3-29-11 de Lauretis, Freud's Drive and "Desire in Narrative"

Teresa de Lauretis, “Desire in Narrative”

Summary: Narrative theory must be more concerned with narrativity, which is a process of narrative’s “work and effects,” troubling the notion of (particularly feminine) identification in narrative.

Teresa de Lauretis, Freud’s Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film

Summary: de Lauretis focuses her analysis around what she calls the “enigma of the now,” attempting to understand spaces of ambivalence that are not expressible through language and work through the complications of Freud’s death drive by arguing that Foucault and Freud must be read together, by queering Laplanche’s reading of Freud, and by arguing that Freud saw the psyche as text through a reading of Nightwood, among others.

 “The continuum of intimacy and abuse, eroticism, aggression and passivity that must have shaped the writer’s sense of self and her relations to others is inscribed in a writing which is both stark and intensely allusive, at once lucid and obfuscating, as if only style (I am paraphrasing Barnes) could dress life in the garments of the unknowable.” (122)

I chose this passage because it is rich in description and metaphor; I found the garment metaphor to be rather beautiful and complicated.  I am also interested in how it seems to do something that is slightly off-kilter in relation to the rest of the text—its insistence in identity formation is striking in a chapter that wants to situate itself comfortably in the space of ambiguity.  At the same time, though, de Lauretis backs off her insistence by using a metaphor to complicate the way that identity is constructed through the text.  There are two moves here that I’m interested in: one is the use of metaphor, and the other is the paraphrase of the author in a sentence about the author.

While de Lauretis insists that the continuum must have shaped Barnes, I don’t think this adds up to any kind of insistence on a solid identity that we can find somewhere in the text of Nightwood.  Even though de Lauretis also insists that the psyche is the text, she also insists on the process of that production rather than the product itself.  Here the continuum is an important part of shaping that psyche (and this text), and the continuum implies a rather diffuse and varying process.  This isn’t a binary system here, and what’s more, the second part of the continuum (“intimacy and abuse” being the first) is not two but three points.  Because of that, it isn’t easy to identity a beginning or ending point, and eroticism, aggression and passivity seem to go hand-in-hand with each other while at the same time being different.

This is, in turn, what “shape[s] the writer’s sense of self.”  First of all, “shapes” is a different kind of verb from one like “constitutes” or “creates.”  In a sense, to shape is to create, but there is no origin.  Shaping is working with material that is already there.  This connects back to de Lauretis’s discussion of construction vs. essentialism, where she says that the self is always constructed, but it can be implanted and become an important part of the self (46).  What’s more, the “sense of self” seems similar to de Lauretis’s discussion of the “sensation of a thought” on pages 130-31.  If I were to summarize that paragraph very briefly, I would say that it is about the ways that the self is shaped through thought, particularly through the text’s function as memory of experience.  That is what I think de Lauretis is talking about in this sentence, particularly where she says that “her relations to others is inscribed in a writing.”  If writing is memory of experience, then writing is a reconstitution of the self in its most unguarded moments. (or at least an attempt at this).

Next is the metaphor.  Dressing is a particular act, one that is fraught with social decisions, directed by the mode du jour.  It’s something that one has to consciously do every morning, and it’s a choice, but not really a choice, as there would be an intense amount of consequences for leaving the house naked.  I think this particular choice of metaphor reflects upon de Lauretis’s concern with the “enigma of the now,” where she can’t quite find a way to express why and how she is troubled by the current events which have inspired her to revise her ideas and her former militancy.  There is a sense that she can’t quite be as militant as she wants, she can’t leave the house naked, because la mode du jour insists that she put on some clothes or requires that she deal with a certain level of ambiguity.  I find it interesting also that, in this analysis, I am directly talking about the author’s sense of self—this is a performance of this move in ways similar to de Lauretis’s paraphrasing of Barnes.  Also, this metaphor for dressing is a performance of guardedness, which relates back to my discussion of “shaping.”  In that same place where de Lauretis talks about essentialism vs. construction, she says “How else could they penetrate the body in depth, as Foucault said in a perhaps unguarded moment, even without the mediation of consciousness or of the subject’s own representations?” (46), implying that even identity is mediated and is constituted by representations.  Clothing acts as a mediator here; it’s also a representation of the self.

What’s more, the metaphor itself is a particularly beautiful illustration of the way that language obfuscates the experience of the Real.  In a sense, the unguarded militancy that de Lauretis feels she can’t sustain any longer is now being clothed in the “enigma of the now,” or the garments of the unknowable.  Yet, I’m struck here by the “as if” which all of the sudden seems to turn all my prior analysis on its head.  What I have previously described in the sentence leading up to “as if” seems to constitute a certain desire to inscribe the self in writing, as if we could mediate our experience of the Real into writing somehow.  But it’s more complicated than that: the garments are that of the unknowable, and the process of getting dressed in something unknowable is rather hard to describe.  That is where we run into the problem of Barnes’s style: at once lucid and obfuscating.

Finally, de Lauretis not only uses a metaphor to overturn this idea of “sense of self,” but she also paraphrases Barnes, once again performing the allusions of Barnes’s Nightwood, her style, and her process of dressing.  She shapes her own text with Barnes, performing a complicated mediation.  What I have done here is to set up a web of relationships within the text: if there is no clear narrative strand that runs through this post it’s because I found that each piece of this sentence performs another part of the text.