- Wallace Stevens: A Lacanian Reading
While divergences of opinion are a necessary part of academic debate, the complexity and obscurity of Jacques Lacan’s writings make those even more inevitable. Most interpretations of Lacan and other writers through the prism of Lacanian theory, however, rely on a number of shared assumptions drawn from careful examination of Lacan’s works. Such assumptions are lacking in Chetan Deshmane’s Wallace Stevens: A Lacanian Reading, a critical study that virtually precludes addressing the question whether a Lacanian reading of Wallace Stevens is desirable or justified. Instead, the reader’s focus is directed on the more fundamental interrogation: is this really a Lacanian reading? In order to demonstrate my severe doubts about this, the focus in this review will be on four characteristic misrepresentations/misappropriations of Lacanian theory to be found in this book: they revolve around the question of authorial intention; the distinction between neurosis and psychosis; the formulae of sexuation; and the definition of the Other. [End Page 274]
Early on in the book, Deshmane candidly exposes his critical creed on the vexed issue of intentional fallacy: “For all our emphasis on practical criticism, it is simply impossible to dismiss the intentional pressure that gives rise to a work of art” (18). This lesson in critical obedience directly contradicts the book’s Lacanian premise. The Lacanian subject of the signifier is primarily subject to the signifier. He/she is not in full control of his/her utterances. Indeed, Lacanian analysis rests on the split between saying and what is said, the meaning that is intended and the sense that is produced. Restoring “intentional pressure” in its own rights is incompatible with this premise.
From the outset, Deshmane is quite open about his desire to revive the genre of authorial psychoanalysis by probing Stevens’ biography in search of complexes that might reverberate throughout his work. In the case of Stevens as psychoanalyzed by Deshmane, the founding moment was the father’s disapproval of the poet’s marriage with Elsie: “Garrett’s aggressive behavior might have had the same castrating effect on Wallace as in a story Lacan tells us of a woman whose permanent aggressiveness gave rise to homosexual tendencies in her son” (39). This turned Stevens into an avatar of president Schreber, the famous psychopath around whose Memoirs Lacan’s third Seminar revolves.
Deshmane explains: “The son living under the shadow of the influential father, says Lacan, undergoes a psychopathic crisis, forcing him to take the feminine position” (39). This comparison is as perilous as it is poorly argued. Deshmane claims that Stevens’ being the victim of “imaginary capture” by his father’s image “could have led him to adopt a feminine function with reference to his father’s image, possibly through identification with his mother or with Elsie or more probably with both simultaneously” (40). The logic is confounding: within the space of a single sentence, we are told that Stevens occupied two antithetical positions, at once captured by his father’s image and identifying with Elsie/his mother—in other words, identifying with all three at the same time.
Similar examples of conceptual confusion abound. One of the most damaging is Deshmane’s conflation of the two fundamentally distinct structures of psychosis and neurosis, when, after asserting that “Stevens positions himself as the woman of the ‘you,’ the Other . . . , like Schreber” (43), the critic further argues that the “neurotic’s situation in his relation with the father is similar” in that he “adopts a feminine position before the father” (44), thus unequivocally indicating that, to his mind, the structures of psychosis and neurosis are identical.
Fortunately for Stevens, however, what Deshmane views as a psychotic moment was apparently limited to the period corresponding to the writing of Harmonium. “[I]n spite of the early psychic abnormality [Stevens] was a good psychoanalyst himself,” Deshmane writes, before adding that “Abandoning the pathological introversion, his poetry shows a positive movement toward finding what will suffice to make the outside world the mirror of his moi” (36). This is a far cry from Lacan’s own reminder that “the...