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?