The Reader's Quest : Reading and the Constitution of Meaning in Five Novels

THE READER'S QUEST Reading and the Constitution of Meaning in Five Novels Julia Saville A ThesisUniversity Submitted to of the Cape Faculty Townof Arts, University of Cape Town for the Degree of Master of Arts October 1984 The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgement of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Published by the University of Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University of Cape Town ABSTRACT In this thesis, I attempt to show how the concept of reading as literary interpretation has been influenced by the insights of the psychoanalyst and theorist Jacques Lacan { 1901-1981). Broadly speaking, I call for a revised view of the role of the reader and the act of reading in the light of arguments such as the following: firstly, that the linguistic subject is "split" rather than "auto nomous"; secondly, that since language is a representa tional rather than transparent med i urn, "truth" can only ever be regarded as partial and irreducibly open to revision; and thirdly, that reading as an interpretive activity arises from the unconscious Desire to resolve the sense of incom pleteness which language acquisition produces in the lin guistic subject. Following the lead of various interpreters of Lacan's theory and psychoanalytic procedure, I offer an introduc tory outline of his thought and its relevance to literary theory and critic ism. Then in the four chapters which follow I attempt to demonstrate this relevance through readings of a selection of novels. In the first chapter, I come to the conclusion that reading should be viewed less as a quest after "the truth" of the text, than a quest to discover what "the truth" must disregard in order to be "the truth." In the second chapter, I conclude that narration is an effect of reading, that the relationship of the narrator and the reader is there fore supplementary, and that the notion of 1 i terary •truth" is established by consensus. In the third chapter I conclude that the attempt to satisfy Desire by an attain ment of a "full disclosure" of "truth" or "meaning" must result in a loss of meaning per se. Finally, in the fourth chapter, I attempt to synthesize the conclusions of the earlier chapters in the argument that the reader is poten tially both the unveiler of the authorial unconscious and the unwitting performer of the conflict of meaning drama tized in the discourse of narrative. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Lacanalysis: The Psychoanalytic Theory and Procedure of Jacques Lacan 1 CHAPTER ONE Whodunit or Whodonut: Reading as Consumption? 68 CHAPTER TWO Narration as a Reading Effect: the Other as the Unknowable in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! 129 CHAPTER 'I'HREE The Nymphet as the Forbidden Other: Questing after the Satisfaction of Desire in Nabokov's Lolita 228 CHAPTER FOUR The Reader as Textual Unconscious in Henry James's What Maisie Knew 323 EPILOGUE 422 BIBLIOGRAPHY 428 * * * * * ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank Professor John M. Coetzee for his insight and endless patience in super vising this thesis; Shaun Irlam for his inter est and encouragement; my parents and sister Angela for their support; and Elizabeth van Ryssen for preparing the final typescript. I wish also to express my appreciation for the financial assistance provided by the Uni versity of Cape Town and the Human Sciences Research Council. The conclusions arrived at in this thesis are not, however, to be regarded as in any way a reflection on the B S R C. * * * * * 1 INTRODUCTION An important feature of literary studies in recent years has been the growth of interest in the reader. If con- temporary theories of literary signification and criticism are numerous and confusing in their frequently incompatible activities, the majority of them seem to agree on the importance of offering some perspective on the activity of reading. In relation to the diversity of these investi gations of reading, the perspective I adopt in this thesis manifests a twofold partiality. It is necessarily partial, since the scope of the project compels the investigator to restrict her investigation to a limited field, and voluntarily partial in that it reflects a preference towards a perspective of reading that has developed recently from the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan. Another feature of recent literary theory and criticism has been the manifestation of interest in interdisciplinary studies which can be seen as a legacy of the intellectual movement loosely describable as •structuralism". The writ ings of leading anthropologists such as Claude L~vi-Strauss, of linguists such as Roman Jakobson, of philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and systems historians such as Michel Foucault, have become acknowledged as seminal influences upon literary theory. While French-Freudian psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, has also been widely acclaimed as an influence upon literary studies, his theories have proved a somewhat 2 less tractable tool for textual analysis than have the theories of, for example, Jacques Derrida. One reason for this is, I believe, the very particular nature of the difficulty with which his writing confronts the reader. Almost every text which aims to explicate Lacanian theory includes some prefatory or introductory remark upon the peculiar difficulty of the task of reading his work. Since this work has been chosen as the chief theoretical basis on which my investigation of the reader's quest will draw, and since its difficulty will be repeatedly confronted by both the writer and the reader of this thesis, it seems important to give some preliminary consideration to the difficulty of reading Lacan. One of the most protracted, but useful, comments on this difficulty is offered by Robert Con Davis in his edit orial introduction to the recent special issue of Modern Language Notes devoted to "Lacan and Narration. 111 Using the wellknown essay by George Steiner, "On Difficulty, " 2 Davis identifies four types of difficulty in Lacan's dis course: contingent, modal, tactical and ontological. He argues: Contingent difficulties, in brief, are those problems we might have with the obscurity of Lacan 's text, pos sibly psychoanalytical, linguistic, and philoso~hical terms that we, as Steiner says, "need to look up." 1 Robert Con Davis, "Introduction: Lacan and Narration," Modern Language Notes, 98, No 5 (Dec. 1983) pp. 855-858. 2 George Steiner, "On Difficulty, " in On Difficulty and Other Essays (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). 3 Davis, "Introduction," p. 855. 3 As this remark suggests, the character of Lacan's work is interdisciplinary and he draws freely from sources as various as Hegel, Heidegger, Saussure and Levi-Strauss, to name only his most obvious influences. In itself, this problem need not prove insurmountable; however, in Lacan's case it is compounded by the exclusivity of the context in which his publications evolve. Most of his writings are transcripts either of lectures originally presented to colleagues or senior students at various academic con gresses and conferences, or of his weekly or bi-weekly Seminar delivered at the Ecole normale superieure and des cribed by Stuart Schneiderman as "one of the longest running Parisian fads in memory •.. a center of Parisian intellectual act1v1ty.· • n4 Speaking then, to in it ia tea audiences whom he expected to recognize his allusions and references, Lacan made little, if any, deference to the newcomer. Fur thermore, as Anthony Wilden, one of Lacan's best known and most respected explicators points out, Lacan rarely draws attention to a revision or contradictory innovation in his opinions. Instead, his theories are presented en bloc in each seminar and it is left to his followers to detect any such changes, even to recontextualize previously familiar terminology that is given an unpredictable appli- . 5 ca_1on.t- I do not wish at this point, to digress to a 4 Stuart Schneiderman, ----::=-----:--=---,---~---=----....,,....,~The Death of an Intellectual Hero (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983) P. 28. 5 Anthony Wilden in J. Lacan, Speech and Language in Psycho- analysis, Trans., Notes and Commentary by Anthony Wilden (Balti- 4 consideration of the professional validity of this approach. Suffice it to say that Lacan has been criticized on more than one occasion for his "intransigent" thinking and his 6 "like it or lump it" attitude to his reader. The fact remains that the uninitiated reader, most particularly the Anglo-American reader who is not accustomed to the comparatively homogeneous intellectual climate of Lacan 's Paris, is 1 iable to find the contingent difficulties of his texts overwhelming. Even if he overcomes this initial difficulty, another, modal difficulty, is liable to arise from the "Seminar" context of the Lacanian text. Davis describes this as follows: modal difficulty, rather than being an obscurity in the text, is a problem of receptivity for the reader in regard to a text's mode of presentation. Lacan 's major publications, mostly transcripts of lectures, are addressed to us as students who are supposedly in diligent pursuit of this Master's teachings (imagine the audacity of entitling one's own book simply Ecrits!). This magisterial mode can pose problems of tone and can generate resistance enough to become a great obstacle in reading. 7 The reader who plunges himself into the spirit of the Parisian Seminar, studying Lacan' s sources, pursuing his teachings more and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968 pbk 1981) p. 182. ( This text is the revised version of The Language of the Self, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1968). 6 For example see Anthony Wilden's remarks in ·The Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real," in System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange ( London and New York: Tavistock, 1972 rpt 1980) pp.

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