텍스트의 욕망 읽기 : 영문학 텍스트를 읽기 위한 라캉의 정신분석학적 패러다임

Abstract

How does the text desire? To answer this question we have to know what desire means in Lacanian psychoanalysis. What Lacan means by desire is the lack or gap in existence. He maintains that desire is the metonymy of the lack of being (manque à être, want-to-be, Écrits 259). In this respect, desire comes into being as a result of the flaw of human existence. Therefore, we can have the following axiom: a human being is the lack of being, therefore he desires. So it is quite natural for a human being to desire. If so, how can the text desire? The best proof that a human being is a being of lack is shown by language. Once a human being enters the Symbolic order after the mirror stage, he truly becomes a being of lack. Since the Symbolic order makes a subject fragmented, he has to suppress his desire, and his repressed desire is stored in the unconscious. Thus the best place to find the contents of the repressed desire is the unconscious. But it is hard to examine the unconscious. One way to see how the unconscious works is through dreams. Dreams can be read through language. Sometimes literary texts are the representation of the dream versions of the writers. By examining these literary texts, we can see the traces of the repressed desire of the writers. In this article three writers are chosen to see how the text desires. These are Emily Brontë, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot. Dreams of Lockwood, the narrator of Wuthering Heights, can be seen as displacement of Brontës suppressed desire as a woman writer. In the case of James Joyce, we can see how the text desires through his use of portmanteau words. One good example is the portmanteau word, cropse, which is the combination of crops and corpse. These two words have totally opposite meanings, but they are collapsed into one word to show how they co-exist in the unconscious level. On the other hand, Eliots use of corpse in The Waste Land is a very interesting example in that it shows how he uses language according to the syntagmatic principle of the Symbolic order.