Psycho-analysts sometimes set out to write. Works of fiction generally, close to autobiography in the special, often sacralized form that reflects their own psycho-analysis. As for writers, they are growlingly aware of psycho-analysis either through a direct personal experience of it or through the general effect it has on the period.
In most cases, the outcome is a massive and complacent description of fantasies with quite explicit patterns of enjoyment recurring as an accumulation of flashbacks without the least trace of repression : The resulting exaltation of anguish is supposed to be a guarantee of the psycho-analytic quality of the writing, and the handling of signifiers a proof of authenticity, even though it hardly differs from the kind of punning used in commercials.
Other texts exemplify a perfect absence of subjectivity with an articulation of language following the most compelling and unlikely necessities of concatenation as in the process of free association. But again, dare one take this as a guarantee of a rigorous attitude vis à vis the unconscious when dealing with the writing of such literary work as a short story ?
A short story à la Lacan would certainly lay direct emphasis on two aspects that are meaningful to both psycho-analysts and writers : the structure and the gap of the metaphor.
But why should I be talking about the short story and not the novel ? The novel would probably be more appropriate for Freud than Lacan: How do we read the five famous cases as told by Freud himself ?
Most short stories however end in what the French call «un trait» (a dart, or sting) i.e. a way of tight- ening together those events and patterns of signifiers that build up the core of the fiction, bringing them together in a brief instant whose nature varies according to the writer : dazzlement, revelation, reversing situations, laughter, complicity or sudden catastrophy. The knot thus tightened coincides in fact with the denouement.
A writer I read extensively last summer gave me a fair idea of what a short story à la Lacan might look like: Guy de Maupassant. With him, the moment of the trait – by no means the only moment of truth in texts where accuracy is never in the least complacent is not a time for any form of complicity or for the unravelling’ of accumulated suspense. It is rather what we might choose to call after Lacan the emer- gence of the Real . The sort of Real that testifies of the gap between the Symbolic and the Imaginary. (I am of course referring here to Lacan’s seminar R.S.I.).
I was told recently about a patient, an obsessed, who had just interrupted his treatment after saying: «I forbid you to ring me home». The clinical accuracy here is a good match for Maupassant’s traits: «I forbid you» exemplifies the patient’s relationship to the Other; the command or Geheiss reflects both his relation to naming and to his exacting inner voices ; as to «home», the word increases our embarrass- ment about the locus of the subject, probably not the same as the «I» which starts off the sentence, dis- torted as it is by the prohibition before it can get any meaning. The «I» and «home» forming an infernal circle. This could very well be the «trait» or the matrix of a short story, i.e. some form of narrative thatbrings about, not anguish, but perhaps some comical impossibility due to the structure.
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Every writer is aware of the necessary accuracy of the words he uses. But there are different forms of constraint attached to this accuracy. Are these differences a matter of different ideals ? Is it a matter of ideals at all ? What I find extraordinary with Maupassant is that his austerity as a short story writer is in no way measured up to an ideal. It is neither the result of suppression nor of abstinence. It dismisses the very concept of ideal. It creates gaps between sentences which are – as regards the story – neither anticipation nor progression nor philosophical comment. What does he mostly deal with ? Filiation, pa- ternity, transmission of inheritance, adoption, death, murder of the enemy, murder of the father.
I am well aware that many critics of Maupassant, and of the «Horla» in particular, emphasize his use of the uncanny, the pathological hallucination of the Doppelganger, the sort of parapsychological terror mystery. Read in that light, the writings of Maupassant would be the mere exaltation of strange feelings alternating with picturesque descriptions of Normandy . But his short stories are always concerned with a particular event whose impact forces the characters beyond their own selves into the Horla who is by no means specular. Reading these passages carefully, we find it is not so much the emergence of desire, but rather its wake (l’erre is the word Lacan uses) that makes the emergence possible: a field that be- comes boundless, free from the exaltation of self-centered feelings. Softening, openings, metaphors of air and undifferentiated tepidness; the subject moves away from his image as a center in perspective: descriptions of coloured spots, dust specks floating in the air. There is no bound, no abutment like a call to a God or some fundamental Other : «Un fils» (a Son) starts off with a description of space with pollen flying about aimlessly in the air.
In the famous «Partie de Campagne», so brilliantly filmed by Renoir, what is at stake is hardly the transgression of prohibitions, which would be but a mediocre idea. In these short stories, the power of the Symbolic is not shown in connection with some fatality such as the contradiction between conflict- ing duties in a Greek Tragedy (e.g. Antigone), but rather in those rare moments when the pressure of fantasy is revealed, at the very instant it gives in for a short while.
In the short story called «Saint Antoine», which is about the murder of an enemy, another writer might have described the moments of procrastination, premeditation and preservation of impunity. In spite of the various incidents, there will be a decision taken, but it will come from a now possible access to the unconscious in its relationship to the real.
Saint Antoine and his pig of an enemy. He will fatten the pig and eventually kill it – for aren‘t pigs fat- tened to be killed ? The moment of the murder has nothing to do with a subjective revelation.
The dog called «Dévorant» howls : exhaustion of the signified of dévorant («devourer») to an animal cry.
Everything was white: exhaustion of the scenery, of the landscape.
He saw a figure: exhaustion of the familiar image of the other. Then he saw the handle of his fork and the pig corning out of the dunghill was killed :
The ruthless logic of the symbolic is on its way in the unspecified whiteness out of which the living dung emerges. Maupassant has detached the patriotic killing of an enemy from any intention whatsoever, yet he has retained a sense of responsibility since the peasant had long been ready for the murder.
In a lighter mood, «La Fenêtre» (the Window) is quite interesting too. A man between two ladies, is there anything more common ? especially when one is the Lady and the other her servant. Of a woman leaning out of a wide open window at the top of a flight of stairs, all one can see is her expanding and beautiful behind under her petticoat. The petticoat hunter noses it and before he can identify the fra- grance he gets thrown out: it was the lady, not the servant! A variation on Don Giovanni’s disguises. But can the sudden opening of the window (reminiscent of the window in the wolfman‘s dream) be anything but the emergence of the object of desire ?
Interestingly enough, Maupassant did not retain the variant he had appended to the story, choosing to keep it instantaneous : the real emergence of what Lacan calls the object o.
In a similar fashion the shapeless mass of the dunghill emerges from the vastness of the white snow as it suddenly starts to move.
But in what respect are we affected by this ? It has nothing to do with the heavy dramatization of fantasies (as is the case with Klossowski for example), nor with the exaltation of the relationship of the subject to his fantasy. Not a trace of perversion in the text. It is not sufficient to spot a fantasy and then describe it : the aim here is not to accumulate scenes of that type. What gives Maupassant such literary power is his way of inscribing the emergence of the object of desire within a strict syntax, capable of articulating the relationship to names, to the unbearable, to the impossible and to pathos. On the other hand the Imaginary relationship to the pathetic and the unbearable is being exhausted and gives way to an implacable and all the same comical concatenation of signifiers. With Maupassant, the derisory aspect of words without referents and of what emerges from them is set both in cruelty and warmth.
This leads us to further questions on sublimation. Freud insists on the difference between idealization and sublimation. His paper on Leonardo da Vinci is in no way an incentive to the practice or elaboration of fantasies through idealization.
Sublimation seems to establish a different relationship between the Symbolic and the Real which, in turn, causes the fantasy to emerge but as a link between the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary. My claim is that the relationship to the fantasy is not a direct one. What makes Maupassant’s short stories so beautiful is his art of describing dimensions of space where subjectivity has no direct access to the division where, with the fantasies, the truth of the subject will emerge, but where it finds its way through the gap the author has established between what we, after Lacan, call the Symbolic and the Real.
Maupassant’s choice is at once concerned with the gap between the Symbolic and the Real: his short stories deal with filiation1, marriage, murder and death, transmission.
An event takes place: the priest’s niece has a lover («Clair de lune») a will has just been read (several stories) a light carriage comes forth like a princely coach to take a child for adoption («Aux Champs») an enemy is billeted at the home of a French farmer («Saint-Antoine»).
Or a gap between sexes, gap between generations, gap between adoptive parents, adopted child and natural parents; or again, in «La Fenêtre», «La Femme n’existe pas» (there is no such thing as the Woman), what there is rather is the object 0 of fantasy.
1. See Le Discours Psychanalytique, fébruary 1989, for further developments on the issue of adoption.
The space in the gap is often filled by the ignorance, obtuseness, drunkenness or stupidity of some of the protagonists ; most of the time the stupidity remains unsolved : which is quite à la Lacan. The short story does not lead to a «Sentimental Education», an initiation or a revelation, even though it strictly follows the path of some unconscious knowledge.
But one question remains : How are we made aware of the gap ?
Maupassant’s narrative is always indirect, very much like the sentence mentioned in the supervision of a treatment that I was quoting at the outset of this paper. The narrative within the narrative is not a vain and complacent device.
« He was called Antoine » : this beginning is at once an example of Maupassant’s way of listening (« son écoute »), his way of being both involved and at a distance. But it also exemplifies the gap between the character and what is said about him in the village. He is neither type nor essence. What we have here, with great authenticity, is the gap and its resolution.
« He woke up, sober again, his mind clear and rested, capable of judging the case and foreseeing the event ».
There is no denying what has happened, no abating of any responsibility for it. In this respect too the stories can be called lacanian : Is it Saint Antoine or Maupassant speaking of judging the case and fore- seeing the event after what has happened ? Marvellous ambiguity of the sentence: what does the event refer to ? The future to be sure, i.e. the consequences, but definitely the past as well, in actual fact the entire short story !
« Aux champs » : « the two cottages stood close together » is the beginning and end of the story. There is no further description of the cottages themselves, but of their environment : this, not their essence, makes them both separate and close. What defines them is connexion and distinction, not similitude and proportion. We are not very far from the borromean approach with the knot as a minimal Definiens of connexion and distinction. And it is in this gap that an approach close to that of Psychoanalysis emerges: the only way to understand the metaphor is through what Lacan, using a term of navigation, calls its wake (son « erre ») : what is the maximum gap between signifiers in the metaphor ?
When it came to transmission (« la passe ») Lacan used to require a narrative that would bring forth a syntax. Supervision is essentially, not a matter for confession or testimony, but another occasion for narratives out of which « traits » will emerge. The point is to delineate the syntax which enables the meta- phorical and metonymic gaps of language to make sense.
