Lacan with Runt Pigs

When Fern Arable realizes that her father is headed out to the barn to kill a runt pig, she is immediately engulfed in identificatory existential angst: "But it's unfair," cries Fern. "The pig couldn't help being born small, could it? If I had been very small at birth, would you have killed me?" (Charlotte 's Web 3). In a flash of horror and insight, she articulates the truth of Lacan's assertion that all humans (and some pigs) are born prematurely,¹ and she understands that it is the task of an "other" to save their lives and bring them into the human community as subjects. In fact, reading Charlotte's Web through Lacan's theory of subjectivity (and reading Lacan's theory through Charlotte's Web) enables us to come to an understanding of just how implicated the Other (as other people, as our own unconscious, as language itself) is in the formation of our own identities. "Through the effects of speech," Lacan says, "the subject always realizes himself more in the Other, but he is already pursuing there more than half of himself" (Four Fundamental Concepts 188). When John Arable makes his daughter a mother, he initiates a process of subject formation that shows clearly how each of the characters in the book is already more than half in the Other; Fern, Wilbur, Charlotte, and ultimately the child reader all emerge as effects of their encounters with others and of their encounters with language. In this essay, then, I explore one possible way of opening a text through a Lacanian poetics, with the result (I hope) that both the text and the theory are made richer thereby.

Written in 1952 by E. B.White, Charlotte's Web is a homely, comforting story about friendship. It is often, as noted by Perry Nodelman, the first "chapter" book adults choose to read to children; it has all the elements that make a story feel right for the very young—a main character with whom the child can identify, a wise and loving mother figure, villains that aren't too frightening, and a triumphant story line, all woven together with gentle humor and carefully crafted language that emphasize the glories of the natural world. More than that, the story is empowering for the young child; it offers a vision of what most parents want for their children (and themselves) in that it can be read as a "consoling fantasy in which a small Everyman survives and triumphs over the pathos of being alone" (Griffith 111). Not only does Wilbur triumph over his fundamental isolation, but he also triumphs over the terror of his being-toward-death. He is saved not once, but twice, by women who act as mothers to him and who use language to intervene in his destiny and to turn him into something that, by any objective standard, he should not be. In order to save Wilbur, first Fern and then Charlotte have to convince Mr. Arable and Farmer Zuckerman that Wilbur is worth saving, that he is more than simply a runt pig, good for nothing and a lot of trouble besides. The way they do this is by speaking for him, by connecting him to the world of language; in a sense, they do what the Lacanian (m)Other² does—together, they provide the conditions for him to have a "voice," at the expense of their own erasure.

The story of Fern, Wilbur, and Charlotte, then, is one of love, death, and the role of language in the formation and transformation of the self. Approaching it from the perspective of Lacan's theory of the subject allows us to situate it in terms of its own preoccupations, for Lacan's theory, like White's tale, is engaged in existentialist concerns regarding the relations between language, meaning, and being.³ This is not to say that Lacanian theory is existentialist. Rather, it is informed by existentialism, but also by structuralism; the two are at some points radically irreconcilable. For instance, Laurence Gagnon's Heideggerian reading of Charlotte's Web centers on what he calls...