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The virtual focus is a quasi-objective structure posited to give rational integrity to a process that exists independently of the self. The subject merely fills in, with the dotted line of geometrical construction, what natural reason had not bothered to make explicit; it has a passive and unpFoblematic role. The "virtual focus" is, strictly speaking, a nothing, but its nothingness concerns us very little, since a mere act of reason suffices to give it a mode of being that leaves the rational order unchallenged . The same is not true of the imaginary source of fiction. Here the human self has experienced the void within itself and the invented fiction, far from filling the void, asserts itself as pure nothingness, our nothingness stated and restated by a subject that is the agent of its own instability. [19] Nothingness, then, the impulse of "fiction," is not the result of a supposed originary act of transgression, a mere historical lapse at the origin of history that can be traced or filled in by a language of logiC and analysis; on the contrary, fiction is the liberation of a pure consciousness of desire as unsatisfied yearning, a space without boundaries . Yet we come back to Blanche's rape by her brother-in-law, which seems visibly to reseal the laws of constraint, to justify the logiC of lost beginnings. Reenacting the traumatic incestuous moment enables history to begin over again, while the suppression of inordinate desire resumes the order of sanity: Stella is silenced; Blanche is incarcerated. And if there is some ambivalence about Blanche's madness and her exclusion, it is subsumed in an argument for order and a "healthy" redirection of desire. In the last stage direction, Stanley's groping fingers discover the opening of Stella's blouse. The final setup feels inevitable; after all, the game is still "Seven-card stud," and aren't we going to have to "go on" by playing it? The play's return to realistic (and we might also say, heterosexual) logiC seems assured, and Williams is still renouncing worlds. He points to the closure of the analytical reading with deft disingenuousness. Closure was always just next door to entrapment; Williams seems to be erasing their boundary lines. Madness, the brand of exclusion, objectifies Blanche and enables her to be analyzed and confined as the embodiment of nonbeing, an 100 A Streetcar Named Desire expression of something beyond us and so structured in language (Foucault, Madness 100). "There isn't a goddam thing but imagination ! ... And lies and conceit and tricks!" Stanley says (398). The containment of desire's excess through the exclusion of madness creates, as Foucault has argued, a conscience on the perimeters of society, setting up a boundary between inside and outside ("[The madman] is put in the interior of the exterior, and inversely"; Foucault , Madness 11). Blanche is allegorically a reminder that liberty can also be captivity, just as her libertinage coincides with her desire for death (her satin robe is a passionate red, she calls Stanley her "executioner ," etc.). And Blanche senses early on the threat of confinement ; she keeps trying (perversely) to end the play. "I have to plan for us both, to get us both-out!" she tells Stella, after the fight with Stanley that seems, to Blanche, so final (320). But in the end the play itself seems to have some trouble letting go of Blanche. Having created its moving boundary line, it no longer knows where to put her; what "space" does her "madness" occupy? As the dialogue suggests, she has to go-somewhere; she has become excessive. Yet she keeps coming back: "I'm not quite ready." "Yes! Yes, I forgot something!" (412, 414). Again she is chased around the bedroom, this time by the Matron, while "The 'Varsouviana ' is filtered into a weird distortion, accompanied by the cries and noises of the jungle," the "lurid," "sinuous" reflections on the walls (414). The Matron's lines are echoed by other "mysterious voices" somewhere beyond the scene; she sounds "like a firebell." "Matron" and "Doctor" enter the play expressionistically, as functional agents, and Blanche's paranoia is now hers alone: the street is not visible. The walls don't disintegrate; they come alive. Blanche is inside her own madness, self-imprisoned: her madness is precisely her enclosure within the image (cf. Foucault, Madness 94). In her paranoid state, Blanche really cannot "get out," because there isn't any longer an outside: madness transgresses and transforms boundaries...

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