Jeff Lang 5/10/00 Mr. RobertsLacanian Psychoanalysis and ‘Surfacing ” The theories of Jacques Lacan give explanation and intention to the narrator’s actions throughout the novel “Surfacing.” Although Margaret Atwood may not have had any knowledge of the French psychoanalyst’s philosophies, I feel that both were making inferences on behavior and psychology and that the two undeniably synchronize with each other. I will first identify the complex philosophies of Jacques Lacan and then demonstrate how the narrator falls outside of Lacan’s view of society and how this leads to her demand for retreat from that society in order to become ‘whole’. Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst that derived many of his theories from Sigmund Freud. His views of the conscious and unconscious being split and a order as the center of society evolved from Freud’s.
Lacan views our development in life as three stages or phases that one must enter into in order to become a part of society. The goal of these phases is the stabilization of signifies. ‘Signifiers’, the elements of memory that make up the unconscious are floating around the unconscious. These ‘signifies’ are held together by the order which is realized in the stages of development. This may be confusing, but related to the narrator it becomes clearer. The narrator was raised in a distinct situation.
When she enters into society she does not have the typical experiences of that society and therefore does not feel that she is part of it. She returns to the lake and feels she can no longer be a part of this society because the ‘ order’ is distorted. This is a brief explanation. First, Lacan’s formation of ‘self’ and ‘Other’ must be understood in great detail. The first of the three phases of development is the REAL, “Lacan”s infant starts out as something inseparable from its mother; there”s no distinction between self and other, between baby and mother (at least, from the baby”s perspective).
The baby has no sense of self or individual identity, and no sense even of its body as a coherent unified whole. There”s no distinction between it and anyone or anything else; there are only needs and things that satisfy those needs. This is the state of ‘nature,’ which has to be broken up in order for culture to be formed.” (Klages, 1). Lacan’s philosophies go on to say that language is always about this loss or absence that happens when we enter into culture; you only need words when the object you want is gone. If your world were all fullness, with no absence, then you wouldn”t need language.
This is the state to which the narrator wants to return. She is deeply disturbed by the identity that has befallen her. I use the word befallen because it is this disparity, of having needs and no way to express or fulfill them, that the narrator wants to escape from and return to the original state of ‘nature’. We must understand the narrator’s position in society in order to understand why she wants to return to the REAL. The second phase, the Imaginary, is where our sense of self is formed.
It must be noted that the process of forming a self is a settlement for having left the REAL and a labor to regain that oneness, ” The fiction of the stable, whole, unified self that we see in the mirror becomes a compensation for having lost the original oneness with the mother”s body. In short, according to Lacan, we lose our unity with the mother”s body, the state of ‘nature,’ in order to enter culture, but we protect ourselves from the knowledge of that loss by misperceiving ourselves as not lacking anything — as being complete unto ourselves.” (Klages, 2). The narrator early on in life has views of society, while she is going through her scrapbook she notes, “They were ladies, all kinds: holding up cans of cleanser, knitting, smiling, modeling toe less high heels and nylons with dark seams and pillbox hats with veils… I did want to be those things.” She wants to fill the gap that has been left by her entrance into the Imaginary by becoming just like her mother. It will be my point to demonstrate later that the narrator falls outside the order formed by her entry into the third phase, the SYMBOLIC. The symbolic is the entrance into society itself, also known as the Phallus, Other with a capital o, and the Name of the Father.
Laciness’ idea of a governing principal in society is very similar to Freud’s. The structuring principle determines how we form our view of self and how others do the same. The center has a lot of names in Laconian theory. It”s the Other; it”s also called the PHALLUS. The Other (capital O) is a structural position in the Symbolic order. It is the place that everyone is trying to get to, to merge with, in order to get rid of the separation between ‘self’ and ‘other.’ “The Law-of-the-Father, or Name-of-the-Father, is another term for the Other, for the center of the system, the thing that governs the whole structure — its shape and how all the elements in the system can move and form relationships.
This center is also called the PHALLUS, to underline even more the patriarchal nature of the Symbolic order. The Phallus, as center, limits the play of elements, and gives stability to the whole structure. The Phallus anchors the chains of signifies which, in the unconscious, are just floating and unfixed, always sliding and shifting. The Phallus stops play, so that signifies can have some stable meaning. It is because the Phallus is the center of the Symbolic order, of language, that the term ‘I’ designates the idea of the self (and, additionally, why any other word has stable meaning). (Klages 1).
In Surfacing, the elements of the phallus do not give stability to the narrator’s experiences. She exists outside of the culture because of her experiences and values. First, I will define the concept of other, the law of the father as it exists in ‘Surfacing’, exemplified by the characters of David and Anna, as well as the Americans. David likes to think of himself as a liberal, almost revolutionary person. I say this based on his hatred for the Americans, which is evident throughout the book. I quote two examples here to make this point clear.
On page five when the narrator points out where the old missile silos are, he responds with the slur ‘Bloody fascist pig Yanks’. This slur does two things, firstly, it marks him off as neither a fascist nor an American, and secondly, it marks him as being in opposition to both the ideology and the group of people with which he is associating it. What is more interesting though is the narrator’s description of the way in which he says this ‘as though he’s commenting on the weather.’ This shows David’s lack of conviction when he says this. Talking about the weather is notorious for being the worst kind of ‘small talk’, that subject to which people turn when they cannot find anything to say. It is something people say just so that they are speaking. By associating David’s slur, a supposed symbol of patriotism, with comments on the weather, its dry empty opposite, she successfully reduces it to something that is just said but not really meant.
Another example of this, is that found on page one hundred and thirteen, where David has another encounter with a group of Americans. The next minute he had scrambled up and was capering on the point, shaking his clenched fist and yelling “Pigs! Pigs!” as loud as he could. It was some Americans, going past on their way to the village, their boat sloshing up and down in the waves, spray pluming, flags cocked fore and aft. They couldn’t hear him because of the wind and the motor, they thought he was greeting, they waved and smiled. We know from the first example that this type of attack is something David just does and doesn’t really feel. What’s more in this example is that the Americans he is attempting to insult don’t hear him, they misinterpret his actions and think he is greeting them.
This then builds on the first example by showing that David, apart from not having any conviction in his ‘hatred’ of the Americans is in tacit partnership with them. These two instances show that David merely says thing in order to mask his true self; to fool the others, for he is in fact that which he so regularly and unconvincingly give vocal protest to. What is interesting is that immediately before his yelling ‘Pigs! Pigs!’ at the Americans, Anna his wife has accused him of hating women. It is thus possible to read his attack on the Americans as an attempt to convince her and the others otherwise by projecting it onto the Americans, his usual scapegoat. We see David’s real side when he forces Anna to take her clothes off and pose for the movie camera. David says to her ‘You ” ll go beside the dead bird’ (p 135).
They saw the dead bird on page one hundred and eighteen, and we need to turn to the narrator’s description of it in order to understand the implications of David’s treatment of Anna. Why had they strung it up like a lynch victim, why didn’t they just throw it away like the trash? To prove they could do it, they had the power to kill. Otherwise it was valueless: beautiful from a distance but it couldn’t be tamed or cooked or trained to talk, the only relation they could have to a thing like that was to destroy it. Food, slave or corpse, limited choices; horned and fang e….