The Cure

I'd first like to start this post by thanking Ms. Ashley Shelden for her extremely informative post about Lacanian ideas and making them more understandable for me at least. The descriptions of the function of language, the mirror stage and the death drive have led me to a much better comprehension of what Lacan was saying.

The parts of the post that interested me the most were the new ideas, at least to me, that dealt with the human striving for meaning, whether in language or in their 'identity'. While I understood that Lacan proposed the idea that there is no true signifier, that language consists strictly of metonyms, the idea that we are constantly searching for the meaning, constantly making attempts to find the signified was one that I think I missed. In turn, the constant searching for a meaning of identity is also a very interesting and disturbing one as well. Finally the discussion of the internal death drive and the ability, in Lacan's mind, that humans can only reach this moment through the jouissance of orgasm is what led me to thinking about and one scene in particular popped into my mind. Lacan's idea that our constant thinking and searching for meaning, in both language and identity, whether it's conscious or not is only put on pause during le petit mort, when for that few seconds our minds are blank and not troubled with this search.

In Mantissa much of the novel consists of Miles and Erato's constant bickering, and while I understand that much of what they talk about is actually quite insightful and full of talk of the literary process, a lot of the time I was just tired of hearing them argue like your annoying neighbors. Yet with these Lacanian ideas in place I now think of all this linguistic arguing, this constant back and forth about the literary, as a result of their internal struggle to find meaning. While I'm unsure as to how to deal with Erato, as she is a muse, a fictional being existing only in Miles' head, Miles is like all other humans trying to find his identity whether he knows it or not. This self-questioning leads to his creation of the muse as he's trying to find his "true" voice and can not do it alone just as no one else can. But I digress, the moment I immediately thought of when reading that the jouissance results in temporary mental silence if you will is the scene that takes place on pages 154-5 when the two begin to have sex and stop talking.

No longer burdened with the search for a meaning the two are quiet, they don't bicker with each other as they approach the moment of orgasm, when their brains are able to be clear of the search for a few seconds. This cleared brain is actually literally represented by Fowles when he describes that the room has become clear plate glass and is no longer the gray room the two were previously in. We find out that the room is gray as it is supposed to represent Miles' mind, the setting of the entire novel. Yet in this scene with the two reaching a real moment jouissance, different from the original sex scene, his brain becomes clear and is no longer clouded by the gray cloudy walls that previously made up the room. This scene seems to directly illustrate the moment of jouissance, the clear brain that is able to very briefly stop its search for an underlying true meaning that does not exist...Lacan's idea come to life, or at least an unreachable life in a fiction, fitting no?

Amnesiac

While Mantissa provides many scenes that leave themselves available for a close reading, the scene I chose occurs very early on, when "Miles Green" (if that is his real name) awakes from his coma and is just re-introduced into the world and in turn, the world of language.

"Her mouth began to announce names, people's names, street names, place names, disjointed phrases. Some were repeated. He had perhaps heard them before, as words; but he had no idea what relevance they were supposed to have, nor why they should increasingly sound like evidence of crimes he had committed. In the end he shook his head. He would have liked to close his eyes, to have peace to reforget, to be one again with the sleeping blank page of oblivion." pg. 5-6

This passage immediately stood out for me, Green is hearing words that he may know, but really all they are to him at this point are sounds he mildly recognizes. This is an idea that is very interesting to me and I linked to structuralism very quickly. Structuralism looks specifically at the linguistic aspect of a text, the meaning of the language utilized within a body of work and this passage directly applies to that idea. Green has woken from what is assumed to be a coma and has no recollection of his past life, and as we find out, has no understanding of words that once meant something to him. Without a past referent, a meaning that he was once taught and no longer remembers, these words have no meaning to him, they are really just sounds to him, phonetic noises that relate to nothing that he is familiar with.

This scene also led me to think about Saussure's ideas of language as a system of dyads, binary opposites that allow us to understand a meaning. Green has no knowledge of anything at this point, and the words that his wife speaks to him, while he does hear them, might as well be incoherent noises, as he has nothing to refer them against. Not only does he no longer remember the places, people, and things that she is talking about, he doesn't remember their opposites. His knowledge is minimal and we are able to see that words do not have an intrinsic, essential meaning but are formulated in regards to other things, and as Green doesn't know any of these things his wife's attempts to jog his memory might as well be gibberish, as he is completely unable to understand the 'words' that she is saying to him.