The other Side of Desire: Lacan's Theory of the Registers

6. Symptomatic Perfectionism in The Journals of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath crafted her last poem, “Edge,” on 5 February 1963, six days before her suicide.1 Its bald, bold opening assessment, “the woman is perfected” comes like the last word in an argument, assertion and conclusion in one blow. “Edge” is an instance of creative speech whose status as mark and as mirror interests both the aesthete and the analyst. What the artist listens for in the poem is, in the words of Ted Hughes, “the direct speech of a real self” (Foreword xiv).2 Here, Hughes’s humanistic assumptions are clear. There is a “real” self from which speech can emerge directly; the source is a human center. By contrast, what the Lacanian analyst listens for in the poem is “full speech.” Full speech allows the real of the subject to find symbolic expression free from the distortions and demands of the ego; full speech voices the history of a decentered subject. Though Hughes and Lacan are opposed in their underlying attitudes toward humanism, they are agreed on speech’s rootedness in the real as the measure of its truth. For Hughes, the real self may be silenced, may remain mute, “shut away beneath the to-and-fro conflicting voices of the false and petty selves” (xv). Note the implied centeredness at work in the notion of a real self buried within, covered over by a false veneer of other voices. Lacanian analysis would not look for the subject’s truth buried deep within since truth resides in speaking . For Lacan, full speech delineates a speaking that is as “devoid as possible of any assumption of responsibility” and free from “any 119 6 Symptomatic Perfectionism in The Journals of Sylvia Plath expectation of authenticity” (Sem I 108). Lacan’s point is not that speech can never emerge authentically; his point is that authenticity cannot be produced on demand—especially on the demand of the ego. Full speech can never be determined in advance. However, neither artist nor analyst will hear the voice from the real until the Self or subjectivity frees itself from the a priori claims of false selves and expectations. Interestingly, the artist and the analyst agree that ideals pose significant barriers to authenticity. In his introduction to Plath’s journals , Hughes writes that “The impulse to apprentice herself to various masters and to adapt her writing potential to practical, profitable use was almost an instinct with her. She went about it, as these journals show, with a relentless passion, and yet in a fever of uncertainty and self-doubt. This campaign of willful ideals produced everything in her work that seems artificial” (Foreword xiii). Hughes’s description of Plath’s modus here situates the issue of her “campaign of willful ideals” squarely in the Freudian field, since the symbolic ideals of which he writes—the ego ideals defined by “various masters”—are never free from the censoring agency of the superego, are ever accompanied by “uncertainty” and “self-doubt.” An even clearer strain of analytically relevant idealism plays at the edges of Hughes’s assessment of Plath’s journals, hinted at in his passing observation of her “relentless passion” and willfulness. Such signatures of the imaginary ideal ego’s exuberance and relentlessness contrast with the superego’s uncertainty, pointing toward a paradox centered in Plath’s perfectionism itself. There is no small irony that Hughes—who clearly sees the drama of Plath’s idealism—comes to serve as the psychic prop for Plath’s ideals. As a mirroring other in whom Plath saw her ideal ego reflected, as an idealized poet whose professional success measured the distance between Plath and her own aspirations, and as the voice of the superego whose disapproval struck her speechless, Hughes’s presence stitched together the gaps between the registers of Plath’s experience. As a suturing presence, Hughes joined the imaginary to the symbolic of Plath’s reality, their marriage a premature solution to her dynamic Oedipal problem of negotiating an artistic self through speech. This substitution of suture for solution, this fantasied happy ending to the permanent problematic of real life between disjunct registers is the wish well captured in Plath’s relentlessly self-analytic journals—the “nearest thing to a living portrait of her” that remains (“Sylvia” 153). The other Side of Desire 120 The Kid Colossus Sylvia Plath’s Journals record her struggle to find a true voice; over and over again the Journals...