Departing from the Real

Looking Glasses and Neverlands: Lacan, Desire, and Subjectivity in Children's Literature, by Karen Coats. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2004.

A few years ago, I attended a talk in which a scholar traced what she described as Freudian imagery in an eighteenth-century text. During the question period, a singularly scruffy don drawled, "You know, my dear, Freud wasn't around in the eighteenth century." Much as I disapproved of his tone, I felt a sneaking sympathy with the sentiment. How can we argue for a correspondence between a particular theorist's analysis of self or society and the work of an author who not only had no direct access to it, but could not even have been exposed to it through the Zeitgeist? Of course, if you are firmly persuaded that the theorist in question is right, mounting a Freudian or Lacanian reading of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland makes perfect sense: Carroll simply anticipated some of the insights about identity, language, and desire later articulated by others. But what if you (or your audience) are not convinced of the truth of such claims?

The signal achievement of Karen Coats's Looking Glasses and Neverlands is that her readings of children's texts are so illuminating and persuasive that her book should capture the respect and attention of skeptics, Lacanians, and novice readers alike. For those who know little or nothing about Lacan but would like to learn more, this beautifully written book is a gift. Coats unquestionably succeeds in her goal of offering "a lucid but nonreductive introduction to Lacan's theories of desire and subjectivity" (10). She provides astonishingly clear accounts of concepts like the mirror stage, the Real, and jouissance, as well as related ideas articulated by theorists like Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Žižek (41). Moreover, she makes ingenious use of a wide variety of texts to illustrate complicated points, as when she reads Shel Silverstein's The Missing Piece as a paradigmatic example of the objet a, or corrects potential misreadings of Lacan's definition of perversion through an analysis of the antics of Curious George. Sections like these also constitute an invaluable resource to anyone wishing to teach Lacan. Instructors can either excerpt Coats's explanations or exploit her wide-ranging expertise as they construct their reading lists.

Lacanians will not only relish how clearly Coats articulates, supports, and synthesizes psychoanalytic theories, they will also be persuaded by her argument that, since Lacan links subject formation with the acquisition of language, texts aimed at beginning readers constitute a key site of study. It is a central premise of Looking Glasses and Neverlands that stories for and about children do not simply illustrate Lacan's picture of psychic development, they actually shape the subjectivity of children. Indeed, Coats reads children's literature as a kind of Lacanian mirror: just as the infant gazing into the glass sees an idealized image of herself as a complete and coherent being which she then attempts to embody, children's books likewise offer representations of the child and the world that help determine how young readers conceive of themselves and others. Thus, in her first chapter, Coats identifies Charlotte's Web not only as "an allegorical story of the advent of subjectivity," but also as an educative text that "facilitates the process whereby the modernist subject comes into being by taking the reader, by way of identification, on a journey through what counts as the normal development of subjectivity" (37).

Since Looking Glasses and Neverlands presents itself as an introduction to Lacanian thought, I do wish that Coats had spent more time defining what she means here by the term "modernist." In her introduction, she associates modernist subjectivity with the Freudian view of the split subject that emerges in the work of writers like Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. A few chapters later, however, she describes children's nonsense books as "a modernist phenomenon, established in the nineteenth century with Edward Lear...