Reading Alice Munro with Jacques Lacan by Jennifer Murray (review)

Literary critics, on the whole, have tended to be slow in catching up with developments in psychoanalytic thinking, falling back even quite recently on an obsolete model of "Freudian" riddle solving, of the sort infamous for offering wise speculations about Hamlet's childhood. Recent decades have seen a critical re-orientation of work in Lacanian theory, spear-headed by Slavoj Žižek but now including a sizeable body of commentators, which has promoted a new and often unexpected version of how to use psychoanalysis in interpretation, focusing less on purloined letters or wayward signifiers and more on the crucial psychoanalytic concepts of fantasy, sexual difference, and jouissance. This book is one of the very best recent studies to engage with this "other" Lacan, and it does so with an engaging combination of theoretical rigour and exegetical lucidity, constantly shedding light on the marvellous enigmas of Alice Munro's stories, their "narrative pearls of jouissance," as Jennifer Murray beautifully puts it. Judiciously choosing to focus on only a few of the stories, Murray leaves herself enough room for careful explications of such challenging Lacanian motifs as "lalangue" and sexuation, always with clarity and, as she shows in her meticulous readings of the stories, with direct relevance to Munro's work. A notable virtue of Murray's writing is her almost complete avoidance of the "Lacanese" jargon, which (to tell the truth) at times mars the work of some of the thinkers she refers to, where Jacques Lacan's word games and coinages are emptily recycled or obediently aped. Murray's book thus addresses itself, quite rightly, to the average reader, and, indeed, it could well serve, should that reader happen to enjoy Munro's stories, as a first-rate introduction to Lacan's later work and its relevance to thinking differently about literature and human culture in general.

Though only a handful of stories are considered, Murray's argument manages very successfully the considerable task of bringing together the whole Munrovian and Lacanian universes. An opening chapter on the dazzling "Royal Beatings" moves from the Freudian analysis of "family romances," through Bruno Bettelheim's work on fantasies, to a strikingly lucid exposition of Lacan's anti-Freudian concept of sublimation, one of the keys to understanding the late Lacanian approach to interpretation. Careful readings of the text focus on the salient details and obsessions of Munro's writing, the points where it recedes from easy legibility and voices its engagement with the fantasmatic core of human existence – that haunting or spectral absence-presence or "black room" at the centre of our human dwelling. A chapter on "Princess Ida" explores the perennial psychoanalytic theme of mothers and daughters, using Lacan's ideas to bring to light the obscure problematic of trauma and memory in the transactions between generations. One of the best chapters uses a reading of "Boys and Girls" to grapple very successfully with one of the most challenging elements of late Lacan, namely the cryptic "formulae of sexuation." And a riveting account of "Eskimo" shows how literature can take us, unfeasibly and against all of our expectations, close enough to the unsymbolizable "kernel" of human existence to be jolted from our habitual complacent position in relation to that existence.

In the end, for me, this engagement with "Eskimo" harbours the chief lesson of Murray's intriguing and compelling book; for what it shows above all is the profoundly anti-ideological dimension of Munro's writing, how that writing cuts through the layers of comforting cliché that cushion our lives in order to make contact with what is unbearable or unspeakable in what we are. This is the very best way to put Lacan's thought to work in the twenty-first century: as an interrogation of cultural blindness and a celebration of creative intransigence.