Using Lacan, Reading Fiction. - book reviews

Despite the lead given by Shoshana Felman's ground-breaking psychoanalytic-Lacanian analysis of Henry James's novella, The Turn of the Screw, the practical application on a large scale of the theories of Jacques Lacan to literary texts has not really happened. There has not been the appearance of Lacanian literary analysis as a major field in the manner of, say the co-optation of Michel Foucault by New Historicism. This relative neglect of Lacan does nothing to suggest his importance outside the discipline of psychoanalysis as a key thinker within what is called poststructuralism.

Of course, significant post-Lacanian interpretations of particular authors have appeared, particularly those whose writings and lives have seemed to lend themselves to psychoanalytic interpretation: studies of James Joyce and Virgini Woolf spring most readily to mind. In film studies, a certain model of Lacanian thinking proved for a while to be a significant force or fashion, depending on one's perspective. However, with the exception of the occasional inclusion of Lacan in a general poststructuralist mode of interpretation and, excluding thos theoretical texts that talk about theory rather than demonstrating the use of "theory" in the interpretation of literature (not that this should necessarily be perceived as a fault), there is a significant lack of a Lacanian scene, to borrow some of Lacan's own language.

This state of things may have not a little to do with the well-known obscurity, whether in French or English, of Lacan's own prose. The early suggestive leads for interpretation provided by Lacan himself, most notably in Ecrits, have not been taken very far. Worrying at how best to make Lacan's theory of the mirror stage generally applicable to the forms and functions of a literary text soon runs out of mileage; and if this result is all that we are going to lay claim t in Lacan's discourse, we can hardly contend that he should be taken seriously i relation to literary criticism.

James M. Mellard usefully addresses all of these issues along with other significant points relating to the reading and use of Lacan in his preface and introduction to Using Lacan, Reading Fiction, as well as offering lucid, cogently reasoned performances of "applied Lacan" with carefully and clearly laid-out, systematic readings of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Henr James's "The Beast in the Jungle," and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.

The book is constructed in five main sections, each of which is divided into principal areas of concern. In addition to a general bibliography a specific bibliography complements each chapter. This careful breakdown with differently emphasized areas of attention is helpful for the reader, for it allows a gradua understanding of the numerous issues "in" Lacan by drawing the issues into focu in a manner most appropriate to the subject. The central three chapters deal with the literary texts and offer readings of the literary texts already mentioned. These are each arranged economically, not only so that one witnesses Mellard's understanding and mastery of Lacanian discourse, but also so that eac literary text comes to shed light for the reader on key elements of Lacanian textuality; elements such as the mirror state, L'Objet Petit A, desire, jouissance, the decentering of the Subject through entry into language, the Gaze, and other important Lacanian tropes. The concluding chapter offers a reading of Woolf's To the Lighthouse, while underlabouring--to borrow a suitabl term from John Locke--the theoretical ground around the notoriously difficult Lacanian concept of the Real.

This process of double reading has important pedagogical ramifications especially with regard to the teaching of undergraduates from theoretical perspectives. We comprehend Lacan through Woolf, through Hawthorne, through James. Mellard handles the literature so as to both enlighten the reader about the literary process from stylistic and formalist perspectives while illustrating and demystifying the Lacanian text with carefully chosen examples.

To take one example, in his reading of The Scarlet Letter, Mellard turns his attention to the figure of Chillingworth, who, he argues, is "the character . . . who most nearly seems a function only" (94). Reading Hawthorne's novel in the past, I have felt the relative absence of characterization in Chillingworth and in conventional critical terms, been at a loss to account for this feature. Certainly, given his importance to the narrative, the flatness of Chillingworth is puzzling. Yet Mellard "rescues" the character of Chillingworth--thereby implicitly showing the shortcomings of traditional close-reading methods that rely on the ability to psychologize characters--by alerting us to his functiona status. Subsumed in his role as physician is the role of analyst: "his aims are to uncover material from within the mind of his patient, rather than to heal physical infirmities" (94). Once stated, this observation seems obvious. But do we need Lacan for this insight? Yes, if we accept the principally linguistic drive of Lacanian theory because, as Mellard shows us, Lacan understands the role of analyst as that of a translator. Mellard takes his reading further by placing Chillingworth in a further Lacanian relationship with the other characters, understanding the physician-analyst as being, "in the domain of the Symbolic," both the Father and signifying the prohibitive Authority of the Father or, as Lacan puts it, the "No-of-the-Father" (98). Here we witness in a single example the reciprocal fashion in which Mellard involves and unfolds bot Lacan's and Hawthorne's texts.

Importantly, and in order to locate his own readings, Mellard situates his understanding of Lacan early on in his text in an extended expository introduction positioned in relation to those key interpreters of Lacan who have helped clear the undergrowth of Lacan's dense language. Usefully, Mellard merge retrospective analysis, referring back most significantly to the work of Peter Brooks, Jeffrey Mehlman, and Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and constructing a context for Lacan in literary studies while insisting on the importance of understandin Lacan's own insistence on the central role of language in the constitution of both the Subject and narratives (of and by the Subject). From this, Mellard helpfully explores the paths towards a Lacanian critical practice while simultaneously examining the grounds for a Lacanian poetics before moving on to the relation between Lacan and interpretation.

The acknowledgement of the theoretical metacriticism as a basis for the present exposition of Using Lacan, Reading Fiction is very important, for it displays a sympathetic comprehension that theoretical books about Lacan have been a necessary stage on the way to reading with Lacan, rather than being self-absorbed hermeneutic strategies that seek to display their own pyrotechnic virtuosity in relation to the Master's discourse, as some detractors of "theory have argued. Mellard thus clears the way for stating what has seemed obvious about Lacan but what has been often inadequately taken on: that Lacan's

insistence on the structure of the unconscious being like a language and his return to the letter, to tropes and figures of speech as keys in psychoanalytic practice are the clearest indication of the way forward for literary criticism intent on engaging its subjects of inquiry from a psychoanalytic perspective that avoids the crudities of psychoanalyzing the author through the text. Mellard thus puts himself in the position, through his tracing of the various debts he owes intellectually, of being able not merely to paraphrase Lacan but to read Lacan. Lacan becomes one more author for Mellard to read, as the advantages of a Lacanian rather than a Freudian analytics are worked through.

This strategy is admirable because it demonstrates a way of taking the trepidation out of approaching Lacan in the first place. Lacan is made over through Mellard's patient readings into another author, as briefly demonstrated in the passages from The Scarlet Letter. Mellard balances his psychoanalytic readings of literary texts through a linguistic interest in both Lacan's linguistic focus and Lacan's own linguistic practices. The interest of both men in "tropes, figures of speech such as metaphor and metonymy, synecdoche and irony" (x) becomes a repeated point of convergence throughout the book, as well as being a provisional starting point from which Mellard begins his investigation and explication.

The overall sense received from this book is a modest one, its project being explicatory rather than innovative; it builds not only on Lacan but on the work of others, whom Mellard is more than happy to acknowledge throughout. Even at the moments when he reads the literary texts in question, he refers back to other interpreters of Lacan for authority in his use of Lacanian tropes and structures. Mellard's advocacy of a Lacanian rather than a Freudian poetics is importantly foregrounded throughout. It is shown through this emphasis that one does not use the text as a (dubious) way through to the author's psychology, a contentious use of Freud in literary studies at best. Nor does Mellard make the error of supposing, through the use of analytical discourse, that the character of novels are "real," that they are human.

In this judicious practice of a Lacanian reading technique, one is reminded of Lacan's own cautious approach to the act of unravelling narratives (despite the latter's own hyperbole). And, if there is a recent book to which James Mellard' should be compared, it is Sheldon Brivic's The Veil of Signs: Joyce, Lacan and Perception. Although this book is a significant single-author study, Brivic's patient expositions are similar to Mellard's in their attempt to involve Lacan in literature and in the interrogation of the mechanics of the linguistic-unconscious-symbolic structures that inform the literary text.

In concluding, Mellard offers an oversight of recent studies of Lacan, particularly those of Shoshana Felman, Catherine Clement, Juliet Flower MacCannell, and Christine van Boheemen. The focus is deliberate since it draws to the reader's attention the issue of reading Lacan from other perspectives, specifically feminist in orientation, and suggests an other way forward for the application of Lacan to literary studies. From this, Mellard concludes that the "necessary elements are in place for a Lacanian criticism of literature" (218). It can only be added that Mellard's book is crucial in establishing those necessary elements, and to ignore it is to ignore a modest but key player in th establishment of a vigorous Lacanian criticism.

Julian Wolfreys University of Luton

Other Works Cited

Brivic, Sheldon. The Veil of Signs: Joyce, Lacan and Perception. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991.

Felman, Shoshana. "Turning the Screw of Interpretation." Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise. Ed. Shoshana Felman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982.

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