|
|
FDU PRESS
 |
| Scholarly Review |
 | The Death-Ego and the Vital Self: Romances of Desire in Literature and Psychoanalysis
ISBN# 0838639216
Reviewed by: Andrew Michael Roberts, Dundee University
Romanticism, Volume 14 |
|  | |
This is a closely-argued and brilliant book which offers a great wealth of insights, arguments and theoretical models relevant to Romantic and psychoanalytical writing. It belongs to that well-established line of criticism which reads psychoanalytic and literary texts on terms of equality and reciprocity. A crucial influence here is Shoshana Felman, from whose 1977 article 'To Open the Question', Reisner quotes the claim that 'in the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis each form represents for the other the "unthought . . . the possibility of its own self-subversion"' (67). Reisner's aim is to use 'the relationship between desire and romance' to 'focus the encounter between literature and psychoanalysis' (17).
He writes of 'the connection, or attraction' between 'novelistic romances' (Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre) and 'romantic psychoanalysis' (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Uncanny, Lacan's Four Fundamental Principles of Psychoanalysis) (18). The relationship between romantic literature and psychoanalytical theory has long passed beyond flirtation; they have had a steady relationship for quite a while now and there might even be a risk of ennui setting in. However, Reisner's use of the intertextual approach does yield striking parallels, as in his joint reading of Keats's negative capability and Freud's 'negation' (the analysis and's denial which serves to reveal the repressed). The connection generates a series of paired concepts, linked and contrasted in ways which illuminate both thinkers: for example, Freud's concept of 'drive' is paired with Keats's term 'sensation', as 'alike located and structured within the body-in-the-mind', but distinguished because drive 'denotes the body's insistent demand on the mind' whereas sensation 'alludes to the mind's disinterested experience of the body' (73). As this example suggests, Reisner is fond of symmetrical schemas, a liking he shares with his two main theoretical influences, Freud and Lacan, as well as with Northrop Frye, from whom Reisner begins by dissenting: 'modern critiques of romance', he tells us, instancing Frye's association of romance with childlike nostalgia, rely on a 'simplified notion of desire' (13).
Reisner himself sees romance as 'the kingdom of desire' (22), but he also finds in romance an'unconscious fear and hatred of desire' (24), and propounds a theory of desire itself as inevitablydivided. So the book 'begins with romance as the literary expression of divided desire' projecting'opposing wishes and clashing fantasies' (17). The notion of divided desire here arises primarily fromFreud's concept of the death-drive, by which Freud modified his own earlier assumption that pleasure is the ultimate goal of our drives and fantasies. Reisner suggests that Freud 'rarely integrates the death drive into readings of fantasy or interpretations of art' (14), and that literary critics who have written about the romance genre have similarly equated desire with wish-fulfillment. Hence Reisner's project is to rethink the genre in terms of the 'compressive energy' which arises from conflicting drives. Not surprisingly, Lacan is part of this rethinking; as Reisner writes: 'Desire is a Lacanian word condensing Freudian "wish" and "drive" while adding an elusive supplement, a reference to the seeking of that which cannot be found' (15).
Reisner develops an elaborate Lacanian / Freudian schema ('Freud supplements Lacan no less than Lacan supplements Freud' (20)), which maps forms and fates of desire onto Lacan's Imaginary, Real and Symbolic, and onto generic distinctions of mythic, romance and realist novel. On the whole the schema works well in its own terms. There is a slight awkwardness, though, in the fact that, while myth is associated with the Imaginary and romance with the Symbolic, Reisner presumably has to resist the implication that realistic novel can be equated with the Real, since the Lacanian Real is supposed to be 'catastrophic', 'shattering' and all but unrepresentable. (Reisner, slightly confusingly, describes it as 'an elusive order that cannot be locked into any image' but also claims that 'when reached it finds its images' (21).) Reisner's scheme-making is virtuosic but slightly exhausting: the introductoryfirst chapter offers, as well as the Lacanian / Freudian schema, and the genre schema of mythic, romance and realist, a schema of Pure Romance (death-drive) vs. Life Romance (life-drive); and a schema of subject, ego and selfhood. Individually the schemas are effective, even exhilarating, heuristic tools; cumulatively there seems something odd about subjecting such supposedly disruptive energies to an incessant process of categorisation, pairing and ordering. The effect can be traced to the deterministic aspects of Freud's thought, and to the implications of Lacan's claim that'the unconscious is structured like a language', which added linguistic categories to Freud's battery ofstructural metaphors. Lacan is a highly schematic thinker who wishes to be radically subversive. Hisdefence against schematic determinism is obscurity, a dubious tactic as Reisner admits, commenting that 'the Lacanian categories are formulated with a deliberate obscurity that restricts their usefulness' (23). Reisner is an accomplished interpreter of Lacan; like those of Shoshana Felman, Reisner's versions of Lacanian thought often seem more convincing than the original.
Chapter Two explores 'desire and anti-desire' in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, while Chapter 3contains the reading of Freud with Keats. Reisner then turns to that archetypal Romantic family romance, Frankenstein. His interpretation is eloquent and engaging, although along generally familiar (and familial) lines, including: the significance of Mary Shelley's parents for the novel's symbolic concernwith birth and creativity; the linking of the maternal and the monstrous; the Creature as Victor's double; and narcissism within the Frankenstein family. Reisner dissents from feminist readings which, heclaims, overrate 'her counter-revolutionary intentions' by 'crediting her with a comprehensivedismantling of male romantic presumptions' and so 'confer a retroactive radicalization that fails to accord with the anxiety pervading a much-disrupted tale'. For Reisner, Mary's rebellion against 'Shelleyean romanticism' is an unconscious one (89). This seems to posit too rigid a dichotomy between intention and unconscious: after all, we have both unconscious and conscious intentions, which conflict, but also supplement and flow into each other, with anxiety an inevitable part of the process. In Chapter 5, the narrative structure of Wuthering Heights is read as an 'infinite intensification of literary desire' (122), and mapped generically, with the 'four narratives' (belonging to Lockwood, Nelly Dean, Catherine / Heathcliff, and Bront) equated with text, story, myth and romance respectively (1212). The appropriation of the structuralist distinction between text and story involves a bit of sleight-of-hand here, since story (which Reisner accurately defines as 'the tale as it exists (or would exist) in chronological order outside the fiction') must, strictly speaking, remain notional and extra-textual. In a striking use of the Lacanian concept of the imaginary, Reisner ends his chapter by defining Heathcliff's fate in terms of 'Imaginary Romance': 'the cosmos takes the form of the beloved'and 'the image of the lover' generates 'a transvaluation of values' (155). Reisner's reading ofJane Eyre is summed up in the title of Chapter 6: 'From Child of the Imaginary to the Real Life of aWoman'. The chapter starts with an intriguing linking of the Imaginary and the sublime, each 'an abstract idea recognizing the limitations of language' and each referring to 'a visual field that eludes verbal consciousness' (157). Reisner then goes on to read Jane's progress towards maturity as a pilgrimage of desire, a contention with the duality of the father (her need for the father both as a figure of desire and as a representative of the law) (163). The chapter ends with a gesture of transcendence, a claim that the novel somehow attains that Lacanian utopia, the Real: 'The damaged Rochester is the Father remade as Lover . . . . This is the way death becomes life in the new promise of the Real' (195). In Chapter 7 Reisner makes a historically surprising leap, turning to Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, seeking 'uncanny connections' between Paul Morel and Ernst, the boy in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. I must confess to a certain resistance to any more readings of the fort/da! game (and Ernst's other games), surely the most over-interpreted child's games in the history of the world. Children's games are indeed rich, but might be better addressed through the work of D.W. Winnicott, who actually gave them systematic attention (Reisner does note his potential relevance (246)). Yet, as ever, Reisner's ceaselessly fecund theoretical imagination generates new and intriguing ideas: here an emphasis on spatiality, the idea that 'narrative action spatializes character, and an interpretation of Lawrence's novel and Freud's essay in terms of 'Symbolic change, the transformation of the space-of-the-mother to aplace-for-the-self' (196). Despite the somewhat jargonistic resonances of these phrases, Reisner'sinterpretation gives central place to traditional grand themes of high literature: love and death. Indeed, a general strength of the way he uses psychoanalytical theory is that it enables an unembarrassed yet conceptually strong address to archetypal emotions, to first and last things. The book concludes with an 'Afterword' about 'the listening other', which seeks to place the relationship between speaker and listener 'at the heart of romance', as the relationship upon which depends 'the difference between the deathly Imaginary and vital Symbolic realms' (231).
Reisner has a good line in striking formulations, often with the elegance of chiasmus: 'If desire is theimplied energy of romance, romance is the implied form of desire' (17); 'desire is the language of the body but also the body of language (19); 'the self is the gift of desire (not the other way round)' (27). Despite occasional longueurs, this is a fascinating study, provided one is to some degree sympathetic to
psychoanalytic modes of understanding, for psychoanalytical writing per se is a major focus of thebook, and despite the claim from Felman that literature enables the 'self-subversion' of psychoanalysis, the latter remains the master-discourse.
|
|
|
