American Contributions to the 14th International Congress of Slavists. Ohrid 2008

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David M. Bethea, ed. American Contributions to the 14th International Congress of Slavists , Ohrid, September 2008. Vol. 2: Literature. Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 167–86. Back to “Gogol’s Retreat from Love”: Mirgorod as a Locus of Gogolian Perversion (Part I: “Ivan Ivanovich s Ivanom Nikiforovichem”) Robert Romanchuk Это дело деликатное, Демьян Демьянович! на словах его нельзя рассказать. Гоголь, «Миргород» Introduction This paper is dedicated to the 50th anniversary of Hugh McLean’s presentation at the Fourth International Congress of Slavists in Moscow in 1958, “Gogol’s Retreat from Love: Toward an Interpretation of Mirgorod.” In his now-classic psychoanalytic reading, McLean demonstrated that Mirgorod stands at a structural crossroads in Gogol´’s writing, between the “evenings” of Dikan´ka and the “Petersburg Tales” and plays. If the majority of the Dikan´ka tales, McLean observed, foreground the love theme—“reinscribing the enigmatic encounter with Otherness into the framework of the production of the couple,” in psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek’s 1999 characterization of a standard Hollywood plotline—then by the “Petersburg Tales,” the love theme recedes into insignificance, the enigma of the Other sharpening into the impenetrable riddle of a devilish conspiracy. Mirgorod, which begins “I love very much” and ends “It’s dreary in this world, ladies and gentlemen,” is the place of transition between these very distinct—in psychoanalytic terms, neurotic and psychotic—stances toward the desire of the Other and a place of desublimation, falling out of love.1 McLean read Mirgorod diachronically and psychobiographically, as “four basic stages in [Gogol´’s] regressive psychological process, […] a movement from a more advanced to a more primitive choice of libidinal objects” (1958: 231). Some decades 1
Textbook definitions of the psychoanalytic terms I will be using throughout this paper may be found in Evans 1996 or the online encyclopedia ; definitions of rhetorical terms may be found in Lanham 1991 or in Gideon Burton’s excellent online Silva Rhetoricae, . 168 ROBERT ROMANCHUK later, Jacques Lacan—in an effort to wean psychoanalytic readings away from biographism —would propose that the literary work is “a forgery [of the Unconscious], since, inasmuch as it is written, it does not imitate the effects of the Unconscious. The work poses the equivalent of the Unconscious, an equivalent no less real than it” (Rabaté 2001: 3).2 In this spirit, I propose a synchronic reading of Mirgorod as a Gogolian locus horribilis—an unpleasant place from which the writer and reader may deal with particular, anxiety-generating forms of desire: the incestuous sterility of the “Old-World Landowners,” the sadistic “version” of the primal father in “Taras Bul´ba,” and the fetishistic disavowal of violent carnal “knowledge” by Khoma Brut in “Vii.” Recent scholarship on the “Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich” has likewise detected the structuring role in that story of homoerotic desire, and while I will argue below that the object-choice of the Two Ivans is only a lure thrown out by Gogol´, still the contemporary reader’s willingness (vel unwillingness ) to entertain this hypothesis shows that Mirgorod is even to this day “no less real” than the real thing. Moreover, Lacanian psychoanalysis compels us to examine not object-choice (as does McLean), but rather the “forced choice” of submission to the Other of language and desire, which precedes the constitution of the very object of desire: that is, the subject’s “choice” of submission to the signifier and its order, the Law. The stories of Mirgorod dramatize both the disavowal of this choice and its repeated stagings—the aim of which is to bring into being, if only for a moment, a paternal limit conspicuous by its absence. This disavowal and these stagings are characteristic of the challenging stance toward the Other known as perversion, and serve to distinguish Mirgorod from both the neurotic Dikan´ka tales with their romantic couplings and the psychotic “Petersburg Tales” with their lonely scriveners and bureaucrats. Finally, as I will demonstrate , the concluding “Povest´ o tom, kak possorilsia Ivan Ivanovich s Ivanom Nikiforovichem ” is written as the symptom, or the condensation of signifier and enjoyment that lies at the bottom of the “forged equivalent” of perversion that is Mirgorod: it offers insights into the Gogolian “retreat from love” and into such a turn in general. The goals of this paper are, therefore, to use Lacanian psychoanalysis to analyze some peculiar structures of the “Two Ivans” and to use the “Two Ivans” to work out some difficult problems of Lacanian psychoanalysis—in particular, the structure of a perverse symptom, if such a writing can be supposed...