה הישנה, ואירוניית המצב שהיא שאלה מן הטרגדיה. התאוריה הרנסנסית של טכניקת הקומדיה עושה את ההבחנה המועילה בין התחבולות של המחזאי לבין ההטעיות של הדמויות במחזה, כפי שאומר לנו סלינגר. אני מגדירה 'אינטריגה' על פי הבחנה זו: 'אינטריגה' נוגעת להטעיות היזומות של דמויות, בניגוד לטעויות
ד
התמימות והמקריות שלהן. אלה האחרונות שייכות לתחבולות של הכותב ותורמות לאפקטים
האירוניים של ה'סדר המלאכותי', שהיווה את ההבדל המרכזי בין התיאטרון המדיוואלי לבין התחדשות המבנה הדרמטי הקלאסי בתקופת הרנסנס. ה'סדר המלאכותי', ההבנייה הסיבתית של הארועים, שהקומדיה החדשה הביאה לעולם, נשענה בעיקר על אקספוזיציה רטרוספקטיבית שאיפשרה סצינות של גילוי מחדש והיוודעות כמו גם אירוניה דרמטית, כדברי סלינגר. ההבחנה בין האפקטים המטעים של הקופוזיציה המלאכותית לבין ההטעיות שיוצרת דמות שהיא כלי שרת או ממלא מקום של המחזאי עצמו היא הבחנה חיונית לתיאורטיזציה של האינטריגה. ההבחנה הזאת מהדהדת הן בהתפתחות של האינטריגה דרך הקומדיה החדשה
והדרמה של הרנסנס ושל המאה השבע-עשרה, והן בגישה הביקורתית לאינטריגה. בעוד שהסדר המלאכותי של הארועים במחזה משתמש באקספוזיציה רטרוספקטיבית, עלילת האינטריגה היא במהותה פרוגרסיבית, כפי שהארבג' מציין. יתר על כן, סלינגר מצביע על כך שהאינטריגר גאה ביכולת ההמצאה שלו ולעיתים משתף את הצופים במזימותיו, כך שהידע של הצופה מקדים את זה של הדמויות. אירוניית מצב יכולה אם כך להופיע ביחס לאינטריגה אך לא בהכרח בשורה אחת עימה. קומפוזיציה מלאכותית טובה מציגה את האינטריגה כמרכיב שהוא במהותו הטרוגני לה, ושבהכרח מעורר תהיות בצופה, גם כשהאינטריגה מגוייסת על ידי האקספוזיציה הרטרוספקטיבית
ליצירת אירוניות משלה. תיאוריה ביקורתית של האינטריגה מזהה את המבנה העצמאי שלה, אבל בעיקרה היא נוטה לטשטש את ההטרוגניות של האינטריגה ביחס לקומפוזיציה המלאכותית הטובה, אם על ידי הדגשת הקשר של האינטריגה לערכים חברתיים ותרומתה לבניית סדר קולקטיבי חדש, או על ידי הדגשת יעודו המשתנה של האינטריגר, כפי שנראה בדיונו של ביצ'ר בפונקציה הארכיטיפית של האינטריגר בקומדיה של הרנסנס. תיאוריה של הטרגדיה מציבה קשיים משלה בנוגע לאינטריגה. כך הארבג' בפרספקטיבה אריסטוטלית מציין שהאינטריגה היא מרכיב קומי שיובא אל תוך
הטרגדיה. פירושה שימוש בשיטות קומיות ביחס לחומר טרגי. הארבג' מצביע על התרומה
הסטרוקטורלית של האינטריגה לטרגדיה הקלאסית, היות שהיא מחייבת שיטה נרטיבית פרוגרסיבית וסיריאלית ולא רטרוספקטיבית. אך בעיקרה האינטריגה, לטענתו, אינה מתיישבת עם הטרגדיה. האינטריגה אינה פוגעת באפקט הטרגי האולטימטיבי, לדבריו, גם אם היא מעוררת תגובות שעומדות בסתירה לשיפוט מוסרי, כל עוד היא מוצגת כדבר "רע" שקשור באנשים "רעים". ביקורת שנוגעת לקומדיה של המחצית השנייה של המאה השבע-עשרה, כמו זו של בראון למשל, מדגישה את הפונקציה הסאטירית של הקומדיה דמויית-האינטריגה, להבדיל מן
ה
הטרגיקומדיה. המגמה הזאת, בדומה לזו של ביצ'ר, מצמצמת את הפער המבני בין האינטריגה
לקומפוזיציה המלאכותית של הדרמה. כך טרוגוט אומר על האינטריגר ההולל של הקומדיה של הרסטורציה, ששנינותו נחוצה כדי לחדור מבעד למסכת הגינונים החברתיים ולפיכך אין אפשרות להפילו בבור שכרה לאחרים. אך היכן שהסאטירה הופכת את האינטריגה לכלי מובהק של המארג העלילתי, הסגנון הוא זה שמשמר את ההטרוגניות שלה. בתקופה שבה השנינות מגיעה לדרגה יותר גבוהה, והמבקרים 'שוקלים כל שורה וכל מילה', כדברי ג'ון דריידן, ההטרוגניות של האינטריגה מתגלמת לא במסרים החתרניים שלה אלא באמצעות הסגנון, במקום בו המסר שלה מגיע אל סופו. השנינות איננה אז סוכנות של תובנה, כפי שטרוגוט מציע. דריידן, תיאורטיקן מרכזי של הדרמה
במאה השבע-עשרה המאוחרת, מציע לנו שהשנינות אינה משקפת או מתקנת חברה חסרת תקנה. במקום זאת, היא מדד אסתטי אטום, ובכך היא תומכת באינטריגה כבלתי ניתנת לצמצום. על הטרגדיה של הרסטורציה אומר לנו רוסטיין שהיא אפיזודית, אך האינטריגה בטרגדיה דווקא בולטת יותר כתוצר קונסיסטנטי של סוכן מעצב מתוך העולם של המחזה. סוג הטקסט בהכרח כופה את מאפייניו על חקר המבנה של האינטריגה, וכך כל אותם אלמנטים שבמידה רבה חרצו את דינה של הטרגדיה של הרסטורציה, הן מבחינת התיאטרון והן מבחינת מחקר הספרות – האפיזודיות שלה, כשלונה להתאים תחבולה לתוכן, סגנון למהות ואופן לחומר, כפי שמרשל אומר-
דוקא הם הופכים את הטרגדיה הזו לחשובה לבחינה פסיכואנליטית של האינטריגה, זאת משום שהם מעידים על התקלות טקסטואלית באובייקט כמה שמפריע לייצוג חלק ונוח. הטקסטים שנבחרו למחקר הנוכחי נבחנו כולם לאור המגבלות הפורמליות שהוזכרו לעיל. כל אחד מן המחזות מציג בהבלטה אינטריגה שהיא פרי תכנונה של דמות במחזה, דמות שפועלת כאינטריגר. האינטריגה כפי שהיא מוצגת ברמת העלילה מתייחסת גם לתימות שעולות במחזות. אך חשיבותם של המחזות היא בעיקר בכך שהסגנון שלהם מובלט בנוסף לאינטריגה. אי ההתישבות היסודית של האינטריגה עם מבנה עלילתי רטרוספקטיבי, האופן שבו האינטריגה מקלקלת את הקומפוזיציה
הטובה של סיפור ושל יחסים בין דמויות, עולים ברמת הסגנון. באמצעות הסגנון מראה לנו כל אחד
מן הטקסטים את הפרטיקולריות שאינה בת הטמעה של האינטריגה, גם אם בקומדיות הפרטיקולריות הזו נראית כממוסכת ביתר הצלחה. מתודולוגית וקונספטואלית, תיזה זו הולכת בעקבות תאוריות וקונספציות של פרויד ושל לקאן על מבנה ועל ייצוג. אחת הסוגיות שמעסיקות בשנים האחרונות את התיאוריה הפסיכואנליטית היא היחס בין הטקסט הספרותי לממשי, החמקמק ביותר מבין שלושת המשלבים הלקאנייניים: הסמלי, הדמיוני והממשי. אנליזה ביקורתית שמכוונת אל הממשי
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מתמקדת בייצוג ובאובייקט הייצוג מצד אחד, ובגבולות הפירוש מצד שני, היות שבמושגים
לקאנייניים הממשי מתכונן כמתנגד לפורמולציה פרשנית. יצירת אמנות, כולל הטקסט הספרותי, נתפסת לפיכך כפיגורציה סימפטומטית של הממשי. כפי שז'אק-אלן מילר אומר במאמרו "מחשבות על המעטפת הפורמלית של הסימפטום", ביצירה מה שפועל הוא הסימפטום כנפרד מן ההתענגות האידיבידואלית שעטף קודם לכן. אקט היצירה, שבתפיסתו של לקאן הוא אקט שנובע מן האין, אומר מילר, מחייב את ריקון ההתענגות. אך כפי שרות רונן מסבירה בספרה לייצג את הממשי, התענגות מסוג חדש שאינה ניתנת לייצוג סמלי ממוקמת עכשיו במעטפת הפורמלית של הסימפטום עצמה. האקט האמנותי כסימפטומטי הוא אקט שאינו ניתן לצמצום לתוכן או למובן, אומרת רונן.
האפקט של הממשי שהאמנות מייצרת מראה עצמו דרך מה שחותר תחת הפונקציה הסמלית ומפריע אותה. כסימפטום, הטקסט הספרותי מייצר חסר, אומרת קולט סולר במאמר שלה "ספרות כסימפטום". היצירה איננה מניפסטציה של אובייקט מודחק אלא פורמציה חלופית שמציבה מסמן במקום חסר או במקום אובייקט אבוד. במונחיו של לקאן בסמינר השביעי שלו, הדבר הינו ריקות בלב הממשי, ריקות שנוצרת על ידי האופרציה הסמלית. בשעה שאמנות כסימפטום כולאת ומקבעת אופן התענגות מועדף של הסובייקט, היא גם מייצרת את האובייקט כאינות שאינה ניתנת
להשגה ושהמובן לא יכול לה. כך גם החלום כפי שמתאר אותו פרויד. בפשר החלומות אומר פרויד כי הכוחות הנפשיים שאחראיים לעוות של החלום מתנגדים לפעולת הפרוש. גם כשהאנליזה של חלום בלתי מובן היא יסודית, עדיין נשארת פקעת של מחשבות חלום שאינה ניתנת להתרה. אובייקט מחשבה לא מודע עולה בכשלון לייצג אותו, בחתך שבין האימז' ומה שהוא מייצג, אומרת רות רונן בלייצג את הממשי. הממשי של הנפש מופיע כעודף מובן ששום אינטרפרטציה לא יכולה לצמצם לתוכן או לנסח במפורש. המניפסטציה של מה שאינו ניתן לייצוג הינו נקודה מרכזית בכל גישה תיאורטית לצורה
ספרותית. נשאלת השאלה באמצעות אילו מכניזמים ספרותיים,ספציפית, נתפס הממשי. פרדיגמה
אחת לתנאים הדיאלקטיים של ייצוג הממשי מהווה היחס בין התכן הנראה של החלום למחשבת החלום. מחשבת החלום יכולה להיות מיוצגת במרכיבים חסרי חשיבות של האימז' או לא להיות מיוצגת בו כלל. האובייקט המודחק מונח מעצם קיום האימז', ואילו האינטרפרטציה הינה שלב הכרחי בהכרה שלאימז' נתון יש אובייקט בלתי ניתן לייצוג של הלא מודע כתוצר של האימז', כדברי רונן בלייצג את הממשי. הקונספציה של לקאן את הדבר הקאנטיאני, ואת האין שעבודת האמנות עוטפת, וההכרה של פרויד בטבורו האטום של החלום, ממקמים את ייצוג הממשי שהוא
ז
האובייקט במרחק הדיאלקטי בין האימז' והאובייקט. האימז' מאפשר מפגש עם האובייקט על דרך
מיסוכו. האינטרפרטציה מתפקדת כגבול או כאי האפשרות של המובן, ובכך מאפשרת את עלייתו של האובייקט כחסין בפני ארטיקולציה. השמטה, א-סימטריה וחזרה הם אמצעים לייצוג הממשי היכן שייצוג כזה עומד על מרחק בטוח הכרחי בין הדבר לאימז' שמייצר את הריק )שהוא הדבר( כתוצר שלו. צורה רדיקלית יותר של מפגש עם הממשי בעבודת האמנות מוצגת על ידי לקאן ביחס ל-
Finnegan's Wake של ג'ויס. אם הלינגוויסטיקה הסוסוריאנית מלמדת שהמסומן מחמיץ את
הרפרנט, כך שהמסמן הוא רק אפרוקסימציה של סיבה שהיא לנצח מוחטאת, הרי שהרפרנט חוזר
למלא את המסמן על יד הפירוק הלקסיקאלי שג'ויס מבצע ביצירתו המאוחרת. ביצירה זו כל האיבוקציות הדמיוניות של מילים מתבטלות היות שהמילים מפורקות למקסימום ההדים הסמנטיים שלהם, עד לרמת האות. כתיבה כזאת ברמת האות היא הסימפטום של ג'ויס, אופן
ההתענגות שלו, ויותר מכך: ה a הקטנה היא זו שמאפשרת לסובייקט להקרא בשם, אומר מילר
במאמרו "לקאן עם ג'ויס"; ג'ויס הופך עצמו ל Bedeutung או לרפרנט.
מצד אחד נראה את החלום או את הדבר כפרדיגמה של אי האפשרות של המובן ביחס לאובייקט שלא ניתן להגיע עדיו, מצד שני נראה את האות הג'ויסיינית כפרדיגמה של אי האפשרות
של המובן ביחס לאובייקט-כאיבר שהתנגדותו לדמיוני ולסמלי מעוררים בנו מועקה, כדברי רונן בספרה האסתטיקה של המועקה. אלה הן שתי צורות של לחשוב את הממשי באמנות ששתי פאזות מרכזיות בהוראתו של לקאן מייצרות. אך קיימת דרך אחרת לגשת אל הממשי, שאת שורשיה נמצא בפונקציה של עבודת החלום: זוהי הטכניקה של הבדיחות והקונספציה הפורמליסטית של טכניקה ספרותית. שקלובסקי מגדיר יצירה אמנותית במונחים של פרצפציה מעוכבת, שהיא אפקט של טכניקת ההזרה. במושגיו של שקלובסקי, פורמציות חלופיות הן אימננטיות לטכניקה
ספרותית: כמעט בכל מקום שנמצאת צורה נמצאת גם הזרה. צורות שהופכות לקשות, זה מה
שמהווה את הספרותיות של טקסט. האם אין זה אפשרי, אם כך, שהממשי כמה ש'נשאר תקוע בגרון המסמן' כפי שלקאן אומר בסמינר ה44- שלו, יעלה דרך צורות ככאלה, ולא רק דרך האפקטים של ההשמטה, החזרה והא-סימטריה שמפיקים מסמנים? פסיכו-רטוריקה, תחום שהתפתח באחרונה באופן אקסטנסיבי דרך עבודתה של שירלי שרון-זיסר, ממקמת את הפונקציה הפואטית עצמה ברפרנט, רפרנט שנתפס כמחורר אך ממשי. במאמר שלה "הפונקציה הפואטית מיעקובסון ללקאן" שרון-זיסר משרטטת את האופן שבו ניתן למקם צורות רטוריות וגרמטיות, המימד הפורמלי של השפה שמאפשר הפקת מובנים אך בעצמו
ח
אינו מפיק כל מובן, כממשי של הטקסט שאינו פועל יוצא של המסמנות. שני הצירים של השפה,
הבחירה והצרוף, שיעקובסון רואה כמכוננים את הפונקציה הפואטית על דרך הטלת עקרון האקוויוולנטיות מציר הבחירה לציר הצרוף, מצביעים על רלבנטיות ניסוחו של יעקובסון את הפונקציה הפואטית לקונספציה של לקאן את הממשי בשתי דרכים: שני הצירים מסמנים את גבולות השפה ונמצאים מעבר למובן, והם מייצרים הפרה של צורה. בשני האספקטים הללו מיקרו-
סטרוקטורות רטוריות מקבלות מעמד טופולוגי כחללים )vacuoles( של הטקסט. השלפוחית
החללית היא האופן שבו לקאן מייצג לכידת התענגות בשדה של האחר של המסמנים. בסמינר ה41- שלו לקאן מדבר על השלפוחית החללית כמייצגת אימפוזיציה של אובייקט הסיפוק המחורר על
הפער המיטונימי של התשוקה, אותו חסר בהוויה שהאחר של השפה מסמן ביחס לסובייקטיביות. שרון-זיסר מדגישה את אופיין הפרוורטי של מיקרו-סטרוקטורות פואטיות, מהיותן הומיאומורפיות עם הפרות של אוניברסלים. אוניברסל כזה הוא הפונקציה האנטומית של איברים ואזורים של הגוף, פונקציה שהמיניות משבשת בשרות סיפוק הדחף, כפי שפרויד מלמדנו ב"שלוש מסות על התאוריה של המיניות". הפונקציה הפואטית היא לפיכך מינית באופן מבני, מעצם היותה מושתתת על אופרציה של אחרות, כמו הפרה של נורמה לשונית, הזרה או השמה לאל של אנטיציפציה. אך קיים יחס עוד יותר אינטימי בין צורות רטוריות וטיבה הפרוורטי של המיניות
כמשקע של הלא מודע. במאמר שלה "ארוטוגניות רטורית" שרון-זיסר הולכת בעקבות הפסיכואנליטיקאית מישל מונטרליי, ומצביעה על כך שבמקרים קליניים מסויימים המסה הפונית- גרפית איננה מייצגת של האיבר אלא הופכת לאיבר עצמו. צורות רטוריות, במיוחד פיגורות לשוניות שעודפות על המובן, שהרטוריקנים הקלסיים ושל הרנסנס תופסים כ'קישוטים' וכ'פרחים', הינם איברים של סיפוק, לא אמצעים לייצוג הארוטוגניות. לפרחים של רטוריקה מבנה טופולוגי שמרכזו הוא חור דרכו המובן דולף. המבנה שלהם מצהיר על לחץ תנועתו של הדחף סביב אובייקט אבוד, החור בסיפוק הפרמורדיאלי שמתגלם בפתחי הגוף ושהייצוג הטופולוגי שלו הוא
של מבנה שפה או קצה )edge(.
בסמינרים ה41- וה41- שלו לקאן שם את המבנה כממשי, המבנה הוא סיבת השיח. התפיסה של שרון-זיסר את הצורות הרטוריות כפרוורטיות, כצורות שמתפקדות כאיברים ארוגניים ולכן בסטיה מן הפונקציה האנטומית, משלבת את תפיסתו של לקאן את המבנה, ומציעה כך גם גם רילוקציה של האות, בעת ובעונה אחת החומר שממנו עשוי הטקסט הספרותי והפסולת
הלא מסמנית שלו. האות כפי שלקאן מדבר עליה בהרצאה שלו "Lituraterre" בסמינר ה41- היא
מה שמפוגג את מראה הכזב של המסומנים. האות תומכת במסמן כסיבה-תחת-מחיקה שלו.
ט
במאמרה "הפונקציה הפואטית מיעקובסון ללקאן" שרון-זיסר מסיתה את המטריאליות של האות
– מטריאליות בהשהייה שמרוקנת את הסמבלנט – למכניזמים של הסגנון שמתנגדים למובן. זה אומר גם שינוי מקומו של אובייקט הסיפוק ביחס לשרשרת המסמנית: האובייקט שהוא הסיבה של שרשרת המסמנים אינו מחוץ לטקסט. אובייקט הסיפוק שמתהווה על ידי צורות רטוריות
ודקדוקיות מסומן בטקסט הפואטי כ'פצע' או כחור ב Bedeutung של הטקסט, נקודת ריקון של
הטקסט ממובן. האפקט של עבודת האות מגולם בפונקציה הפואטית, בצורות הסגנון, שמבנה
השפה )edge( של הדחף עכשיו הופך להיות.
המחשבה של יעקובסון על השפה הפואטית כמושתתת על האוקלוזיה של הרפרנט ועל
ההבלטה של צורות דקדוקיות א-סמנטיות, אומרת שרון-זיסר, מצביעה בכיוון של תיאוריה פסיכואנליטית שהדגש שלה ביחס למבנה הטקסט הפואטי לא יהיה רק החור של הדבר, האובייקט האבוד הפרטיקולרי שהשירה מסתובבת סביבו כסיבה שלה, אלא אף יותר מכך צורות הסגנון
כמניפסטציה מיקרו-סטרוקטורלית של החור הזה. צורות אלה אינן תומכות במובן, כפי שטוען יעקובסון, כי אם מרוקנות אותו. שתי אימפליקציות נוספות של הארוטיקה של הרטוריקה כפי ששרון-זיסר עושה תיאורטיזציה שלה נוגעות לכותב, וליחס של הסגנון לעלילה. באשר לכותב, הפסיכואנליטיקאי הרבה קסטנה אומר שהכתיבה הינה עיסוק בממשי. זהו פרקסיס שמייצר את
הכותב כאפקט שלו. סגנון ספרותי יכול אם כך ללמד אותנו משהו על אובייקט סיבת התשוקה הפרטיקולרי שמפיק את הסיגנון הזה ואת הכותב כאפקט שלו. עבודת האמנות עצמה הינה אובייקט שנחתך ונושר מן האורגניזם של הכותב, אומרת שרון-זיסר במאמר שלה "לחשוב/דבר את שייקספיר". פואזיס הוא לפיכך חיתוך לא פחות מאשר עשייה. כמו כל האובייקטים שנופלים מן האורגניזם של ההוויה המדברת, גם הטקסט הפואטי מצביע על האופרציה של החתך שהיא התנועה של הדחף עצמו. עבודת האמנות היא מן הסדר של הדחף, ממש כשם שמיקרו- סטרוקטורות ותימות או מוטיבים שאינם בני פירוק הינם מקומות ארוגניים של הכותב כאפקט
סובייקט. בין כאובייקט שנושר או כאזור ארוגני, הטקסט שממוקם כך פועל כמרכיב של הדחף כפי שפרויד תופס אותו. באשר ליחס הסגנון לעלילה, אפשר לומר שאם פואזיס ככזה מסמן לנו את תנועת הדחף, גם צורת עלילה מסויימת תהיה כפופה לאותה עשייה שפועלת בשרות הדחף. הפסיכואנליזה באופן כללי תופסת עלילה, בדומה לנרטיב, כפנטזמטית במהותה. מילר אומר שבספרות 'הממשי נשאר ממוסך על ידי הדמיוני: הדמויות, הסיפור, ההתחלה, הסוף, כל הסמבלנטים האריסטוטליים של פואטיקה, דמיוניים כסימבוליים' )"לקאן עם ג'ויס"(. אך כפי שרונן מציינת, אופרציית מראית
י
העין של האמנות מגלה תוך שהיא מסתירה: הדבר מקבל משמעות כחסר רק כשמשהו מופיע
במקומו. כך הטרגדיה הבנויה כהלכה מספקת כיסוי משמעותי אפקטיבי לקרע בסימבוליזציה שהיא למעשה מציגה )לייצג את הממשי(. היות שהאינטריגה חותרת תחת קומפוזיציה נאותה, גם כשהיא כפופה לתכליות האירוניות של קונסטרוקציה רטרוספקטיבית, קיימת שאלה אם הפונקציה האיבוקטיבית של מראית העין הנרטיבית מספיקה כדי להסביר את האינטריגה כצורת עלילה. האינטריגה, לטענתי, מהווה את צידה הפרוורטי של הדרמה הבנויה כהלכה. האינטריגה לפרקים מצטרפת לאירוניית המצב או לאקספוזיציה רטרוספקטיבית אבל כל הזמן נפרשת באופן
עצמאי מן הסיבה האסתטית של קונסטרוקציה כזאת. העלילה הפרוגרסיבית של האינטריגר, למן התכנון ועד להשגת המטרה, איננה שונה מן העלילה הרטרוספקטיבית שבתוכה היא מתקיימת, כמאפשרת חילוץ של פבולה שמהווה לה בסיס. ובכל זאת ההבדל שהאינטריגה מכניסה בצורת הבנייה של העלילה מטיל ספק בבנייה אידיאלית על ידי הצגת אפשרות הקריסה של כל מיתוס אפקטיבי, אם להשתמש במושגיו של אריסטו בפואטיקה, לארגומנט או לפבולה שחושפים אותו. האינטריגה, אם כן, היא צורת עלילה שמכחישה את יעילות הקומפוזיציה הטובה באותו זמן שהיא מכחישה את הקרע הסמלי שקומפוזיציה אידיאלית נועדה להסתיר. בה בשעה שהאינטריגה
מצביעה על אותו קרע עצמו על ידי כך שהיא עצמה לא מאפשרת אקספליקציה באמצעות הבנייה סיבתית, היא גם עושה יד אחת עם הבנייה סיבתית של ארועים. בה בשעה שהיא מכוננת אטימות רדיקלית במונחים סימבוליים, האינטריגה גם מצביעה על כשלונה של בנייה לתת מובן לפעולה וגם מתכוננת כחלופה ממולחת לאותו חסר או כשל עצמו. הכחשה של החסר באחר ומיקום עצמה כחלופה לחסר הזה – אלה הם האלמנטים שמציבים את האינטריגה בסדר של הפרוורסיה. יתרה מזו, במחזות שנבחנים כאן, לאינטריגה יש גם חלק בעניין התמטי שלהם באניגמות של העונג. באמצעות תימה ותוכן המחזות מנסחים את המיזאנסצינה של האינטריגה כסצינה
פנטזמטית של הדחפים הסאדו-מזוכיסטיים. האספקטים הפרוורטיים והפנטזמטיים של
האינטריגה, המעמד המבני של עלילת האינטריגה כמו גם התכנים הסמנטיים שמעצבים אותה ברמת עולם המחזה, עולים בקנה אחד עם התיאוריה הפסיכואנליטית של צורות רטוריות כפי שבונה אותה שירלי שרון-זיסר. אבל גישה כזאת מציבה גם אתגר: נשאלת השאלה כיצד הארוגניות של הטכניקה הפואטית כמה שמרוקן מובן במקום לייצר מובנים יכולה לתמוך בקונספציה של עלילה. תיזה זו מוקדשת לפיכך בעיקרה לבחינת הפרודוקטיביות של הארוטיקה של הרטוריקה כדרך לעסוק בעלילה. הסגנון אינו נתפס כמשלים סמנטי לתוכן תימטי וליחסים בין דמויות.
יא
במקום זאת, הסגנון נתפס כסטרטום שממנו שום מובן לא יכול לצמוח. זה הרובד שבו ניתן
להקשיב למוצא הריק של האינטריגה ולהיענות לריק הזה בדרך של הבנייה תיאורטית. האספקטים התיאורטיים שנוגעים להתמודדות עם שאלת הדחף כסיבת האינטריגה מובילים לאותה הבעיה שמעמידה בפנינו שאלת ייצוג הממשי או האובייקט. כיצד ניתן לתפוס את הדחף מבחינה אסתטית בטקסט הספרותי? הספרות והפרקטיקה הפסיכואנליטיים מתווים את הדרך במספר צורות. כך ב"הבניות באנליזה" של פרויד ה'שרידים הארכאולוגיים' שמשמשים את האנליטיקאי להבניית מה שנשכח הם החומר החי של פרגמנטים של זכרון, אסוציאציות והתנהגותו של הסובייקט באנליזה. מילים אינן החומר היחידי של הבנייות אנליטיות. לעומת זאת,
באנליזה של איש הזאבים פרויד מבודד את האות V כציר של המומנטים המרכזיים של האנליזה.
את המודל הזה של עבודה עם מילים ועם אותיות מאמץ הפסיכואנליטיקאי הלקאנייני סרג' לקלייר. לקלייר מחפש את המסמן הראשון, הפורמולה האסנציאלית שמהווה את הלא מודע של האנליזנד בסינגולריות שלו, על ידי חילוץ של שרשרת מסמנים חוזרת ונשנית ומתן תשומת לב למשחק האותיות שבה. פרויד הולך מעבר למילים, לקלייר מתמקד במילים בלבד. מישל מונטרליי לעומת זאת טוענת שיש להאזין למילות האנליזנד כאילו עברו הזרה, כפי שאנו מקשיבים למילות שיר: לצליל שלהן, לריתמוס, ללוגיקה ולדקדוק. מגוון אלמנטים לינגוויסטיים מקבלים חשיבות
באנליזה, לא רק מילים מסויימות. בשורה אחת עם הקו המנחה שמציעה תרומתו של פרויד עצמו למחקר לינגוויסטי ורטורי בספרו על הבדיחות, ובעקבותיה של שרון-זיסר, אני מוסיפה לשרשרת המסמנים סכימות קומפוזיציה דקדוקיות ורטוריות שמהן מבני דחף מובנים. פיגורות דיבור דקדוקיות ורטוריות מכוונות ליצירת אפקטים בשומע, כשלעצמן הן נטולות מובן. להסביר מיקרוסטרוקטורות אלה כצופן של הלא-מודע של הטקסט, להעניק להן ערך ארוטוגני או לראות בהן סטיגמטה של עונג, כפי שעושה לקלייר ביחס לאות, פירושו להצביע על הפונקציה של צורות רטוריות באינטראקציה שלהם עם מסמנים. אך אין זה אומר שהצורות הללו מקבלות סטטוס של מסמנים. למעשה הן מספקות את המסד הלוגי והמבני של הרובד המסמני
הפנטסמטי של המחזות. הן מרוקנות את המובן ובו בזמן הן סינגולריות: בכל טקסט הן פועלות אחרת ובכך מעידות על אופן ההתענגות הייחודי של כל כותב. צורות רטוריות ודקדוקיות מהוות כך שארית או פסולת של המימד הדמיוני של מסומנים ומובן. יחד עם זאת, הפרספקטיבה הפסיכואנליטית של מחקר זה מכירה בכך שמה שלא ניתן להסביר, מה שממוסך על ידי צורות רטוריות ולפיכך נותר באניגמטיות שלו הוא אובייקט הסיבה של הדחפים הקונסטיטוטיביים של
יב
האינטריגה. האובייקט הזה מתגלם כמה שמכשיל את האינטריגה, מה שמתיק אותה מן הסדר של
סיבתיות ליניארית אקטיבית. חשוב לציין ששאלת היחס בין המסמן לבין מה שלא ניתן לייצוג אינה זרה לקונטקסט התרבותי של אנגליה של המחצית השניה של המאה השבע-עשרה. מאמרי הביקורת של ג'ון דריידן דנים בפרקסיס של כתיבת מחזות ועוסקים גם בנקודות שנוגעות לייצוג. נקודות אלה רלבנטיות הן לקונספציה של הספרות כסימפטום והן לתפיסה של הצורות הרטוריות והדקדוקיות כמימד
הממשי של השפה. בשני מאמרים שלו על פואזיה דרמטית )"An Essay of Dramatic Poesy" ו-
"A Defence of an Essay of Dramatic Poesy"( דריידן מתחבט בשאלת הייצוג של אובייקט
החיקוי של הטרגדיה במונחים של שקיפות )או אטימות( האובייקט והמרחק ההכרחי ממנו באמצעות חריזה. עם מודעות לפרדוקס שבדבר, הוא מציע פער בין האובייקט המיוצג ואופן הייצוג שלו. אובייקט החיקוי מעניין אותו פחות מאשר ההשפעה על הנפש, והוא מצביע על כך שהאפקט
של עונג הוא בלתי נפרד ממלאכותיות הייצוג. במונחים שלנו, דריידן מכיר בכך שסימפטומטיזציה של הממשי קשורה עם צורה טהורה )כמו חריזה(, שלפיגורציה מלאכותית שמכשילה שקיפות פסיכולוגית יש אפקט כי זה המקום שבו נתקלים במשהו מסוג אחר. באופן דומה, קונגריב מתגאה
בתכנון המלאכותי של הקומדיה שלו The Double-Dealer. בקומדיות כמו גם בטרגדיות של
המאה השבע-עשרה המאוחרת, מלאכותיות הסגנון או התכנון משמשת אמצעי להצביע על האובייקט הממשי אותה ממסכת מלאכותיות זו. מלאכותיות הסגנון היא אכן מה שאני בוחנת במחזות ביחס לעלילת האינטריגה. בכל מחזה, דומיננטות סגנוניות שאני תופסת כמרוקנות מובן וכך כמעלות התענגות, מהוות אבני בניין לקונסטרוקציה של מה שלקאן בסמינר ה - 41 שלו מכנה 'ההשלמה הלוגית של ההוויה' של המחזות: מה שהוא הכי קרוב לאובייקט הסיבה שלהם. כל מחזה בדרכו הייחודית מצביע על
האימפליקציה של האינטריגה באובייקט הסיבה של הדחף, ליבה אניגמטית של עונג מזוכיסטי
שגם אם אינה פותרת את החידה הנצחית של מניעי האינטריגר, לפחות מצביעה אל טבור הכשלון של האינטריגה. לפני שאפרט מה הן הדומיננטות שנבחנות בכל מחזה ומחזה, ומה הן מלמדות אותנו על האינטריגה הספציפית לכל מחזה, ועל האינטריגה בכלל, אציין רק שאל כל אחד מן המחזות אני ניגשת דרך מה שג'נט מכנה 'מפתני' או 'סיפי' הטקסט. אלה הם פאראטקסטים שלדברי ג'נט מכוונים את קריאתנו בו. במחזות שאני בוחנת קיימים מספר פאראטקסטים כאלה, החל מאגרת ההקדשה של המחזאי לפטרון, דרך הכותרת, המוטו, האפילוג וגמור בפרולוג. אני מתייחסת לפאראטקסטים אלה כאל המניפסטציות מחוררות המובן הראשונות של הדליברציות
יג
של המחזאי, שבאופן טופולוגי מתקפלות אל עולם המחזה. כלומר, באמצעותן המחזאי עולה
כסובייקט האמירה, דבריו מייצרים עודף מובן שהמטריאליות של הטקסט אינה מגבה, וכך גם לא מאפשרת צמצום העודף הזה למסומנים.
המחזה הראשון שאני דנה בו הוא הקומדיה The Way of the World של וויליאם
קונגריב. קומדיה זו מציגה למעשה שני אינטריגרים ושתי אינטריגות מרכזיות, אחת שנכשלת )זו
של Fainall(, אך מתקיימת בתוך עולם המחזה, ואחת שמצליחה )זו של Mirabell(, אך נרקחת
מחוץ לרצף ההתרחשויות וקובעת את העלילה בכללה כקונספציה רטרוספקטיבית של 'משחק' שהוכרע לגלית עוד לפני העלילה, כדברי ברוורמן. כאמור, מה שעומד במרכז הדיון שלי הוא שאלת
הייצוג הסגנוני כדרך לבחון את הסיבה הדחפית של האינטריגה במחזה. למעשה, קונגריב עצמו בהקדשה שלו מעלה את סוגיית הסגנון כשהוא מצהיר שהחליט לבנות כמה מן הדמויות כמגוחכות לא על דרך סכלות טבעית אלא על דרך שנינות מעושה, ולפיכך כוזבת. באופן הזה הוא מבקש
להקשות על מבקריו להבחין בין מי שהוא wit אמיתי למזויף. הבחנה כזאת לא מתאפשרת באמות
מידה סגנוניות. קשה להבחין בין שנינות אמיתית לכוזבת בלא להזדקק לפרטי תוכן שמעניקים ערך
מוסרי או לא מוסרי לשנינות, או לחלופין להשען על אמת מידה חיצונית בדמותו של ה decorum
כפי שדריידן מתווה אותו, ולזהות חריגות ממנו בטקסט. הטענה הראשונה שלי היא, אם כן, שכל
נסיון לפתור את הקושי שקונגריב מציב כרוך למעשה במחשבה על הסגנון כאינדקס שקוף לדמות, בשעה שהאתגר שקונגריב מציב הוא בדיוק זה שהסגנון אטום. באופן הזה, אני טוענת, הוא מכוון אותנו לחפש את גרעין הרציונליות שלדברי המבקרים מאפיינת את סגנונו לא במה שהוא בסופו של דבר בתחום המובן והתוכן אלא בצורות הסגנוניות של לוגיקה, צורות בטהרתן, שמתנגדות למובן. צורה כזאת מופיעה למעשה בפתיחת המחזה כשפיינאול, שמנצח במשחק את מירבל, דוחה על הסף את הצעתו של האחרון לנקום בו במשחק גומלין. מירבל, לטענתו, אדיש מדי להפסדו וזה גם מפחית מן העונג שלו כמנצח. המשפט שהוא אומר במרכז הטיעון שלו הוא מן אפופסמה או
מקסים:
'the coldness of a losing gamester lessens the pleasure of the winner'
למשפטים שחוזרים בצורה מכתמית כזאת על הטיעונים שמקדימים אותם ושבאים בעקבותיהם ביחידת ארגומנטציה בנושא מסויים יש מעמד של דומיננטה סגנונית משני טעמים: הם לא מוסיפים דבר מבחינה של תוכן או מובן, כלומר הם צורה עודפת שיש לה אפקט על השומע ככזו, וכן יש להם מבנה מורכב שממנו ניתן לחלץ את המבניות הדחפית הייחודית למחזה.
יד
המשפטים המכתמיים האלה, כפי שאני מראה, הם אנתיממות, מה שאריסטו באמנות הרטוריקה
שלו מגדיר כ'צורה רטורית של דמונסטרציה'. לאנתיממות שאני מאתרת במחזה של קונגריב יש מימד לוגי: הן מבנים סילוגיסטיים קטגוריים מן הסוג של הפיגורה הראשונה, כלומר הסילוגיזם המושלם שאינו דורש כל תוספת או היפוך. בנוסף, האנתיממות מאורגנות במבנים סינטקטיים שמסיטים את הקטגוריה הנושאית של המשפט ויוצרים סוכנות לא מוגדרת. בו זמנית הן מהוות מבנה רטורי, כמו למשל האפופסמה. האנתיממה במחזה היא לפיכך מבנה מורכב שנע בין שלושת האמנויות או התחומים שרטוריקנים קלסיים ושל הרנסנס שמרו בנפרדותם: הלוגיקה, הדקדוק והרטוריקה. ההבחנה הקלסית והרנסנסית הזאת, אני טוענת, מהדהדת בכתביו של פרויד, כמו
למשל בפרוייקטשלו, בספרו בדיחות והקשר שלהן ללא מודע ובאופן שהוא מנתח את הפנטזמה הפרוורטית במאמרו "מכים ילד". הבחנה זו היא גם פרודוקטיבית להבנת ההקשר המבני של האנתיממה עם הפנטזמה הפרוורטית. הטענה המרכזית שלי ביחס לאנתיממות במחזה של קונגריב היא שיש להם איזומורפיות מבנית עם הפנזמה המזוכיסטית כפי שהיא מתכוננת בארטיקולציה הסגורה: "מכים ילד". לקאן בסמינר ה – 41 שלו הלוגיקה של הפנטזמה בונה את הלוגיקה של הפנטזמה מן הסינטגמה הזאת שהוא מזהה כמבנה בטהרתו, מבנה שחושף את מעמדו המיוחד של הסובייקט ביחס להוויה
הדחפית שאינו יכול לחשוב. למרות שאת השילוב של הסובייקט עם הווייתו הדחפית בפנטזמה לקאן מבנה באמצעים לוגיים )לקאן משתמש בחוקים של דה מורגן(, מבנה עבורו הוא אפקט של שפה וככזה הוא דקדוק. המעמד הלוגי של הסובייקט של הדחף הסאדו-מזוכיסטי הוא במונחיו של לקאן דקדוקי, אך שלא כמו אצל פרויד אין הדקדוק הזה אומר אנליזה דקדוקית של המבנה
"מכים ילד". רק כמבנה סגור "מכים ילד" מהווה מה שלקאן מכנה ה Es או האיד, הגילום של
האני לא חושב שהוא הסובייקט ביחס להווייתו הפרוורטית. המבנה הזה כסגור מעלה את ההוויה שלא ניתן לחשוב, כמושללת )אני לא(.
האנתיממה המכתמית מזכירה את הסגירות המבנית של ה Es של הדקדוק, אבל בעיקרה
היא מבנה מורכב, תוצר של טכניקה כמו הבדיחה כפי שפרויד מנתח אותה. אני מראה אם כן שהאנתיממה מכוננת את המבנה הפנטזמטי דוקא על דרך הרטוריקה, על ידי האופן שבו המבנה שלה, כמו שנראה בטקסט של קונגריב, הוא נקודה שבה הדקדוק מתערב במבנה הסילוגיסטי כך
שבו בעת מתקיימת החסרה של term לוגי והסתה של הקטגוריה הנושאית – מעין שלילה כפולה
כמו לקאן קורא במבנה הסגור "מכים ילד". האנתיממה כמבנה רטורי מכוננת כך הוויה מושללת, מה שבניתוח של פרויד את המשפט האניגמטי של מטופליו עולה כהבנייה באנליזה, היות הילד
טו
המוכה בצורה הסדיסטית המודעת של "מכים ילד" לא אחר מאשר המפנטז עצמו, "אני מוכה על
ידי אבי".
לאנתיממה יש פונקציה כפולה במחזה: היא בעצמה Es, שלקאן רואה כמבנה כאפקט של
שפה, כמשלים לוגי של אי ההוויה של הלא מודע, וכגוף זר שבו מתמקמת ההתענגות לאחר שעברה
ניכור תחת המסמן, כלומר כשווה ערך לאובייקט a . האנתיממה היא Es ביחס לטקסט בכללו
בדיוק כמייצגת של הפונקציה הפואטית, או של הטכניקה הפואטית. והאנתיממה בנוייה כשלילה כפולה, דרך היחס בין המבנה הדקדוקי שהיא מבליטה למבנה הלוגי הכמותי שבבסיסה, ובכך היא מכוננת מבנית את אותה הוויה מושללת שהיא חיונית להבנת הפנטזמה, או מה שהסובייקט סובל
ממנו בחשיבה. ברמה המסמנית של המחזה נראה שקיימת תימה מרכזית שהיא העונג. ואילו במישור היחסים בין שני האיטריגרים - המישור הדמיוני במונחים של לקאן - נראה את התמונה הסאדו-מזוכיסטית בשאלה של מי הוא המרמה ומי המרומה. למזוכיסט דרך לגנוב התענגות דוקא
מן המקום הפחות של השארית האליינטיבית של השלם או האחד של המין, כלומר בכיוון הופכי לסרוס, כפי שלקאן מסביר בלוגיקה של הפנטזמה. אפשר לומר שבכל מחזה מתרחש היפוך בין האינטריגר לקורבנו. האינטריגר הסדיסט הופך בלא ידיעתו לאובייקט עונג מזוכיסטי לקורבנו. אבל בנוסף, כפי שרואים במחזה של קונגריב, הוא גם ממוקם במקום השאריתי והזר הזה שממנו
המזוכיסט מתענג. כך מירבל הוא הן הלא מענג שמעורר את פיינאול, והן מוביל אינטריגה בתוך עולם המחזה שאת הנוסחה שלה הוא שואל מן הדרמה של בן ג'ונסון, ובמובן זה היא מעין שארית תיאטרלית. גם האינטריגה המוצלחת של מירבל עומדת על ביטוי שגור "דרכו של עולם" - ביטוי שגור וסגור דיו כדי לכונן רגע מזוכיסטי שהוא אך ורק הבנייה, כפי שאומר פרויד על הפאזה "אני מוכה על ידי אבי" בפנטזמה "מכים ילד". האנתיממה היא, אם כך, המבנה הפרטיקולרי שמזהה על דרך הטכניקה הרטורית את אותו קיפול של רובד מזוכיסטי רגרסיבי שהוא מהותי לפנטזמה כמו גם לאינטריגה במחזה.
הקומדיה השניה שאני בוחנת היא קומדיה מוקדמת יותר של קונגריב, -The Double
Dealer. קונגריב מעיד באגרת ההקדשה שלו שקומדיה זו מעוצבת היטב ובכל זאת יש בה פגם,
העובדה הלא קונבנציונלית שגיבור הקומדיה הוא המרומה על ידי הנוכל. קונגריב מצדיק את עצמו על ידי דקויות כמו העובדה שלא כל מי שמרומה הוא בהכרח טיפש, אבל למעשה סוג של טשטוש הבחנות מאפיין הן את המוטו של המחזה והן את האסטרטגיה של הנוכל. המוטו של המחזה מתייחס לאפשרות שקומדיה 'תרים קולה' כמו טרגדיה וגם לקומדיה של טרנטיוס שהאינטריגר
טז
שלה מרמה על דרך אמירת האמת לאמיתה. בקומדיה זו כמו באחרונה ההקדשה מעלה תהיות
לגבי שלמות העיצוב וביחד עם המוטו שמה בשאלה את מה שהוא מהותי לסדר הסימבולי: ההבדלים שמאפשרים יצירת מובן. השאלה הזו ממשיכה להדהד גם בקומדיה עצמה ביחוד דרך
האסטרטגיה של הנוכל ששמו הוא Maskwell, שמצליח להסוות היטב את תכניותיו על ידי כך
שהוא חושף אותן בפני קרבנותיו, וגם דרך המונולוגים שלו שבהם, כפי שקונגריב אומר, הקהל הוא צופה נסתר. בדבריו של הנוכל, שנאמר עליו שהוא 'נבל חושב', מתגלה הדומיננטה הסגנונית של
המחזה, הטיעון הכוזב או ה fallacy. למשל, הנוכל מעיד על נאמנותו לבעלת בריתו, אותה הוא
משרת לכאורה נגד הגיבור, בטיעון שאהבתה הנסתרת לגיבור נתגלתה לו מהר מאוד:
An Argument that I Lov'd; for with that Art you veil'd your Passion, 'twas imperceptible to all but Jealous Eyes (Act I, Scene VI).
הטיעון כוזב במובן זה שמאהב קנאי עשוי אמנם לגלות את אהבתה הנסתרת של אהובתו למישהו אחר, אך לא כל גילוי כזה הוא אכן עדות לאהבתו.
אריסטו דן בטיעון הכוזב בספרו On Sophistical Refutaions. מדובר בטיעונים שהם
לוגיים לכאורה או בטיעון שסותר למראית עין בלבד את הנאמר. הטיעון הכוזב, אני טוענת, הוא הדומיננטה הסגנונית של המחזה מהיותו המבנה שמרכז את מה שעומד בשאלה במחזה: גורלותיו
של המסמן. מן הפונקציה הזאת של הטיעון הכוזב נפתח גם מישור התייחסות אחר אל הניבלות או
אל הפונקציה של ה villain שהטרידה את הביקורת על המחזה. דרך הטיעון הכוזב הניבלות חדלה
להיות רק משהו ששייך לרובד המודע של ההתרחשויות והופכת להיות מן הסדר של הלא מודע. אלא שלא מדובר בדומיננטה זו בלבד. בנוסף לטיעון הכוזב נראה דומיננטה סגנונית אחרת שהיא רטורית במהותה: אליטרציה. שפת המחזה משופעת בתבניות צליליות חוזרות שנראות אקראיות
לגמרי, למשל שם המחזה, או שילובים כמו: Recesses of my Soul
Mellefont, married to Morrow
באחת מאינטריגות המשנה במחזה הגברת הבוגדת בבעלה היא גם חובבת העשייה הפואטית והשם
שהיא נותנת לפואמה ההרואית שלה הוא Sillabub, מילה שהצליל שלה מטעה לחשוב שהיא חסרת
מובן. למעשה באותה עת שהמילה היא בעלת מובן ומרכזת משחק מילים שלם בנושא החלב והקצף, היא מרכזת גם את מסת הצליליות של משחק המילים הספציפי הזה כמו גם של המחזה
בכללו, והופכת למעין S1, או המסמן הראשון של המחזה. יתרה מזו, הגברת הפואטית ביחד עם
יז
מאהבה ושותפה-לרגע בעשייה הפואטית מנסים להזכר בשמה של אשה מסויימת כדמות בשירם
המשותף אך אינם מצליחים בכך וסוברים בסופו של דבר ששמה הוא Phillis, שם שנשכח או
שמעולם לא היה, שהצליליות שלו תואמת שוב את הפונמות השולטות בשפת המחזה. את הדומיננטה הלוגית של הטיעון הכוזב, אני טוענת, יש לראות ביחס לדומיננטה הרטורית של האליטרציה. ברמת הסגנון מקיימת הקומדיה מהלך לוגי שבו הניבלות ברמת העלילה הופכת מהתנהלות מודעת ויודעת כל, להתנהלות בלתי מודעת שבבסיסה עומדת הדחקה. במאמר שלו "פסיכואנליזה ועדות משפטית" אומר פרויד שלפושע כמו להיסטרי יש סוד, אלא שהפושע יודע על סודו, ואילו ההיסטרי אינו מודע לסודו בשל פעולת ההדחקה. ברמת הסגנון מתנהל לטענתי
מהלך כזה בכיוון ההדחקה והסימפטום. הנוכל מצד אחד מתנהל כמי שיודע היטב מה הוא עושה. מצד שני האסטרטגיה הספציפית שלו היא של שקר באמצעות האמת. הטיעון הכוזב, שבמושגיו של אריסטו אינו זהה עם שקר אלא מראה רק עבירה על חוקי הטיעוניות התקינה, חובר במחזה לאסטרטגיית הפעולה של הנוכל. אבל במונחים פסיכואנליטיים השקר כאמת הוא האופן שבו נזהה את הסובייקט של המסמן, הסובייקט כנתון לשיסוע המסמני. הנוכל בעת ובעונה אחת מקיים את סודו של הפושע, או את מה שמתנגד לשיסוע המסמני ולסרוס, ומצד שני מצביע על כפיפותו של הסובייקט לשיסוע הזה. על דרך המבנים הסגנוניים המחזה מוביל להפיכת סודו של הפושע, או
ההתנגדות הפרוורטית לסרוס, לסודו של ההיסטרי. מה שבטיעון הכוזב מרפרר אל המסמן כמאפשר מובן וכחותר תחת האפשרות הזאת )הבסיס לטיעון הכוזב אליבא דאריסטו(, מה שבטיעון הכוזב פועל עם השקר מצד אחד אבל גם עם האמת כהתענגות האחרת שמעבר למסמן מצד שני, במילים אחרות, מה שבטיעון מסרב לחתך של הסרוס, עובר ניכור באמצעות האליטרציה שמהדהדת בשם הנשכח ובשם בעל הצליל הנונסנסיקאלי "סילאבוב". ניכור כזה מאפשר לפרוורסיה למצוא את מקומה בסימפטום ההיסטרי, כפי שאומר פרויד ב"שלוש מסות על התאוריה של המיניות": תכני הפנטזיות המודעות של פרוורטים והפנטזיות הלא מודעות של היסטריים, שהפסיכואנליזה מגלה מאחורי הסימפטומים שלהם, תואמים זה לזה עד לפרטיהם.
במהלך הסגנוני של הפיכת הניבלות המודעת והפרוורסיה של הסמלי להדחקה ולסימפטום ההיסטריים מתרחשים שני דברים נוספים. ראשית, האינטריגה ככזו מוצבת כסימבול המודחק ביחס לטיעונים הכוזבים שפועלים בשרותה. האינטריגה במובן זה היא כמו המסמן הראשון שמכתיב את ההתייצבות הסובייקטיבית לפני כל ידע וודאי, כפי שלקאן מראה במאמר שלו "הזמן
הלוגי וביטוייה של וודאות נצפית מראש" )Ecrits(, וכפי שפרויד מסביר את היחס בין הסימבול
המודחק לכוזבות הלוגית בבסיס הסימפטום במקרה של אמה בפרוייקט. ושנית, ההתייחסות
יח
המטפורית לנבל במחזה מקבלת מימד אחר, שמעיד על הפונקציה המזוכיסטית של האינטריגר
ושמחזיר לטיעון הכוזב את חשיבותו כמייצג של הסובייקט של המסמן ושל החוק. בסוף המחזה, אביו של הגיבור משווה בגידה או תרמית לצפעונים ברחם שממיתים את מולידם. מעמדו המזוכיסטי של הנבל מתחיל ממעמדה הבלתי אפשרי של האינטריגה כסימבול מודחק. האינטריגר שפועל כיודע הכל על קורבנו, שכופה עצמו כמו הסדיסט על תומת הסובייקט שאינו יודע דבר על הווייתו הפרוורטית, מופלל על ידי פעולתו במובן זה שמאמציו הם לשוא, קורבנו תמיד יחמוק ממנו. אבל הכפייה הסדיסטית על הסובייקט פותחת גם את הדרך אל הינתנות הקורבן לכפייה
זו )ואכן גיבור המחזה וקורבנו של Maskwell נקרא Mellefont – מה שמזכיר את מתיקותו, mellifluent, ונעימותו, mellow(. במונחי ההוראה הפרוידיאנית נראה כאן את היחס הארוטי
מזוכיסטי של האגו לאכזריות הסופראגו, כפי שפרויד מסביר ב"הבעייה האקונומית של
המזוכיזם". במונחים של פרויד, הסדיזם של הסופראגו והמזוכיזם של האגו הם אחד. לקאן במאמרו "קאנט עם סאד" מוביל את הכפייה הסדיסטית מטעם החוק אל מה שהיא התשוקה במהותה, העונג בחוק והחרות למות. הנכונות המזוכיסטית של האינטריגר להוליד את קיצו שלו עצמו מראה את אותו הרצון להתענגות של החוק. במובן זה האינטריגר הוא המשרת הטוב ביותר
של הסובייקט הנוירוטי של החוק. הוא מציע לנוירוטי את מודל החרות שעושה תשוקה מודחקת למקום של העונג בחוק: החרות להשתוקק. אפשר לומר אם כן שביחס המורכב בין הטיעון הכוזב לבין האליטרציה בקומדיה של קונגריב נחשף גם משהו שהוא מהותי לאינטריגה בקומדיה. אפשרויות הכזב הלוגי והמסמני נבחנות כדי בסופו של דבר להבטיח את כינונה של הטכניקה הרטורית כמה שיכונן את השיסוע הסובייקטיבי בין התשוקה להתענגות, בין המובן לאי-מובן, בין הידוע לנעלם, כך שסודו של הפושע יהפוך לסודו של ההיסטרי. לאחר הדיון בשתי קומדיות של אינטריגה אני עוברת לדון בשלוש טרגדיות של אינטריגה
שנכתבו על ידי מחזאים בני זמנו של קונגריב. שני דברים בסיסיים מבחינים את הקומדיות מן הטרגדיות: הדומיננטות הסגנוניות ואובייקט הייצוג המרכזי של הטרגדיות. כך נראה שבקומדיות הדומיננטות הסגנוניות הן פיגורות ארגומננטטיביות )הטיעון הסילוגיסטי התקני לעומת הכוזב(, ואילו בטרגדיות הדומיננטות הן פיגורות לשוניות או דקדוקיות. על פי הגדרתו של קווינטיליאנוס,
פיגורות לשוניותת בניגוד ל- tropes, אינן נוגעות לשינוי בסיגניפיקציה אלא לשינוי בצורת הביטוי
הרווחת, הן מהוות סטיה מן הצורות התקניות של השפה. פוטנהם מדגיש שפיגורות נועדו לענג את האזן. בניגוג לפיגורות מחשבה, פיגורות לשוניות אינן טוענות דבר ואינן מייצרות מובן חדש. באשר
יט
לאובייקט הייצוג של הקומדיה של המאה השבע-עשרה המאוחרת, פוג'ימורה למעשה הגדיר אותו
במושג wit כשטען שיש לראות קומדיה זו כ- comedy of wit במקום כ- comedy of manners.
ביחס לטרגדיה, ההגדרה של דריידן את המחזה במאמר שלו על פואזיה דרמטית, וההבחנות שעולות ממאמריו בין הטרגדיה של המודרנים לעומת הטרגדיה הקלאסית מצביעים כולם על
עניינה של הטרגדיה המודרנית ב passions כאובייקט הייצוג המרכזי שלה. הדגש על הדמייה של
רגשות חזקים על כל מגוונם בניגוד להדמייה של פעולה הוא אחד המאפיינים שמבחינים את הדרמה של המודרנים מן הדרמה הקלאסית. אלמנט מבחין נוסף הוא הדגש על הסגנון. לדברי דריידן במאמר שלו "סעיפי מענה לריימר", מה שמעיד על עליונות כשרונם של המודרנים בתחום
הטרגדיה הוא העובדה שהם מצליחים לעורר רגשות רבי עוצמה באמצעות סגנון כמו אלה שהמחזאים הקלאסיים מעוררים באמצעות פעולה. חשיבותו ואופיו של אובייקט הייצוג של הטרגדיה המודרנית כפי שדריידן מגדיר אותו מצד
אחד, ומרכזיות הסגנון מצד שני, מובילים אותי לבחון את האינטריגה בטרגדיה ביחס לשתי קואורדינטות אלה. האפקטים או הרגשות שהטרגדיה מבקשת לייצג ולעורר בצופה, אני טוענת, מחייבות בחינה של האובייקט כפי שהפסיכואנליזה תופסת אותו מכיוון שהן מתקילות אותנו עם סיבת הדחף באופן שהוא שונה מהותית מן השנינה הקומית. האפקטים שהטרגדיה מייצרת ברובד
המסמני, אם ככלי בידיו של האינטריגר להניע את קורבנו למטרותיו או כמשהו שהגיבור הסובל מבטא בדבריו, מקיימים יחס אחר מזה של השנינה עם הרובד הסגנוני ועם האינטריגה. בטרגדיה כמו בקומדיה הרובד הסגנוני הוא הנתיב אל הדחף ואל אובייקט סיבת הדחף. כלומר, הרובד הסגנוני מהווה מניפסטציה של אופן ההתענגות הלא מודע הפרטיקולרי של הכותב, מה שמתנגד למובן. זוהי גם התפיסה הפסיכואנליטית את מה שהוא האובייקט כשמדובר בפירוש כאקט בתחום הממשי. האובייקט כפקעת שאינה ניתנת להתרה, כהתענגות לא מודעת ששום מסמן לא יכול ללכוד באופן מלא, מהווה את גבול הפירוש בו בזמן שהפירוש הכרחי כדי להצביע על אי האפשרות
של האובייקט. לחשוב את האובייקט כסיבה פירושו לפיכך לא לראות אותו כמטרה אינטנציונלית, כפי שמבקרי הטרגדיות והקומדיות שאני דנה בהן נוטים לעשות. האובייקט במונחיו של פרויד אינו קשור לדחף מלכתחילה אלא מיוחס לו בדיעבד כתוצאה מכך שהוא נמצא מתאים לאפשר סיפוק )"דחפים וגורלותיהם"(. האובייקט במובן זה ניתן להבנייה אך לא לפירוש. גם אם בקומדיה דומיננטות סגנוניות חושפות מה שחותר תחת השנינה כמגלמת רציונליות, עדיין אפשר לומר שמהיותן דומיננטות טיעוניות שמקיימות יחס קרוב יותר אל המסמן, הן משמרות מרחק מן האובייקט. יתר על כן, הקומי כפי שפרויד מסביר אותו בבדיחות והקשר שלהן ללא מודע עושה
כ
שימוש באינהיביציה על הטענות אידיאיות כדי לאפשר את קיומו של האפקט הקומי. יש פה ויתור
על האובייקט. לקאן בסמינר החמישי שלו אף מציע שלאינטריגה יש תפקיד בויתור הזה לטובת המשך קיומה של התשוקה. הדיון של לקאן בטרגדיה הקלאסית בסמינר השביעי שלו קושר טרגדיה זו עם מהלכה של התשוקה אל המקום שבו היא משתחררת מכל דיאלקטיקה. מהלך זה מתגלם בדמותה של גיבורה כמו אנטיגונה. לקאן מכנה מהלך זה בשם 'המוות השני': המוות בסדר הסמלי שהגיבור הטראגי מגלם עבורנו על ידי התייצבותו כמת עבור הסדר הזה או כמממש את החסר הטבוע בו. אך באותה עת שהגיבורה מסמנת את האימה שבדבר שהוא מעבר לסדר המסמני, אליו חותרת התשוקה, יופיה
מגן עלינו מן המעבר הזה. בזכות היופי והאפקט של הקתרסיס, האובייקט נשמר כחסר או כמפוגג. לא כך בטרגדיה של המאה השבע-עשרה המאוחרת. עניינה האסטתי של טרגדיה זו שונה מזה של הטרגדיה הקלאסית, כפי שראינו. מטרתה המוצהרת היא לעורר עוצמות רגש בצופה, והאפקטים של הסגנון חשובים למטרה זו יותר מאשר העלילה. תחת האימפרטיב לייצג עוצמות רגש באופן כזה שהצופה יחזיר אותן כרפלקציה של הסערה של הטרגדיה, לידתה של הטרגדיה המודרנית כמו שדריידן ורפן מציגים אותה היא במועקה. יתר על כן, האפקט הדמיוני שלה על הצופה הוא יותר ממה שהיא מבקשת לראות. במילים אחרות, במחוייבות של הטרגדיה לייצג עוצמות רגש היא
מגלה את ה passions of the body, כפי שלקאן הופך את המושג הקרטזיאני passions of the soul במאמרו על הסיבה הפסיכית.
הטרגדיה של המאה השבע-עשרה המאוחרת מייצרת עודפות התענגותית שאינה מתפוגגת. אפשר לומר שאובייקט הייצוג של טרגדיה זו וההעדפה שלה את הסגנון מייצרים אפקט של עודפות שלא מאפשר התמקמות )של הגיבור כמו גם של הצופה( באחר על דרך של הפחתה או נגציה של הוויה כמו שראינו בקומדיות של קונגריב. הסיבה האוטו-ארוטית של הדחף, אני טוענת, אינה תחת מחיקה בטרגדיה של המאה השבע-עשרה המאוחרת. לפיכך, טרגדיה זו שלידתה במועקה תחת
אימננטיות האחר שעליה להניע, מייצרת אפקט של מועקה. דרך העודפות הרגשית מתגלה משהו אחר: ליבידו בהקשרו המאוחר בחשיבה הפרוידיאנית, כלומר כנמצא בחפיפה מתמדת עם דחף מוות. אופייה המיוחד של הטרגדיה של המאה השבע-עשרה המאוחרת מוביל אותי לטעון שיש לבחון אותה, ואת האינטריגה בתוכה, כעונה יותר על האסתטיקה של המועקה, אם להשתמש בכותרת ספרה של רות רונן בנושא זה, מאשר על האתיקה של התשוקה כפי שמכוננת אותה הטרגדיה הקלאסית. לפיכך בדיון שלי בטרגדיות, אני מתייחסת למאמרים של פרויד על המועקה- חרדה ולסמינר העשירי של לקאן על המועקה.
כא
באמצעות הפאתוס שלה ברמה המסמנית מאפשרת הטרגדיה התקלות עם אובייקט
התענגות כשארית בלתי מתפוגגת שנוגעת לגוף הסובל עצמו. שארית זו מתגלמת במבנים הדומיננטיים של הסגנון בכל מחזה ומחזה. מבנים אלה הם מניפסטציות אובייקטליות של השארית הליבידינלית, השארית הדחפית עצמה, של האָפקטיביות כתוצר מסמני. כך, בכל מחזה מתגלם דרך מבני הסגנון אובייקט ספציפי, כמו העין הספוגה במבט, הקול, והאובייקט האנאלי עצמו. גילומים סיגנוניים של השארית הדחפית, כפי שאני מראה, בה בעת שהם מרוקנים את העודפות האָפקטיבית מייצרים כשלעצמם אפקט של מועקה, בדיוק בשל האובייקטליות שלהם. אפשר לומר שהאָפקט של המועקה לא רק מבטיח לטרגדיה את הדאגה והמעורבות הרגשית הבלתי
מרמה של הצופה, אלא גם מאפשר לה להבליט את הסגנון כמלאכותיות הדרושה לייצג את הטבעי, כדברי דריידן. לאובייקט הייצוג )אָפקטיביות( מצד אחד ולסגנון מצד שני יש אימפליקציות ביחס לפונקציה של האינטריגה בטרגדיות. האינטריגה נמדדת כיחס בין האָפקטים )התוכן המסמני( והסגנון )פיגורות דקדודיות(. בטרגדיות אנו נדרשים באופן בולט יותר להבחנה של פרויד בין התוכן הנראה לעבודת החלום כמה שמתרגם תוכן זה למחשבת החלום. יחס האינטריגה לאובייקט הייצוג של הטרגדיה ולסגנונה קובע את טיבה. בדומה לסגנון, אני טוענת, האינטריגה מרוקנת את
העודפות האָפקטיבית באופן כזה שנמצא בה, כמו במבני הסגנון הדומיננטיים, את השארית הדחפית עצמה של האָפקטיביות. במובן זה, האינטריגה בטרגדיות שאני בוחנת היא לא רק מיזנסצינה של הפנטזמה הסאדו-מזוכיסטית. הפסיביות והאקטיביות של הגבורים הופכת מרכיב עלילתי שקובע במידה רבה את התקדמות האינטריגה. באופן דומה, גם האניגמה של מניעי האינטריגר, שהגילום האולטימטיבי שלה הוא יאגו השייקספירי בשתיקתו, מקבלת מענה אחר בטרגדיות כאן. שלא כמו בקומדיות, האינטריגר אינו מסולק. הוא נוכח כמו האובייקט מעורר המועקה עצמו, והוא עושה זאת כמגלם הסיבה המזוכיסטית. האינטריגר מייצג כך את הסובייקט
של הליבידו שהטרגדיה של המאה השבע-עשרה המאוחרת מכוננת. לסובייקט הזה אין מוות שני –
הדרך היחידה שלו אל מחוץ לסדר המסמני היא על ידי תשלום בליטרת בשר, כפי שאומר לקאן על האובייקט האובייקטלי, האובייקט שנחתך על ידי המכונה הלוגית ונותן סובסטנציה למה שהיא הסיבה. האינטריגר אינו מסולק אלא על ידי מוות אחד.
הראשונה מבין הטרגדיות שאני בוחנת היא Caesar Borgia של נתניאל לי. לטרגדיה זו
חשיבות כפולה להבנת האינטריגה בטרגדיה כקשורה באובייקט מעורר מועקה: בולטת בה הפונקציה של האינטריגר, מקיאוול, כחבר לגיבור, הנסיך בורג'ה, והפיגורות הסגנוניות
כב
הדומיננטיות שלה הן שרשרות חיתוך כמו הברכילוגיה, מבני חיתוך שאין להם כל פונקציה
מיטונימית. מבני החיתוך קושרים לטענתי את הטרגדיה הזאת עם פנטזיית סרוס, שהחזרה שלה
ברשמים שונים מייצרת אפקט של uncanniness, כפי שהוא מוגדר על ידי פרויד במאמרו על
המאוים. מבני החיתוך מתרגמים את התוכן הנראה של היחסים בין האינטריגר לקורבנו/חברו לפרוקו של הגוף המיוסר בלהט האפקטים לאיבריו הבלתי ניתנים לצמצום. דרך מבני הסגנון הסיבה המזוכיסטית של האינטריגה מתגלמת בפרוק למה שהוא בלתי פריק. האינטריגר עצמו מקבל אף הוא מעמד של בלתי פריק ביחס לפרוק גופו המורעל של נסיכו בורג'ה. ברמת העלילה נראה שהאינטריגר מקיאוול חולק עם נסיכו אינטרס פוליטי ומעוניין
בהבטחת יכולתו לשלוט. לפונקצית החבר יש חשיבות כי למעשה מקיאוול מביא את בורג'ה אל חורבנו. החברות, אם כך, מתכוננת באופן שונה: במעורבות של מקיאוול עם השליט שהוא מבקש ליצור. נראה זאת באופן שבו מקיאוול מניע את בורג'ה למצב אפקטיבי של זעם צרוף תוך שהוא מסיט אותו מנתיב האהבה, כדי להבטיח כך שנסיכו יעדיף תהילת שליטים על פני חולשת אוהבים. אבל בתהליך הזה שבו הוא מענה את בורג'ה על ידי כך שהוא מעורר בו רגשות עזים לתכלית זיכוכם, הוא גם נתבע על ידי בורג'ה להוסיף ולעורר עוצמות רגש כאלה. מקיאוול הוא משרתו של בורג'ה במובן זה. למחזה הזה באופן בולט אין כל מוטו, אבל האלוזיות הבין-טקסטואליות שלו
נפרשות בתמונה שמקיאוול משרטט בתחילת המחזה, כשהוא מציג לצופה את תכניתו להרוס את כל מי שיעמוד בדרכו להגשמת תכניותיו לגבי בורג'ה. מקיאוול מרפרר לדמויות שראה בתמונות של אמנים, כמו הירו ודידו. "הירו וליאנדר", הן בגרסה הקלאסית של מוסיאוס והן בגירסתם של מרלו וצ'פמן, מהווה תימה מרכזית במחזה: מקיאוול בדומה לנפטון עומד בדרכו של בורג'ה אל אהובתו. אבל תמונת תכניותיו של מקיאוול לא מוסרת בדיוק את אופן פעולתו וגם מטעה ביחס לסופה של הגיבורה )הירו ודידו שמו קץ לחייהן, בלמירה נרצחת על ידי בורג'ה כתוצאה מן המניפולציות של מקיאוול(. התמונה הפותחת נשארת במידה רבה חתוכה מן התוכן של האינטריגה שהיא אמורה
לפרוס, אך היא קובעת את אופיו של החלל שבו האינטריגה מתנהלת. הטאבלו של מקיאוול פותח שדה ויזואלי שחוברים בו מרכיבי תוכן, מסמנים ומבני סגנון ששומרים על פרידותם, הן בעצם המבנה שלהם והן אחד ביחס לשני. מסמן פריבילגי כזה שחוזר ומופיע הוא ה'עין'. תדירות הופעתה של העין בשרשרות מסמנים שונות ובהקשרים שונים, שלא לדבר על העובדה שעיניו של בנו של בורג'ה נעקרות והוא מזכיר בסוף שאביו נהג לכנותו "עינים קטנות", דוקא תורם לכך שהעין החוזרת ונשנית איננה אורגן ראייה, ביחוד אם נזכרים באופן שבו עיניו של ליאנדר רואות כל הזמן
כג
את אורה של הירו בדרכו אליה. העין במחזהו של לי הופכת אובייקט שחתוך מן הפונקציה
האנטומית כמו גם המטפורית שלו ככלי קיבול. זאת עין שאינה רואה, עין שבמונחיו של פרויד ב"הפרעה פסיכוגנית של ראיה" עיוורת מהיותה כולה ברשות דחף מיני מודחק. מבני הסגנון הדומיננטיים מאופיינים צורנית בחתך שאינו מסמני. אלה הן הפיגורות של סוגריים, אסינדטון, פוליסינדטון וביחוד ברכילוגיה, שפוטנהם מכנה 'פסיק חתוך'. הדוגמה הפרדיגמטית של ברכילוגיה כתליית איברים חתוכים בשרשרת, כך שאפשרות נפילתם נראית כל הזמן, היא החזרה הגרגרנית על שמה של הגיבורה על ידי הקרדינל שעורג אליה:
'Ah, Bella, Bella, Bella, Bella, Bellamira!'
שינוי מספר הפריטים, למשל, לא ישנה את משחק המילים על שמה. החזרתיות מדגישה לעומת זה את אופן קשירתם על ידי פסיקים חותכים. למבנים החתוכים, כמו גם לעין יש קשר עם פנטזיית סרוס שפרויד מדבר עליה בהקשר של
ה"מאוים" ביחס לסיפור "איש החול" . ההחיאה של קומפלקס הסרוס הילדי ברושם מסויים
מספיקה כדי לעורר תחושת מאוימות. במישור המסמני של המחזה אכן נוצרת אפשרות ליצירת אפקט כזה על ידי הפונקציה המטפורית של מקיאוול כגוזל את עיניו של בורג'ה. אך חשיבות הפונקציה המסמנית כאן היא ביחוד בכך שהיא באמת לא מייצרת אפקט כזה. אפקט המאוים
שמתעורר בצופה אל מול יצירת אמנות היא כאן תוצר של הסגנון, של האופן בו האיברים הסגנוניים והמסמניים נשארים בפרידותם הלא הרמונית. עם זאת, אותו מבנה דומיננטי של חיתוך מאפשר קשירה של היחסים הסאדו-מזוכיסטיים בין מקיאוול ובורג'ה דרך מימד אחר של המועקה-חרדה, הקשר המעגלי שלה לדחף )פרויד, "אינהיביציות, סימפטומים, מועקה", והרצאה 23 מתוך הרצאות המבוא החדשות לפסיכואנליזה(. באמצעות סיגנל החרדה-מועקה האגו מתגונן נגד כפיית החזרה של הדחף תוך כדי שהוא שב ומכונן בצורה מוחלשת את הטראומה של אותה פריצה דחפית עצמה אל גבולותיו. הטראומטיות הדחפית מתגלמת בקזורה של הלידה. והיא
קשורה באותו אופן גם באופיו המזוכיסטי של הדחף, את היותו דחף מוות שחוזר ומשתחזר בכל פריצה של חיים אל האינאורגניות שאליה הוא חותר לחזור. מבני הסגנון החתוכים אם כן הם המישור שבו הקשר של עודפות אפקטיבית עם הגוף הליבידינלי מתגלם. זה הגוף שנוצר בנקודה שבה חייו מתגלמים כדחף אל מותו. כך בורג'ה המיוסר שותה בטעות רעל שהכין לאורחיו וכמו מתפרק לאיבריו. ואילו דבריו של האינטריגר בסוף מותירים אותו בנתיקותו, כמה שמצביע על הטראומה הדחפית עצמה כמקום האחר של ההתענגות, התענגות שבמונחי הסובייקט של הליבידו היא הרס עצמו.
כד
הטרגדיה השנייה שאני דנה בה היא פרי עבודתם המשותפת של נתניאל לי וג'ון דריידן,
The Duke of Guise. שמה של הטרגדיה מעיד על הקשרה ההסטורי-פוליטי, וכפי שדריידן מצהיר
בהגנה שלו על המחזה, הרקע הפוליטי של צרפת של תקופת מלחמות הדת )מאה שש-עשרה( מהווה הקבלה למאבקים האנטי-קתוליים באנגליה של המלך צ'ארלס השני )שנות השמונים של המאה השבע-עשרה(. אבל בצד הקבלה הסטורית מוצהרת, המחזה מייצר הקבלה מבנית בין גיז המורד שחותר תחת המלך אנרי למלך שמאויים על ידו. במובן זה המרד הפוליטי מקבל אופי של אינטריגת חצר. אותם יחסים מורכבים שראינו בין מקיאוול לבורג'ה, שהאינטריגה בהגדרה מייצרת, מתקיימים גם בטרגדיה של דריידן ולי. המוטו של המחזה, ציטטה של פלוטרכוס על אגיסלאוס ועל
אהוב נעוריו ואוייבו ליסנדר, גם היא מכינה לאופן שבו האינטריגר וקורבנו מופללים איש על ידי רעהו. אלא שבשונה מסזאר בורג'ה האימפליקציה של האינטריגנט בקורבנו נבנית באופן כזה
שהרובד המסמני והדומיננטיות הסגנוניות חוברים יחדיו בדרך של הרמוניזציה ליצירת vacuole ,
אותה שלפוחית של לכידת התענגות בשדה של האחר של המסמנים ושל החוק. החוק המלכותי הוא אכן לב העניין של המחזה, הן במובן של הפרתו והן במובן של כינונו.
וכינון החוק הזה קשור במישרין בעלילה על חייו של המלך )כפי שאומרת המלכה-האם – It is a plot directly on your person ( שהיא גם האינטריגה במחזה. כינונו המתעכב של החוק שישים
קץ לעלילה על חיי המלך הוא גם האופן שבו האינטריגה מייצרת התעכבות על עלילה זו עצמה ועל הגוף הסובל תחתיה. בליבה של שלפוחית לכידת ההתענגות אם כן עומד הצו החסר, הצו המלכותי שמעוכב עד סוף המחזה, ושהרובד הסגנוני מכונן כאובייקט קול, אובייקט שלקאן בסמינרים העשירי והשישה עשר שלו קושר עם האינקורפורציה של הסופראגו ועם אופן התקיימות הדחף
הסדיסטי מזוכיסטי באחר. הדומיננטות הסגנוניות הן בעיקרן צורות של omission או השמטה,
כמו האליפסיס, הסילפסיס ואני מראה שגם מבני השאלה והציטוט במחזה הם מבני החסרה. על דרך מבני ההחסרה הסגנוניים, מבנים שאני רואה כאינבוקטוריים, העלילה על חיי המלך מתקפלת
טופולוגית על עצמה כדי לייצר בו זמנית את הגוף הסובל ואת הצו החסר שיביא את קיצו, כמו גם את המועקה שמצביעה על נוכחות/העדרות כפולה זו. ברמת העלילה נראה שהמרד של גיז מצטייר כהתקדמות חתרנית אל המלך. נאמר על גיז שהוא אורב בפאתי פריס, ונוכחותו האורבת מעוררת בתחילה תגובת חרדה מצד המלך. בטרגדיה זו חרדה-מועקה מתעוררת במלך עצמו מן האימפוזיציה של נוכחותו ושל התקדמותו המאיימים של גיז. אך במצב העניינים המוזר שנוצר בין הדוכס המורד למלך המלך נשאר בחיים ואינו עושה
כה
דבר נגד גיז. עד סוף המחזה המלך מקבל באופן פסיבי את השתלטותו של גיז על הרחוב הפריסאי
ובאקט החמישי אף נאמר לנו שהוא מקיים יחסי ידידות עם המורד שמסכן את שלטונו בלא לפגוע בחייו. אפשר לומר אם כן שברמת העלילה המועקה של המלך ממשיכה להתקיים כמוחסרת, בלבוש תיאטרלי של קבלה-לכאורה. זו מועקה בטהרתה כציפיה שבה הבלתי נודע עולה כנורא מכל. אלא שבקבלת הדין הפסיבית של המלך קיים מימד אקטיבי. הוא חניך העורמה המקיאווליסטית ובעידודה של המלכה-האם מחכה לשעת כושר לחתוך, כדבריו, את האיבר הגנגרני שגיז, ובאופן מטפורי גם העלילה במובנה הכפול, מהווים על גופו. ברמת הסגנון נראה שהמבנים הדומיננטיים הם מבני האליפסיס, מבנה שפוטנהם מכנה
אוריקולרי, וכן השאלה והציטוט. דוגמה למבנה אליפטי במחזה היא
'Shall I fight him?/If he provokes me, strike him?'
בעוד שאליפסיס הוא צורה של החסרה שכמו שפוטנהם אומר ניתנת להשלמה על ידי הבנה,
השאלה והציטוט במחזה אינם צורות החסרה שפוגעות במובן. שני אלה פועלים כשיבוש הפונקציה הפאטית או התקשורתית היות שהשאלה אינה בדיוק שאלה, ואילו הציטוט מייצר ערבוביה באותו
מימד בסיטואצית הציטוט שמאיר שטרנברג במאמרו "Proteus in Quotation Land" מזהה כפונה
אל הקורא. קשה להבחין מצטט ממצוטט או להבחין בין מצוטט אחד לאחר. טענתי היא שמבני
הפיגורות של שאלה, מימזיס של הדיבור ואליפסיס מכוננים אובייקט קול, אובייקט שמופיע כדברי לקאן בסמינר העשירי כהחסרה במימד הפאטי של השפה, כלומר במישור ההתייחסות הלא ספקולרית של הסובייקט אל האחר. בניגוד לאובייקט המבט אין אובייקט הקול תלוי בגשטלט ויזואלי שמאפשר את הופעתו. הוא אובייקט שמופיע בנפרד באחר, במימד הקורפורלי של כל ארטיקולציה מסמנית כמה שנפרד מן האופוזיציות הפונמיות שמאפשרות יצירת מובן. על אובייקט הקול, שלקאן מוסיף ביחד עם המבט לאובייקטים שפרויד דן בהם, לקאן אומר שהוא קשור במהותו לרצח האב הקדמון ולכינונו של הצו שמעיד שוב ושוב על החסר הפרמורדיאלי בתשוקת
האחר, כמו גם על האין שעומד בלב האחר כערובה לצו הזה. אותו אין או זרות של הצו מתגלמים בסופראגו שלקאן רואה כמבטא צורה אחרת של הזדהות הסובייקט עם האחר, צורה שאינה ספקולרית אלא של אינקופורציה. הסופראגו כמה שמבוטא כאובייקט הקול הוא גוף זר שהסובייקט מכניס אל חללו, הוא קשור לגמרי בסובייקט אבל גם זר וחיצוני לו כשייך לאחר של החוק שהוא גם האחר של התשוקה. המימד הפרוורטי של הקול כצורה של אינקורפורציה מובילה את לקאן בסמינר ה41- לקשור את הקול עם המזוכיסט ועם הסדיסט, עמדות פרוורטיות במובן זה שהן צורות של השלמת החסר של האובייקט באחר. המזוכיסט גונב התענגות על ידי כך שבשתיקתו
כו
הוא מחזיר לאחר את הפונקציה של הקול, ביחוד כאשר האחר מוחלש. הסדיסט לעומת זאת כופה
את הקול על האחר שמקבל את הדין, אך ההתענגות איננה שם. אובייקט הקול כפי שהוא מתגלם דרך הפיגורות הסגנוניות אינו דומה לשיר שמושר במחזה בתוך עלילת משנה, מעט לפני שהשטן בא לקחת את נשמתו של אחד מאנשיו של גיז. אובייקט הקול אינו מודולרי כי אם מהובר, לקאן אומר. השיר הוא כמו שארית של מה שמוחסר ברמה אחרת. אני קושרת את אובייקט הקול שמתגלם ברמת הסגנון עם הפסיביות של המלך, פסיביות כפי שפרויד דן בה ב"דחפים וגורלותיהם", והצו המעוכב שפסיביות זו מכוננת. המועקה שהאימפוזיציה של האינטריגר על חיי המלך מעוררת מקבלת את אופייה האובייקטלי במבני
הסגנון הדומיננטיים. הקול כצו שלא מופיע היכן שיש ציפייה להופעתו, הצו שיפריד את האימפוזיציה של המורד על חיי המלך וימצה את העלילה על/של הגוף - המימד הזה של הקול עולה דרך מבני הסגנון באותה עת שהפסיביות מחזיקה את אותו גוף עצמו, על דרך גורלו הפסיבי של הדחף. בתמונה הזאת הפונקציה הסדיסטית של גיז מתחלפת. הוא, כמו המזוכיסט, מחזיר למלך את הפונקציה של הקול. המלך פועל בסופו של דבר ומחזיר לעצמו את מעמדו כמלך צרפת לאחר שגיז נופל לרשתו ומומת באכזריות. הקול כפונקציה מעיקה של האין של האחר ממשיך אבל להדהד גם בדברי המלך בסוף המחזה, על דרך פסיק חסר שמשאיר אי בהירות ביחס לאופן הנגנת
דבריו. אך באותו אופן עצמו, מסת סימני הפיסוק של המחזה משמרת את המימד הקורפורלי של העלילה על/של הגוף על ידי צמצומה לכלל סימן הפיסוק החסר.
הטרגדיה האחרונה שאני דנה בה היא The Ambitious Step-Mother של ניקולס רוו.
טרגדיה זו מהווה סיום הולם לדיון שלי באינטריגה כי היא מגלמת באופן מובהק יותר מכל מחזה אחר כאן את קריסתה של האינטריגה אל המישור הלינגוויסטי שמכונן את האובייקט שלה כסיבה. את הסיבה הזאת אני רואה כאובייקט האנלי, האובייקט הנתיק האולטימטיבי. נתיקותו של האובייקט האנלי עושה אותו עבור לקאן למייצג הטבעי ביותר של מה שהיא הסיבה: ליטרת בשר שנותנת סובסטנציה גופנית לסיבה כנחתכת מן הסובייקט על ידי המכונה הפורמלית של השפה.
ליטרת בשר שהמכונה המסמנית אינה יכולה לשלב או לצמצם או לסלק. צמד האינטריגרים במחזה, כפי שנראה, נכשלים בהצלחתם. יתר על כן, הם מייצגים גם דפוס חשיבה על יתרונו של האינטריגר על קורבנותיו. השר מירזה, שפועל יד ביד עם ארטמיזה, אשתו השניה של מלך פרס הגוסס, להביא לכך שבנה מן המלך יומלך במקום בנו הבכור מאשה קודמת, מתפאר בכך שהמחשבה חזקה אצלו מן הרגש. גם המלכה האמזונית, שמדברת בלשון האמזונה באיניאדה של וירגיליוס, מזהה את פעולותיה כעבודת מחשבה. ועם זאת הקשר של המלכה עם השר האינטריגר
כז
כמו נכשל באותו מקום שבו הוא מצליח. האינטריגר החושב מוצא את מותו בידי אהובת הבן
החורג לאחר שהוא כופה עצמו עליה. כלומר, הוא מת בתוך תשוקה עזה אל נעוריה ואל יופיה. המלכה האמזונית אכן רואה במות הבן החורג ובעליית בנה שלה לשלטון, אך הבן הזה מסתייג מפעולותיה וקורע עצמו ממנה. אושיות המחשבה הבהירה והצוננת שעליה נבנית האינטריגה מתמוטטים, אם כך. האינטריגה מגיעה כאן אל גבול הצידוק הלוגי שלה. הקשר בין המלכה לשר,
קשר שמוגדר על ידה כ knot הופך ל not, כפי שאנחנו רואים במישור העלילתי והמסמני.
המחזה של רוו מציג את האינטריגה כמעין קליפה ריקה. אבל בגבול הזה של מה שהאינטריגה טוענת לעצמה מתגלה האובייקט שלה כסיבה במבני הסגנון הדומיננטיים של המחזה.
מבנים אלה הם בעיקרם מבנים סינטקטיים שמאופיינים באלמנטים הסופלמנטריים שלהם, אלמנטים שמוצבים כבעלי קישור רופף לגרעין המשפט בה בעת שהם קשורים אליו סמנטית. נוכחותם של מבנים כאלה, מבנים אבסולוטיים במובן הדקדוקי, היא גורפת בשפת המחזה. חוברים
אליהם מבנים רטוריים שמעידים אף הם על אינטגרציה רופפת, כמו כינוי הלוואי )epithet(,
האפוזיציה, הפליאונזם וההיפרבטון או הטרנספוזיציה, ביחוד של האיברים האדוורביאליים לפני הפועל. דוגמה מתוך המחזה למבנה אבסולוטי שהוא גם היסטרון פרוטרון, כלומר צורה שבה מה שנאמר בסוף הוא מה שנעשה קודם, כפי שפיצ'אם מסביר, היא:
'Could you afford him such a bribe as that'/ A brother's blood yet unaton'd?'
סגנונו של רוו, אני טוענת, מגלם את האבלטיביות, מבנה שהוא מן השפה הלטינית ומתאפיין בקישוריות סינטקטית רופפת, אם באמצעות מילת יחס או כשמדובר במבני המשפט האבסולוטי, בחוסר אינטגרציה עם גרעין המשפט. אני מציעה שאותם הדברים היפים שרוו בהקדשה שלו מבקש להחזיר לטרגדיה המודרנית מן הטרגדיה הקלסית אינם נוגעים רק להצגתן של דמויות נשים. בסגנון שלו רוו מתייחס למשפט האנגלי באותם כלים שהאינפלקציות הבנייניות מאפשרות בשפה הלטינית. באופן הזה השפה שלו חושפת גם את מה שמאה שנים לפניו כינה סמואל דניאל
האכזריות של השפה הלטינית. איבריה הקרועים של הלטינית, דניאל טוען, מקשים על הקורא ליהנות מחרזנות. יתרה מזו, בהקדשה שלו רוו אומר שהוורסיה הכתובה של המחזה, שהוא מעדיף על פני זו שמוצגת, כוללת שורות רבות שנחתכו מן האחרונה. בוורסיה הכתובה שורות אלה מצויינות בסימנים מיוחדים שמעידים על הקושי של רוו, כפי שהוא מודה, לקצר את המחזה. שורות אלה מוחזקות בטקסט באותו זמן שאפשרות סילוקן נראית לעין. מחזהו של רוו מציע לנו לראות את אובייקט הסיבה של האינטריגה ברובד הסגנוני שלה. לטענתי, לדומיננטה האבלטיבית בסגנונו של רוו יש איזומורפיות מבנית עם מה שהוא האובייקט
כח
האנאלי במחשבה של לקאן על אובייקט המועקה בסמינר העשירי כמו גם עם הפונקציה של
האובייקט הזה בתיאורתיזציה של פרויד את מקרה "איש הזאבים". האובייקט כאובייקט סיבה הוא האובייקט בנתיקותו. אצל לקאן הכינון של האובייקט כסיבה הוא לוגי – האובייקט האנאלי כאובייקט סיבה הוא האובייקט שהסובייקט מחזיק בו בניגוד לתביעה לנתינה מצד האחר, כלומר כאובייקט שמשהו מן הסובייקט נמצא בו ברגע שהוא ניתן. הסיבה האנאלית חומקת מן התשוקה
אל האובייקט, התשוקה האנאלית, ומופיעה כ anal dismay, אי נחת או אימה שהם תוצר של
חרדה-מועקה. זהו אכן האובייקט שהמועקה מייצרת בתוך סיטוציה של עודף-עונג, כפי שמילר מסביר בהקדמה שלו לסמינר העשירי. האובייקט שהמועקה מייצרת, האובייקט כפי שהוא עולה
בסמינר העשירי, מובחן באורגניות שלו. הוא אינו תוצר סימבולי או דמיוני של הסרוס ושל הקומפלקס האדיפלי. במחשבה הפרוידיאנית יש לאובייקט האנאלי פונקציה ארוטית מזוכיסטית. הוא קשור ביחסו של איש הזאבים לאביו, בהזדהותו עם הפוזיציה של אמו בסצינה הראשונית, שחלום הזאבים חוזר ומחייה על דרך ההיפוך. במילים אחרות, אצל פרויד נראה יותר את האופן שבו המועקה בונה את אובייקט הסיבה של התשוקה מן התביעה של הדחף, כדברי מילר בהקדמה שלו. לקאן, אני טוענת, אכן מחזיר את ההיבט הארוטוגני הזה לאובייקט האנאלי כשהוא מדבר
על תגובת הילד החולם בחלום הזאבים. ברגע הזה הילד הופך לפאלוס, והוא נופל אל תוך הסצינה באופן שלקאן מכנה פיקסציה של הסובייקט כולו בליבידו. אפשר לומר שזהו גם גורלו של האינטריגר במחזה. קריסתו של האינטריגר אל מותו מגולמת סינטקטית, באופן שבו המילה
Dying תלויה ומתפקדת במשפט שהוא אומר לפני מותו. באופן דומה מה שנופל מן המלכה, בנה
שלה כדבר הזר לה ביותר, מתגלם בפונקציה הסינטקטית של היותה אם חורגת, בשם המחזה: The
Ambitious Step-Mother )הדגשה שלי(. מה שנופל נופל ברמת מבנה המשפט. האינטריגרים כמו
גם האינטריגה במחזה נופלים כמו הילד האקסקרימנטלי אל/עם איבריה המעונים של השפה ככזו.
המבנים הסגנוניים הדומיננטיים מייצרים את הסיבה של האינטריגה כרגע של פיקסציה של הסובייקט כולו בליבידו. זוהי נפילת האובייקט כחתוך מטריאלית מן השרשרת המסמנית: האובייקט הגופני כסיבה מוחזקת, שלא ניתן לוותר עליה באותו אופן שבו היא צונחת כעונג המזוכיסטי האנאלי במהותו. האפקט או הרגש שנדחה ברובד הסמלי של המחזה מקבל כך את מעמדו כממשי.
כט
הטרגדיות מראות לנו את היחס המורכב של האינטריגה כמערכת יחסים בין האינטריגר
לקורבנו, לאפקטים שעולים בדבריהם ואף משמשים ככלי בידיהם, לבין מרכיבי הסגנון הדומיננטיים בכל מחזה ומחזה. מרכיבי סגנון אלה מגלמים את הסיבה המזוכיסטית של האינטריגה, אך בכל מחזה הם עושים זאת בדרך אחרת ובדרגות שונות של הנכחת המזוכיזם כהתענגות של הגוף. אם יש לשפה משהו עם הגוף, הטרגדיות של האינטריגה מראות זאת דרך הדומיננטות הייחודיות שלהן. אבל הן גם מראות את מה שהוא מהותי לאינטריגה, מה שהוא שמה, כמה שאינו ידוע לה. בקומדיות ההוויה המתענגת המזוכיסטית מתכוננת על דרך פיגורות לוגיות רטוריות באופן שמשמר את החסר בהוויה. האובייקט בקומדיה מוחסר, ואילו בטרגדיה הוא אינו
מתפוגג. לכן הטרגדיה של האינטריגה של המאה השבע-עשרה המאוחרת היא לא ללא אובייקט. היא מעוררת מועקה במקום סוג של רווחה שהטרגדיה הקלסית מאפשרת באמצעות הקתרזיס. המסקנה המרכזית של תיזה זו היא שניתן לבודד את מה שהוא בלתי ניתן לשיום של האינטריגה: "אינטריגה, שמך הוא מזוכיזם". אבל הדבר הזה נעשה על ידי אקט פרשני שמבקש
את המחיקה כאפקט הכתיבה בטהרתו, ה litura pure עליו מדבר לקאן בשעורו Lituraterre
בסמינר השמונה-עשר שלו. עיקר המאמץ של תיזה זו הוא לבחון את האפשרות של פרשנות כאקט בתחום הממשי, אקט שמבקש לבודד את הסיבה של האינטריגה כדבר שהיא אינה יכולה לדעת
עליו. אקט כזה אינו מחפש לבנות משמעויות. להיפך, במקום שבו מבודדת הצורה הרטורית או הדקדודית או הלוגית, הוא גם המקום שבו המובן דולף, זו הנקודה שהיא אטומה בכל מה שנוגע למובנים. מן המקום הזה אפשר רק לצאת בהבנייה אנליטית. כמו הבנייות באנליזה אפשר שהבנייה כזאת מעלה משהו שאיננו קיים והוא אפילו לא מסביר משהו, אבל יש לו אפקט של אמת. במקרה של האינטריגה, הצורה הסגנונית הייחודית בכל מחזה מאפשרת לי להגיד דבר מה על האינטריגה: לעשות הבנייה של סיבתה ולהראות שהסיבה הזו הולכת נגד הסירוס. האנתיממה בקומדיה מכוננת הוויה דחפית מושללת שהיא גם רגרסיבית, כמו זו שפרויד ממשיג ב"מכים ילד". הטיעון הכוזב בצד האליטרציה מכוננים אמנם הדחקה נוירוטית, אבל מתרגמים סדיזם מוסרי
לכפיפות מזוכיסטית שמחזירה אותנו לאותה רגרסיביות שעומדת בבסיס היחס הארוטי של הילד המוכה לאב. לעומת זאת, בטרגדיות פיגורות לשון מנכיחות מזוכיזם נשי ביחד עם פסיביות וארוטיזם אנלי. האובייקט כאן הוא ליבידו במובנו הטראומטי, אובייקט מועקה שמקדים לוגית את הסרוס. ההבחנה של פרויד בין מזוכיזם מוסרי למזוכיזם ארוטוגני חיונית להבנת הסיבה של האינטריגה, דוקא משום שמפתה לחשוב שהראשון מביניהם הוא מה שהאיטריגה מרפררת אליו. לטענתי אין זה כך. האינטריגה מוצאה אמנם מן הקומדיה אבל את טיבה הז'אנרי היא מקבלת מן
ל
הטרגדיה. את הסיבה שלה נבין דרך המחשבה המאוחרת של פרויד את הדחף לא כמולחם
לאובייקט אלא כמזיגה של שני דחפים, מזיגה שמחזירה אותנו אל הסיבה האוטו-ארוטית של הדחף. האובייקט-סיבה של האינטריגה הוא פרוורטי כמו הפונקציה של האינטריגה ביחס למבנה הטוב של הדרמה. האינטריגה מחזירה אותנו אל טיבו הפרוורטי של המבנה הלינגוויסטי בפונקציה הפואטית שלו. דרך המבנה הלינגוויסטי ביחס לגוף המתענג נוכל לראות מהי האינטריגה. במובן זה, על דרך הבידוד של מבנה ייחודי בכל מחזה ומחזה כתו האחד שלו, ובאופן כזה בידוד התו האחד של האינטריגה במשולב עם אובייקט סיבתה, יש גם לאינטריגה מה לתרום כמאפשרת
ניואנס נוסף של אופייה הפרדוקסלי של הפרשנות כפרשנות אחרת, אנטי-פרשנית, כזו שמצביעה לעברה הפסיכואנליזה.
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