Lyric Disaster: Poetic Voice and Its Lacanian Other

In this essay I want to focus on “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” a poem of mourning revolving around the disastrous loss of a “powerful western fallen star,” where the catastrophic event of Lincoln’s death prompts the poetic subject to address a che vuoi? to the symbolic Other as the depository of his truth, that is, as that which is apt to legitimize and guarantee the role that the poet takes on as an elegist speaking in the name of the American nation.¹ This symbolic role Whitman partially assigns to literary precedents that the poet both appropriates and revises; the other part he assigns to the figure of the dead Lincoln summoned to authorize poetic speech by guaranteeing that it tallies the occasion which it is called forth to commemorate. The poet also brings the object voice, that inert precipitate of enjoyment, into play within the frame of fantasy, and substitutes it for that which, in the Other, fails to authorize his speech.

Throughout this discussion, poetic voice will be approached within a Lacanian purview from two complementary angles that Lacan himself clearly distinguished when, upon being asked by Jacques-Alain Miller to clarify the distinction between the object of the drive, the object of fantasy, and the object of desire, he observed that there are several possibilities involving the function of the object. The object, Lacan specified, is “never in the position of what desire aims at. It is either pre-subjective” when circumscribed by the drive, “or the foundation of the subject’s identification” in fantasy, or “the foundation of an identification disavowed by the subject” in perversion.² This article addresses the first two possibilities mentioned by Lacan in his answer to Miller. As will be seen in the following pages, my understanding of the notion of voice is consonant with the conceptual framework delineated by Žižek notably in his readings of Hitchcock, and by Mladen Dolar in his seminal work on voice, which builds upon the triple distinction set forth by Lacan.³ Where my focus differs from these critics’ is in examining the modalities of the drive and of desire that emerge from the specifically poetic and lyrical—as opposed to cinematic, acousmatic, or novelistic—inscription of the Lacanian object voice in elegiac works of mourning, which requires an additional detour via the Lacanian theory of mourning whose outline may be found in Lacan’s seminar on Desire and the Interpretation of Desire, and in Jean Allouch’s exegesis of this text in his own Erotique du deuil au temps de la mort sèche.⁴ I hope to show how in “Lilacs” the voice is the privileged medium whereby Whitman reaches a poetic formulation of the dynamics of mourning delineated by Lacan in Seminar X:

We only mourn the loss of someone about whom we can say: I was his or her lack. We mourn the loss of individuals about whom we did not know that we fulfilled the function of being substituted for their lack. What we give, in love, is essentially what we do not have.⁵

Before proceeding to my analysis of Whitman’s “Lilacs,” I want to discuss briefly a few key concepts that may serve as prolegomena to a Lacanian problematic of mourning. In Lacan’s theory of the genesis of the subject, language and the unconscious both fall under the heading of the Other as the locus where “all the symbolizations which define culture” are deposited “and where, unbeknownst to the subject, all the operations which determine his being and his desire unfold.”⁶ The Other bears the inscription of the subject’s truth, including when, in fantasy, it is articulated in the guise of fiction. The subject’s entry into the symbolic order is the catastrophic moment when he or she has to give up the enjoyment of being, an act of renunciation that allows the subject to assume the name he or she receives from the Other and which, while defining his or her place in the symbolic order, simultaneously denies him or...