Inaugural Wounds: The Shaping of Desire in Five Nineteenth-Century English Narratives (review)

"It is the nature of desire to be radically torn," Jacques Lacan tells us in the epigraph to this book, "never completely fulfilled." "Desire lacerates the appearances and things of this world," Robert Lougy writes, "testifying to a want or gap in the human subject that the world and its structures and sites can never fill in or satisfy" (8). We are inexorably wounded coming into human identity, this book suggests, and Lacan's image of "the corps morcelé, the fragmented or wounded body that is part of the human condition itself" (129) figures our doomed mortality. As human animals, aware of our condition, we "want" with an ache that marks our difference from the rest of nature; it is that double nature of "wanting"—desire and lack—that carries Lougy's readings in this book.

This is, by now, a familiar reason to turn to Lacan, but nevertheless a persistently crucial one, Lougy maintains. His insistence on the importance of "desire as Jacques Lacan has theorized it" (2) is in this study at once manifesto, lament, and plea. In its argument and performance, Lougy's book suggests that we should keep reading Lacan because his work best evokes the poignancy of human transience; when we deny that understanding, we remain impoverished. Certainly, our readings of the Victorians suffer: "Until rather recently," Lougy writes, history has trumped psychoanalysis—"[Foucault's] theories of power and sexuality have tended to be at the center of critical conversations concerning Victorian literature" (15). Restricting the grounds of meaning to historical reality or cultural context makes us forget that "history" and "culture" are themselves texts and distracts us from the textual nature of the Victorian literature we study. Lacan, however, supplements "the inadequacies of such an approach" for Lougy (5). The elusiveness of language—"paradoxical, impossible, and resistant" (17), the strange and astonishing resonance with which it says "other than what it would mean" (7)—is for Lougy the reason to read. Produced to close the gap between what we would like to have and what we are doomed to be, language registers its own insufficiency as it records ours. Lacanian psychoanalysis foregrounds the elusive unconscious—individual, textual, cultural—and thereby provides the critical tools with which to attend "not only to what was said but also how it was said" (7).

We read and write books, Lougy implies, not only to grieve our condition but also to amend it. The books he treats—Martin Chuzzlewit (1842–44), Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (1846), Ruth (1853), The Woman in White (1860), and Jude the Obscure (1895)— and the critical text he writes remain more diagnostic than therapeutic. There is no cure for what ails us, he emphasizes; it is "the price we pay for being human" (158). Nevertheless, as his introduction's title—"Insupportable Absence and the Writing of Desire"— suggests, the writing of desire, the acts of representation and interpretation, may alleviate our otherwise lonely and insupportable humanness: "Language testifies to our wounded relationship with the world" but also provides the same surprising exhilaration Lacan's infant in the mirror stage feels in the face of its imago (17).

And I felt definite moments of elation in the performances of Lougy's text: its close readings are as exciting as the best attention to paradox we find in Geoffrey Hartman or Paul de Man. It halts readers in front of passages we've raced past, notes their ambiguity, their "obscure conflicts" (7), their "ontological undecidab[ility]" (67): "Why [does Defoe] call our attention . . . to the strangeness of [Crusoe's] longings when what he wants—namely, the company of other human beings—would seem to be so self-evident and understandable?" (6). Why is Jonas Chuzzlewit's response to the wound Tom Pinch gives him so puzzling, the language describing it as evasive as that describing Charles Dickens's ironic American "Eden" (28–51)? What do W. M. Thackeray...