A Lacanian Reading of No-No Boy and Obasan : Traumatic Thing and Transformation into Subjects of Jouissance

Two months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9102 on 18 March 1942, "Establishing the War Relocation Authority in the Executive Office of the President and Defining its Functions and Duties." The act made it legal for the United States to "relocate" Japanese American families from their homes, mainly on the West Coast, and forced them into concentration camps, also known as relocation camps, in Idaho, Arizona, Utah, California, Arkansas, Colorado, and Wyoming. Approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans, viewed in their homeland as "enemy aliens" or, worse, "the enemy," lived in barracks with the barest essentials. The U.S. government justified its action on the basis of national security. Similarly, immediately after the outbreak of World War II in the Pacific, Canada passed the "Order in Council PC 1486" and announced a policy of mass evacuation of Japanese Canadians from the coast. The Canadian government removed 23,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, 75 percent of them Canadian citizens, from a designated protected zone within a one-hundred-mile radius of British Columbia. The Canadian "Interior Housing Project" was crueler and more drastic than the United States' relocation. Unlike in the United States, where families were generally kept together, male Japanese Canadians were separated from their families and sent to road camps in the British Columbia interior, to sugar beet farms on the prairies, or to internment in a prisoner-of-war camp in Ontario. At the same time, women, children, and older people were moved inland to internment camps in the interior of British Columbia, many of them ghost towns that had originally sprung up during the gold rush. Japanese Canadians were not allowed to join the military until after 1945, and until 1949 it was illegal for displaced Japanese Canadians to return to Vancouver or even to western Canada.¹

But the internment camps of World War II question both the United States' and Canada's often-stated commitment to a multicultural society. Until a movement toward redress began in the 1980s, Americans and Canadians alike were unwilling to face the existence of concentration camps in their own lands, wanting to continue to regard their nations as likable and admirable. These repressed traumas maintain the ontological consistency of the United States, Canada, and other nations as democratic nations. A traumatic thing such as slavery or internment camps is relegated to national unconsciousness. Slavoj Žižek argues that "national identification is by definition sustained by a relationship toward the Nation qua Thing. This Nation-Thing is determined by a series of contradictory properties." For Žižek, what unites a nation is not simply a shared set of values or beliefs, but "a shared relationship toward a Thing" (Tarrying 201). Likewise, human history can be seen as "precisely the way we are implicated in each other's traumas" (Caruth 24). The traumatic thing, in the words of Jacques Lacan, is "characterized by the fact that it is impossible for us to imagine it," and becomes "the cause of the most fundamental human passion."² In Lacanian theory, we all start with a structural trauma, and, says Paul Verhaeghe, "the way in which this trauma becomes elaborated through the relationship with the Other determines our identity" (8). Verhaeghe explains that "besides this structurally determined trauma . . . , there might be an accidental real trauma as well, caused by an external agency. This trauma will inevitably come into interaction with the structural trauma caused by the subject's own drive" (58). The interaction between external traumas and internal conflicts complicates the process of our subjective construction.

The Lacanian Thing

In Lacan's three orders—the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real (which have nothing to do with imagination, symbolism, or reality respectively as we generally understand them)—the thing is firmly situated in the Real order. Different from mental forces in Freud's three agencies, Lacan's three registers in conjunction indicate three psychic levels and form a topology of subjectivity. The Imaginary corresponds to the formation of the ego as the result of...