Goethe's Iphigenie: a Lacanian reading

IRMGARD W. HOBSON Goethe's lphigenie: a Lacanian reading GOETHE'S IPHIGENIE AUF TAURlS is a drama of language in more essential ways than classicist drama is in any case: language representing action. The issue of true speech and the exegesis of the divine word constitute the focus of its plot structure. Both are decisive changes Goethe made to Euripides' model and major postwar interpretations bear witness to that fact. Sigurd Burckhardt goes furthest when he says: "the world of the play is the world of language."1 Heinz Politzer considers dialogue as such, speaking to a "thou," as crucial.2 The most influential reading of recent times, Theodor Adorno's essay of 1967, finds that in the process of civilization transacted here, language has a decisive function: substituting form for content, language becomes the representative of order and at the same time produces order out of freedom and subjectivity; it thus plays an essential part in creating the fragile balance of Goethean classicism.3 Language, in Jacques Lacan's thought, holds an absolutely crucial position. His Discours de Rome, which in 1953 founded his own movement in opposition to established psychoanalysis, places language at the center of the psychoanalytic enterprise.4 Following structural linguistics and anthropology, Lacan distinguishes between the two aspects of language, langue and parole. Langue is the structuring network which mediates his entire world for the subject, and it is the locus of the symbolic function (the category of 'le symbolique') which alone makes the subject human. "It is the world of words which creates the world of things— Man speaks therefore but it is because the symbol has made him man" (E, 65). Parole, the act of speech, organizes human life from the moment the child begins to speak. Freud's Fort-Da game carries tremendous weight: "The moment in which desire becomes human is also that in which the child is born into language" (E, 103). From then on, language, since it structures the unconscious, participates in all happenings to and all acts by the subject. Language is, above all, the locus of intersubjectivity and thus, Lacan insists, the only legitimate tool of analytic practice. "The problem [which concerns 52 GOETHE SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA psychoanalysis] is that of the relations between speech and language in the subject" (E, 68). Relying heavily on the symbolizing power of language, the psychoanalytic dialogue, in a dialectic of interlocution, functions itself as a signifying chain, changing and producing the reality of the subject. Interlocution, dialogue, produces and determines the dramatic events in Iphigenie, too, events which consist entirely of psychic processes: Orest's miraculous cure, Iphigenie's radical decision to tell the truth, Thoas's change of mind. What light can Lacanian theory throw on these three most controversial aspects of Goethe's drama? Lacan's relevance for literary criticism has been pointed out in theoretical articles.5 Bringing together the most languageoriented of psychoanalysts with this extremely language-oriented drama, my experiment is designed to test the applicability of Lacanian insights to literature. Of Lacan's writings, my study relies throughout on the Discours de Rome, but also uses his essays on the agency of the letter in the unconscious, on the mirror stage, and on the Schreber case. Orest's cure, attributed without further clarification to the encounter with Iphigenie, has been a stumbling block for critics ever since Erich Heller in 1949 declared it inadmissible, untrue, and a symptom of Goethe's avoidance of tragedy.6 The explanation of the cure, if there is one, would have to be found in the dialogue between Orest and Iphigenie in Act III. What happens to Orest is nothing short of a miracle apparently performed through the human word, and not through divine magic as in Euripides. Lacan unabashedly claims such powers for language, as he riles the typical analyst, whose "guilty conscience about the miracle produced by his speech" makes him shy away from such unscientific "practice of magic" (E, 92). Without deciding whether Orest's case really ("really"?) is a psychosis,7 one can show that his cure consists of becoming a subject by assuming his past as his history; that he does so via...