Lacan and Fantasy Literature: Portents of Modernity in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Fiction 9004336575, 9789004336575

Table of contents :
Lacan and Fantasy Literature: Portents of Modernity in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Fiction
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Preface
Introduction
1 The Modernization of Britain 1870–1914
2 Lacan and the Question of Evidence
3 Lacan’s Reconsideration of Totem and Taboo
1 Totem and Taboo and Oedipus Rex
2 The Name-of-the-Father
3 The Thing (Das Ding) and Object a
4 Anxiety and Object a
5 Père ou Pire: Father or Worse
4 Science and the Thing: Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World
1 The Doubling of the Primal Father
2 The Abdication of the Father
3 The Father-Out-Law
4 The Return of the Courtly Love Tradition
5 Courtly Love as Art and the (Scientific) Need to See for Oneself
6 The ‘Larger than Life’ Scientist
7 Lacan and Sublimation
8 Science and Civilization
9 The Ending of the Novel: The Use of Beauty
5 The Missing Name-of-the-Father: She
1 She and Totem and Taboo
2 The Fantasy Space
3 The Asexual Primal Father
4 A Land Where the Names of Fathers are Missing
5 The Absence of the (Normal) Sexual Relationship
6 The Father’s Bequest to His Son
7 Myth, Fantasy and Realism
6 The Recuperation of the Thing: ‘The Horror of the Heights’
1 The Symbolic, the Real and the Thing
2 The Danger of the Thing
3 The Social versus a Deadly Solipsistic Enjoyment
4 The Primal Father Who Enjoys
5 The Return to the Greek Myths
7 The Name-of-Science: The Invisible Man
1 The Invisible Man as Primal Father
2 Invisibility and the Anonymity of the City
3 Beyond the Law
4 The Impossibility of a ‘Special, Solitary Enjoyment’
5 The Cancellation of the Name-of-the-Father
6 The Impossible Existence
7 ‘In the Country of the Blind the One-eyed Man is King’
8 The Re-inscription of the Name-of-the-Father: Dracula
1 Lacanian Readings of Dracula
2 Dracula as Totem and Taboo
3 The Fantasy Area: Transylvania and the Loss of the Symbolic
4 Dracula’s Castle and Freud’s Reception Hall
5 In the Castle: Dracula as Jonathan Harker’s Double
6 Van Helsing and the Return of the Master
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Lacan and Fantasy Literature

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Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies Editor Jon Mills Associate Editors Gerald J. Gargiulo Keith Haartman Ronald C. Naso Editorial Advisory Board Howard Bacal, Alan Bass, John Beebe, Martin Bergmann, Christopher Bollas, Mark Bracher, Marcia Cavell, Nancy J. Chodorow, Walter A. Davis, Peter Dews, Muriel Dimen, Michael Eigen, Irene Fast, Bruce Fink, Peter Fonagy, Leo Goldberger, Oren Gozlan, James Grotstein, R.D. Hinshelwood, Otto F. Kernberg, Robert Langs, Joseph Lichtenberg, Nancy McWilliams, Jean Baker Miller, Thomas Ogden, Owen Renik, Joseph Reppen, William J. Richardson, Peter L. Rudnytsky, Martin A. Schulman, David Livingstone Smith, Donnel Stern, Frank Summers, M. Guy Thompson, Wilfried Ver Eecke, Robert S. Wallerstein, Brent Willock, Robert Maxwell Young

volume 23

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Lacan and Fantasy Literature Portents of Modernity in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Fiction

By

Josephine Sharoni

leiden | boston

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Cover illustration: “Returning to the Trenches” (Print) by Christopher R. W. Nevinson. Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017022453

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1571-4977 isbn 978-90-04-33657-5 (paperback) isbn 978-90-04-33658-2 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

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‫ יותם וקרן‬,‫ אוריין‬,‫ תומר‬,‫באהבה למשה‬ (‫)שהייתם שם בשבילי במודע או שלא במודע‬

⸪

Josephine Sharoni - 978-90-04-33658-2 Downloaded from Brill.com04/11/2023 08:51:11AM via University of Cambridge

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Contents Preface ix Introduction 1 1 The Modernization of Britain 1870–1914 9 2 Lacan and the Question of Evidence 16 3 Lacan’s Reconsideration of Totem and Taboo 35 1 Totem and Taboo and Oedipus Rex 37 2 The Name-of-the-Father 39 3 The Thing (Das Ding) and Object a 42 4 Anxiety and Object a 46 5 Père ou Pire: Father or Worse 48 4 Science and the Thing: Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World 52 1 The Doubling of the Primal Father 54 2 The Abdication of the Father 56 3 The Father-Out-Law 60 4 The Return of the Courtly Love Tradition 62 5 Courtly Love as Art and the (Scientific) Need to See for Oneself 67 6 The ‘Larger than Life’ Scientist 75 7 Lacan and Sublimation 77 8 Science and Civilization 89 9 The Ending of the Novel: The Use of Beauty 97 5 The Missing Name-of-the-Father: She 102 1 She and Totem and Taboo 104 2 The Fantasy Space 105 3 The Asexual Primal Father 107 4 A Land Where the Names of Fathers are Missing 111 5 The Absence of the (Normal) Sexual Relationship 115 6 The Father’s Bequest to His Son 117 7 Myth, Fantasy and Realism 124 6 The Recuperation of the Thing: ‘The Horror of the Heights’ 136 1 The Symbolic, the Real and the Thing 137 2 The Danger of the Thing 140 Josephine Sharoni - 978-90-04-33658-2 Downloaded from Brill.com04/11/2023 08:51:11AM via University of Cambridge

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Contents

The Social versus a Deadly Solipsistic Enjoyment 143 The Primal Father Who Enjoys 145 The Return to the Greek Myths 149

7 The Name-of-Science: The Invisible Man 152 1 The Invisible Man as Primal Father 154 2 Invisibility and the Anonymity of the City 155 3 Beyond the Law 156 4 The Impossibility of a ‘Special, Solitary Enjoyment’ 159 5 The Cancellation of the Name-of-the-Father 165 6 The Impossible Existence 166 7 ‘In the Country of the Blind the One-eyed Man is King’ 170 8 The Re-inscription of the Name-of-the-Father: Dracula 175 1 Lacanian Readings of Dracula 177 2 Dracula as Totem and Taboo 179 3 The Fantasy Area: Transylvania and the Loss of the Symbolic 183 4 Dracula’s Castle and Freud’s Reception Hall 186 5 In the Castle: Dracula as Jonathan Harker’s Double 189 6 Van Helsing and the Return of the Master 202 Conclusion 218 Bibliography 225 Index 231

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Preface Late-Victorian and Edwardian Fantasy Fiction has since the 1970s attracted a great deal of critical attention. Works such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Rider Haggard’s She have been approached from numerous perspectives, including the psychoanalytical, in an attempt to explain their continuing fascination. The dominant approach nonetheless has always been the historicist/contextual; the attempt to understand these texts within the political, social and intellectual milieu in which they were produced. This book claims instead that it takes a Lacanian view – routinely considered a-historicist – to gauge the significance of these texts in their historical context; the emergence of a modern urban democratic society in place of a traditional agrarian one. As will be discussed from about 1870 to 1914, Great Britain is transformed in an unprecedented way. Tellingly it is in this period that the term ‘modern’ in its present meaning comes into being. While it had been used to distinguish modern from classical or medieval times, as the historian Jose Harris points out by the 1870s it comes to designate the specific contemporaneous period of “evolution, plutocracy, gaslight, and feminism’. Within less than fifty years, Britain was transformed from a largely agricultural, illiterate, rural society dominated by aristocratic landowners and the Anglican Church into an urbanized society living from industrial manufacturing and financial investments whose population was largely literate and less traditionally religious; in short, a prototype of the modern western democracy. Furthermore, as will be a major focus of this book, science both as a discourse and in the form of its technological products becomes increasingly dominant. My contention is that fantasy fiction of this period pertains to the Britain which was coming into being and is proleptic, (rather than as perhaps may too readily be ascribed to the late Victorian or Edwardian male author; nostalgic). The book centers on close readings of a number of texts. These are three science fiction stories; The Lost World (1912), ‘The Horror of the Heights’ (1913), both by Arthur Conan Doyle, and H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897); an adventure or quest novel, She by Henry Rider Haggard (1887), and a gothic novel, Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897). The thread linking these works is Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo published in 1913 and the aspect which will be highlighted is the return, in various guises of an obscene and violent primal father figure. Since the transformation of Britain at this period entailed a significant improvement in the conditions, both material and other, of the vast majority of the population, particularly women and children the question this book attempts to answer is why, there is in the literary works the concomitant re-appearance of

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this atavistic figure, murdered according to Freud once at the dawn of human time or at the initial (mythical) instantiation of human culture. In order to answer I turn primarily to the work of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan and post-Lacanian thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek Mladen Dolar, Joan Copjec and Lorenzo Chiesa. Reading these texts within such a Lacanian paradigm brings to light the function of apparently obsolete symbolic frameworks in society, for the most part that of the ‘father’ and the corresponding deficiency in modern paradigms of knowledge, in particular, of science. The layout of the book is as follows. The initial three chapters set out the basis for the project. The first is a survey of the historical changes in the period under consideration, underwriting my contention that in contrast to the perspective of historicist criticism the salient point is the coming-into-being in Britain of the modern Western society. The second chapter sets out the rationale for the linkage of literary criticism with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, countering some of the criticisms commonly levelled both at Lacan’s work per se and the application of an extraneous theory to literature. The third d­ iscusses Lacan’s re-reading of Totem and Taboo, underpinning my interpretation of the literary works as a portent in regard to the transition to modernity and providing an introduction to the Lacanian concepts (treated in separate subsections) appearing avant la lettre in the literary texts at stake. The main part, of the book, six chapters, consists of in-depth readings of the literary works from the privileged standpoint of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Chapter 4 is a detailed interpretation of The Lost World where a number of recurring motifs present in all the works I investigate are analysed, including the absent or non-functioning father, the motif of the doppelgänger and the implications for modern culture of the decline of religion and the ascendency of empirical scientific practice. There follows chapters offering shorter readings of She, ‘The Horror of the Heights’ and The Invisible Man, examining the implications of the repeated recourse to the Totem and Taboo story, which, again, relates to the consequences of the breakdown of traditional forms of authority and belief and concomitantly the increasing reliance on scientific discourse. The fact that such otherwise varied literary works can all be shown to constitute versions of this narrative indicates the major significance of the myth beyond the psychoanalytic theory within which it first appeared. The last chapter looks at Dracula, given that with the attainment of a sexual relationship and paternity, its ending diverges from that of the other texts. In the writing of this work, my gratitude and acknowledgement go to Professor Lorenzo Chiesa, director of the Genoa School of Humanities.

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Introduction We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. pablo picasso

∵ The thirty years in Britain leading to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 saw the publication of a spate of literary works very different from the realism which characterized the English novel from its inception in the late ­eighteenth century. There had indeed been some gothic novels at this earlier period, yet these, although very popular, remained outside the literary mainstream.1 In this new turn-of-the-century fiction there emerged, in contrast to the archetypal ­Victorian novel involving realistic situations of childhood, marriage, and family, a number of fantasy scenarios in new genres such as science fiction and the adventure quest, while gothic fiction experienced a revival. Such examples include a man turning into another by means of a chemical substance, a portrait growing old and hideous while its sitter remains unaltered, and a scientist who travels back and forth in time.2 This book offers a close reading of several such works loosely categorized as ‘fantasy’3 from the perspective of Lacanian psychoanalysis. It is with Jacques Lacan’s ‘return to Freud’, that is, his re-­examination of the texts of Sigmund Freud, and ensuing contemporary theorists, such as Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar and Joan Copjec,

1 Examples of such novels are The Castle of Ontario by Hugh Walpole (1764), The Monk by Mathew Lewis (1796), The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe (1794) and The Private ­Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824). 2 The examples are, respectively, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886), A Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde (1891) and The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (1895). 3 The term fantasy is used here as an ‘umbrella’ term which in contrast to accepted literary usage also includes science fiction. The point is to distinguish these novels from those labelled realistic; as will be argued throughout this book, despite their formally belonging to different genres, they can be all distinguished from realistic novels in containing elements that cannot occur according to the laws of nature or any conceivable physics.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004336582_002 Josephine

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that the significance or purpose of these fanciful devices emerges. Within a Lacanian framework these works can be linked together as unfolding common concerns in regard to the rapid modernization of a traditional agrarian society which, proving anticipatory rather than nostalgic, are still relevant to us today. This book takes issue with two assumptions prevailing in current literary criticism. The first concerns the continuing relevancy of these works and counters the dominant paradigm in literary criticism, the historicist or contextual which aims to interpret literary works within their historical context. In contrast I argue it takes a psychoanalytic Lacanian reading (routinely condemned as a-historicist) to historically situate these texts. The distinction involves two different ways of thinking about the period in which these works appeared: as a bygone era or alternatively as the coming into being of the contemporary Western world. Historicist criticism, it will be argued, treats this context as past, pertaining to conditions and modes of thinking no longer current, the task being to recover for a twenty-first century audience a set of historical elements of which they may not be aware. The novels at stake are thus seen as reflecting contemporaneous public discourse, firstly, on topics such as the B ­ ritish Empire or male anxieties in the face of the rise of the New Woman – one no longer confined to the home or more recently, the scientific or philosophical, for example conceptions of subjectivity, evolution or degeneration. In contrast I argue that this period, one of unprecedented historical change, has had longterm and ongoing consequences so that the historical context has to be the coming into being of ‘modern’ Britain, a world that bar the recent digital and internet revolution, we still inhabit today. Accordingly, it will be seen that the anxieties permeating these literary texts are not those of the imperialist, misogynistic or out-of-date Victorian or Edwardian author, now immaterial, but are ones pertinent to the twenty first century. My second contention is that, fantasy literature, while involving the counter factual, bears on the truth. This is in contrast to critical readings assuming a dichotomy between fantasy and truth, conflating the latter with reality or the factual. Given that it is science which in modern consciousness is synonymous with the truth qua factual, Lacan allows us to see that science can be approached from two different, if not opposite, perspectives: on the one hand, ‘empirical realism’, based on the observation, measurement and categorization of a pre-existing reality, which constitutes the dominant paradigm for j­ udging the truth value of social science disciplines. This norm, however, ignores the role of the ‘always already in-place’ symbolic framework. On the other hand, it is science seemingly detached from reality as exemplified by ­modern

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­ athematics and physics, that, as Lacan evidences a propos the ­Galilean m ­revolution, ‘manipulates the symbolic’, thus creating a new reality. It turns out that, counter intuitively fantasy literature in its creation of such imaginary devices, is analogous to this second type of science, that of the manipulation of the symbolic in order to change our conception of reality. Common to all the literary texts studied in this book are unrealistic or supernatural devices such as vampires and invisible men, which in conjunction with Lacanian theory, say something additional of the truth about – primarily sexual – aspects of human subjectivity and culture, which tend to be repressed by contemporary hegemonic discourses (first and foremost, the medical and that of the social sciences).

The Return of the Primordial Father: Freud’s Totem and Taboo and the Late Victorian and Edwardian Fantasy Novel

What will emerge as highly significant for my argument is the thread linking the literary works discussed in this book; three science fiction stories, The Lost World (1912), ‘The Horror of the Heights’ (1913), both by Arthur Conan Doyle, and H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897), an adventure or quest novel, She by Henry Rider Haggard (1887), and a gothic novel, Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897). Common to all is the plot of a psychoanalytic text, Totem and Taboo published in 1913 by Sigmund Freud. The connection indeed has already been noted. Maurice Richardson in 1958 writes of Dracula that ‘the set-up reminds one rather of the primal horde as pictured somewhat fantastically perhaps by Freud in Totem and Taboo, with the brothers banding together against the father who has tried to keep all the females to himself’.4 Slavoj Žižek emphasises the tie with this Freudian theme in relation to the novels of Joseph Conrad: This figure of the ‘other father’ – the obscene, uncanny, shadowy double of the Name of the Father – emerged for the first time in all its force in the novels of Joseph Conrad; what we have in mind here, of course are figures like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness or Mister Brown in Lord Jim. […] Perhaps, the contemporaneousness of these of Conrad’s works with the moment

4 Maurice Richardson, ‘The Psychoanalysis of Ghost Stories’, Twentieth Century, 166 (1959), 419–431 (p. 427).

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when in Totem and Taboo, Freud proposed his theory on the ‘primordial father’, is not a mere external coincidence.5 Although used in my argument as ‘a common denominator’ nothing foundational is ascribed to Freud’s text which should rightly viewed as another ­example, albeit in its most abbreviated or condensed form, of a reoccurring fictional text of this period. Indeed as will be discussed Lacan categorizes ­Totem and Taboo as a myth in contrast to Freud who appears to have regarded the murder as an historical event. The significance of a myth, for Lacan is that it marks the point at which knowledge fails, a story which papers overs a gap or void which cannot actually be filled so that in contrast to the claims of modern science, Lacanian psychoanalysis theorises an a-priori limit to knowledge or in other words the impossibility of being able to ‘say it all’, a ‘standpoint’ it will be argued shared by the literary texts. The plot of Totem and Taboo concerns the murder of the primordial father. Freud writes of an originary state with ‘a violent, jealous father who keeps all the females for himself and drives away the growing sons’. However, ‘one day the expelled brothers joined forces, slew and ate the father, and thus put an end to the father horde’.6 What appears in the literary novels and the short story under consideration is the re-emergence of a violent primordial father figure and, in all but one case, his or her subsequent death. In The Lost World there is the ‘king of the ape-men’, in Dracula, a vampire, in ‘The Horror of the Heights’, an aerial giant purple monster and in She and The Invisible Man, the eponymous heroes, a despotic African queen and a man who by becoming invisible attempts to attain an extra-ordinary positon above his fellow men.7

5 Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy your Symptom. Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 158. 6 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, trans. by A.A. Brill (New York: Random House, 1938), pp. 807–930 (p. 915). 7 As will be seen in due course the plots of the literary texts diverge at several points from Totem and Taboo. In none of the texts is the father killed by his actual sons, nor do all the women belong to him. In regard to this latter point, in Dracula, the most which might be said is that the primal father figure and the men compete for the same women. In Conan Doyle’s short story, ‘The Horror of the Heights’, there is what might be termed the most ‘pared down’ or abstract version of Freud’s story, with the primal father figure (and perhaps the women) represented by imaginary objects and there being only one ‘son figure’. Nonetheless, despite these differences, this book is based on the contention of the significance of the reemergence­of a figure who can be categorized as the primal father and, with the exception of ‘The Horror of the Heights’ his killing by a group of people.

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The re-emergence of this figure is enabled in plots based on a ‘dual space’ – a regular ‘every day’ location and an extra-ordinary fantasy one. In most cases the distinction is geographical, between the mapped, familiar space of ­England from which the hero or heroes set out and their exotic destination, where the primordial father re-appears. This second type of space is a generally inaccessible area requiring special means to gain access; secret instructions, prodigious physical feats, or the use of a futuristic technology. In The Lost World, it is an isolated South American plateau: in She, an apocryphal country somewhere upriver in Africa; in ‘The Horror of the Heights’, a sky ‘jungle’ above Southern England and in Dracula, the vampire’s Transylvanian castle. In all the cases involving areas on the globe, it is stressed, often more than once, that they are nowhere to be found on any map. Where, as in The Invisible Man and the major part of Dracula, the setting remains England, the staging of the primal father’s return occurs by means of a fictional device, in the first case, an invented chemistry and in the second an already existing vampire mythology. Thus while the contemporaneous extension of the British empire and these fictional exotic geographical locations typically leads to critics linking the two, my grouping of these texts undoes this, altering representations of British imperial possessions into imaginary devices created to stage the return of the primal father. The endings of these stories also turn out to be highly indicative. The primal father is a threat to the lives of the protagonists, to the social order or both, and, with, the exception of ‘The Horror of the Heights’ eventually dies. In The Lost World, the adventure in the remote territory ends in the killing of the numerous monsters including the king of the ape-men, enabling the explorers to return home. They come, moreover, in possession of an amazing specimen ensuring the triumph of an expedition sent out to obtain proof of a scientific contention. In Rider Haggard’s novel, the death of the primal father figure, She, enables the escape of the Englishmen – prompting some critics to view the novel as staging a male fantasy of the vanquishing of the threatening figure of the New Woman. In both The Invisible Man and Dracula, the fearsome primal father is tracked down and killed; the invisible man whose behaviour turns increasingly murderous and the vampire who at the novel’s end is harried back to his castle and slain. It thus appears that all ends well. Yet, with the exception of Dracula, the endings could also be read in an opposite way. In The Lost World there had been another purpose to the ­expedition, at least as far as the main protagonist and narrator of the story is concerned, namely, getting a wife, and in this aspect the expedition is a complete failure. The hero arrives home to find the woman in question now married to someone else. He then sets off on another expedition. In She, there is a

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similar ­circularity. The novel opens with the information that the first person narrator of the adventure about to be related and his companion have already left on another expedition from which it is unlikely that they will ever return. The Invisible Man also ends in an epilogue depicting another attempt to become an invisible man after the death of the first one. Only in Dracula is there a ‘traditional’ happy ending: marriage(s) and the birth of a baby.8 One of the objectives of this book is to show the underlying reason for this difference, where the answer appears to involve the social cohesion of a group subject to a set of shared symbolic rules. In contrast to the other novels, most of the plot of Dracula – following the initial encounter with the primal father in the fantasy space – is taken up with the restoration of what might be called symbolic ‘normality’ or, in Lacanian terms, as will be discussed in the course of this book, the re-instantiation of the Name-of-the-Father. In order to appreciate the full significance of this recurrence of the plot of Totem and Taboo, I look in detail at Lacan’s re-reading of Freud’s narrative. This is for two reasons. Firstly, for Lacan, ‘the primordial father is the father from before the incest taboo, before the appearance of law, of the structures of marriage and kinship, in a word, of culture’.9 In the literary works this figure indeed re-emerges in a space beyond law and culture created by means of the imaginary territories or scientific devices. Moreover, it is made very clear that the protagonists have to go beyond the law in order to, again, kill the primal father. Yet, notwithstanding the impression of a return to a remote past, these texts do not involve any kind of atavistic escape from civilization but, as been noted, a foreboding in regard to aspects of the modernization of Britain in the late nineteenth century. The salient point is that the return of the primal father, a violent and obscene figure who must be killed again (in so far as for Freud this was a unique event which occurred at the beginning of human time) comes in the wake of the absence or deposition of the traditional father figure and the breakdown of other traditional forms of symbolic authority, such as aristocracy and religion. It turns out that the rising dominance of science and technology apparently rendering these former authorities obsolete (as is claimed by the scientist in The Lost World) cannot fulfil their functions in culture and society as identified by Lacan. The decline of traditional authorities leaves a 8 Barry McCrea writes of the English nineteenth-century novel from Austen on that, in contrast to the early twentieth-century modern European novel, it is in ‘thrall of a sort of fertility cult, where all sense of beginnings and endings are predicated upon marriage and ­procreation.’ Barry McCrea, In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 7. 9 Jacques Lacan, ‘Introduction to the Names-of-the-Father Seminar’, trans. by Jeffrey M ­ ehlman, October, 40, (1987), 81–95 (p. 88). Josephine Sharoni - 978-90-04-33658-2 Downloaded from Brill.com04/11/2023 08:51:11AM via University of Cambridge

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deficit which the concomitant rise of scientific thinking and technology cannot offset. My contention is not an isolated one. As Mladen Dolar points out referring to an earlier literary period, strictly related, however, to the texts considered in this book, the gothic novel’s first appearance came with the triumph of the Enlightenment, which swept aside many elements of the old religious order in favour of rational thinking, human rights and scientific empiricism. Thus ‘ghosts, vampires, monsters, the undead dead, etc., flourish in an era when you might expect them to be dead and buried, without a place’ – ‘something brought about by modernity itself’.10 The romantic period also sees the first appearance of what Dolar identifies as the motif of the double which continues into nineteenth century: The exhaustive studies by Otto Rank and more recently by Karl Miller have shown the very extensive use of this motive in literature (and elsewhere), particularly its incredible proliferation in the romantic era. The authors range (apart from Hoffmann) from Chamisso (Peter ­Schlemihl), the Gothic novel [sic], Andersen, Lenau, Goethe, Jean Paul, Hogg, H ­ eine, Musset, Maupassant, Wilde, etc., to Poe (William Wilson) and D ­ ostoyevsky (Golyadkin).11 The double is, in most cases, the (almost) identical twin or shadow of a character, often the main protagonist of the story, typically showing up only in private, unknown to anyone else. Importantly for our purposes, he can also appear in the guise of the two fathers, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’, as is the case in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ (1816). This motif of the double, especially as relating to an obscene paternal figure, is germane to the re-appearance of the primal father figure during this period. Dolar’s point that the contemporaneity of the first wave of gothic works with the Enlightenment is not gratuitous, applies equally to this second wave of fantasy fiction appearing in an era of radical modernization. The second reason for engaging at length with the Lacanian revision of ­Totem and Taboo has to do with my contention that unrealistic or supernatural devices such as vampires and invisible men, can, in conjunction with ­Lacanian theory, say something additional of the truth about – primarily ­sexual – ­aspects of human subjectivity and culture, absent from contemporary hegemonic ­discourses. Re-reading through the lens of subsequent Lacanian theory, it can 10 11

Mladen Dolar, ‘“I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night”: Lacan and the Uncanny’, October, 58 (1991), 5–23 (p.7) Ibid., p. 11. We can certainly add to this list Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Josephine Sharoni - 978-90-04-33658-2 Downloaded from Brill.com04/11/2023 08:51:11AM via University of Cambridge

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be said that such concepts as jouissance, the Name-of-the-Father, object a, and the superego appear in the texts avant la lettre, furnishing an alternative view of human subjectivity and culture. Thus for example, the Englishman’s stay in Dracula’s castle in Transylvania relates to the problematics of jouissance, anxiety and the superego in a fantasy space imaginatively representing the reappearance of the obscene primordial father in the absence of the Name-of-the-Father.

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The Modernization of Britain 1870–1914 Given my privileging the view of the historical period under consideration as the formation of ‘modern’ Britain, a summary overview of its most important social and economic changes is set out. The subjects discussed are urbanization, literacy, the decline of the aristocracy, the waning of religion, the ­unprecedented alteration in the position of woman and the strengthening of scientific thinking and technological innovations. My focus is, a­ ccordingly, not  on the fact that these phenomena of modernity can be noted in the ­novels – ­although this is indeed the case for some if not most of such trends, as will gradually emerge in the following chapters – but on avoiding the practice, common among prevailing historicist modes of criticism to which I will turn in the next section, of retrieving a historical context stressing the divergence between Victorian and Edwardian and twenty-first century conceptual ­frameworks. These works pertain to the Britain which was coming into being and are in this sense proleptic. Furthermore, in surveying these major ­developments it must be emphasised that overall they cannot be seen as other than progressive,  ­representing a significant improvement in the conditions, both material and other, of the vast majority of the population, particularly women and children. Thus, to reiterate, one of the main questions this book attempts to answer is why, nonetheless, there is in the literary works the concomitant re-appearance of such atavistic horror phenomena as vampires and ape men. It is worthwhile to begin by saying that it is, significantly enough, precisely in this period that the term ‘modern’ in its present meaning comes into being. In her social history of Britain from 1870 to 1914, Jose Harris points out that while the term was not new, during these years its meaning alters dramatically. It had been used to distinguish modern from classical or medieval times (thus, for example, the title of The Cambridge Modern History designates a history beginning with the discovery of the New World in the late fifteenth century).1 But as Harris writes:

1 The Cambridge Modern History was published in fourteen volumes between 1902 and 1912 by the Cambridge University Press, Wikipedia, [accessed 19 November 2012].

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004336582_003 Josephine

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over the course of Queen Victoria’s reign the subjective time span of modernity grew shorter and shorter, and by the 1870s the term was being widely used to describe ‘the way we live now’: the age of evolution, plutocracy, gaslight, and feminism, rather than the longer sweep of postclassical European civilization.2 In other words, over less than fifty years, Britain switched from a largely agricultural, illiterate, rural society dominated by aristocratic landowners and the Anglican Church to an urbanized society living from industrial manufacturing and financial investments whose population was largely literate, less ­traditionally religious and whose politics was becoming more and more democratic. Science and technology in particular began to have an increasing, even ­revolutionary, impact on society, including advances in medicine, public sanitation and a long list of technological inventions such as the motor car, typewriter, radio, telegraph and the x-ray machine.3 The most significant change in this period was undoubtedly economic in that ‘for the first time in British (and perhaps human) history the sheer fact of scarcity receded from the cockpit of social organization’.4 A significant percentage of the people now lived above subsistence level where getting enough food was their main and sometimes only concern. Although poverty remained widespread among working class families, there was overall money left over for discretionary spending. ‘Markets for commodities were increasingly designed not merely to satisfy human wants, but to invent and impose those wants through the new medium of mass advertisement’.5 2 Jose Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain, 1870–1914, Penguin Social History of Britain (London: Penguin, 1994, Kindle Electronic Edition), p. 32. 3 Dracula, a story which returns to an ancient vampire myth, is replete with modern technical innovations. There is the use of a phonograph, into which one of the characters dictates his story which another then types up. The telegraph, by which means the characters get the latest shipping news, also features prominently. In addition the basic plot of The Horror of the Heights revolves around a future fictional advance in aviation based on already existing technology. 4 Harris, Private Lives, p. 33. 5 Ibid. In Wells’ The Invisible Man, in a chapter called ‘The Emporium’, there is a department store called Omniums, modelled, as Andy Sawyer notes, on department stores such as ­Harrods and John Lewis which were expanding their range in London in the 1890s. The name of the department store ‘Omniums’ might be seen as based on the Latin word omnia meaning ‘all things’; indeed the store appears to contain a vast array of things which were catering for a much larger market of potential consumers than had previously been the case. There also appear to be numerous workers foreshadowing the type of employment found

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Economic scarcity in Britain at this period diminishes in tandem with a switch in the dominant means of subsistence, or, increasingly, the new concept of ‘earning a living’, from agriculture to industry, with a concomitant move of people from country to city: While in 1871, farm labouring was still by far the largest male occupation, and persons employed in agriculture were as numerous as the three ‘leading sectors’ of the Industrial Revolution – textiles, transport, and mining – put together, by 1914 only 8 per cent of the British people were employed in agriculture and the percentage of the British population living in rural areas and small towns had shrunk to less than a quarter, and for England alone to one-eighth.6 There was also an unprecedented expansion in the employment of white collar workers both in the public and private spheres. ‘The growth of cities, communications, Empire, and international trade generated whole new areas of “service” employment, of a kind that had scarcely existed in the earlier stages of industrialization’. This can be measured in the fourfold increase in employment in transport, clerical, commercial, and retail occupations which occurred during the years 1871–1911.7 The same years also saw the beginning of universal literacy, in marked distinction to the unschooled society of early industrial Britain. As the historian Martin Daunton notes, in 1867 child labour was restricted by the Workshop Regulation Act and further by the Factory and Workshop Act eleven years later. Simultaneously, compulsory education was introduced and, moreover, strictly enforced.8 In 1870, legislation ‘established a system of school boards to build and manage schools in areas where they were needed’.9 This was in addition to the existing voluntary schools. In 1880 ‘a further Education Act finally made

today at d­ epartment stores and large supermarkets. The narrator reports that ‘a number of brisk young men begin with remarkable alacrity to tidy up the goods’ and then he observes ‘how rapidly the young men and women whipped away the goods displayed for sale during the day’ (H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man, ed. by Patrick Parrinder (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 109–110). 6 Harris, Private Lives, p. 43. 7 Ibid., p. 127. 8 Martin Daunton, Wealth and Welfare: An Economic and Social History of Britain, 1851–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 333. 9 uk Parliament Website, http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsoci ety/livinglearning/school/overview /1870educationact/ [accessed 30 June 2013].

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school attendance compulsory between the ages of five and ten’.10 Legislation in 1893 extended the age of compulsory attendance to 11, and in 1899 to 12. Even though compliance was not absolute it was high. By the early 1890s attendance of children between the ages of five and ten stood at 82 per cent.11 It is also this period, with the precipitate decline in the importance of agriculture in the economy, that sees the end of the centuries’ old dominance of the aristocratic class, based on birth and inheritance. As the historian David Cannadine writes, ‘until the 1870’s there was an exceptionally high correlation between wealth, status, and power, for the simple reason that they were all territorially determined and defined. Land was wealth: the most secure, reliable and permanent assets’.12 Land entailed political and administrative power, both at the local and national level; ‘from land to power the line ran and rarely the other way’.13 Yet by the end of this period the wealth on which aristocratic dominance ultimately rested had crumbled. There was a ‘sudden and dramatic collapse of the agricultural base of the European economy’ as a whole.14 The world-wide plunge in farm prices led to estate rentals in Britain falling dramatically, and land values plummeting. The repeal of the Corn Act and the fall in transport costs meant Britain was open to imports of corn from the vast open spaces of the usa. Simultaneously the growth of the industrial economy depressed the position held by the class of landed owners as a whole and as individuals. ‘Prodigious, unprecedented plutocratic fortunes were now being made around the world in business, in industry, and in finance, which equalled and soon surpassed the wealth of all but the greatest of the super-rich magnates’.15 With the slump in wealth came a corresponding reduction of political power and, in tandem, the democratic politics of today’s Britain began to emerge. Previously, the aristocratic class had dominated British politics to the extent that ‘until the 1880s, the lower house of Parliament was essentially a landowners’ club’.16 But ‘the passing of the Third Reform Act in 1884–5 and the Liberal triumph over the House of Lords in the aftermath of the People’s Budget of 1909 meant that the traditional aristocratic constitution was definitely brought 10 Daunton, Wealth and Welfare, p. 333. 11 Ibid. 12 David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 16. 13 Ibid., p. 18. 14 Ibid., p. 26. 15 Ibid., p. 27. 16 Ibid., p. 14.

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to an end’.17 As a result ‘the cities and suburbs became pre-eminent in British politics and a working class electorate had “the dominant voice”’.18 The landed interest no longer controlled elections. As Hobsbawm notes, ‘aristocrats were a majority in almost all British cabinets before 1895. After 1895 they never were’.19 Furthermore, this period saw the emergence of the modern British popular press when in the 1890s, for the first time, a newspaper reached a million-copy sale.20 This constituted a new force in the political life of the country. As John Pemble writes, the notion of a Fourth Estate, that is, the ‘Press’, as an addition to the existing powers of the land acquired ‘real political purchase when most of the population was able to vote, read and afford a daily’.21 Religious practice amongst all denominations declined steeply in the wake of urbanization and industrialization. As James Obelkevich writes, the churches’ biggest problem ‘was changes in the wider society – the continued spread of industry and large towns, and the deepening of class divisions’, and despite responding energetically to the changes ‘they largely failed to win the allegiance of the urban working classes, and by the end of the century they were 17 Ibid., p. 36. 18 Ibid. 19 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (London: Abacus, 2003), p. 171. 20 Hobsbawm, Empire, p. 53. 21 John Pemble, ‘The Only True Throne’, London Review of Books, 34 (2012), 9–10 (p. 9). In several of the fictional works studied in this book, the new mass journalism plays a significant part. Indeed, in The Lost World, the fantastic journey which returns to a pre-historic time is being covered by a mass circulation newspaper as a good, revenue making story. In Dracula, the bizarre and sensational arrival of the vampire in Whitby, a coastal town of England, is described in great length in a ‘Cutting from “The Dailygraph”, 8 August’ (Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. by John Paul Riquelme (Bedford: St, Martin’s Press, 2001), p. 96). Thus, in sharp contrast to the newspaper covering politics and foreign affairs read in most cases silently by a single man in the drawing room of a country house in the works of Jane Austen, the newspapers in these novels now spread the news widely amongst the public at large. In Sense and Sensibility, for example, Mr. Palmer ‘entered the room with a look of self-consequence, stiffly bowed to the ladies, without speaking a word, and after briefly surveying them and their apartments, took up a newspaper from the table and continued to read it as long as he staid.’ Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (London: Penguin, 2008, p. 104). Most tellingly, in The Invisible Man the fact of the existence of such a person is transmitted by a newspaper which a mariner has in his possession and is talking about with a Mr. Marvel, a tramp: ‘“There’s some extra-ordinary things in newspapers, for example,” said the mariner. “There are.” “In this newspaper,” said the mariner. “Ah!” said Mr. Marvel. “There’s a story,” said the mariner, fixing Mr. Marvel with an eye that was firm and deliberate; “there’s a story about an Invisible Man, for instance.”’ (Invisible Man, p. 65, emphasis mine).

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losing their hold on the respectable middle classes as well.’22 This came in the wake of another factor, the rise of science and of ‘rational’ thinking in general, which had already contributed to the weakening of religion. Jose Harris writes of the ‘intellectual undermining of religious belief, first, through discoveries in geology, which showed that the world was much older than suggested by a literal reading of the Book of Genesis’, and, secondly, ‘by the gradual percolation into Britain of the new German historical scholarship, which ­questioned the historicity of many parts of the Bible’. What would become known as ­Darwinism – ‘the evolution and mutability of species, and creation as a process not of “divine Providence” but of “random selection”’23 – between 1859  and 1871 dealt a further blow to religious belief. This process of the intellectual ­undermining of religiosity is noted by another historian, Peter Bowles, who points out that in the wake of the negation of the biblical account of creation by ­geology and evolutionary biology, other accounts on which many aspects of faith depended were opened up to doubt.24 Finally, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries see a fundamental change in the position of women as evinced by the term ‘New Woman’. Scholars disagree as to when the term was first coined, but it entered general circulation following an exchange in an American literary magazine, The North American Review, between two British writers, Sarah Grand and Ouida (the pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé).25 It came to designate a woman who demanded and received new rights and opportunities both in the domestic and public spheres. Firstly the formal legal status of women as wives changed substantially over this period in a number of ways, as Jose Harris has detailed. At the beginning of this period, in 1870, an English husband ‘had an absolute right of control over his wife’s person and, unless constrained by a private settlement, over her property as well’. In contrast, ‘the wife had no enforceable legal rights’ so that ‘in common law her juridical personality was totally submerged in that of her husband’. She could, for example neither hold property separately from him nor enter into any contracts. In regard to the children, the father had the sole responsibility, and the law also gave the husband almost unlimited power over the woman’s own person.26 From 1870 onwards, however, the legal framework altered. In 1870 and 1882 the Married Women’s Property Acts 22

James Obelkevich, ‘Religion’ in The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950, ed. by F.L.M. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 311–356 (p. 329). 23 Harris, Private Lives, p. 170. 24 Peter Bowles, Reconciling Science and Religion: The Debate in Early Twentieth-century B ­ ritain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 198. 25 Martha H. Patterson, The American New Woman Revisited (New Brunswick: Rutgers ­University Press, 2008), p. 1. 26 Harris, Private Lives, p. 73. Josephine Sharoni - 978-90-04-33658-2 Downloaded from Brill.com04/11/2023 08:51:11AM via University of Cambridge

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gave to all ­married women the powers to hold, acquire, manage, and dispose of their own property. From 1873 the courts could grant custody to a mother in the case of children under 16, while in 1886 ‘a mother was permitted for the first time to appoint guardians and to act as the guardian of her own children without her husband’s express consent’. An act of 1895 also gave a woman protection against assault by the husband, enabling her to apply to the county courts for a judicial separation and maintenance.27 The second major change was in education. As Hobsbawm points out, the provision of universal elementary education in the acts of 1870, 1880 and 1891 applied to girls as well as boys. In Britain, where there was no national ­secondary system before 1902, the number of private girls’ schools by that year reached comparable figures to that of that of the boys’. Furthermore, despite the numerous arguments still put forward against educating women, universities in Britain nonetheless began admitting them, starting with London University, which from 1878 on awarded women degrees on the same terms as men. ­Cambridge University, one of the bastions of upper class male ­privilege, allowed women to study courses and sit examinations from 1875 and 1881 ­respectively, although they would not be awarded the actual degree.28 The third noticeable development was in the opportunities for women of employment and participation in public life. The structural changes in the economy already noted and technological developments greatly increased female employment as wage earners. Hobsbawm shows that the number of women employees in central and local government rose from 7000 in 1881 to 76,000 in 1901, while that of commercial and business clerks’ reached 146,000 as opposed to a mere 6000 earlier – ‘a tribute to the typewriter’.29 ­Finally, there was, according to Hobsbawm, a significant change in the position of young women in the greater freedom of movement outside of the home they acquired, both as individuals and in their relations with men. ‘This was of ­particular importance for girls of the “respectable” families, subject to the strongest conventional restraints’.30 At this time, for example, public places, became available for casual social dancing, rather than the strictly monitored private balls of previous eras. 27 Ibid, p. 74. 28 Jane McDermin, ‘Women and Education’ in Women’s History: Britain, 1850–1945: An Introduction, ed. by June Purvis (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 107–130 (p. 112). 29 Before her marriage, Mina in Dracula is employed in a school. As she writes to her friend: “Forgive my long delay in writing, but I have been simply overwhelmed with work. The life of an assistant schoolmistress is sometimes trying. (Stoker, Dracula, p. 265.)” 30 Hobsbawm, Empire, p. 206.

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chapter 2

Lacan and the Question of Evidence We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us. shakespeare, Hamlet

…

My dear chap, things don’t happen like that in real life. People don’t ­stumble upon enormous discoveries and then lose their evidence. Leave that to the novelists. arthur conan doyle, The Lost World

∵

Types of Literary Criticism: Contextual and Critical

The above historical survey viewing the years 1870–1914 as the portal to our own modernity impinges on the debate on critical approaches to literary works. Contextual or historicist criticism can be unduly limiting by seeking the referents or keys to literary works in issues and circumstances of that period which are no longer current. This focus comes instead of the recognition of the movements described above. The prevailing type of criticism of the literary works analysed in this book is what Herman Rapaport, in a compendium of literary concepts and methods, published in 2011, terms contextual analysis. This involves, in Rapaport’s words ‘the establishment of a context (or contexts) within which to situate and determine the meanings of a work by drawing direct connections between elements within the context’. These include: (i) philological history of the language (ii) the literary tradition that has influenced the work and to which the work ‘belongs’ (iii) the biography of the author; and (iv) the social, political, and cultural contexts likely to have a bearing on the work’s meaning.1 1 Herman Rapaport, The Literary Theory Toolkit (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), p. 6. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004336582_004 Josephine

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According to Rapaport, it is this type of criticism of literature in general which is dominant today, at least in the English speaking world. ‘Such studies are the most typical of what professors of literature produce and they are most typical of the research on literature that one is likely to find in a university library’.2 The prevailing research on turn-of-the-century fantasy fiction is no exception. As one of the alternatives to the contextual method, there is what Rapaport names the ‘critical approach’. This is defined as ‘a more systematic example of interpretation in which a coherent body of thought (i.e. a theory) is mapped onto the literary work in order to explain its meaning’. An example Rapaport gives is a Freudian reading of Hamlet. As regards this type of criticism, ‘if it has an advantage, it is that the researcher is working with a coherent body of analytical thought and not just making ad hoc determinations’.3 The critical method, and in particular psychoanalytic criticism, has, however, been censured on several grounds. The first is that of predictability. In Rapaport’s words, ‘those who are critical of applied theories, whether they be psychoanalytical, anthropological, sociological or whatever else, will complain that to read cultural works or events in this way is to reduce them to neat models that are reductive (simplistic)’. In consequence, ‘connecting a theory to a work becomes merely a “plug and play”’ and ‘often tells us just what we already know’.4 A second objection is that psychoanalytic criticism does not take into account the historical context within which the work was produced, and assumes a universality which is unwarranted. Thirdly, using (Lacanian) psychoanalytic theory as a key to interpret literary works inevitably raises the question of the correctness or reliability of the theory itself. As will be seen, in the case of Lacan, the critique of academics has extended to accusations of charlatanism and an impenetrable style hiding a vacuous theory.5 These points will now be taken up in turn. Regarding the critique of psychoanalytic analysis of literary texts being reductive and calculable, Rapaport points to Žižek as an exception, ‘whose applications are mostly unpredictable’. This is, Rapaport suggests, perhaps due to the fact that they often pertain to popular culture where ‘no one has noticed or bothered to look’, as ‘for most people it isn’t imagined to be intellectually 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., p. 7. 4 Ibid., p. 9. 5 The linguist Noam Chomsky said of Lacan in a 2012 interview that “quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t see anything there that should be influential”. [accessed 31 May 2014]. Josephine Sharoni - 978-90-04-33658-2 Downloaded from Brill.com04/11/2023 08:51:11AM via University of Cambridge

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respectable’.6 In regard to this book, this explanation is at least partially applicable in that the literary texts are popular ones, even huge ‘bestsellers’ in their time. However, on the other hand, apart from Conan Doyle’s texts, they have, at least in recent years, received a great deal of serious academic critical attention. Moreover, all of them have been published as one of a series of ‘classics’. The contention of this book, one which can only be unfolded in the course of its reading, is that a psychoanalytic reading, rather than forcing the texts into an already known (and perhaps in any case ill-fitting) framework, brings out aspects which otherwise remain concealed. In particular, in the course of a detailed reading of parts of the texts, it renders significant odd or seemingly trivial details, such as, for instance, why The Lost World begins with a father leaving for a Masonic meeting and the return of the medieval courtly love scenario, and ends with the sharing out of some diamonds between four explorers. This, as will be discussed further on in more detail, forms an important d­ imension of my overall argument in that a theory is always required in order to be able ‘to see’ in the first place, that is, to render ‘raw data’ meaningful so that one takes note of it. The ‘data’ to be rendered meaningful is precisely the trivial, the seemingly insignificant, that which initially makes no sense; in the literary texts, the ‘unnecessary’ details extraneous to plot development. This is analogous to, in psychoanalytic practice, patients’ asides, slips of the tongue, hesitations, repetitions, recounts of nonsensical dreams and as Freud remarked any utterance prefaced by ‘this is probably not very important’. The charge of predictability is also countered by considering the reciprocity involved in the interaction between literature and psychoanalysis. As ­Rapaport, using the specific instance of Lacanian theory, points out, the examples work in such a way that they [both] help explain and develop a theory (Lacanian psychoanalysis) that for many people makes no sense without a key. This last point is important; an application ought to work two ways. The theory should illuminate a work and a work should illuminate a theory.7 This aspect concerning explanation or illumination is particularly relevant to Lacanian psychoanalysis which has been and is still regarded as opaque. As Chiesa writes, ‘Lacan has acquired the reputation of being unreadable, and while he is indisputably difficult to understand, it has rightly been observed

6 Rapaport, Toolkit, p. 9. 7 Ibid., p. 5 [my emphases].

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that he is perhaps not so difficult’.8 One of the means of rendering Lacan not ‘so difficult’ is, as this book hopes to show, through fictional illustrations. One should also note in regard to the accusation levelled at psychoanalytic criticism of predictability that the interaction between psychoanalysis and literature has had repercussions on the theory of psychoanalysis itself.9 Although this issue will remain outside the scope of my book it should nonetheless be stressed that while a theory may allow us to interpret a work of literature, it in turn may be substantially modified by it. Thus, in both these cases, that of illumination and that of interaction, the sense of predictability or déjà vu will have been lessened. The second charge levelled at psychoanalytical criticism, in particular from the perspective of contextual approaches, is that of being cocooned in its own ahistorical and ‘ageographical’ theoretical framework. The critic Stephen A ­ rata, for example, writing in 1990, maintains that the historical context of Dracula has been mistakenly neglected partly due to psychoanalytic approaches: While Gothic novelists had traditionally displaced their stories in time or location, these later writers root their action firmly in the modern world. Yet critics have until recently ignored the historical context in which these works were written and originally read. Most notably, criticism has persistently undervalued Dracula’s extensive and highly visible contacts with a series of cultural issues, particularly those involving race, specific to the 1890s. This neglect has in part resulted from the various psychoanalytic approaches taken by most critics of Gothic.10 Arata adds that, while, in his opinion, psychoanalytic approaches do not in theory preclude a ‘historicist’ reading of literary texts, in practice, they have ‘been used most exclusively to demonstrate’11 that as another critic John Allen Stevenson wrote, ‘Dracula is, a representation of fears that are more universal than a specific focus on the Victorian background would allow’.12 Arata’s 8 Chiesa, Subjectivity, p. 3. 9 A paradigmatic case is Lacan’s turning in his final seminars to the work of James Joyce in order to elaborate a new psychoanalytical notion, that of the sinthome. See Roberto ­Harari, How James Joyce Made his Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan, trans. Luke ­Thurston (New York: Other Press, 2013). 10 Stephen Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonialisation’, Victorian Studies, 33 (1990), 621–645 (p. 621). 11 Ibid., p. 622. 12 John Allen Stevenson, ‘A Vampire in the Mirror, The Sexuality of Dracula’, pmla, 103 (1988), 139–149 (p. 141), quoted in Ibid.

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c­ ontention is that Dracula in particular, ‘continually calls our attention to the cultural context surrounding and informing the text, and insists that we take that context into account’.13 The relevant context, Arata sees as being ‘the decline of Britain as a world power at the close of the nineteenth century; or rather, the way the perception of that decline was articulated by contemporary writers’.14 Hence, the key to late-Victorian fiction is ‘the sense that the entire nation – as a race of people, as a political and imperial force, as a social and cultural power – was in irretrievable decline’.15 In contrast to the contention being made in this book, it should be noted that, while Arata observes that the novel is set firmly in the ‘modern’ world, the context he considers pertinent turns out to be that specifically of the 1890s, the general decline of Britain as ‘articulated by contemporary writers’. This example hence demonstrates the tendency of contextual criticism to search for a historical background no longer circulating, thereby providing a framework that the modern reader might not be aware of but for the historicist contextualization. To highlight this point, I give another example, this time a comment from an anonymous (female) member of Lacan’s seminar audience in the 1950s as recounted by Joan Copjec. Lacan was speaking in connection with a dream of Freud’s, (to be discussed further on in regard to Dracula), about a patient, known as Irma, who, Lacan relates, at some point in the dream starts gasping for breath. The following observation is then made by someone whom Copjec designates as ‘Mme. Culturalist or Mme. Historicist’: ‘In the old days, three or four people were needed to pull on the laces of a corset to tighten it.’16 While factually correct in that, a nineteenth-century lady might well have been left gasping for breath by a too tight corset, Mme. Historicst’s explanation renders the incident of no relevance to the modern reader. Since Western women are no longer squeezed in this particular way, the cause of Irma’s gasping for breath becomes a thing of the past. Copjec’s observation is that the intervention thereby ‘sweeps under the carpet’ something which does concern us namely Lacan’s real, a concept discussed in the course of this book. Offering these historical contexts tends to reduce the literary works involved to interesting historical documents but diminishing or even eliminating their literary significance. Further instances of such a process, which is itself reductive, can be given; the plot of She enacting the come-uppance of the New Woman hoped for by the anxious Victorian male author, or The Lost World as 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Joan Copjec, ‘Vampires, Breast Feeding and Anxiety’, October, 58 (1991), 24–43 (p. 32).

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an Edwardian justification for imperialism, through its vanquishing of the bad natives by the good. As Rapaport points out, one of the drawbacks of contextual analysis is its reduction of ‘works of literature to ordinary norms that were widely held in society’.17 It is, I argue, in contrast, the view of history as change and its enduring and still on-going effects, namely, the coming into being at a given time (1870–1914) of what even contemporaries saw as modern Britain – and the modern Western world tout court – which untethers these works from the period in which they were written, thereby also reinstating their literary value. With this latter approach, the exotic locations common to all the novels no longer appertain to the late nineteenth century ideological geography of the British but to a historical juncture. at which, as was noted in the survey, the authority of traditional institutions, the patriarchal family, the aristocracy and the Church is severely diminished. Although it appears that these old types of authorities based on the irrational, the superstitious and the contingent – such as the accidents of birth – are replaced by much more rational authorities in the form of, for instance, elected politicians, scientific thinking, and women’s legal rights, these literary texts stage how these latter do not manage to replace or fulfil certain lacunae or fissures left by the decline of the former. First and foremost the primal father figure emerges following the depiction of certain unusual or non-traditional actions of an actual father (The Lost World, She) or specific mention of the fact that a father or fathers are missing or disowned (The Invisible Man, Dracula). In particular, a connection is made between the abolition of the father’s role in the daughter’s choice of husband and the subsequent failure of the marriage quest (The Lost World) or its suspension until after, with the aid of an ‘ersatz’ father, the primal father figure is killed (Dracula). Indeed, these stories are marked by the rather abrupt termination of the age-old authority of the pater familias, present in literature from the Biblical story of Jacob, Lea and Rachel, in determining the choice of his daughter’s husband. The obscene and violent figure of the primal father emerges in this gap. This change is more clearly seen in a comparison with the mid-nineteenthcentury novel. Here the narrative typically stems from some kind of impediment or failure in the functioning of the father, who is however still present as crucial symbolic role. Examples abound, such as Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, published in 1859, where the plot is set in motion on the daughter’s acting in accordance with the promise given by her dead father to marry the ‘wrong man’. In George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1874), the heroine (Dorothea 17 Rapaport, Toolkit, p. 6.

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Broke) wrong-headedly picks a man, Edward Casaubon who, she comes to realise, was not the person she had imagined and desired. In the world of the novel (set around the period 1830–2) this can only happen because she, an orphan, has no father and is living with an easy-going and muddle-headed uncle who does not care to intervene despite promptings to do so. Another instance in Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, (1875), where much of the plot centres on the doings of the would-be couple Marie Melmotte and Sir Felix Carbury who, wishing to get married in opposition to her father’s wishes, first try to win him over and then devise a plan of eloping together and marrying in New York. In contrast, in the novels under consideration, this very function of the father has been abolished. The plot is now triggered in its complete absence and not in the wake of its miscarrying due to some contingent reason. Even when a father is still present, it is no longer his task to act. The change is most evident in The Lost World, the novel beginning with the daughter’s own response to a proposal of marriage. In the first paragraph, the father is with his daughter and a man who is wooing her, but he is not at all concerned in the matter, conversing with the suitor on a totally unrelated topic. At the end of the scene he leaves, never to reappear again. In Dracula, the choice of husband is also left to the rich heroine, Lucy Westenra. Even though in this case the father has died, the difference is still remarkable compared with the Victorian novel. There is never the least doubt that it is Lucy’s choice to be made. There is no reference, as might have been the case in a previous era, to the dead father’s wishes or plans, in particular taking into consideration the fact that there appears to be a great deal of money and property involved on both sides. That there are three suitors for her hand (which also occurs in Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady (1881), the choice of husband also being that of the young heroine) evokes the contrast with The Merchant of Venice, where three suitors are also involved, but where the daughter Portia complains: ‘I may neither choose who I would nor refuse who I dislike; so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father’.18 Finally, in She, it is a father’s will which propels the son towards the terrible encounter with the primal father figure (in this case a woman, She) who will also destroy his relationship with the ‘normal’ woman. Thus, it will emerge in the course of the book that these late nineteenthcentury and early twentieth-century fantasy literary texts concern issues that came into being in a particular form with ‘modernisation’ and are still current. These include, in addition to the choice of marriage partners and the ­difficulty 18

William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. by Leah S. Marcus, A Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 2004), I.2.25.

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of establishing sexual relationships after the ‘abdication’ of the father, the problem of enjoyment in a permissive society which has abolished seemingly oppressive rules and moral restrictions based on religious belief, and the pull of solipsistic enjoyments as opposed to pleasures dependent on the fabric of social discourse. It will also be seen that the novels address the new faith placed in science, in particular that based on empirical evidence and technology and, concomitantly, raise the question of the place of myths such as are found in religion and by extension fantasy literature, in a society which prides itself on rational thinking and insists on the equating of the factual with truth. Thus, while, the literary texts are specific products of their historical period, a Lacanian approach will allow us to see both why and how their concerns are still relevant.19

The Critique of Lacan

The third question raised in the use of what Rapaport calls the critical method concerns the general acceptance of that body of theory used as a ‘coherent body of thought’ capable of providing for the reading and interpretation of a literary work. This question is particularly acute in the case of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Criticism of Lacan and Freud is widespread; in particular, there are numerous complaints regarding the opacity of Lacan’s writings and speech,20 19

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As Rapaport notes, contextual criticism sometimes makes use of an author’s non-fictional writings as some sort of privileged guide or key. It is clear, however, that there sometimes appears a discrepancy between the literary work and an author’s non-fictional writings. A writer’s letters, prefaces or newspaper articles do not, necessarily, provide a key to his literary oeuvre. An example can be given regarding She where Norman Etherington, in furtherance of his contention that the novel is not necessarily a part of the on-going contemporaneous discourse on colonialism and empire, argues that a distinction be made between the non-literary writing and public pronouncements of creators and their art. In Haggard’s case, the real-life person ‘eulogized Cecil Rhodes, apologized for the J­ameson Raid, and regarded the Matabele War as a very good thing’. In addition, ‘he scoffed at the idea that Africans could have built the impressive stone structures of Zimbabwe and doubted the ability of blacks to govern themselves’. When it came to the novelist, however, the case is different. ‘Haggard’s “savages” are the best and cleverest since James ­Fennimore Cooper’s Mohicans’ (Norman A. Etherington, ‘Rider Haggard, Imperialism and the Layered Personality’, Victorian Studies, 22 (1978), 71–87, (p. 74)). As Dany Nobus notes ‘There is a colloquial expression in French that one can sometimes hear in the company of psychoanalysts, but with increasing frequency also amongst the so-called “educated lay-people,” and which serves to emphasize the excruciatingly ­awkward formulation of a spoken sentence or written statement. Faced with his complete

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where this obscurity leads to charges of charlatanism in that an emptiness of thought is being covered up by impenetrable writing. There is also a second type of critique of Lacan which rejects his thinking (and that of Freud’s) absolutely, and this on the grounds that it does not conform to the ideals of science, given the absence of evidence of the kind considered de rigueur for a body of thought to be taken seriously, even if it falls within the category of a ‘social science’. These two points are addressed here in turn, beginning with the issue of evidence and ‘testability’. A sample complaint about the ‘non testability’ of Lacan’s work comes from an evolutionary biologist, Dylan Evans, who in an earlier period of his academic career was seriously engaged with Lacan’s work. The biological Freud was wrong, but at least he advanced clear, testable claims. The cultural-linguistic Freud that Lacan invented, on the other hand, was completely untestable. He was not merely impervious to contradictory evidence in biology; he was impervious to any evidence at all.21 In Evans’ view psychoanalysis served as a kind of stop gap, given the state of scientific technology at the time of its invention, analogous to the popular conception of the role of religion or superstition in providing bogus explanations for natural phenomena before science provides the real ones. If, writes Evans, Freud ‘had been born a century later, things might have been very different’. More advanced technology would have rendered psychoanalysis unnecessary. Had Freud had access to an mri scanner, Evans writes, he ‘may well have never invented psychoanalysis’.22 It turns out, nonetheless, that the argument between Freud’s ‘cultural linguistic’ approach and the somatic one, based on brain imaging, emerged long before the invention of the mri scanner. As Eric Santner, a Lacanian cultural and literary critic, points out, the end of the nineteenth century sees the rise of two conflicting discourses on the nature of the soul and mental illness:

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failure to fathom the significance of a text, confronted with her radical inability even to begin to understand the meaning of a phrase, a person may be heard to say: “Eh bien, c’est vraiment du Lacan”’. Dany Nobus, ‘The Punning Of Reason On The Strange Case Of Dr Jacques L’, Angelaki, 9 (2004) pp. 189–201 (p. 189). Dylan Evans, ‘From Lacan to Darwin’ in The Literary Animal; Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, ed. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), pp. 38–55 (p. 49). Ibid., p. 51. Josephine Sharoni - 978-90-04-33658-2 Downloaded from Brill.com04/11/2023 08:51:11AM via University of Cambridge

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On the one hand is the invention of psychoanalysis by Freud, the cure by talking and on the other, the application of medical practices, either in the use of an analogous symptomology to describe both physical and mental illness or in the direct intervention on the body, where both approaches bypass the patient as a social and speaking subject with his/her own particularity.23 Daniel Paul Schreber, a prominent German jurist, was subjected to both methods. Schreber suffered a mental breakdown and was interned in an asylum. The man responsible for his treatment was a psychiatrist, Dr. Paul Emil Flechsig. Flechsig’s interest was ‘the localization and mapping of brain functions and the purely physical causes of mental illness’.24 For Flechsig, brain dissection was ‘the most direct way to penetrate to the knowledge of the lawful relations between mental illnesses and brain anomalies’.25 As Santner, relying at this point on Zvi Lothane, notes, ‘the appointment of a brain anatomist with no real psychiatric experience to the directorship of a psychiatric clinic signalled a historical shift of paradigms in the discipline of psychiatry toward extreme medicalization’. In Lothane’s words: ‘in one fell swoop, through Flechsig’s nomination, the tradition of the soul ended and the reign of the brain began’.26 The other approach to Schreber’s mental illness was Freud’s (and subsequently Lacan’s) who, while never actually treating the patient, nevertheless read what he had to say. Schreber had recorded his thoughts and experiences in an autobiographical book called Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, first published in 1903. On reading the memoirs it soon becomes evident that as it stands, a lot of the writing makes little sense. Here is a sample: I believe I may say that at that time and at that time only I saw God’s omnipotence in its complete purity. During the night…the lower God (airman) appeared. The radiant picture of his rays became visible to my inner eye…that is to say he was reflected on my inner nervous system. Simultaneously I heard his voice; but it was not a soft whisper – as the talk of the voices always was before and after that time – it resounded in a mighty bass as if directly in front of my bedroom window.27 23

Eric L. Santner, My Own Private Germany. Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 70. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., p. 71. 26 Ibid., p. 70. 27 Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, trans. by Ida Macaplpine and ­Richard A. Hunter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), p.124, quoted in Santner, pp. 40–41. Josephine Sharoni - 978-90-04-33658-2 Downloaded from Brill.com04/11/2023 08:51:11AM via University of Cambridge

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It is not credible that either rays or the voice of the lower God ever in reality actually appeared to Schreber, and, hence, his writing appears deranged. In consequence, I would argue, it becomes all too easy to simply stop listening or reading. To make sense of such speech requires an interpretation and this can only be made on the basis of a theory. In the case of Lacanian psychoanalysis the interpretation would be one of a case of psychosis, based on the theory, that a certain fundamental metaphor, the Name-of-the-Father has been foreclosed.28 It is such a theory which allows us to explain for example why Schreber is hearing non-existent voices (and believing them). Yet, the use of the theory leads to a certain impasse as regards ‘testability’. Without the use of some kind of theory, it is impossible to make sense of Schreber’s words and yet no theory stands apart from or is completely posterior to that same empirical evidence from which it is supposed to stem. Thus a circular process is set up: in order to determine this theory, empirical facts are required, yet in order to make any sense of the raw data, some kind of theory must already be in place. Freud was well aware of this impasse, to which he returns at several places in his writings: The true beginning of scientific activity consists either in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them. Even at the stage of description it is not possible to avoid applying certain abstract ideas to the material in hand, ideas derived from various sources and certainly not the fruit of the new experience only.29 Thus it proves impossible to examine material without that observation being ‘contaminated’ by preconceived ideas. In fact, according to Freud, it is these which come first: ‘We come to an understanding about their meaning by repeated references to the material of observation, from which we seem to have deduced our abstract ideas, but this is in point of fact subject to them’.30 It is, moreover, not clear where these ideas come from in the first place. Freud writes of ‘relations that we seem to divine before we can clearly cognize and demonstrate them’.31 This evidential impasse is not, however, unique to 28

For a discussion of the Lacanian category of psychosis, see Bruce Fink’s chapter entitled ‘A Lacanian Approach to Diagnosis’ in A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 79–111. 29 Freud, ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’ in General Psychological Theory, trans. by James Strachey (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), pp. 83–103 (p. 83). 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid.

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­psychoanalytic thinking but also pertains to what is known as the ‘hard sciences’, such as physics and chemistry. As Adrian Johnston points out, many authors have argued that sciences, no matter how much they appear to rely solely on empirical data and unbiased observation, cannot function without a non-empirical foundation (such as a set of methodological presuppositions issuing from specific epistemological and ontological convictions). Johnston refers to Thomas Kuhn, a philosopher of science who showed that ‘the interpretation of empirical data is always governed by implicit scientific paradigms, which themselves are left untested’.32 Further grounds for the complete dismissal of Lacan’s work, on the basis of charlatanism, rely on a charge of the misuse of language, as if, like Humpty Dumpty, Lacan makes words mean whatever he wants, rather than what they ‘really’ do mean. In a book published in 1998 entitled Fashionable ­Nonsense, which attracted considerable notice, two physicists, Alan Sokal and Jean ­Bricmont set about exposing what they see as the fraudulent use of mathematical concepts in the writings of French intellectuals. One of their purposes is to warn ‘against some manifest cases of charlatanism’ by ‘“deconstructing” the reputation that certain texts have of being difficult because the ideas in them are so profound’. If, in many cases ‘the texts seem incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that they mean precisely nothing’.33 In particular as regards this book, Sokal in his introduction says of intellectuals such as Lacan that they ‘exhibit a veritable intoxication with words, combined with a superb indifference to their meaning.’34 In the chapter on Lacan, Sokal complains of the imprecision of his psychoanalytic terminology, taking as example the word jouissance, and its supposedly mathematical implications. ‘Even if the concept of “jouissance” had a clear and precise meaning, Lacan provides no reason whatsoever to think that jouissance can be considered a “space” in the technical sense of this word in topology.’35 Yet, the contention of this book is that it is the problem of meaning and interpretation which is in question in both literary studies and psychoanalysis in a way which is for the most part irrelevant to sciences such as mathematics and physics. 32 Adrian Johnston, Time Driven (Evanston: Northwestern University Press), p. 67. 33 Ibid. 34 Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectuals’ Impostures (London: Profile Books, 2003), p. 6. 35 Ibid., p. 19.

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Thus, although Sokal’s complaint about Lacan’s apparent indifference to the actual meaning of words appears as marginal (‘even if’), a mere aside to what he claims constitutes the primary indications of charlatanism (the alleged abuse of mathematical concepts), I take it up here because of the implications it has for the disciplines of psychoanalysis and literature. This has to do with two fundamental traits of language: the first is that it is continually evolving (this also concerns science) and the second is that terms are equivocal (a facet which science does its best to eliminate). To begin with, it should be pointed out that new theories introduce new concepts, often designated by neologisms or the complete re-elaboration of an already existing term, whose meaning does not exist a-priori. This is certainly the case with the word jouissance, whose meaning evolves with the development of Lacan’s theory (or even post Lacanian theory).36 The problem of precisely defining the term is evident on looking it up in a French dictionary, and finding a number of entries. The same word can mean, firstly, ‘an intense intellectual or moral pleasure which one obtains from the possession of something or some knowledge, for example, the jouissance of poetry’, secondly, ‘an intense physical pleasure’, for example, the jouissance of love’, thirdly, ‘the free disposition of something’, for example ‘to keep the jouissance of his apartment’, and fourthly, ‘the taxing of the produce (natural or commercial) of a property’.37 Given several meanings for the same word, the problem arises how to translate the word into English, where there is no obvious equivalent in the way that the word vache can be translated by the word cow. In the case of jouissance, the act of translating becomes of itself an interpretation. In one instance, that of an English edition of a work by Roland Barthes, it is translated as bliss.38 As will be seen in the following section, a close attention to the way Lacan uses this word suggests that this choice does not convey his concept. Neither does Lacan’s usage conform to any one of the definitions given in the French dictionary, albeit they all have some relevance. The main argument I am putting forward against Lacan’s critics, such as ­Sokal, is the following: one of the key aspects of language is that, in the wake 36

See Jacques Alain Miller, ‘Paradigms of Jouissance’ in Lacanian Ink 17 (New York: Wooster, 2000), pp. 8–47 for a description of the way Lacan’s thinking about jouissance evolves. 37 [accessed 16th February 2012]. Translation mine. The original French reads: ‘Plaisir intense, intellectuel ou moral, que l’on tire de la possession de quelque chose ou de la connaissance: Les jouissances de la poésie. Plaisir physique intense: Les jouissances de l’amour. Libre disposition de quelque chose: Avoir, garder la jouissance de son appartement. Perception des fruits naturels ou civils d’un bien’. 38 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. by Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. v.

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of a theory, it brings new ‘things’ into being. This occurs both in the ‘hard sciences’ and the ‘humanities’. We speak of ‘jouissance’ because of or in the wake of Lacan, just as we speak of ‘capitalism’ and the ‘proletariat’ after Karl Marx, and of ‘relativity’, with a new meaning, after Einstein. The meaning of the word unfolds in the course of Lacan’s work and trying to pre-define it falsely assimilates it to an already existing meaning which is not Lacan’s. Because of this difficulty, in many instances, the French word is simply used by Anglophone Lacanian critics, which has the effect of gradually introducing the word into the English language but thereby leaves open the question of what it means. Once, however, the word jouissance begins to ‘acquire’ meaning it is perfectly possible that one would be able to see why Lacan employs topology to talk about it, even though this would not be the case with any of the existing dictionary definitions. Thus as in the case of ‘capitalism’, ‘proletariat’ and ‘relativity’ the meaning of the word jouissance unfolds together with an understanding of that same theory which introduces it. The two cannot stand apart. In the same dialectical manner it will be shown that thinking about the literary texts with the concept of jouissance in mind enables simultaneously a further understanding of the texts and the new psychoanalytic concept. A second issue regarding the problem of meaning is that of context. What interests me most here is the distinction in regard to the question of ­meaning from the mathematical point of view, on the one hand, and that of psychoanalysis and literary criticism on the other. The point is that, unlike mathematical language which strives to tie down the meaning of all of its terms as precisely and unequivocally as possible, any natural language used by humans is perennially and unavoidably ambiguous, and this is both reflected and ­problematised by literature and psychoanalysis. As happens to Hamlet in the play, speaking ‘by the card’, where one’s words are to be taken in one sense only, turns out, in practice, to be unattainable and, paradoxically, it is precisely in these instances that equivocation undoes us all (Hamlet’s attempts to make his words have only the one sense he intends, is thwarted by his interlocutor, the gravedigger, insisting on hearing a different one).39 Without employing linguistic theory, it is evident that even looking up a word in a dictionary will, in 39

John Sturrock in a review of Intellectuals’ Impostures criticises Sokal’s implicit view of ambiguity in writing as a ‘subterfuge’ and ‘ the all too convenient and dishonourable resource of the impostor’ rather than as is the actual case something which ‘we can none of us avoid’. Sturrock points out that assertions have, throughout history, been shown to ‘bear more than one meaning and to be open to literally interminable re-interpretation’. John Sturrock, ‘Le pauvre Sokal’ in London Review of Books 20 (1998), pp. 8–9.

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most cases, give more than one result, as was the case with jouissance, and as will shortly be seen with the word uncanny (unheimlich in German); only the context and the judgement or interpretation of the user can determine which one is ‘correct’. This is in contrast to mathematics where, within that field, a term always means or rather stands for the same thing. In literature the same term may be interpreted in any number of different ways depending on the work. Thus for example, in the case of Dracula, it will be argued that ‘wolves’ should be seen as standing in for or representing jouissance, whereas in another work the term wolf might signify ‘a fierce, rapacious, or destructive person’ or ‘a man forward, direct, and zealous in amatory attentions to women’, while in yet another text it might not make sense to think of the wolves as anything other than ‘any of several large predatory canids (genus Canis) that live and hunt in packs and resemble the related dogs’.40 If in literature the context is an individual text and its reader, in the practice of psychoanalysis the context is the specific human subject, the analysand. In the case of science, on the contrary, its terms have meaning only in relation to other terms within the entirety of the scientific field. This does not entail that the latter does not concern the world outside. Newton’s law of gravity, for example, formulates the way the world is, in its being. Yet it has no meaning to anyone as a subject. It has meaning to a scientist only qua scientist, to an objectified subject. The law determining the behaviour of the apple falling from the tree does not, normally, concern or have meaning for one personally. In psychoanalysis, on the other hand, we have a particular subject rather than the world as a whole, for whom words mean something in particular, as in the case of a literary work, and it is not pre-determined what that meaning is. In the case of a psychotic such as Schreber the non-sense is so to speak ‘in the open’. It evidently means something to him since he writes a book and has it published, but as was seen, it is not at all clear what. In turn, with regard to the non-psychotic subject psychoanalysis is specifically interested in those strange manifestations which appear to consciousness in dreams, slips of the tongues and symptoms, which are known as formations of the unconscious. It is here that the ‘nonsense’ appears, that which does not make sense, until it is translated. As Shoshana Felman points out, psychoanalysis is all about translation: ‘The unconscious itself, in Freud’s writings, is often compared to a foreign language, and Freud has literally defined the basic fact of repression as a constitutive “lack of translation”’.41 Translation, however, as we have seen, must always involve interpretation, there being always more than one alternative 40 [accessed 16 February 2013]. 41 Shoshana Felman, Literature and Psychoanalysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1980), p. 4.

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meaning which is possible. There is no way of being certain that the ‘correct’ one has been chosen. It should be stressed once again that the empirical evidence or the ‘observed fact’, for example, the dream which was experienced and remembered once awake, is being governed by a theoretical paradigm. According to psychoanalytic theory a dream is a formation of the unconscious, and thus ‘proof’ for the thesis that there are thoughts occurring in or to the subject which are not brought to consciousness. A theory is used to interpret the dream, which it (the theory) also uses as evidence for itself. For those, however, who dismiss this circular paradigm, it is not, I would argue, so easy to find an alternative one (for example, few people nowadays would regard dreams as evidence of prophecy). Dreams can no doubt be simply dismissed as ultimately meaningless. This contention, however, does not take into account something which for science is difficult to measure or quantify, namely, affect or feeling. A dream, a slip of the tongue or a symptom can bother a subject, make her feel curious, anxious, intrigued, frightened, sad, horrified, annoyed and so on. The same ­applies to literature which also usually evokes highly personal feelings. For a subject, meaning and significance imply affects. The proof of the theory and the concomitant interpretation is thus that it ‘moves’ in both senses of the word. It shifts something which has become stuck, for example a repetitive dream, and it gives rise to a new feeling itself entwined with meaning which could be satisfaction, relief, sadness or even the smile which comes with the comprehension of a riddle. Returning to the problem of the sundry definitions of words and elaborating on it, I now take the example of the German word, unheimlich, usually translated into English as uncanny. When Freud looked up the German word in a d­ ictionary, he discovered two incompatible definitions. In the first place, unheimlich is obviously the opposite of heimlich, meaning ‘familiar,’ ‘native,’ ‘belonging to the home’; and hence, wrote Freud, ‘we are tempted to conclude that what is “uncanny” is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar’.42 However, by the time Freud had worked his way through the list of definitions of heimlich, he came upon the following one: ‘Withdrawn from knowledge, unconscious’ and also ‘that which is obscure, inaccessible to knowledge’.43 Freud comments that ‘the notion of something hidden and dangerous, which is expressed in the last paragraph, is still further developed, so that heimlich comes to have the meaning usually ascribed to unheimlich’. 42 43

Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’ in On Creativity and the Unconscious, ed. by Benjamin Nelson (New York: Harper & Row, 1958) pp. 122–161 (p. 124). Ibid., 131.

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­ ccordingly, the German artist, Max Klinger can write: ‘At times I feel like a A man who walks in the night and believes in ghosts; every corner is heimlich and full of terrors for him’. Thus, concludes Freud, ‘heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops towards an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich’ and, therefore, ‘unheimlich is in some way or other a subspecies of heimlich’.44 It was an example of fantasy literature, the early nineteenth-century ­German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story ‘The Sandman’ (1816), to which Freud turned in order to try to make these indications ‘comprehensible to us’.45 It will emerge that it is the devices of unrealistic, fantasy fiction, including vampires and sandmen, which best serve to portray other ‘impossible’ concepts, irreducible as they are to the scientific approach to meaning. For example, the vampire in Dracula will elucidate both the concepts of unheimlich (a word which appears to be a ‘sub-species’ of its opposite, heimlich) and jouissance, which, as will later be seen, might be regarded as an intense but painful pleasure – also a contradictory notion. On a close inspection, such an interest in antithetical notions was after all one of the main reasons why Lacan turned to mathematics, for it had itself produced ‘unreal’ concepts such as the square root of -1, a cleavage of intuition (in the sense of immediate apprehension) and number. In particular, it was modern topologists who managed to conceive of figures which do not exist in reality, but possessing similar (impossible) properties to the new concepts Lacan was trying to convey. In this way, it will turn out that, against what is claimed by doxastic science, fantasy fiction and modern mathematics share a feature; the invention of concepts which do not exist in reality and hence cannot be seen or measured, and yet with their invention altering our reality as well as the meaning we give to it. Thus, to summarize, in the case of psychoanalysis, the requirement for evidence proves complex. Observed facts can only be tested under the auspices of a theory for which the test is meant to constitute the proof and, furthermore the equivocation of natural language where no final meaning can be determined ensures that any translation or interpretation remains provisional. As I have pointed out, the question of what might be called ‘scientific proof’ is indeed one raised in the fiction itself. The expedition taking up most of The Lost World is set up to obtain evidence for a scientist’s assertion as to the continuing existence of dinosaurs. On the explorers’ return. a very rowdy public meeting in a large London hall demands to see that evidence.

44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., p. 138.

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What other evidence had they? Under the conditions of their escape it was naturally impossible to bring a large amount of baggage, but they had rescued Professor Summerlee’s collections of butterflies and beetles, containing many new species. Was this not evidence? (Several voices, ‘No.’)46 In the end, the incontrovertible evidence, the baby pterodactyl is produced. As Ian Duncan writes in his introduction to the novel, No one delighted by The Lost World can forget the scene of Professor Challenger’s amazing London triumph. Confronting an audience skeptical of his claim to have explored a South American plateau infested with dinosaurs and ape-men, the Professor unpacks his evidence.47 What, however, is lost if one gets too caught up in the delight is the question as to what point is thereby being made by the novel. After all, as is evident to every reader that, in reality, such a plateau cannot exist nor that decisive proof, the baby dinosaur. The novel, it will be shown, despite first appearances, works to undermine the priority given to palpable evidence one can see with one’s eyes. Moving from these premises, I return to the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter, taken from The Lost World (‘My dear chap, things don’t happen like that in real life. People don’t stumble upon enormous discoveries and then lose their evidence. Leave that to the novelists’). The speaker evidently means that such a claim about making an enormous discovery and then ‘losing’ the evidence is simply not credible and hence could only happen in a novel. Yet the phrasing leaves the momentary possibility of ‘that’ referring not to such an unbelievable course of events but to the word ‘evidence’. This would be the proposition that the provision of evidence for a great discovery, such as Freud’s, might be found in a novel. This later sense relies on the conception of evidence as a process rather than a once and for all proof. The aim then becomes to convince a, perhaps sceptical, reader that a particular interpretation makes sense and fits the actual text. It also accepts the circular conception of theory and proof; that is, a theory is proved to be true by means of an interpretation of empirical facts in accordance with that same theory. Thus the evidence in question is not the horrible stinking baby pterodactyl proving the 46 47

Conan Doyle, The Lost World, ed. by Ian Duncan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 175–176. Ian Duncan, introduction to The Lost World, p. vii.

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continuing existence of dinosaurs, but literary elements and devices in these fantasy novels which post facto portray Lacanian theory. My contention is that, given the intuition or feeling that these novels ‘mean something’, being able to interpret convincingly what that is using a particular theory constitutes acceptable evidence for the truth of that same theory. These arguments have repercussions on the position of Lacanian psychoanalysis outside the confines of literary analysis. Although this issue will not be treated explicitly in this book, it is worth pointing out that in the United States and Britain, at least, the Lacanian practice of psychoanalysis is still marginalized. Instead, ‘evidence based’ treatments dominate, such as ­Cognitive ­Behaviour Therapy (cbt), a practice regulated and controlled through the use of questionnaires and measurements.48 Lacanian psychoanalysts such as ­Darian Leader contend that in the process of these empirically oriented practices the individual vanishes since ‘a pseudo-scientific emphasis on measurable outcomes and visible “results” has replaced careful, long-term work’.49 In relation to this debate, my aim will be to demonstrate the productivity of intertwining an a-priori theory and the close reading of a literary text, taking into account in particular apparent minutiae – a procedure analogous to that which Leader calls for in the case of clinical work, that is, to listen to each individual’s speech applying an apriori theory in order to be able to apprehend or catch what is being said.

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In 2008, the Health Secretary in Britain announced that the government would train an extra 3,600 Cognitive Behaviour Therapists to private treatment on the National Health Service. ‘The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (nice) says cbt should be the first line of treatment for mild to moderate depression, followed by drugs only if it proves unsuccessful’. Jeremy Laurance, ‘The Big Question: Can Cognitive Behavioural Therapy help people with eating disorders?’ Independent Online, 16 December 2008, [accessed 12 February 2013]. Darian Leader, What is Madness? (London: Penguin, 2012, Kindle Electronic Edition), p. 5.

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Lacan’s Reconsideration of Totem and Taboo The argument of this book is that the shared narrative of the literary works and Totem and Taboo takes on its full significance only in conjunction with the Lacanian reading or interpretation of Freud’s text, of which an outline will now be given. Freud’s narrative is also compared with another story of the murder of a father, itself crucial to psychoanalysis, that of the drama of Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, in order to elucidate Lacan’s concept of the ‘dead father’. What Totem and Taboo shows is that it is not any particular living father who contingently bars the incestuous enjoyment of the mother, as appears, at least at first sight, to be the case in the play, but an inherent impossibility. Furthermore, for Lacan, it is only the law rather than any kind of natural state outside of human culture which enables any possibility of enjoyment. This is what is called ‘surplus jouissance’, a residual jouissance both owing to and enabled by the fact that one speaks or is ‘in language’. In Lacan’s words ‘jouissance is prohibited to him who speaks, as such – or, put differently, it can only be said between the lines by whoever is a subject of the Law’.1 It is in the wake of this stipulation that we arrive at Lacanian concepts such as the Name-of-the-Father and the object a, which can be seen in terms of the problematic of surplus jouissance and the necessity, as will be discussed, of its symbolic mediation as a consequence of castration and the installation of the fundamental fantasy. It is these notions which appear avant la lettre in the literary texts. I begin with a brief introduction to and Lacanian contextualization of Freud’s account of the father of the horde story. This latter appeared in a book, Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, published by Freud in 1913, which is a collection of four essays, first published in the journal Imago, a year previously. The essays are ‘The S­ avage’s Dread of Incest’, ‘Taboo and the Ambivalence of Emotions’, ‘Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts’, and ‘The Infantile Recurrence of ­Totemism’. Freud, in his attempt to understand modern European neuroses, turns, as can be seen from the titles, to anthropological studies of the customs of some remote, ‘primitive’ tribes. In the essay ‘The Infantile Recurrence of Totemism’, Freud notes that, in the case of some tribes, there is one particular animal, known as the totem animal, 1 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2007), p. 696.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004336582_005 Josephine

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which, while normally sacred and taboo so that it can neither be harmed nor eaten, is, nonetheless, once a year killed and consumed at a feast. Freud’s conjecture is that this violation of the taboo constitutes the commemoration of the killing of the primal father. Once, writes Freud, there was ‘a violent, jealous father who kept ‘all the females for himself’ and drove ‘away the growing sons’. However, ‘one day the expelled brothers joined forces, slew and ate the father, and thus put an end to the father horde.’2 It is this deed which is memorialized in the feast: This violent primal father had surely been the envied and feared model for each of the brothers. Now they accomplished their identification with him by devouring him and each acquired a part of his strength. The totem feast, which is perhaps mankind’s first celebration, would be the repetition and commemoration of this memorable, criminal act with which so many things began, social organization, moral restrictions and religion.3 Lacan thought that Freud regarded Totem and Taboo as pertaining to an actual event, something that must have happened sometime in the dawn of history. ‘Freud holds that it was real. He clings to it. He wrote the entire Totem and T ­ aboo in order to say it – it necessarily happened’.4 Lacan, himself, on the other hand, considered Totem and Taboo as a myth. ‘The father of the horde – as if there has ever been the slightest trace of it, this father of the horde. We have seen orangutans. But not the slightest trace has ever been seen of the father of the human horde’.5 Lacan also noted that there is, in Totem and Taboo, an impossible time loop, in that there cannot be such a thing as a murder, an unlawful killing for which one might feel guilty, before human society, which in the myth is the outcome of that same murder: ‘If it is true that there can only be an act in a context already replete with everything involving the signifier’s effect, its entry into the world, there can be no act in the beginning at least none that could be described a murder.’6 The murder is thus both effect and cause of the law. Hence, Lacan concludes that ‘This myth can have no other sense here than the one I have reduced it to, a statement of the impossible’.7 The ­impossibility 2 Freud, ‘Totem’, p. 915. 3 Ibid., p. 916. 4 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book xvii, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2008), p. 113. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., p. 129. 7 Lacan, Other Side, p. 125.

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here being marked is, as will be shown, the structural impossibility of a speaking being obtaining a full as opposed to a surplus jouissance, that is an enjoyment that would completely satiate his desire. 1

Totem and Taboo and Oedipus Rex

Totem and Taboo’s story about the primal father can be profitably compared and contrasted with that of Oedipus, with which Freud’s name is most commonly linked. As Charles Shepherdson notes in ‘From Oedipus Rex to Totem and Taboo’, Freud himself insists that the two stories do not in fact differ (in one case, incest, in the other, the elimination of incest). And in Totem and Taboo he draws explicit parallels between the two accounts of the father, as if there were no difference at this level. But, nonetheless, writes Shepherdson, ‘this only leads us back to the question of whether Totem and Taboo does indeed introduce, or respond to, difficulties that the Oedipal narrative fails to address’.8 In Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus, brought up at the court of the King of Corinth, but now running away to avoid a prophecy that he will kill his own father and mate with his mother, slays in the course of an argument a traveller at a crossroads, who, unknown to him, is his real father, Laius, the King of Thebes. On reaching Thebes, he proves to be the only one who can answer the riddle of the sphinx, thus putting an end to her curse on the city. In return, Oedipus is made king and the new husband of Jocasta, Laius’ widow, who, unbeknown to him, is his biological mother. In consequence of Oedipus’ actions, the play has given its name to what has become known in psychoanalysis as the Oedipus complex, whereby the child desires his own mother and hates his father as his rival, this being, as Chiesa writes, the ‘doxastic idea of the Oedipus complex: loving the mother and hating the father’.9 Yet, Oedipus Rex as a narrative that is taken to be self-explanatory and foundational from a psychoanalytic perspective leaves open a number of ­questions or problems, which are, in a manner of speaking, addressed in Totem and ­Taboo. In particular there remains the question as to how the taboo on ­sleeping with the mother came about in the first place, the action of the play 8 Charles Shepherdson, Vital Signs (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 135. 9 Chiesa, Subjectivity, p. 64.

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already assuming the prohibition, Oedipus being so completely overwhelmed when he finds out the identity of his sexual partner that he gouges out his own eyes. In addition, the Oedipus complex in its doxastic version already assumes, un-problematically, sexual difference as can be seen in the terminology employed. As Charles Shepherdson points out, though ‘we commonly speak of the “mother” and the “father”’, these terms are ‘profoundly misleading insofar as normal usage […] implies a difference between the sexes that is not, strictly speaking, appropriate or descriptively accurate with respect to the subjective position of the child’.10 The question is thus elided as to the constitution of sexual difference, its formation already assumed. The initial issue raised above is how the prohibition of incest, already a given in the Oedipus story, arises in the first place. In Totem and Taboo, one finds an answer: it is the dead father who bars access to the mother rather than the actual living one. Here it appears that, contrary to the Oedipus story, it is the murder of the father which has the effect of barring the free access to women the brothers had hoped for once the obstacle of the father had been removed. This is due, according to Freud, to the ambivalent feelings of the brothers towards the father. Having loved and admired as well as hated him, they are, after the murder, overwhelmed by guilt and as a result make a pact between them ‘denying themselves the liberated women’. As a consequence, ‘what their father’s presence has formerly forbidden, they themselves now prohibited’.11 From now on, because of the pact, nobody can occupy the exceptional position of the Primal Father, who kept all the women, including the mother, to himself. The concept of the ‘dead father’ thus leads to a reading of the Oedipus ­complex that strongly differs from the doxastic one revolving around a simple rivalry between the father and son for the affections of the mother. While the story of Oedipus suggests a possible enjoyment of the mother, but for the barrier of the living father, Totem and Taboo shows that this enjoyment is possible only for the mythical figure of the primal father who is always already dead (as soon as there is human culture). The Oedipus myth, it appears, is ambiguous. On the one hand, it suggests that in the absence of the father, enjoyment would be possible. In Lacan’s words, according to Freud, what Sophocles’ play reveals is that one sleeps with one’s mother when one has killed one’s father – murder of the father and 10 Shepherdson, Vital Signs, p. 124. 11 Freud, ‘Totem’, p. 917.

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jouissance of the mother, to be understood in the objective and the subjective senses, one enjoys the mother and the mother enjoys.12 Yet, on the other hand, even in the Oedipus story, the eventual revelation that Jocasta is Oedipus’ mother and his reaction to this suggests that being human means that the ultimate enjoyment, that of one’s own mother, is impossible since the moment one knows it is her, the enjoyment turns horrific (while as long as one does not know, as far as one is aware, one is enjoying another woman). Thus the myth of Totem and Taboo shows unambiguously that this enjoyment of the mother, a recuperation of an absolute enjoyment allegedly lost (but actually mythical since it never existed even for the infant) and which would have permanently fulfilled or sedated one’s desire, is impossible for a human subject. As Charles Shepherdson explains, employing Michel ­Sylvestre’s formulation: the Oedipal myth corresponds to the neurotic fantasy in which a merely external and contingent prohibition (the imaginary father) stands in the way of a possible jouissance, while Totem and Taboo, by locating jouissance in prehistory, in a past that is always already lost, presents the prohibition as constitutive or necessary, and jouissance as impossible.13 2

The Name-of-the-Father

Although of course never appearing explicitly, the Lacanian concept of the Name-of-the-Father runs as a thread throughout the literary texts discussed in this book. The Name-of-the-Father is the symbol into which the ‘ferocious figure’ of the primordial father figure is sublated by the post-oedipal law. As will now be charted, the anyway impossible jouissance of the myth of Totem and Taboo is nonetheless prohibited, assuaging the anxiety which would otherwise emerge and transforming the enjoying primal father figure into the ‘dead’ father of the law. In my reading of the texts I take the absence or inaction of the normal ‘everyday’ father character and the subsequent appearance of the primal father figure to indicate the undoing of this sublation of the ‘ferocious figure’. Thus, in The Lost World, the ‘abdication’ of the father at the outset from his role as father-in-law will propel the protagonist, Malone, in the prosecution 12 Lacan, Other Side, p. 114. 13 Shepherdson, Vital Signs, p. 149.

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of his journalistic assignment, towards Challenger, a kind of father-of-science and a father-out-law who is also shown as the double of the King of Ape Men, something akin to Freud’s despotic head of a horde of proto-humans. In She, the strange will of a dying father sends his son (and companions) into a ­fantasy land where She, a primal father figure rules and where, as will be seen, any names of fathers are literally absent. In Conan Doyle’s short story, The ­Horror of the Heights, the fatal lure of jouissance unscreened and unhindered by the Name-of-the-Father and the rivalry with an enjoying primal father figure lure the protagonist to his death. In The Invisible Man, as in The Lost World, the Name-of-the-Father is replaced, so to speak, by the ‘name of science’ when the actual father is disowned by the son in favour of scientific practice and the enjoyment it appears to offer. Finally, in Dracula, it is the restoration of the ­regime of the Name-of-the-Father after its initial dissolution in Dracula’s castle (again, following the absence or death of actual everyday fathers) which enables the protagonist to consummate his marriage and become a father. The concept of the Name-of-the-Father emerges from Lacan’s reformulation of the Oedipus complex, which becomes, rather than the story of the rivalry between father and son for the mother, the three-stage process by which the child emerges as an individuated subject, male or female, from the straits of the encounter with the mother’s desire. The complex is reworked into a linguistic metaphor whereby it is, in Chiesa’s words, ‘resolved after castration thanks to the metaphorical substitution of the signifier Name-of-the-Father for the signifier Desire-of-the-Mother’.14 It is as a result of a ‘successful’ resolution of the complex by the Name-of-the-Father that the child, as will now be outlined, becomes an individuated ‘normally neurotic’ subject of the law, sexuated as male or female with the possibility of a future sexual relationship and parenthood. Without going into detail regarding all the stages of Lacan’s reformulation of the Oedipus complex, for my purposes I briefly consider what happens at the second and third stages. It is in the second stage that the child tries to become the sole object of the mother’s desire, what psychoanalysis terms the phallus or the phallic object, the object that would, so to speak, make the mother whole, wanting nothing (the term ‘wanting’ should be take here in both senses, that of desiring and of lacking). The mother’s desire is, however, something that the child has to be protected from. The mother’s role is the mother’s desire. That’s fundamental. The mother’s desire is not something that is bearable just like that, that you are 14 Chiesa, Subjectivity, p. 89.

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indifferent to. It will always wreak havoc. A huge crocodile in whose jaws you are – that’s the mother.15 What intervenes (as the third and final stage of the Oedipus complex) in this scenario where the child is threatened with being ‘swallowed up’, or not being able to find a place for himself as an individuated subject in the desire of the Mother, is what Lacan terms the Name-of-the-Father. This is, for Lacan, a linguistic metaphor in which the signifier ‘the Name-of-the-Father’ signifies an enigmatic ‘What does she want?’ The desire of the mother is for the child traumatic and symbolically ungraspable in so far as he or she tried to be whatever it was she might desire. After the metaphoric substitution, the desire of the mother is, on the contrary, retroactively signified. The child has some sort of linguistic answer as to what she desires, namely, the father’s symbolic phallus, and which can be now seen as reaching beyond him or her. It is in this regard important to stress that the term, Nom du Père, in French, plays on the homonymy between Nom, which means ‘name’, and non, meaning ‘no’. The non is the laying down of the law that stops the child from becoming the mother’s incestuous object, and with the same move liberates him or her from the mother’s desire. The name refers to the father’s actual surname (or whichever surname the child is given). This is a name which is not the child’s individual name but one that inserts him or her into a family lineage. In other words, it is in the third stage of the Oedipus complex that it is ‘the (real) father who shows the child that he is the one who has what the mother lacks’. Thus, as Chiesa writes, Castration occurs when the child gives up attempting to be the phallus of the mother on realizing that it is the ‘real father’ who is the one who has it, the real father being the person who, for the child, at least partially embodies the law. He shows the child that it is his ‘No!’ which deprives the mother of him.16 For Lacan, it is also as a result of castration that the subject is sexuated. According to Lacanian psychoanalysis, sexual difference does not equate automatically to anatomical difference. Although a newborn baby will be labelled by others as either boy or girl depending on anatomy, for the child, seeing itself as either male or female is a symbolic function. The phenomenon of transsexuals, people who believe that nature has wrongly determined their sex,

15 Lacan, Other Side, p. 112. 16 Chiesa, Subjectivity, p. 80.

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d­ emonstrates that anatomy in itself does not make a man or a woman. As Chiesa explains: Castration is a prerequisite for the child to be able to identify symbolically with the father as the bearer of the symbolic phallus: the result of such an identification is the subject’s assumption of his or her sexual position (masculine or feminine). On renouncing being the imaginary phallus of the mother, ‘the girl assumes her sexuality in so far as she realizes that she does not have the (father’s) symbolic phallus’ while the boy, on his part, assumes that ‘he has the symbolic phallus, albeit for the time being through the intermediary of the father’.17 I will return to this issue in the discussion of She in that the character named She, straightforwardly assumed by most critics to be a woman, even some sort of epitome of ‘woman-ness’, will be viewed as outside of sexuation – which in turn is one of the main characteristics of the primal father. 3

The Thing (Das Ding) and Object a

Two further Lacanian notions which I argue are prominently present in the literary texts at stake are the Thing and object a. Freud first developed the notion of das Ding in the Project for a Scientific Psychology published in 1895. He claimed that the first caretaker (usually the mother), that unforgettable one on whom the human baby is dependent, is divided into two parts, the thing and the attributes which can be applied to it. As de Kesel explains: confronted for the first time with the Other in the figure of the mother […] the child also immediately makes an irrevocable primary division – an ‘Ur-teil’ – between the Other as ‘thing’ and the Other as a fluid aggregate of representations (or, in Lacan’s terminology, as a field of signifiers).18 The Other as ‘thing’ (das Ding in German) thereby becomes ‘an unsignified (and fundamentally unsignifiable) “stupid” real thing’.19 Yet, this ‘unsignifiable’ thing becomes the heart of the libidinal economy of the subject. The Thing, as the remainder or reminder of that ‘unforgettable prehistoric other’ comes to 17 Ibid., p. 85. 18 De Kesel, Eros and Ethics, trans. by Sigi Jottkandt (New York: suny, 2009), p. 89. 19 Ibid.

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function as that which leads to the cause of desire. It is what we continue to search for. As de Kesel writes, the libidinal economy is ‘oriented toward that traumatic “distant thing” and no matter how inaccessible, the thing functions all the same as the main point of reference for the entire libidinal economy and in this sense grants it a final, real consistency’.20 One thus has, on the one hand, the pre-historic Thing one seeks and, on the other, its permanent inaccessibility, since it is only within reality as mediated by language and time that one can ever find anything. The Thing is always already lost. Unsurprisingly, Lacan also equates ‘the Sovereign Good’ of the Thing with the mother,21 thus making its inaccessibility equivalent to the prohibition of incest. It is to the extent that the function of the pleasure principle is to make man always search for what he has to find again, but which he never will attain, that one reaches the essence, namely that sphere or relationship which is known as the law of the prohibition of incest.22 The Thing is therefore what has to be ‘lost’, voided, a would-be incestuous enjoyment, mortified by the symbolic. In the fantasy novels examined in this book such ‘things’ remerge, alive when they ‘should’ be dead, arousing the ­anxiety of the characters and often appearing at the place and instead of the desired female object of a male protagonist. In Dracula, as the critic Fiona ­Peters points out, one of the characters, Lucy, after being turned into a vampire is tellingly called a ‘foul Thing’. Lucy, on her death as a normal person, does not really die but returns from the grave as a ‘living dead’. She has to be killed again by her husband on the prompting of the ‘ersatz’ father so that she ‘really’ dies, and at the end of the novel, he can marry another woman. In The Lost World, in an episode to be discussed at greater length in the first chapter, Malone is paying a visit to a lake named for his desired woman when a monster appears, ­chasing him until he falls into a pit which saves him and which can be regarded as creating a new void cancelling the Thing. Towards the end of the novel, after some particularly loathsome monsters have been killed by the explorers, their giant hearts remain alive and palpitating for a few days after their deaths, offering another blatant instance of things which ‘should’ be dead. Finally, in The Horror of the Heights, the protagonist, an aviator, is, as noted fatally captured precisely by the lure of the Thing, represented by some strange creatures at 20 Ibid., p. 95. 21 Lacan, Ethics, p. 70. 22 Ibid.

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high altitude, which he prefers to any kind of temperate terrestrial sexual relationship (whose absence is hinted at in the text). On the other hand, what comes to represent, at least partly, the Thing in the subject’s actual libidinal economy is the object a. Lacan understands the latter as the ‘detachable part-object which is imaginarily cut from the subject’.23 These objects are the breast, the faeces, the voice and the gaze. Taking the example of the breast, a shift occurs in the infant’s experience of it in that, ­initially, he assumes it is a part of himself, while only at a later time does he realize it belongs to another. As Adrian Johnston explains: In early infancy, prior to the onset of anything like a subject-object demarcation, the breast is not registered as being a separate/separable o­ bject belonging to another subject. Later, the breast, although recoverable in a physical sense, is a ‘lost object’ since it becomes a severed representation of something belonging to another. That is to say, the later experience of the ‘same’ breast is phenomenally different than the original experience of this object.24 It is this temporal shift in the experience of an object which is responsible for the appearance of object a. ‘Object a is at one and the same time, a residual remainder produced by the incision separating subject from object as well as a reminder harkening back to an alluring, pre-subjective Real, presumably rendered inaccessible through this dividing process’.25 It is this object which stands in for or represents the always already voided mythical union between mother and baby, which would have satiated all desire. As Chiesa writes, ‘the Thing which is forever lost can be refound only through another thing, object a, the sublime object that represents it (its lack) at the foundations of the unconscious’.26 In Lacan’s own words, the object a ‘lures’ the subject ‘at the very point of das Ding.’27 To approach this from another angle, for the human subject, the only ­jouissance obtainable is what Lacan calls surplus jouissance and which is, in ­Chiesa’s words, ‘always equivalent to the jouissance of the object a’.28 It is a remainder of something lost but a loss which only occurs retrospectively once 23 Chiesa, Subjectivity, p. 161. 24 Johnston, Time Driven, p. 151. 25 Ibid., p. 189. 26 Chiesa, Subjectivity, p. 135. 27 Lacan, Ethics, p. 99, quoted in ibid. 28 Ibid, p. 184.

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the ­symbolic is in place. It is those remaining scraps after the anyway impossible ‘full’ jouissance has nonetheless been relinquished. Surplus jouissance is the only sort available, always leaving dissatisfaction and hence an appetite for more, which is effectively conveyed by Lacan when he states that ‘one takes jouissance by morsels’.29 By the same token, surplus jouissance is always symbolically mediated. In consequence of the resolution of the Oedipus complex, a ‘fundamental fantasy’ is put in place and it is this which enables the ­subject to enjoy. In Chiesa’s words ‘the fundamental fantasy occurs when the loss (alienation) of the Thing […] is retroactively signifierized (represented) in the object a qua lost object’.30 This conception of a non-existent or lost Thing which nonetheless has effects on the subject’s libidinal economy in the guise of object a gives rise to a different understanding of the psychoanalytic concept of sublimation. For Freud, sublimation was libido channelled in a socially acceptable way, implying the funnelling of sexuality into more ‘cultural’ or socially acceptable activities. Yet, Lacan defines sublimation as the ‘elevation of an object of the dignity of the Thing’31 and such an elevation is what takes place in the fundamental fantasy ‘the form on which the subject’s desire rests’.32 Given that the ultimate aim of human sexual desire is the impossible recuperation of the Thing, it can only ever be partially satisfied by a ‘stand in’ object, engendered by symbolic substitution. The concept of sublimation will become particularly relevant in my discussion of The Lost World. In the interaction between the hero and his beloved there is a repetition of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century practice of courtly love, an art which Lacan sees as a paradigm of sublimation, in which a desirable but unattainable lady is ‘elevated to the dignity of the Thing’.33 Thus, what Lacanian psychoanalysis maintains is that, actually, unlike in the animal world, there is no natural automatic human instinct for the other sex leading to reproduction. Human desire (for anything) has to be installed ‘artificially’ by means of the fundamental fantasy which is the outcome of the Oedipus complex. This means that, in Chiesa’s words, ‘human sexuality always entails sublimation and sublimation can only be sexual’.34 In the absence of any extra-linguistic instinct it is only the symbolic that ‘constitutes the ­structural condition of possibility for any sort of (reproductive) human sexual 29 Lacan, Other Side, p. 108. 30 Chiesa, Subjectivity, p. 134. 31 Lacan, Ethics, p. 112. 32 Chiesa, Subjectivity, p. 135. 33 Lacan, Ethics, p. 134. 34 Ibid.

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relationship to occur’.35 Given that the standard way of resolving the Oedipus complex and setting up the fundamental fantasy is by means of the Nameof-the-Father, this entails in consequence that, as Žižek writes, ‘according to a Lacanian commonplace, the role of the Name-of-the-Father is precisely to enable the semblance of a sexual relationship’.36 In the literary texts the failure of the sexual relationship is bound up with the absence of the role or, in the case of Dracula, the restitution of the relationship comes in the wake of the restoration of the role. 4

Anxiety and Object a

A further Lacanian concept relevant to the fantasy fiction examined in this book is that of anxiety. Lacan adjusts the prevailing conception in psychology of the difference between fear and anxiety being in only the first having an object: one is frightened of a phenomenal object but anxious only about an ill-defined or future possibility.37 In contrast, Lacan maintains that ‘anxiety is not without an object’, the object a.38 Precisely this concept of anxiety is staged in Dracula. A character sees the vampire lying as a corpse in his coffin, yet with the eyes looking at him, as if animated by themselves. This is the object a in the form of the gaze, an impossible look on the comatose vampire. It paralyzes the character with anxiety. For Lacan, anxiety is experienced at precisely those moments when it appears that the lost ‘Real Thing’ of jouissance might actually be obtained through the object a. In Žižek’s words: ‘Anxiety occurs not when the object-cause of desire is lacking; it is not the lack of the object that 35 Ibid, p. 83. 36 Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 143. 37 See for example the following discussion of the difference between fear and anxiety which appeared in the journal Anxiety and Depression. While the authors point out the that, ‘the definition of fear and anxiety varies greatly, the following concepts are used: “anxiety is a future oriented mood state associated with preparation for possible, upcoming negative events; and fear is an alarm response to present or imminent danger (real or perceived). This view of human fear and anxiety is comparable to the animal predatory imminence continuum. That is, anxiety corresponds to an animal’s state during a potential predatory attack and fear corresponds to an animal’s state during predator contact or imminent contact. (Michelle G. Craske, Scott L. Rauch, Robert Ursano, Jason Prenoveau, Daniel S. Pine, and Richard E. Zinbarg, ‘What Is an Anxiety Disorder?’ Depression And Anxiety 26 (2009), 1066–1085, pp. 6–7.).” 38 Lacan, Other Side, p. 147.

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gives rise to anxiety but, on the contrary, the danger of our getting too close to the object and thus losing the lack itself’.39 Such losing of the lack takes place, first and foremost, when the Name-of-the-Father is temporarily suspended or malfunctions. To illustrate the link between anxiety and the absence of the father’s ‘No’ I turn to one of Freud’s cases known as Little Hans. Hans, the five year old son of one of Freud’s followers, developed a phobia of horses. Freud, it appears, regarded the case as ‘classically’ oedipal. Hans, Freud wrote, indicated only too plainly that he felt the father to be his rival for the favour of the mother, upon whom his budding sexual wishes were by dark premonitions directed. He therefore had the typical attitude of the male child to its parents which we call the ‘Oedipus complex.40 The fear of the horse, according to this interpretation, represented or substituted for Hans’ fear of his father. Yet as subsequent commentators have ­pointed out, Hans’ problem stems from the fact that, contrary to the oedipal scenario, the father proves to be no rival for the favours of his mother, which she far too generously bestows upon her young son. In Lacan’s words, ‘the mother’s behaviour with little Hans – whom she drags everywhere she goes, from the loo to her bed – clearly shows that the child is her indispensable appendix’.41 In consequence, as Safouan notes, Hans, ‘as his mythic inventions attest, does not find the way out of his castration complex and remains a prisoner in the Oedipus complex, not for having business with a castrating father but with a father who is not.’42 The result is not enjoyment, at least not in the sense of unadulterated pleasure, but anxiety. According to Van Haute, in Hans’ case ‘anxiety arises precisely where the infant has the feeling that it could actually become the ultimate object of the mother’s desire, and that his “project” of ­being what the mother is lacking might actually succeed’.43 In this case, although, the enjoyment of the mother (to be understood in both senses of the genitive) arouses anxiety in the child, Hans, on his part, does not desist. As his father records: 39

Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge: mit Press, 1992), p. 8. 40 Freud, ‘Totem’, p. 906. 41 Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre iv, La Relation d’Objet (Paris: Seuil, 1994), p. 242, quoted in ­Chiesa, p. 78. 42 Moustapha Safouan, Lacaniana (Paris: Fayard, 2001), p. 69. 43 Philippe Van Haute, Against Adaptation, trans. by Paul Crowe and Miranda Vankerk (New York: Other Press, 2002), p. 115.

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On April 5th Hans came in to our bedroom again, and was sent back to his own bed. I said to him: ‘As long as you come into our room in the mornings, your fear of horses won’t get better’. He was defiant, however, and replied: ‘I shall come in all the same, even if I am afraid’.44 The question raised is why, with his enjoyment of his mother becoming ­unpleasant and even anxiety-provoking, Hans does not put an end to the intimacy. The pleasure principle, that is the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain, ought to have led Hans himself to abandon his visits to his mother’s bed. Yet it happens that, nonetheless, Hans requires the intervention of the father’s ‘No’, the laying down of the law against incest (which in his case does not happen). The reason for Hans’ not desisting can be most clearly seen in the discussion of the psychoanalytic concept of the drive provided by Adrian Johnston in his Time Driven, Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive. Johnston shows that the pre-oedipal child is at the mercy of the drive, essentially the continuous attempt to retrieve a previous satisfaction. This attempt is, however, always already doomed because the object of satisfaction of the drive is, as Freud had pointed out, a ‘refound’ object. Recalling the example of the mother’s breast, the ‘lost’ object is always constituted as an object only at the point it is experienced as belonging to another. Hence the ‘pre-object’, as it was originally experienced by the child, cannot ever be re-found by the drive. Yet, Johnston says, the ‘drive-source wills nothing except the indefinite reiteration of the earliest experience of enjoyment with which it’s acquainted’,45 thus forming an incessant and ceaseless pressure for an irretrievable satisfaction. It is at this point that the father’s ‘No’ is missing to protect Hans from his own drives and the concomitant anxiety. 5

Père ou Pire: Father or Worse

Given the centrality of the notion of the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ in this book, two clarifications are in order: the first has to do with the connection between this symbolic function and the actual person known as ‘father’ who may or may not actively participate in a child’s life. The second concerns a further temporal contextualization of the fantasy literature at stake, which was to 44

Freud, ‘Two Case Histories: “Little Hans” and the “Rat Man”’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. x, trans. by James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 47. 45 Ibid.

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be ­followed by twentieth century ‘modernist’ literature, and in particular the work of James Joyce. As Lacanian literary critic Luke Thurston Thurston points out – ­subsequent to Lacan’s own reading of Joyce – this work, rather than ­‘restoring’ the Name-of-the-Father invents new ways of fulfilling at least some of its functions. Regarding the first point, although the Name-of-the-Father sounds obsoletely patriarchal in placing the emphasis on the role of the father, it should be noted firstly that the metaphorical form of the resolution of the Oedipus complex in itself signals that it is a function rather than a specific person that is involved. Lacan’s interpretation of the Freudian account of the Oedipal conflict as a symbolic operation distinguishes between, in Shepherdson’s words, ‘the father, as an actual person, the living individual who may or may not be present in a particular child’s life, and the symbolic operation, the primordial metaphoric substitution, by which the symbolic order of difference and mediation is established’.46 As Chiesa points out, the Name-of-the-Father already functions in and through the mother herself, in so far as she herself is a ­speaking and desiring being and that she herself renounces her child as her phallic object. Thus when Lacan calls for a return to the place of the father he is, in Jacqueline Rose’s clarification, crucially distinguishing himself from any sociological conception of the role.47 In regard to the second point, one should bear in mind Lacan’s aphorism ‘père ou pire’, which plays on the proximity in French between the words for ‘father’ and ‘worse’. It is the Name-of-the-Father which enables an infant to emerge from the Oedipus complex as a desiring subject, a consistent ‘I’, and it is, in turn, on the basis of the Name-of-the-Father being, in most cases, instantiated in each individual subject that society is able to function. Yet as Lacan’s phrase indicates this is not necessarily ‘good’ or ideal, but its non-functioning or absence, as has been set out in this introduction and will be filled in greater detail in the course of this book, has worse consequences. Having said this, it should be noted that in the course of Lacan’s later work, the Name-of-the-­Father becomes viewed as merely the standard, most common way in which subjectivity is accomplished, a way which Lacan will end up calling père-version – a pun on the words father, version, perversion and a turning towards – ­implying that the function of the father is only one possible form of subjectivation and sexuation (and moreover that there is something intrinsically perverse in it). 46 Shepherdson, Vital Signs, p. 135. 47 Jacqueline Rose, ‘Introduction ii’ in Feminine Sexuality, Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne, trans. by Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1982), p. 39, quoted in ­Shepherdson, Vital Signs, p. 136.

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In this regard, what Thurston points out is that late nineteenth-century fiction, which is the subject of this book, ‘does not go beyond the Name-of-the Father’, whilst sensing its crisis. Using the examples of Hoggs’ Confessions of a Justified Sinner (an earlier gothic work from 1824), Stevenson’s Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde (1896) and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Thurston shows how their plots do indeed ‘hinge on a fantasmatic reversal of symbolic castration and the consequent emergence of an obscene enjoyment that threatens to engulf both reality and the desiring subject or consistent i’. Nonetheless, for Thurston, in the end ‘what all three texts offer their characters (and in turn us as readers) [are] ways of shying away from this fantasy – or else suffering allegorical damnation if they yield to it – via conventional, “neurotic” discourses of moral authority’.48 In other words, it is a Hobson’s choice, either one remains trapped in the accepted rules and behaviour of society or, exiting the regime of the Name-of-the-Father, one abandons all moral restraints allowing one’s drives or impulses free reign. The second option can however lead only to damnation and destruction, as for instance with the death of the Hyde/Jekyll character in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella when Jekyll can no longer turn into Hyde (and thereby hide from the law). It is, according to Thurston, only with the writing of James Joyce and the publication of Ulysses in 1922 and Finnegans Wake in 1939 that literature will go beyond the Name-of-the-Father. What distinguishes Joycean writing, Lacan himself will claim in his late seminars and writings, is that, in ­Thurston’s phrasing, ‘it abjures this re-inscription of neurotic fantasy and manages to re-sow the fantasmatic seeds scattered by his predecessors without reproducing their subjection to a vengeful, superegoic Law’.49 Here, in contrast to the earlier literature, there is no depiction of the nightmare consequential on the non-­functioning of the Name-of-the-Father (including the ‘neurotic’ or ­fundamental fantasy), but a new mode of dealing with or channelling jouissance (a ‘­re-sowing’) which is not dependent either on its restoration or on what Thurston terms the superegoic Law – a somewhat paradoxical concept which, as will be seen in the discussion on Dracula, emerges as a kind of agency of last resort in the absence of the ‘father’s law’. Thus, until the appearance of Joyce, and modernist literature, more generally, there is, in the absence or non-functioning of the Name-of-the-Father in the fantasy literature of the preceding decades, only ‘worse’. The point about this ‘worse’ is that sensing the Name-of-the-Father is in crisis does not necessarily denote nostalgia or a call 48

Luke Thurston, James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 124. 49 Ibid.

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for its restoration, that is, a return to traditional values or modes of thinking, but an understanding of what its non-functioning entails.

‘Yet Another Interpretation’

British fantasy literature between 1870 and 1914 presents in various guises the re-emergence of a primal father-figure, who remains outside the law and refuses castration. If, according to Freud’s myth, the father was murdered once at the beginning of time thereby originating human culture, the question arises as to why he now re-emerges and has to be killed again. While a comprehensive answer goes beyond the scope of this book, it is hoped that some of the motifs common to the works investigated in the following chapters will shed some light on the conjunction of fantasy fiction and the emergence of modern (Western) society. According to the literary theorist Jonathan Culler, ‘to engage in the study of literature is not to produce yet another interpretation of King Lear’.50 Yet this is precisely what this book will do, providing yet another interpretation, this time Lacanian, of a number of fictional works arguing that existing, mostly contextual, interpretations account neither for the import of these works nor give a compelling reason why, aside from pleasure, they ought still to be read today.

50

Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Deconstruction, Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 5, quoted in Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), p. 107.

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Science and the Thing: Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World Introduction In this chapter on The Lost World, the problematic role of science is examined in regard to two different facets. The first concerns science’s complete disregard of the jouissance-Thing (and in consequence the resulting failure of the sexual relationship) in contrast to the role of the Name-of-the-Father, art and religion. As noted in the introduction, the plot loosely follows that of Freud’s Totem and Taboo, where the primal father, an ‘ape-man’ is killed by a band of brothers – an expeditionary group of four Englishmen. While in Freud’s work the appearance of the primal father concerns another historical era, here, this figure re-appears contemporaneously, in a fantasy space antithetical to the normal every day one, and in the wake of the abdication of the actual father and his traditional authority. It turns out that without the Name-of-the-Father the sexual relationship does not happen – and the novel ends without m ­ arriage – even though it seems that in the father’s absence the way is opened for wouldbe couple, Gladys and Malone, to form according to their inclinations. While the expedition returns in a triumph for (empirical) science, Malone does not attain his lady. The second relates to science in its form of ‘empirical realism’ as represented by the scientist, Challenger, which still forms the dominant paradigm for judging the truth value of social science disciplines. One sees the workings of this type of science in in the naming and cataloguing of a pre-existing reality as represented in The Lost World by the dinosaurs and fauna (re-)discovered on the plateau. It is the ‘need to see with one’s own eyes’ the actual thing or object, as if ‘in the raw’, which provides the whole impetus of the story: the scientific expedition sent out to bring back evidence of the continuing existence of dinosaurs and the proof an actual dinosaur (albeit a baby one). While the novel appears to end in triumph with the production of the irrefutable evidence, several aspects completely undermine this apparent happy ending: the depiction of the scientist Challenger as the double of the King of the ape-men, Gladys’ marriage to the ‘wrong’ man (not the hero of the tale) and the evident fact that in reality dinosaurs do not exist. What occurs in The Lost World is the bogus

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004336582_006 Josephine

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evidence of the continuing existence of dinosaurs and the critique of the ideal of empirical science.

The Plot

For those readers unfamiliar with the novel, a synopsis of the plot is given here. The Lost World, a science fiction adventure yarn, begins when a young reporter, Edward Malone asks Gladys Huntingdon for her hand in marriage. Gladys’ answer is that Malone would have to do something worthy of her and be ‘a man of great deeds’.1 In answer to his request for an assignment comprising danger and adventure, Malone’s editor sends him to interview Professor George ­Edward Challenger, a famous zoologist but reclusive and violent, whose claims to have discovered dinosaurs in South America have been dismissed as a hoax. Although, the interview ends in a fight, the two make up, with Challenger suggesting Malone come to the public lecture of another zoologist which he will be attending. At the crowded lecture, Challenger interrupts continually, leading to a general uproar. Its outcome is a proposed expedition to retrace C ­ hallenger’s original journey to South America. The new party consists of Challenger, one of the disbelieving zoologists – Professor Summerlee – Malone, and an English aristocrat, Lord John Roxton, who has already been to the area and aided some of the indigenous tribes against their more powerful oppressors. With the aid of local guides, the new expedition reaches the mysterious ­plateau where Challenger claims to have seen the dinosaurs. One of the guides, Gomez, will turn out to be the brother of a man killed by Roxton on his previous trip. When the expedition manages to get onto the plateau by bridging a ravine, Gomez destroys the makeshift construction, trapping them. Stranded in any event, they decide to investigate the plateau and it is here that most of the action of the novel will take place. The explorers discover a tribe of indigenous Indians living there and through the annihilation in two momentous fights, of their enemies, a tribe of ape-men and some monstrous dinosaurs, they help the Indians take control of the whole plateau. One of them eventually reveals the hidden tunnel which enables the explorers to escape from the plateau. Upon returning to England, they present their findings in another public lecture. The new testimony is received with the same scepticism as before until the incontrovertible evidence is dramatically produced; a live baby pterodactyl brought in a cage from South America. During the resulting turmoil the 1 Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World and Other Stories (Ware: Wordsworth, 1995), p. 13.

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beast escapes and flies out into the ocean, never to be seen again. However, the doubters are silenced and the travellers turn into heroes feted by a large and ebullient crowd in a triumphant procession through the streets of London. However, it turns out that before the lecture Malone has been to see Gladys, but finds her already married to a solicitor’s clerk. The story ends when Roxton reveals to his companions the diamonds he discovered on the plateau. They are worth about £200,000 and are split between them. Challenger decides he will open a private museum, Summerlee that he will retire from teaching to categorize fossils, while Malone decides to go with Roxton on another expedition to South America. 1

The Doubling of the Primal Father

As already noted, The Lost World is considered a variant of Totem and Taboo. The king of the ape-men, the despotic ruler of a horde killed in the fight with the band of explorers, is a version of the primal father of Freud’s myth. As ­Roxton reports: ‘This old ape-man – he was their chief’.2 The ape-men straddle the border between animal and human, running on the ground like humans but bent like apes. They ‘jabber’ in a language which is half signs and use sticks and stones. Their female and young are in a group apart, a setup similar to that in Totem and Taboo. The king of the ape-men directs the unfettered sadistic enjoyment of the tribe which consists in, on his signal, throwing captured native Indians, one by one, off the edge of a cliff to see if they die from the impact on the ground or by being pierced by the sharp stakes below. At that point, the tribe ‘sprang about, tossing their long, hairy arms in the air and howling with exultation’.3 As far as this atavistic menace (the king of the ape-men) is concerned, the novel ends in triumph. The primal father figure is killed and the travellers escape arriving safely back in London. Yet, the apparent ‘happy ending’ is belied given that Malone, the main protagonist and Roxton set on another, similar expedition, as if the first, despite the triumph, has resolved little. There is also no marriage although it was set up as the narrative goal. Despite accomplishing his assigned task, Malone does not get a wife. Furthermore there is a doubling of the primal father figure, the king of the ape-men with the scientist, Challenger. When the explorers (except Malone) are captured by the ape-men, Challenger becomes, as previous literary critics have pointed out, ‘one of them’,4 albeit retaining a remnant of his former 2 Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 134. 3 Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 139. 4 See Ian Duncan, ‘Introduction’, p. xvi. Josephine Sharoni - 978-90-04-33658-2 Downloaded from Brill.com04/11/2023 08:51:11AM via University of Cambridge

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a­ffiliation with his colleagues. As Lord John Roxton reports afterwards to Malone: ‘When I say “we” I mean Summerlee and myself. Old Challenger was up a tree, eatin’ pines and havin’ the time of his life’.5 The King of the apemen and ­Challenger bear a striking resemblance to each other, a point which is stressed. First in Roxton’s report to Malone: Then one of them stood out beside Challenger. You’ll smile, young fellah, but ‘pon my word they might have been kinsmen. I couldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. This old ape-man – he was their chief – was a sort of red Challenger, with every one of our friend’s beauty points, only just a trifle more so. When the ape-man stood by Challenger and put his paw on his shoulder, the thing was complete.6 Then later on in Malone’s account of the battle with the ape-men: A single day seemed to have changed him [Professor Challenger] from the highest product of modern civilization to the most desperate savage in South America. Beside him stood his master, the king of the ape-men. In all things he was, as Lord John had said, the very image of our Professor, save that his colouring was red instead of black.7 The question is why it is specifically the eminent science professor who is represented as the double of a barbaric ape-man. The novel after all never deflates Challenger’s standing as a scientist, but on the contrary upholds it completely. Furthermore one should note that this doubling is intertwined with that other aspect of the novel, the failed romance quest. Science, in this version of Totem and Taboo, produces in its triumph the obscenely ugly specimen of the baby dinosaur instead of, as in the traditional ‘happy ending’, the married couple (and the human baby). In order to provide an answer to these questions, I revisit the courtly love tradition of the twelfth to thirteenth centuries. The trigger for the expedition, Gladys’ demand of Malone that he should do something to prove himself worthy of her hand, is an innovative revival of that praxis. The young couple left alone in the absence of the father, unexpectedly proceed to set up their own barrier to the sexual relationship. It is this tradition as re-examined by Lacan (especially in Seminar vii, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, given in Paris in the years 1959–1960) which is used in ascertaining the significance of this 5 Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 134. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., p. 139. Josephine Sharoni - 978-90-04-33658-2 Downloaded from Brill.com04/11/2023 08:51:11AM via University of Cambridge

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crucial element of the novel. Moreover, the return of the courtly love scenario in The Lost World proves to be a return with a difference. The courtly lover in the M ­ iddle Ages was a poet and artist creating a new way of seeing the world, whereas in the early-twentieth century novel, he is a journalist who writes ‘copy’, reporting that which he can see before him as objective facts. As noted it is this ‘need to see with one’s own eyes’ which triggers the plot. In this regard, I will dwell on the fact that, according to Lacan, science can be approached from two different, if not opposite, perspectives: on the one hand, it shares a fundamental characteristic with art – as epitomised by medieval courtly love poetry – in that, as Lacan evidences a propos the Galilean revolution, it ‘manipulates the symbolic’, thus creating new ways of conceiving reality. On the other hand, science stubbornly clings to the incessant categorisation of already existing objects that are taken to have of themselves a truth-value. This latter aspect of science will lead to a more detailed examination of the role of Challenger as scientist. Among other things, he will be considered as a forerunner of the larger than life hero, typical of the films of Orson Welles, who, as Welles points out, subordinates himself to nothing, that is, neither the law, art, or religion (as basic productions of culture). Welles’ remark will in turn be recast in the terms of Lacan’s Ethics Seminar, where the different roles of art, religion and science are theorized in regard to the Thing and, more precisely, their sublimation of it – vital for culture. Taking into account, in turn, Lacan’s theorization of science’s problematic relation to the Thing, Dolar’s analysis of the motif of the double and Challenger’s scientific practice consisting of the (re-) discovery of things and their incessant naming (in contrast to Lacan’s creative Galilean model of science), it will be determined why Challenger, the eminent professor of science, is portrayed as a replica of the atavistic ape-man. Contrary to the impression of, in the critic Patrick Brantlinger’s phrase,8 an excursion out of 20th century civilization, the subject matter of the novel is actually the culture of nascent modern Britain, and in particular the implications of the changing place of art, religion, and science. My overall claim is that this reading then renders the novel relevant to a post-imperial Western society. 2

The Abdication of the Father

Right at the start of the novel one sees the erosion of the long-standing authority of the father, with the abolition of the father’s role in the marriage of the daughter. This was discussed in the Introduction, where it was pointed out 8 Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, p. 38. Josephine Sharoni - 978-90-04-33658-2 Downloaded from Brill.com04/11/2023 08:51:11AM via University of Cambridge

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how fundamental and long-standing this particular role had been in Western literature. Malone’s adventure on the South American plateau was actually the answer to a demand from the woman herself, that he accomplish something that would make him worthy of her hand. The opening scene plays out as if it is evident to all concerned that the father, although present, has nothing to do with his daughter’s marriage, a situation which the modern reader may too easily also take for granted, not taking note of the radicalism of the change.9 In the absence of the father in his role as father-in-law to Malone, the wouldbe son-in-law comes under the direction of another father figure, the scientist Challenger, who rather than a substitute father-in-law can more pertinently be seen as a father-out-law. Malone’s account of his courting of Gladys begins with her father, Mr. Hungerton, who: really believed in his heart that I came round to the Chestnuts three days a week for the pleasure of his company, and very especially to hear his views upon bimetallism, a subject upon which he was by way of being an authority. For an hour or more that evening I listened to his monotonous chirrup about bad money driving out good, the token value of silver, the depreciation of the rupee, and the true standards of exchange. ‘Suppose,’ he cried with feeble violence, ‘that all the debts in the world were called up simultaneously, and immediate payment insisted upon, – what under our present conditions would happen then?’ I gave the self-evident answer that I should be a ruined man, upon which he jumped from his chair, reproved me for my habitual levity, which made it impossible for him to discuss any reasonable subject in my presence, and bounced off out of the room to dress for a Masonic meeting.10 The father here acts as the colleague or comrade of the suitor rather than as the traditional father-in-law to be. In the Victorian novel, this situation would, at the very least, have given rise to some commentary, either from another character or within the narration, it being taken for granted that the father be involved in determining who his son-in-law was to be.11 What interests ­Gladys’ father in 9

10 11

The critic Peter Childs thus errs when he says that that Malone ‘is trying to win the hand of his beloved from her father’ (Childs, Modernism, p. 31). The case is precisely the opposite in that Malone does not have to ask the father’s permission nor impress him. Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 11. In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the father’s apparent indifference to his daughters’ marriage prospects can be seen to be somewhat feigned, arising from his contempt for Josephine Sharoni - 978-90-04-33658-2 Downloaded from Brill.com04/11/2023 08:51:11AM via University of Cambridge

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this instance, is the exchange values of the various currencies, an academic subject. Yet the daughter in the traditional 19th century novel, aside from whatever consideration might have been given to her own preferences, also had an exchange value of great interest to her father.12 Here however, as opposed to ­being an authority, in the sense of having the prerogative of carrying out a particular function, that of marrying his daughter, Mr. Hungerton is reduced to a purveyor of pseudo-scientific knowledge. The subject of bimetallism, an argument as to whether the value of a currency should be tied to silver as well as gold, is in fact not a matter over which he has any authority. Moreover even as a would-be authority, he is now looking for the ‘real’ authority – the Someone who would determine the ‘true standards’ of currency values and the Someone who might suddenly put everything in true order by calling in all the outstanding debts. From being a master to whom theoretical, academic knowledge is immaterial in that he commands by virtue of his authority, he now becomes a piteous suppliant (‘for an hour or more that evening I listened to his monotonous chirrup’) for an endorsement of the correctness of his theoretical assertions. This change in the position of the paternal figure is made clearer with Lacan’s theory of discourses. Where the traditional Victorian father would have spoken from within what Lacan called the Master’s discourse, Mr. ­Hungerton speaks within that of the University. Lacan defined a discourse in terms of four ­positions which can be filled by one of four terms, common to all the ­discourses. Only the position of each term varies. A graphic representation of the master and university discourses is as follows: Master’s Discourse

University Discourse13



his wife. In the second chapter of the novel, it turns out that he has after all paid a visit to the eligible bachelor, newly arrived in the neighbourhood, after having refused in the first chapter to do such a thing at his wife’s behest. 12 In Anthony Trollope’s novel, The Way We Live Now (1875) the rich commoner, Augustus Melmotte, reckons on how through his daughter’s marriage he will be able to ‘purchase’ himself a place in the British aristocracy. 13 Lacan, Other Side, p. 31. Graphs of the Discourse of the Master and the Discourse of the University courtesy of Terry Harpold. See Terry Harpold, “The Underside of the Digital Field”, Digital Humanities Quarterly 6.2 (2012), [accessed October 16 2016]. Josephine Sharoni - 978-90-04-33658-2 Downloaded from Brill.com04/11/2023 08:51:11AM via University of Cambridge

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Comparing the two discourses it can be seen that the top left hand position in the master’s discourse is occupied by S1 while in that of the university by S2. This position is called the agent, the acting party, whereas the right hand side is the party acted upon. The use of symbols rather than words leads to a certain flexibility in giving concrete examples. In the master’s discourse, S1 is usually described as the master acting on the slave, S2. This master is one who, according to Lacan, cares nothing for knowledge but only requires that the slave work producing enjoyment for the master. This enjoyment is designated by the letter a (relating to the object a, as discussed in the Introduction) in the third position, which represents the product or result of a discourse. ‘A real master’, says Lacan, ‘as in general we used to see until a recent era, and this is seen less and less, doesn’t desire to know anything at all – he desires that things work’.14 In the novel, as noted, there is something very different: a father immersed in a theoretical problem over how currencies should work. He does not simply desire that the system just function yielding him the profits or enjoyment, but is worried about how it does so. Conversely, in the university discourse, S1 is in the bottom left position. This position represents the truth of a discourse. For Lacan knowledge is never neutral or inherently true, only generally accepted because underpinned by a master or a master signifier, often (although not necessarily) hidden. This guarantee at the beginning of the 20th century, when the novel is set, has become more nebulous and diffuse, as for example in the case of the currency systems whose traditional, palpable supports, such as gold in the case of the gold standard, have waned. Currencies are valued in relation to one another and although one currency, such as sterling or the dollar, may assume a dominant role in an ersatz gold standard, this more evidently stems from within the system itself as opposed to something immutable and ‘naturally determined’ from without. In the opening scene, as an S2, an agent of knowledge, the father is looking for the reassurance of an S1, a master, an authority who would restore the true standards of currency values thus giving the backing he feels is missing to a trading system spiralling out of control. Thus the father who abdicates his position as the master remains in search of another one even if that master is ‘hidden’ from view (in the diagram it is under the bar). This is, perhaps, why the episode ends with the father preparing for a Masonic m ­ eeting – ‘he bounced off out of the room to dress15 – a society which provides (secretly to the initiated) a more structured environment of rules and regulations and a palpable master.

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The Father-Out-Law

When Malone, the would-be son-in-law, escapes the traditional paternal authority, on the abdication of Gladys’ father, he encounters what can be seen as another father, the ‘father-of-science’, Professor Edward G. Challenger. The ­Professor indeed treats Malone as a boy. ‘“I have already explained to our young friend here,” said Challenger (he has a way of alluding to me as if I were a school child ten years old)’.16 This father-of-science, it turns out, is not subordinate to any other authority, including the law. Challenger essentially neuters it, getting around it as something beneath him. For instance, the reader is informed that Challenger has broken the skull of the last journalist who tried to interview him. Malone is indeed given the task by his editor in answer to his request for adventure and danger. Challenger has already ‘thrown several of you [journalists] out of the house’. There was a cost, ‘Three pound fifteen each – that is how it averaged’ but it was worth it: ‘Expensive, but very necessary’. Thus, as far as Challenger is concerned, the law is merely a nuisance, to which he need not submit but can buy off at a certain price which he can afford to pay. The sequel of the fight between Malone and Challenger which ensues when Malone is thrown out makes clear that he has to make a choice between Challenger and the law in the form of its representative, the policeman. After Malone exits the house in the altercation, a police officer appears and asks Malone if he wants to press charges. Malone declines, taking the blame upon himself: ‘I intruded upon him. He gave me fair warning’.17 While, on the one hand, this episode looks like a plot device that supplies a plausible reason for the professor to relent and continue the interview with Malone (‘The Professor looked at me, and there was something humorous at the back of his eyes. “Come in!” said he. “I’ve not done with you yet”’18) it also demonstrates the schism between Challenger and the law. The law, represented in the figure of the police officer, is demonstratively shut out: ‘The speech had a sinister sound, but I followed him none the less into the house. The man-servant, Austin, like a wooden image, closed the door behind us.’19 On the expedition, Challenger will be a law unto himself, accepting no one’s authority on any matter except his own.

16 Ibid., p. 79. 17 Ibid., p. 27. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., p. 27.

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Challenger had from the moment of joining us issued directions to the whole party, much to the evident discontent of Summerlee. Now, upon his assigning some duty to his fellow-Professor (it was only the carrying of an aneroid barometer), the matter suddenly came to a head. ‘May I ask, sir,’ said Summerlee, with vicious calm, ‘in what capacity you take it upon yourself to issue these orders?’ Challenger glared and bristled. ‘I do it, Professor Summerlee, as leader of this expedition.’20 The argument continues a while longer re-occurring several more times during the expedition. Challenger also takes umbrage at Lord John Roxton’s presumed authority over him by virtue of his past experience of military campaigns in such areas. After Roxton has prevented Challenger from crossing onto the plateau before all necessary preparations have been made, the aristocrat finally gives his permission, only to be answered with a heavy dose of the Professor’s insubordinate sarcasm. ‘I am much indebted to you for your gracious permission,’ said the angry Professor; for never was a man so intolerant of every form of authority. ‘Since you are good enough to allow it, I shall most certainly take it upon myself to act as pioneer upon this occasion.’21 Nonetheless, Challenger does, on more than one occasion, accept the judgement of the aristocrat – a representative of the old discourse of the Master. One example is the ending of an altercation with Summerlee regarding the naming of a large lake which Malone, the ‘young fellah’, has discovered. Summerlee, with a twisted smile, was about to make some fresh assault when Lord John hastened to intervene. ‘It’s up to you, young fellah, to name the lake,’ said he. ‘You saw it first, and, by George, if you choose to put “Lake Malone” on it, no one has a better right.’ ‘By all means. Let our young friend give it a name,’ said Challenger.22

20 21 22

Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., p. 118. Ibid. p. 118.

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It is specifically ‘Lord John’, the most aristocratic form of his name and not simply ‘Roxton’, as he is sometimes called in the novel, (e.g., ‘Roxton came back to us with a face of granite’23) who puts an end to the quarrel. The presence of the Lord and his function on the expedition is interesting in that the function of the aristocrat can be seen as similar to that of gold and silver in regulating currency values – the subject of bimetallism with which the novel opened. A ruling aristocracy is an authority based on something accidental, that is birth, but dependent on a social system which recognizes this seemingly natural thing as something of great symbolic value. As Charles Shepherdson writes in connection with the gold standard, because the value of money in relation to other goods is constantly changing, then, ‘if we wish to define ten dollars “scientifically,” we must therefore take a formalist perspective and say ten dollars is “half of twenty”, or “twice five”’.24 However, when the gold standard is in operation, there appears to be a basis which guarantees the structure, where money can be measured against an outside value, based on the seemingly intrinsic or natural value of gold as a precious metal. Having said this, the value of gold is in turn a convention, for it has no use value itself – or rather its value cannot be accounted for by its limited uses, for example in jewellery (which in itself has no use value) and dentistry. Likewise the aristocrat has no use, he does not work and only consumes (usually a great deal), his value being entirely symbolic, depending on the social valuation of a seemingly natural thing, birth. In this regard, what is portrayed in the novel is the figure of the aristocrat who serves to maintain some residual order on an expedition which would otherwise be submitted solely to the guiding direction of the wild pursuit of science, and thus seriously threatened with disintegration. The Lost World suggests that the elimination of outdated, ‘erroneous’ conventions such as the gold standard and the aristocracy nonetheless leaves a gap which cannot easily be re-filled either by science or anything else that can be rationally accounted for. 4

The Return of the Courtly Love Tradition

In the absence of the traditional father and the barrier he would once have formed between a suitor and a woman, the would-be couple turn to deal with

23 24

Ibid., p. 93. Charles Shepherdson, Lacan and the Limits of Language (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 21.

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one another directly, Malone having to ask Gladys herself. Returning to the opening scene, it is evident that as far as Malone, is concerned, Gladys’ father is superfluous or worse: ‘If anything could have driven me from Gladys, it would have been the thought of such a father-in-law’.25 Malone thinks he just needs him out of the way so as to leave him in charge of the business of the courtship. ‘At last I was alone with Gladys, and the moment of Fate had come!’26 It turns out however, that this direct method does not lead to formation of the couple. As is foreshadowed – ‘all that evening I had felt like the soldier who awaits the signal which will send him on a forlorn hope; hope of victory and fear of repulse alternating in his mind’27 – the father’s absence does clear the field but on the contrary, another barrier appears erected by the would-be couple themselves in the form of an early 20th century version of the Courtly Love scenario. As soon as the two are left alone and Malone proposes to Gladys, her answer is she does not love him, ‘one must wait till it comes’, and she is in love with someone else, although ‘it is not a particular man but a certain kind of ideal.’28 In the face of her refusal, her becoming an unattainable object, Malone becomes the medieval courtly lover, where even to think badly of his lady counts as ‘treason’. ‘Some judged her to be cold and hard; but such a thought was treason.’29 Even the fact that Gladys appears frigid is read as a sign of passion by Malone: ‘The bent head, the averted eye, the faltering voice, the wincing figure – these, and not the unshrinking gaze and frank reply, are the true signals of passion’.30 In the poetical courtly love scenario of the Middle Ages the function of the Lady was to appear sublime in her suitor’s eyes so she could function as his supremely desired object and yet remain always out of his reach. As Lacan writes: ‘It is impossible to serenade one’s Lady in her poetic role in the absence of the given that she is surrounded and isolated by a barrier’.31 This was the case even if in reality the social position of the suitor was more than adequate to have made her accessible: The object involved, the feminine object, is introduced oddly enough through the door of privation or of inaccessibility. Whatever the social 25 Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 11. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., p. 13. 29 Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 12. 30 Ibid., p. 11. 31 Lacan, Ethics, p. 149.

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position of him who functions in the role, the inaccessibility of the object is posited as a point of departure.32 In the novel, Gladys ‘sat with that proud, delicate profile of hers outlined against the red curtain. How beautiful she was! And yet how aloof!’33 When Malone asks Gladys what he has to do to measure up to the ideal whom she could marry, the answer is the accomplishment of any mission so long as it is full of danger and where he would have put his life at risk for her sake. ‘Above all, he must be a man who could do, who could act, who could look Death in the face and have no fear of him, a man of great deeds and strange e­ xperiences’.34 In reply, Malone pronounces ‘that not another day should elapse before I should find some deed which was worthy of my lady’.35 The terms ‘deed’ and ‘worthy of my lady’, evidently refer to the courtly love tradition where the Lady is put in charge, but also tasked with placing herself beyond the attainment of the suitor. This can be seen in the language of the twelfth century where the word domnei is used. Lacan claims that this is related to the word Domina, ‘the Lady, or in other words, to her who on occasion dominates’.36 The barriers she erects are the missions she imposes on the suitor. There she is ‘as arbitrary as possible in the tests she imposes on her servant’ and as ‘cruel as the tigers of Ircania’.37 The ultimate function of courtly love, with the never ending demands, is a detour, a permanent postponement of the moment when love would finally be consummated. When Malone having accomplished his mission arrives to claim his Lady, he finds her married in the meantime to a Mr. Potts, a solicitor’s clerk who, when Malone asks him something, ‘looked nervously at the electric push’38 (as opposed to looking death in the face). As the name also suggests, the husband is very far from fitting Gladys’ stated criteria for that position. Moreover, in the ultimate effrontery, if anyone is to blame for the new state of affairs, it is not her but the heroic knight himself: I’ve told William all about you,’ said she. ‘We have no secrets. I am so sorry about it. But it couldn’t have been so very deep, could it, if you could 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 13. 35 Ibid., p. 15. 36 Lacan, Ethics, p. 150. 37 Ibid. As Chiesa points out, this lady who dominates forms yet another substitute or standin for the traditional master now absent (Chiesa, personal communication, 15 April, 2013). 38 Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 180.

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go off to the other end of the world and leave me here alone. You’re not crabby, are you?39 The point, according to Žižek, is that, given the true function of courtly love as a permanent detour, it really was not so very deep: Our ‘official’ desire is that we want to sleep with the lady; whereas in truth, there is nothing we fear more than a Lady who might generously yield to this wish of ours – what we truly expect and want from the lady is simply yet another new ordeal, yet one more postponement.40 The invention of courtly love as a way of endlessly postponing the consummation of the sexual relationship between a man and a woman belies the assumption that this relationship is natural, instinctual or innate. When Malone first proposes, Gladys complains that he is ruining their friendship: ‘“You’ve spoiled everything, Ned”, she said. “It’s all so beautiful and natural until this kind of thing comes in! It is such a pity! Why can’t you control yourself?”’ Malone’s reaction is ‘I didn’t invent it’ and ‘It’s nature.’41 Her remark, I would argue, is amusing, precisely because it is sexual relations that are commonly regarded as natural or instinctual (‘I didn’t invent it’) while it is abstinence or sexless friendship which is seen as an anomaly in the natural order of things (as opposed to what Gladys says). For Lacan, what courtly love suggests is that, on the contrary, the sexual relationship between a man and a woman is not natural or innate but artificial; in other words, it has to be invented: ‘Between male and female human beings there is no such thing as an instinctive relationship, because all sexuality is marked by the signifier.’42 In these circumstances it can happen that what is created is not a means to an actual relationship, but, instead, a way of maintaining the illusion that, if only no contingent, external obstacles existed, the sexual relationship between man and woman would be both automatic and successful. Courtly love, by endlessly postponing that moment where the truth 39 Ibid. 40 Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality (London: Verso, 2005), p. 96. 41 Ibid., p. 12. 42 Lacan, ‘Conférence à Genève sur le symptôme’, Les Block-Notes de la psychoanalyse, ­(Geneva: Éditions Georg, 1975) quoted in Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of L­ acanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 184. For a more detailed exposition of Lacan’s saying that ‘il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel’ see the entry for ‘Sexual R ­ elationship’ in No Subject – Encyclopedia of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, [accessed August, 2011].

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would appear, is in Lacan’s words ‘a very refined manner to supplant the absence of the sexual relationship by feigning that it is us who put the obstacle in its way’.43 This interpretation of the function of courtly love also solves the puzzle which the critic Peter Childs raises concerning the apparent indifference of Malone to Gladys, when he writes that ‘Malone has hardly referred to Gladys throughout his adventure aside from the obligatory adventurer’s gesture in naming a lake after her, which was undertaken to persuade her of his worthiness’.44 The reason according to Childs is that ‘Conan Doyle decides to present Gladys as a woman who is as duplicitous as the “half-breed” Gomez’, who betrays the expedition in revenge for the killing of his brother by Roxton in his campaign against slavery in the region.45 Child’s interpretation, though, might be questioned on two counts. Firstly, although Gladys does turn out to be duplicitous, it would not explain Malone’s indifference to her on the expedition before his knowing this. Secondly, Child’s explanation would merely lead to another question: why is Gladys presented in this way? One possible answer lies in the consideration of the courtly love scenario. If it bars the suitor from obtaining what, in Žižek’s words, he ‘officially’ desires, it can be surmised that given the after all voluntary consent to this impediment, there is something duplicitous in desire itself. It is sexual desire which dupes human beings, both men and women, and not a conscious subject who deceives another. The gulf between Gladys’ stated requirements and the qualities of Mr. Potts should be seen in this light. At the beginning of the story, Gladys exclaims to Malone: And Lady Stanley! […] These are the sort of men that a woman could worship with all her soul, and yet be the greater, not the less, on account of her love, honoured by all the world as the inspirer of noble deeds.46 Malone comes back a Stanley, but Gladys has already married Potts. Malone is sure there has to be an explanation: ‘How did you do it? Have you searched for hidden treasure, or discovered a pole, or done time on a pirate, or flown the Channel, or what? Where is the glamour of romance? How did you get it?’ 43 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book xx: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1999), p. 69. 44 Childs, Modernism, p. 16. 45 Ibid. 46 Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 13. Josephine Sharoni - 978-90-04-33658-2 Downloaded from Brill.com04/11/2023 08:51:11AM via University of Cambridge

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He stared at me with a hopeless expression upon his vacuous, goodnatured, scrubby little face. ‘Don’t you think all this is a little too personal?’ he said. ‘Well, just one question,’ I cried. ‘What are you? What is your profession?’ ‘I am a solicitor’s clerk,’ said he. ‘Second man at Johnson and Merivale’s, 41 Chancery Lane.’47 The point is that there can be no explanation. Hence the comparison that Childs makes between the duplicity of Gladys and that of Gomez is interesting in that it breaks down at just this juncture. While there is a reason for Gomez’ betrayal, (the killing of his brother), it is very difficult to conceive of anything explaining Gladys’ choice. In terms of her stated requirements, it is Malone who lives up to them.48 A solicitor’s clerk does not suggest either that Gladys has given up on her original ideals and married for money or status. In the absence of any explicit information concerning Gladys’ feelings for Potts reading between the lines one might speculate that what she desires is a man like Potts who will precisely not be masterful but good naturedly submissive, allowing her to continue to dominate. 5

Courtly Love as Art and the (Scientific) Need to See for Oneself

While, the reappearance of the courtly love scenario in an early twentiethcentury novel fulfils a similar function to that of the original twelfth- and thirteenth-century version, it also introduces a significant difference. There is in both cases a conception of a relationship between a man and a woman based on something other than considerations of property and alliances and hence 47 48

Ibid., pp. 180–181. The misleading assumption that we can state what we desire when it comes to finding a partner can be seen in the questionnaires filled in by people joining dating sites. These questionnaires ask people to define their desired partner in terms of attributes which can be articulated such as age, educational qualifications, interests, politics etc. However, in an article which recently appeared in The Guardian entitled ‘Online Dating: Computer says yes: But will we click?’, there appears the gap between the ‘official’ requirements set out for the would-be partner of the woman journalist and the unpronounceable qualities in the man who actually ends up attracting her. Just as in Gladys’ case, he appears almost the exact opposite of the would-be partner she had demanded and, nonetheless, is preferred to the man who does conform to her original specifications. Guardian, Life and Style Section, [accessed 10 August 2012]. Josephine Sharoni - 978-90-04-33658-2 Downloaded from Brill.com04/11/2023 08:51:11AM via University of Cambridge

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determined by the father (or an acting head of the family) while yet preventing a consummation. However there is also a notable contrast between the two versions. In the medieval practice, at least as it has come down to us, courtly love was an artistic or aesthetic form. It consisted of writing poetry and what was created in poetry had no equivalent in reality. As Lacan points out: ‘All the historians agree: courtly love was, in brief, a poetic exercise, a way of playing with a number of conventional, idealizing themes which couldn’t have any real concrete equivalent’.49 The merit of the poetry lay not in the genuineness of the feelings expressed, nor in any representation of the poet’s true ardour but in its artistry, or, as de Kesel expresses it: ‘The hallmark of the courtly lover lay […] in the degree of artistry with which he was able to express his desire for his inaccessible lady’.50 Furthermore, according to de Kesel, the courtly love of the Middle Ages was an act of creation. In contrast to a reality where the woman was an object of exchange among propertied or titled families, the idea of courtly love created a new position for her ‘that completely broke away from that marriage economy and, in time, even forced the existing marriage culture into a specific historical direction.’51 In other words, the artist created a new conception of woman and of man’s relation to her, which eventually had concrete social repercussions. While in actuality, the medieval woman stayed more than ever man’s ‘possession’ and ‘object’, through the artefact of poetry her status was changed, if only within the imaginary courtly love scenario, where she becomes the almost divine object of a suitor’s supplications: The entire fixed field of signifiers that made woman ‘what she was’ in this culture was shaken up, and became the stakes of a creative poetic game. The poetic revolution of courtly love reworked, rearranged, remodelled, and refurbished the set of signifiers that regulated sexual difference at that time.52 If, in its first appearance in the Middle Ages, Courtly Love originated a new concept of a sexual relationship between a man and a woman by means of an artistic invention, the contrast with its re-appearance in the early 20th century novel is clear. Here, the courtly lover is not a poet, but a journalist. The word reporter is in tandem with Malone. Introducing himself to the e­ xpedition’s 49 Lacan, Ethics, p. 148. 50 De Kesel, Eros and Ethics, trans. by Sigi Jottkandt (New York: suny, 2009), p. 177. 51 Ibid., p. 176. 52 Ibid., p. 179.

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o­ rganizing committee, he states: ‘My name is Edward Dunn Malone. I am the reporter of the Daily Gazette. I claim to be an absolutely unprejudiced witness’.53 In other words, this courtly lover does not, in the manner of the medieval poet, create anything new but records what is already present in front of his senses. During the original conversation with Gladys, it turns out that Malone has done something brave already: ‘Now, when you described the Wigan coal explosion last month, could you not have gone down and helped those people, in spite of the choke-damp?’ ‘I did.’ ‘You never said so.’ ‘There was nothing worth bucking about.’ ‘I didn’t know.’ She looked at me with rather more interest. ‘That was brave of you.’ ‘I had to. If you want to write good copy, you must be where the things are.’ ‘What a prosaic motive! It seems to take all the romance out of it’.54 Thus, Malone, the writer, has to see things for himself. ‘Copy’ is a duplicate of something in front of his senses. In fact, the whole adventure of the novel arises from the need to see for oneself what already exists in reality. The mission is sent out because nobody will believe the word of a scientific ­authority’s for the continuing existence of dinosaurs.55 People demand to see p ­ hotographs, and when Challenger says they were ruined in a river accident, they (not ­surprisingly) mock him in disbelief. The purpose of the mission is that a nonbelieving member of the scientific community, Professor Summerlee, will see the evidence with his own eyes and, for good measure, a journalist, trained to report what he sees. 53 54 55

Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 50. Ibid., p. 14. When Malone’s editor briefs him on his assignment he produces a piece of paper with the scientist’s Curriculum Vita showing a very large number of positions and honours, which turn out to be too many even to list: ‘Challenger, George Edward. Born: Largs, N.B., 1863. Educ.: Largs Academy; Edinburgh University. British Museum Assistant, 1892. AssistantKeeper of Comparative Anthropology Department, 1893. Resigned after acrimonious correspondence same year. Winner of Crayston Medal for Zoological Research. Foreign Member of’ – well, quite a lot of things, about two inches of small type – ‘Societe Belge, American Academy of Sciences, La Plata, etc., etc. Ex-President Palaeontological Society. Section H, British Association’ – so on, so on!’ (Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 17).

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Indeed, Malone’s apparently common sense remark that ‘if you want to write good copy, you must be where the things are’, and Gladys’ reply that that would take all the romance out of it, turn out to have a further meaning in the context of the novel. As was noted, the expedition does not produce romance for the reporter, but the sight of a series of horrible objects, which, as will be discussed later, can be seen as ‘Things’. The horrible nature of these things is foreshadowed by the sights Malone presumably encountered at the bottom of a Wigan coal pit after an explosion. Moreover, it also appears that the science in the novel triumphs precisely in that it produces the missing evidence, in the form of the baby dinosaur brought back to England. Yet, this seemingly unambiguous resolution to the controversy forms a discrepancy between what Challenger had originally demanded of the doubters and what, in the end, is required of them, continuing the theme of the distinction between seeing what already exists and the invention of new ways of seeing. Before the expedition to South America is set up, Challenger, complaining about those who refuse to take his word as to the continuing existence of dinosaurs, says: Every great discoverer has been met with the same incredulity – the sure brand of a generation of fools. When great facts are laid before you, you have not the intuition, the imagination which would help you to understand them. You can only throw mud at the men who have risked their lives to open new fields to science. You persecute the prophets! Galileo! Darwin, and I – .56 However, Challenger is not, at the end of the novel, believed due to an understanding aided by intuition or imagination, as he demands from his detractors, but because he displays the actual dinosaur in front of their disbelieving eyes. The nature of the evidence and the impact of it on the crowd make it very clear that nothing whatsoever is left either to the imagination or intuition. As ­Challenger opens the cage of the baby dinosaur to reveal it to the crowd: a most horrible and loathsome creature appeared from below and perched itself upon the side of the case. Even the unexpected fall of the Duke of Durham into the orchestra, which occurred at this moment, could not distract the petrified attention of the vast audience.57

56 57

Ibid., p. 48 [emphasis mine]. Ibid., p. 177.

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This discrepancy could in itself be easily dismissed, especially as Challenger’s complaint occurs, as far as the reader is concerned, more than a hundred pages before the production of that evidence which leaves nothing to the imagination. It can also appear to be a mere barb of the novel, aimed at Challenger’s insufferable self-regard. Nonetheless Challenger’s elevated status is completely upheld in the triumphal ending, made possible by his endangering his life for science, just as in the case of Galileo, threatened by the Church authorities, and Darwin, who in the mid-nineteenth century was five years circumnavigating the earth. What does jar, however, is Challenger’s use of the word ‘discoverer’ to describe both himself and Galileo. Galileo, although sometimes described as the discoverer of Jupiter’s moons, is generally regarded in a totally different manner. For instance, according to the scientist Stephen Hawking, ‘Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science’,58 where the word ‘birth’ suggests the creation of something radically new. In the Ethics Seminar, Lacan refers to modern science as ‘the kind that was born with Galileo’.59 For Lacan the defining characteristic of modern science is that it breaks with existing reality. The increasing power of symbolic mastery has not stopped enlarging its field of operation since Galileo, has not stopped consuming around it any reference that would limit its scope or intuited data; by allowing free rein to the play of signifiers, it has given rise to a science whose laws develop in the direction of an increasingly coherent whole, but without anything being less motivated than what exists at any given point.60 Modern science reorganizes what one sees according to a particularly sophisticated symbolic system, in particular the language of mathematics, which has no connection with how that same reality appears beforehand. Hence the mastery of the symbolic over the imaginary, that is, the reconvening of the ways things are perceived through the manipulation of symbols. This schism between what we see and what is according to modern science, requires intuition, that is the ability to conceive of or imagine things in a different way than they first appear to the senses.61 58

Stephen Hawking, ‘Galileo and the Birth of Modern Science’, American Heritage’s Invention & Technology, 24 (2009), pp. 34–37 (p. 36). 59 Lacan, Ethics, p. 122. 60 Ibid. [emphasis mine]. 61 The historian Eric Hobsbawm points out that there was, so to speak, a second revolution in physics and science at the time when The Lost World was being published, one that

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One can better understand Lacan’s point using the example of the concept of inertia, which Phillipe Julien takes from Alexandre Koyré, a historian of scientific thought. Julien points out that ‘to a contemporary of Galileo, the ideas of motion and space, the principles of modern mechanics, would have constituted a paradox’. This is because, ‘the law of inertia, teaches us that a body left to itself persists eternally in its state of motion or repose’ so that ‘in order to transform a state of motion into a state of rest, or vice-versa we must put a force into operation’.62 But for a contemporary of Galileo, influenced by ­Aristotle, this would have clashed completely with his empirical experience. Such motion was never encountered, as any moving body always appeared to come to rest of its own accord. The answer of modern physics is that for the law of inertia to be true, there has to be uniform, rectilinear motion which, however, can only occur in a vacuum, so that, in normal circumstances it can never been seen. This is, then, an example of how modern science constitutes a different way of seeing reality. Before the first law of motion was formulated, one saw a moving body ‘naturally’ come to a halt in accordance with the essence of motion. After the law one sees a moving body brought to rest by opposing forces such as friction in the absence of which that body would have continued moving

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further divided science from reality as we perceive it. ‘There are times when man’s entire way of apprehending and structuring the universe is transformed in a fairly brief period of time, and the decades which preceded the First World War were one of these’. However, ‘this transformation was not as yet understood, or even observed, by relatively exiguous numbers of men and women in a handful of countries, and sometimes only by minorities even within the fields of intellectual and creative activity which were being transformed’. The revolution to which Hobsbawm is referring can be epitomised by the development of mathematics. ‘Sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century the progress of mathematical thought began to generate not only (as it had already done earlier) results which conflicted with the real world as apprehended by the senses, such as non-Euclidean geometry, but results which appeared shocking even to mathematicians, who found, like the great Georg Cantor, [a German mathematician 1845–1918] that “je vois mais Je ne crois pas”’. [I see but I do not believe].The consequence of these developments, which in due course came to be espoused by the majority of mathematicians, was to free the subject ‘from any correspondence with the real world, and to turn it into the elaboration of postulates, any postulates, which required only to be precisely defined and linked by the need not to be contradictory. Mathematics was henceforth based on a rigorous suspension of belief in anything except the rules of a game.’ (Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (London: Abacus, 2003), pp. 246–247). Phillipe Julien, Jacques Lacan’s Return to Freud: The Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary, trans. by Dvra Beck Simiu (New York: New York University Press, 1994), p. 119. [Emphasis mine].

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forever. Descartes, in his Meditations, gives another example of the discrepancy between the modern scientific conception of an object and an empirical one. He writes that there are two views of the sun, the one stemming from what one sees and the other deriving from the calculations of Galilean science. I find, for example, two completely diverse ideas of the sun in my mind; the one derives its origin from the senses, and should be placed in the category of adventitious ideas; according to this idea the sun seems to be extremely small; but the other is derived from astronomical reasonings i.e. is elicited from certain notions that are innate in me, or else it is formed by me in some other manner; in accordance with it the sun appears to be several times greater than the earth. These two ideas cannot, indeed, both resemble the same sun, and reason makes me believe that the one which seems to have originated directly from the sun itself, is the one which is most dissimilar to it.63 This notion of reconceiving reality has to do with the difference noted earlier between the courtly lover as medieval poet and as modern journalist. If the poet created, according to de Kesel, a new conception of the sexual relationship between man and woman as opposed to depicting that already in existence, then art is, in this sense, analogous to Galilean science, in that both invent something at odds with existing perception. The term, discoverer, does, on the other hand, fit Challenger an explorer who (re-)discovers something already existing as a concept, albeit that the actual manifestations are (as with Jupiter’s moons) not yet visible to anyone else. It is not a case of an intuited theory needing verification. Challenger tells Malone at the beginning of the novel, he had gone to the plateau area in order to study the fauna (‘it was my business to visit this little-known back-country and to examine its fauna’).64 He stumbled upon the dinosaurs by accident on his way home, when he thought his mission accomplished. The clue that leads Challenger to the dinosaurs comes from the sketches of a predecessor in the area (a clear manifestation in the novel of an already existing concept). On searching for what he is convinced the artist must have seen he shoots a pterodactyl and even manages to bring one of its bones back to England. Challenger is therefore trying to convince his fellow scientists of something that he has seen with his own eyes. 63 64

René Descartes, Mediations of First Philosophy (Whitefish, mt: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), p. 26. Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 31.

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One final point in regard to the ‘need to see for oneself’ concerns us as readers. The tendency, also noted by Ian Duncan in his introduction to the Oxford Classics edition, to identify with the travellers and their triumph, leads us to overlook that surely, we, the readers of the 21st century, would have been with that sceptical audience in their demand for proof of Challenger’s assertions and their refusal to take any authority’s word in lieu (however many letters he might have had after his name). It is fair to say we would also have shared the scepticism as to the story of the destroyed photographs. It is, however, the case that at the end of novel the doubters and therefore, by implication, us readers, are resoundingly defeated when Challenger produces the dinosaur in London. Challenger’s chief opponent, a Dr. Illingworth, (let’s say our representative) demanding incontrovertible evidence (as opposed to likely doctored photographs), is set up for a complete humiliation. DR. ILLINGWORTH: ‘No picture could convince us of anything.’ PROFESSOR CHALLENGER: ‘You would require to see the thing itself?’ DR. ILLINGWORTH: ‘Undoubtedly.’ PROFESSOR CHALLENGER: ‘And you would accept that?’ DR. ILLINGWORTH (laughing): ‘Beyond a doubt.’65 Given one must assume that The Lost World is not proposing that dinosaurs might actually exist, why this complete routing of the doubters? My suggestion is that the producing of the baby pterodactyl which makes fools of the doubters (and us) is the novel’s answer to the chorus of demands for evidence. That one no longer accepts the word of an authority without proof is not necessarily the step forward assumed if it is replaced by the demand for a specific kind of incontrovertible, hard evidence and in particular the idea that it is what one sees with one’s own eyes which counts. There is for humans no pre-existing raw reality unmediated by the symbolic and to act as if there is, is to be deceived. On the contrary, as Žižek writes, what Lacan insinuates with his motto les non-dupes errent (‘those who are not duped err’ – which is in French homophonous with Le Nom du Père) is that ‘those who do not let themselves be caught in the symbolic deception/fiction and continue to believe their eyes are the ones who err most’.66

65 Ibid., p. 176. 66 Slavoj Žižek, ‘With or Without Passion’, [accessed 10 August 2012].

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The ‘Larger than Life’ Scientist

The inclination of the reader to identify with the triumphant ending of the novel despite the reasonableness of Challenger’s critics also sits uneasily with the characterisation of Challenger as rude, insufferable and, as was seen, even violent. Furthermore, the humour and comic exaggeration in the story serves to mask the serious point being made in regard to the potentially devastating impact of science in society, as represented by Challenger. In this light, the professor can be seen as a forerunner of the ‘larger than life’ central characters Žižek has identified as a leitmotif of Orson Welles’ films. The comparison shows how the contradictory mixture of, on the one hand, a serious almost super-human heroism and, on the other, a comic buffoonery ultimately proves to be, as in Welles’ films, so destructive. The first point to be highlighted is the complete identification of the ­character of Challenger with the pursuit of science. The professor acts in the ‘name of science’ and, in its name, he ignores social conventions and the community, as is made clear in the description of the events leading up  to the expedition. When he persistently and rudely interrupts the lecturer, a Mr. ­Waldron, at a public meeting, he does so for science’s sake: ‘I must in turn ask you, Mr. ­Waldron,’ he said, ‘to cease to make assertions which are not in strict ­accordance with scientific fact.’67 For Challenger, the pursuit of science overrides any social considerations. Malone’s journalistic source briefs him as to why the professor is so detested in the scientific community: ‘Well, by his insufferable rudeness and impossible behaviour. There was poor old Wadley, of the Zoological Institute. Wadley sent a message: “The President of the Zoological Institute presents his compliments to Professor Challenger, and would take it as a personal favour if he would do them the honour to come to their next meeting.” The answer was unprintable.’ ‘You don’t say?’ ‘Well, a bowdlerized version of it would run: ‘Professor Challenger presents his compliments to the President of the Zoological Institute, and would take it as a personal favour if he would go to the devil.’ ‘Good Lord!’ ‘Yes, I expect that’s what old Wadley said. I remember his wail at the meeting, which began: ‘In fifty years experience of scientific intercourse –’ It quite broke the old man up.’68 67 68

Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 46. Ibid., p. 19.

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Challenger’s quest is science at its purest, a drive for knowledge for its own sake, unadulterated by any other considerations. His fellow scientist Summerlee’s teaching activities for example are scorned. ‘The true (and uniquely talented) scientist should not waste his time on education but further scientific research’.69 In fact it will turn out that, as far as Challenger is concerned, science can continue, even in the absence of society. In one of the sequels to The Lost World, the novella, The Poison Belt, a cloud of poison ‘kills’ (temporarily) all humans apart from five: Challenger, his wife, Summerlee, Roxton and Malone who survive by the use of a private supply of oxygen. While sitting together Malone suddenly asks: ‘But what in the world are we to do with our lives?’ I asked, appealing in desperation to the blue, empty heaven. ‘What am I to do, for example? There are no newspapers, so there’s an end of my vocation.’ ‘And there’s nothin’ left to shoot, and no more soldierin’, so there’s an end of mine,’ said Lord John. ‘And there are no students, so there’s an end of mine,’ cried Summerlee. ‘But I have my husband and my house, so I can thank heaven that there is no end of mine,’ said the lady. ‘Nor is there an end of mine,’ remarked Challenger, ‘for science is not dead, and this catastrophe in itself will offer us many most absorbing problems for investigation.’70 This mixture of a grand, disinterested adherence to scientific truth, on the one hand, and the disdain for society, on the other, invites comparison with what Žižek names Welles’ ‘larger-than-life central characters’, such as Citizen Kane in the eponymous film. While Challenger’s conduct is uncivil, there is a willingness to put his scientific truths first, a refusal to bow to petty considerations of self-interest, such as academic office, and his disdain for social approbation. As his wife tells him: ‘You, a man who should have been Regius Professor at a great University with a thousand students all revering you’.71 Thus, in Challenger’s dedication to science, there is the same ‘bold and authentic subjectivity, which disregards the pleasure seeking and utilitarian motivations’,72 that Žižek sees in Welles’ screen characters. 69 Ibid. 70 Conan Doyle, ‘The Poison Belt’ in The Lost World and Other Stories (Ware: Wordsworth, 1995), pp. 185–254, (p. 233). 71 Ibid, p. 28. 72 Žižek, ‘Four Discourses, Four Subjects’ in Cogito and the Unconscious, ed. by Žižek (­Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 93. Josephine Sharoni - 978-90-04-33658-2 Downloaded from Brill.com04/11/2023 08:51:11AM via University of Cambridge

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There is a further resemblance, this time in physical appearance, between Challenger and Welles’ ‘larger-than-life’ characters, both in the excessive dimensions and the strange distortions which mark them off from their fellow human beings. In Welles’ films there is, according to Žižek, a superhuman dimension to the main character: ‘The depth of field – which, by way of the wide-angle lens, distorts reality, curves its space by pathologically exaggerating the close-up of the main character, and bestows on the reality that stretches behind a strange, dreamlike quality’.73 By this means ‘the gap that separates the main character from social reality’ is also accentuated. In the novel, Challenger possesses those same excessive dimensions in comparison to those surrounding him: His appearance made me gasp. I was prepared for something strange, but not for so overpowering a personality as this. It was his size which took one’s breath away – his size and his imposing presence. His head was enormous, the largest I have ever seen upon a human being. I am sure that his top-hat, had I ever ventured to don it, would have slipped over me entirely and rested on my shoulders. A huge spread of shoulders and a chest like a barrel were the other parts of him which appeared above the table, save for two enormous hands covered with long black hair. This and a bellowing, roaring, rumbling voice made up my first impression of the notorious Professor Challenger.74 Finally, there is also the same alternation between the character’s greatness and buffoonery in both the films and the novel. The use of the wide angle lens, writes Žižek, ‘directly materializes the Wellesian “larger than life” subjectivity in all its ambiguity, oscillating between excessive, superman power and pathological ridicule’.75 In the novel, Challenger, a man of immense physical and mental prowess, turns into a pine eating ape, up a tree. 7

Lacan and Sublimation

The comparison of Challenger with Orson Welles’ ‘larger-than-life characters’ leads to a quote from the director regarding them, which I find particularly significant for my reading of The Lost World and the character of the scientist in particular: ‘All the characters I’ve played are various forms of Faust. I hate 73 Ibid. 74 Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 24. 75 Žižek, ‘Four Discourses’, p. 93. Josephine Sharoni - 978-90-04-33658-2 Downloaded from Brill.com04/11/2023 08:51:11AM via University of Cambridge

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all forms of Faust because I believe it’s impossible for man to be great without admitting there is something greater than himself – either the law or God or art’.76 This comment of Welles can be seen as a conclusion, albeit radically condensed, which could be drawn from Lacan’s discussion throughout the Ethics Seminar of the place of art, religion, the law, and science in human culture. The law and Challenger’s refusal to submit to it have already been discussed, so I now turn to the place of art, religion and science in the novel. I will show how The Lost World, despite Challenger’s triumph, undermines his Faustian claim of science’s cultural dominance. This discussion hinges on Lacan’s concepts of the Thing (das Ding) and sublimation brought up in the Introduction. Sublimation manages the conflicting aspect of the Thing, of which the subject must necessarily be frustrated because he ‘could not stand the supreme good das Ding would bring him’.77 As de Kesel writes, ‘all sublimations enable us to give what is in principle the impossible object relation with which we correspond a form that is nevertheless liveable’.78 Sublimation ‘works’ by putting in the empty place of the Thing a symbolic object of which one is conscious and which has been elevated to the dignity of the Thing. Nonetheless, it does not, as de Kesel notes, ‘give us the desired “object” itself, the “thing”, we seek; it refers us solely to the place where the object lies and, further, keeps this place explicitly empty’ and, hence, ‘sublimation produces an empty place, a void’.79 Returning to the subject of courtly love qua artistic creation (that ultimately has repercussions on society at large), one sees that, for Lacan it is ‘in effect, an exemplary form, a paradigm, of sublimation’.80 As de Kesel explains, on the one hand, the lady, ‘elevated to the dignity of the Thing’, becomes supremely desirable. Yet, on the other hand, by remaining inaccessible and imposing on her suitor the cruellest tasks, ‘the “Lady” simultaneously functions as a hindrance, a terrifying “doom” that deters him from it’.81 Hence, the lady does not become the Thing itself, thus leaving ‘the domain of the “thing”’ empty.’82 Moreover, for Lacan, while art, religion and science are all forms of sublimation they can nonetheless be distinguished. ‘In every form of sublimation, emptiness is ­determinative’ yet, there are ‘three different ways according to 76

Quoted in Joseph McBride, Orson Welles (New York: Da Capo, 1996), p. 36, quoted in Žižek, ‘Four Discourses’, p. 95. 77 Lacan, Ethics, p. 73. 78 De Kesel, Eros and Ethics, trans. by Sigi Jottkandt (New York: suny, 2009), p. 186. 79 Ibid., p. 182. 80 Lacan, Ethics, p. 128. 81 Ibid., p. 183. 82 Ibid.

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which art, religion and the discourse of science turn out to be related to that’.83 I will first show how religion and art are indeed depicted in the novel as two different modes of sublimation and then in the following section how science’s relation to the Thing is problematic (and ultimately potentially destructive) in its tendency towards the cancellation of the void, rather than its maintenance. 7.1 Religion in The Lost World At first sight, it appears that the subject of religion barely figures in the novel. Childs writes that ‘Zambo [the expedition’s black servant] is the only one to introduce religion into the story when he suggest that the lost world is “the devil’s country, sah, and he take you all to himself”’.84 However, there are several other places were religion is touched upon and in contingent fashion as far as the plot is concerned, thus raising the question of the significance of these allusions. The first time is when we are informed by Challenger that one of his sources for the existence of dinosaurs on the plateau happens to have been an ecclesiastic: Fortunately, I had a definite clue, for there was a particular picture in his sketch-book which showed him taking lunch with a certain ecclesiastic at Rosario. This priest I was able to find, and though he proved a very argumentative fellow, who took it absurdly amiss that I should point out to him the corrosive effect which modern science must have upon his beliefs, he none the less gave me some positive information.85 The second time is in the tree climbing episode when Malone discovers the central lake which will become Lake Gladys. On the tree, Malone encounters for the first time on the expedition an ape-man. When he gets back the following conversation takes place: He has been there all the time,’ said I. ‘How do you know that?’ asked Lord John. ‘Because I have never been without that feeling that something malevolent was watching us. I mentioned it to you, Professor Challenger.’ ‘Our young friend certainly said something of the kind. He is also the one among us who is endowed with that Celtic temperament which would make him sensitive to such impressions.’ 83 Ibid., p. 130. 84 Childs, Modernism, p. 13. 85 Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 82. [emphasis mine].

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The whole theory of telepathy –’ began Summerlee, filling his pipe. ‘Is too vast to be now discussed,’ said Challenger, with decision. ‘Tell me, now,’ he added, with the air of a bishop addressing a Sunday-school, ‘did you happen to observe whether the creature could cross its thumb over its palm?’86 On both occasions, it is evident that for Challenger, science has superseded religion and rendered it obsolete. It is only the unscientific ‘Celtic’ temperament (and here I am reading ‘Celtic’ not as synonym for Irish and hence as a racial or national designation but as an antonym for ‘scientific’ and ‘rational’) which would make someone prone to such anxiety inducing impressions such as being watched by something malevolent. Science, in its action of classification (‘If the creature can cross its thumb over its palm’ then it must belong to such and such a type) quickly neuters this kind of fears. The use of the term bishop in order to depict the manner of Challenger’s speaking intimates that science here has taken over a role once performed by religious authorities. This function, now to be explored, has to do with the preclusion of anxiety. As Joan Copjec writes, the feeling of being watched, without being able to say who is doing the watching or how, is what ‘Freud would have called anxiety’, that is an ‘objectless fear’, in so far as an object is conceived of as a thing existing in reality. ‘Because it does not issue from a determinate source or as a determinate warning, it is a blank threat or objectless fear.’87 This feeling of being watched in such a mysterious manner occurs on further occasions during the expedition. For example, at one point the protagonists hear ‘a singular deep throbbing in the air, rhythmic and solemn’; Lord John says they are war drums: Yes, sir, war drums,’ said Gomez, the half-breed. ‘Wild Indians, bravos, not mansos; they watch us every mile of the way; kill us if they can.’ ‘How can they watch us?’ I asked, gazing into the dark, motionless void.88 There are two more such incidents, the first being when Malone remembers that ‘during the whole long day I was haunted by the feeling that we were

86 87 88

Ibid., p. 117. Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman, Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge: mit Press, 2002), p. 219. Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 69.

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closely observed, though by whom or whence I could give no guess’.89 The second is when Malone is sure that they have been watched all day by someone or something unknown, and Challenger puts it down ‘to the cerebral excitement caused by my fever’.90 It was religion which, according to Copjec, once performed the function of protecting the subject from anxiety and it is the decline of religion which leaves the subject exposed to the feeling of being looked at from an unknown source. Thus, contrary to what might be supposed, it is in the rational, scientific world, where God has been removed, that this feeling occurs more often: This moment has sometimes been described as that of the disenchantment of the world. A disenchanted or realistic world could hardly be said to be all-seeing, to gaze back at us, or so some would say. But this is precisely what the Lacanian theory of the gaze does say: it is when the realistic world emerges from the collapse of a sacred beyond that the subject comes to be submitted to the scrutiny of an unlocatable gaze and becomes visible from within the world it sees. Visible not from outside the world, as formerly, but from within it. The beholder becomes visible in an all-seeing world, when the place of an all-seeing agent is vacated.91 In addition to assuring the presence of God, religion also functions by veiling the object inducing anxiety. As Mladen Dolar explains, ‘to put it simply, in pre-modern societies the dimension of the uncanny was largely covered (and veiled) by the area of the sacred and untouchable. It was assigned to a religiously and socially sanctioned place in the symbolic’.92 In The Lost World, the way in which religion serves to cordon off a sacred area is clear. At one point the explorers are to pass into ‘the unknown’, which will turn out to be full of horrible monsters. As Challenger tells Malone: ‘There where you see lightgreen rushes instead of dark-green undergrowth, there between the great cotton woods that is my private gate into the unknown. Push through, and you will understand.’93 Malone notices that that place appears very peaceful and 89 90

Ibid., p. 106. Ibid. This feeling of being watched by something indeterminate also vividly occurs in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness where Marlow feels that the jungle is watching him: ‘I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me at my monkey tricks’, Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Norton Critical Editions, 4th edn (New York: Norton, 2005), p. 60. 91 Copjec, Imagine, p. 113. 92 Mladen Dolar, ‘“I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night”: Lacan and the Uncanny’, October, 58 (1991), 5–23, (p. 5). 93 Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 71.

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there is no sign of man. As the half breed Gomez tells him: ‘No Indian here. Too much afraid’.94 Roxton then explains that ‘Curupuri is the spirit of the woods’, ‘a name for any kind of devil’ and that ‘the poor beggars think that there is something fearsome in this direction, and therefore they avoid it.’95 Here is the difference between the part played by the religion of a ‘pre-modern society’, the Curupuri, the spirit of the woods, whose area is sacred and not to be encroached upon, and modern science, before whose penetration there are no barriers. Later on, having entered this area, Malone remembers the ‘the Indian superstition of the Curupuri – the dreadful, lurking spirit of the woods’ and imagines how ‘his terrible presence haunted those who had invaded his most remote and sacred retreat’.96 In this way, religion is depicted as maintaining an inaccessible space, thereby in Lacan’s formulation, respecting the emptiness of the Thing, while science (in pushing through) desecrates it, giving rise to forms of unprecedented anxiety.97 7.2 Art and Sublimation In regard to art, there is a representation of its function of sublimation in the episode where an unknown monster chases Malone and he is rescued by a large pit. Malone is just returning to the explorers’ camp after a furtive, nocturnal visit to Lake Gladys, when, to his great astonishment and terror, a ‘great flesh eating dinosaur’, which has been lurking in the background, begins c­ hasing him. This dinosaur can easily be seen as an example of one of the monstrous animals of literature and cinema which Žižek classifies as representations of the Thing – ‘the intrusion of some excessive massive Real – where we expect nothing’.98 Giving examples, Žižek shows that ‘this Thing can be a monstrous animal, from King Kong through Moby-Dick to the gigantic white buffalo – obviously a new version of Moby Dick, the white whale – in J. Lee Thompson’s The White Buffalo’.99 In The Lost World, it is a terrible beast from the distant past, a lost world that, however, returns: ‘His ferocious cry and the horrible energy of his pursuit both assured me that this was surely one of the great flesh-eating dinosaurs, the most terrible beasts which have ever walked this earth’. At first inscrutable, Malone realises that this thing is implacably after him. ‘My heart 94 Ibid., p. 72. 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid., p. 106. 97 Lacan, Ethics, p. 130. 98 Žižek, ‘The Thing from Inner Space’ in Sexuation, ed. by Renat Salecl, Sic 3 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 217. 99 Ibid.

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stood still within me as it flashed across me that the beast, whatever it was, must surely be after me. My skin grew cold and my hair rose at the thought’.100 What is interesting about this episode is that Malone is rescued from the monster not by his guns (one of which he left behind in the camp in any event), the products of scientific advances, but by a material nothing, a void in the form of a pit dug by humans. On seeing the beast Malone realises the only thing he can do is try to run: ‘Even now when I think of that nightmare the sweat breaks out upon my brow. What could I do? My useless fowling-piece was in my hand. What help could I get from that?’ At the moment he knows that the monster is infallibly on his trail and catching up, he falls into a pit with a sharpened stake in the middle, which had been dug by the human inhabitants of the caves surrounding the lake. It was, as I have said, a pit, with sharply-sloping walls and a level bottom about twenty feet across. There could be no question as to its nature. It was a trap – made by the hand of man […] In their narrow-mouthed caves the natives, whoever they might be, had refuges into which the huge saurians could not penetrate, while with their developed brains they were capable of setting such traps, covered with branches, across the paths which marked the run of the animals as would destroy them in spite of all their strength and activity.101 While this incident can be taken ‘at face value’ as a scientific explanation of how humans manage to survive on the plateau in spite of the monsters, it can also be read as an encounter with the traumatic Thing and the way in which it can be contained. In the first approach, the digging of holes as traps and the use of the hollow caves are a rudimentary technology preventing dangerous animals from devouring humans, whereas in the second, the monsters are representations of the too close approach of the Thing, rendering it horrifying and evil, and the pits are the creation of voids (to be understood as a quasi-­ architectonic form of primitive art) in order to maintain the Thing at a d­ istance and return it to its extra-phenomenal state. With the re-establishment of the Thing as void, the traumatic Thing, as materialised object, vanishes. 100 Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 125. This dinosaur can be seen as an example of what will later appear in science fiction movies as the inhuman thing which nevertheless is alive and has its own will. As Žižek writes: ‘The exemplary case of the Thing is, of course, the mysterious undead alien object falling from the universe, an object which is inhuman, but nonetheless alive and often even possessing an evil will of its own’ (Žižek, ‘Thing’, p. 217). 101 Conan Doyle, Lost World, pp. 127–128.

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Here the unexplained manner of the monster’s subsequent disappearance is also of interest. After Malone finds himself in the pit he is sure the monster must still be there: ‘I looked up in terror, expecting to see that dreadful head silhouetted against the paling sky. There was no sign of the monster, however, nor could I hear any sound from above’.102 Still he hesitates to climb out, uncertain as to whether the dinosaur is not lying in wait for him at the side of the pit: ‘How did I know that he was not lurking in the nearest clump of bushes, waiting for my reappearance?’103 After reassuring himself, by recalling that the professors had explained that the monsters were practically brainless and therefore would not think to wait, he slowly climbs out, but remains sitting for a time, ‘ready to spring back into my refuge if any danger should appear. Then, reassured by the absolute stillness and by the growing light, I took my courage in both hands and stole back along the path’.104 There is here no explanation as to where the beast has gone – no corpse as would have been the case had it been skewered on the stake in the middle of the pit, as other animals have been (the stake ‘was black with the stale blood of the creatures who had been impaled upon it’) nor any sound or sight of its going away: ‘I could see or hear nothing of my enemy’.105 This emphasis on the mysterious disappearance of the beast indicates the ambiguous status of Malone’s experience. As Žižek writes of the Thing as it appears, for example, in the science fiction film, Star Wars: ‘The object-Thing is thus clearly rendered as a part of ourselves that we eject into reality’.106 Thus, the vanishing into thin air gives the impression that there never was an actual beast, but a welling up within the subject of anxiety caused by something intimate to him, which, nonetheless, given the massive presence of the beast, appears to him, as if coming from outside reality. One should also take note of the solitary nature of this particular experience, in strict contrast with the rest of the expedition as a collective event. Malone is at this point alone, having for once left his regular companions. He himself acknowledges that the beast is after ‘me’: the monstrous dinosaur is Malone’s Thing. The place he has gone to visit is, far from coincidentally, a lake he has insisted on naming Lake Gladys, which suggests a connection between the approach to the object of his desire and the welling up of anxiety. This substitution of the monster/Thing for the Lady of Malone’s desire foreshadows the end of the novel when the result of 102 Ibid., p. 127. 103 Ibid., p. 128. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid. 106 Žižek, ‘Thing’, p. 216.

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the expedition will be not the hand of Gladys but the stinking and frightening baby pterodactyl. Finally, the pit dug by the humans on the fictional plateau, by which Malone is saved from the monster, and the natives’ caves noted at the same time in his report, can both be profitably compared to Lacan’s vase, designated in the Ethics seminar as both one of the most ancient artefacts of humanity and a form of art. On the one hand, ‘it is certainly a tool, a utensil that allows us to affirm unambiguously a human presence where we find it’.107 In the novel, Malone writes of the pit that ‘there could be no question as to its nature. It was a trap – made by the hand of man’. On the other hand, a vase, is also regarded as a work of art. As Lacan writes ‘we are going to refer to what is the most primitive of artistic activities, that of the potter’.108 The point is that it is art which serves to bring forth and maintain the void keeping the Thing at bay: ‘All art is characterized by a certain mode of organization around this emptiness’.109 This is what architecture and painting do: To put it briefly, primitive architecture can be defined as something organized around emptiness. That is also the authentic impression that the forms of a cathedral like Saint Mark’s give us, and it is the true meaning of all architecture. Then subsequently, for economic reasons, one is satisfied with painting images of that architecture, one learns to paint architecture on the walls of architecture; and painting, too, is first of all something that is organized around emptiness.110 Given this theorization of the relationship of architecture to the Thing, there emerges an underlying point to the otherwise incidental description of the explorers’ walk through a kind of primeval forest. Malone describes the forest in terms of Gothic architecture where a void is created through the, in practical terms, useless height of the building. The forest which the explorers traverse is described as follows: The height of the trees and the thickness of the boles exceeded anything which I in my town-bred life could have imagined, shooting upwards in magnificent columns until, at an enormous distance above our heads, we could dimly discern the spot where they threw out their side-branches 107 Lacan, Ethics, p. 120. 108 Ibid., p. 119. 109 Ibid., p. 130. 110 Ibid., p. 136.

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into Gothic upward curves which coalesced to form one great matted roof of verdure, through which only an occasional golden ray of sunshine shot downwards to trace a thin dazzling line of light amidst the majestic obscurity.111 In this atmosphere, linked to gothic architecture, even science is muted (albeit not completely extinguished). ‘As we walked noiselessly amid the thick, soft carpet of decaying vegetation the hush fell upon our souls which comes upon us in the twilight of the Abbey, and even Professor Challenger’s full-chested notes sank into a whisper.’112 In spite of this fleeting instance of respect for the void, it is no wonder that Challenger as a scientist could not have conceived of the method by which the humans could inhabit the plateau (i.e. digging pits or holes to trap the monsters). Malone remembers that ‘Challenger had declared that man could not exist upon the plateau, since with his feeble weapons he could not hold his own against the monsters who roamed over it’.113 Whilst Malone is saved from one of these monsters by an abyss, in the form of one of the pits, Challenger the scientist is, in contrast, always figuring out how to bridge them. Arriving at the foot of the plateau, the explorers find themselves at the bottom of some high cliffs which they cannot possibly ascend. There is, however, a very impressive pinnacle of rock beside them which could be climbed (and which art or religion might have admired or stood in awe of) but between its summit and the cliffs there still remains a great chasm. At this point Challenger exclaims: ‘A bridge! It is not for nothing that I expended an hour last night in focusing my mind upon the situation. …… A drawbridge had to be found which could be dropped across the abyss. Behold it!’114 As in the case of the sacred area, where the scientist, in quashing the taboo proffered by the natives, destroys the ‘respect for the thing’ established by religion, here he also annuls the gap, literally a geographical one, but which can also be seen metaphorically in its function of keeping the Thing at distance. 7.3 Science and the Evil Thing Science for Lacan has a different relationship to the Thing than art and religion. Rather than maintaining it as a manufactured void in the case of the 111 Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 68. 112 Ibid. An abbey actualizing both art (as architecture) and religion shows the link between the two in regard to sublimation, respectively creating and respecting the emptiness. 113 Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 127. 114 Ibid., p. 89.

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former, or as unknown thing to be respected and left undisturbed in the case of the latter, science attempts to access it directly and thus cancel it through what Lacan terms absolute knowledge. ‘The discourse of science repudiates the presence of the Thing insofar as from its point of view the ideal of absolute knowledge is glimpsed, that is something that posits the Thing while it pays no attention to it’.115 Lacan continues by saying that this process leads in the end to a kind of uncontrollable re-appearance of the Thing. The discourse of science is determined by this Verwerfung [foreclosure], and, in the light of my formula that what is foreclosed in the symbolic reappears in the real, this is probably why it leads to a situation in which, at the end of physics, it is something as enigmatic as the Thing that is glimpsed.116 In this way science moves towards the collapse of the symbolic order. In ­ hiesa’s words, science ‘“posits the Thing without accounting for it” in the C sense that the more it repudiates its presence as the real lack of the symbolic order, the closer it comes to returning to the primordial Real by means of a selfsaturation’.117 The symbolic order can only exist on condition that it remains lacking or not completely whole. The point which needs to be made is that neither absolute knowledge nor the re-emergence of the Thing is actually possible. The Thing, as discussed, emerges as an always already lost object in that it is coextensive with the ­advent 115 Lacan, Ethics, p. 131. In a discussion of Absolute Knowledge, Žižek sees Hegel’s version of the concept as that which actually maintains the void of the Thing. ‘Absolute Knowledge, far from filling the lack sensed by “finite consciousness” separated from the Absolute, transfers this lack into the Other itself. The twist introduced by Absolute Knowledge thus concerns the very status of lack: the “finite”, “alienated” consciousness suffers from the loss of the object, while “de-alienation” consists of the realization that this object was lost from the beginning, and that any given object is simply an attempt to fill in the empty place of this loss’. This is the concept that Žižek sees as having been adopted by Lacan, albeit without explicit acknowledgement. However, in Lacan’s early seminars, one finds a conception of Absolute Knowledge that confirms the more intuitive sense of the term as the complete filling in of the gaps in the symbolic, (Lacan, The Seminar, Book 1 Freud’s Papers on Technique, trans. by John Forrester [New York: Norton, 1997], p. 264) or in Žižek’s words ‘as the impossible ideal of attaining a definitive closure of the field of discourse’. [accessed 12 February 2012]. It is in this latter sense that Absolute Knowledge is taken as still being current in the Ethics Seminar. 116 Lacan, Ethics, p. 131. 117 Chiesa, Subjectivity, p. 177.

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of language, whose incompleteness it marks in the guise of a hole. Thus, it can never be recuperated because it never existed as such. Yet, paradoxically, it still needs to be maintained as a void, because otherwise it is filled in by what Žižek calls the evil Thing. From this perspective of the Thing as Evil, one should perhaps turn around the well-known Augustinian notion of Evil as having no positive substance or force of its own but being merely the absence of Good: Good itself is the absence of Evil, the distance toward the evil Thing.118 What occurs in The Lost World is exactly a series of evil Things which science and the uncompromising quest for knowledge bring forth through Challenger. The link between the quest for scientific knowledge and the appearance of the evil Thing is intimated right at the start of the expedition. The explorers come upon some creatures in a glade which will turn out to be pterodactyls. For Malone they are hideous filthy creatures but for the scientists they are ‘a golden opportunity for studying the life of a prehistoric age.’119 The scientists’ determination to increase their knowledge almost brings disaster upon the party when ‘Challenger, bent upon proving some point which Summerlee had contested, thrust his head over the rock’. At that point the beasts fly up and begin attacking the intruders. With Roxton firing his elephant-gun at them, the men run for cover, getting somewhat mauled and bloodied by the animals’ beaks and wings in the process. ‘“A most interesting and convincing experience,” said Challenger, as we halted beside the brook and he bathed a swollen knee. “We are exceptionally well informed, Summerlee, as to the habits of the enraged pterodactyl”’.120 As the expedition proceeds a succession of ever more evil things emerges on the plateau, underwriting my contention that Challenger’s pursuit of (empirical) scientific knowledge is a reference in the novel to the tendency of science towards absolute knowledge (in the sense of the Lacan of the Ethics seminar) and the ensuing cancellation of the necessary void in the symbolic – conjuring up the evil-Thing. The face of the ape-man Malone first encounters on the tree is described as follows: The eyes, which were under thick and heavy brows, were bestial and ferocious, and as it opened its mouth to snarl what sounded like a curse at 118 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallex View (Cambridge: mit Press, 2006), p. 152. 119 Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 103. 120 Ibid., p. 104.

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me I observed that it had curved, sharp canine teeth. For an instant I read hatred and menace in the evil eyes.121 There follows the pack of huge, amorphous, monsters, called Stoa by the native Indians, which appears after the defeat of the ape-men. Of the same type that had previously chased Malone, it is unlike any existing creature: ‘In shape they were like horrible toads, and moved in a succession of springs, but in size they were of an incredible bulk, larger than the largest elephant’. These beasts turn out to be implacable killing machines: For in an instant they had overtaken the fugitives and were making a dire slaughter among them. Their method was to fall forward with their full weight upon each in turn, leaving him crushed and mangled, to bound on after the others. The wretched Indians screamed with terror, but were helpless, run as they would, before the relentless purpose and horrible activity of these monstrous creatures.122 8

Science and Civilization

8.1 The Scientist as the Ape-Man’s Double The portrayal of the eminent scientist as the lookalike of the king of the apemen is strictly entwined with the motif of the double in literature, which, as noted in the Introduction, has been elucidated from a Lacanian perspective by Mladen Dolar. This doubling has indeed attracted the attention of literary critics of the novel. For instance, Duncan notes that there are ‘two scenes in which humans and ape-men become doubles or mirrors of one another, reflecting 121 Ibid., p. 104. 122 Ibid., p. 15. As was noted in the introduction, an interesting aspect about these monsters is what happens after their death in that their hearts continue to live. ‘Each as large as a cushion, still lay there, beating slowly and steadily, with a gentle rise and fall, in horrible independent life. It was only upon the third day that the ganglia ran down and the dreadful things were still’ (Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 157). These undead organs can be compared to an object which Žižek discusses with regard to Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s film version of Wagner’s Parsifal. There the wound of the ruler of the Grail kingdom, ­Amfortas, is placed outside of him on a pillow. It is described by Žižek as ‘a vagina like partial object out of which blood drips in a continuous flow’. As with the beating heart in The Lost World, ‘it is a palpitating opening’ and ‘an organ which is at the same time the entire ­organism’ and which ‘epitomizes life in its indestructibility’ (Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative [Durham: Duke University Press, 1993], p. 182).

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a mutual identity and difference’. The first, the comical version occurs when Challenger stands alongside the king of the ape-men’, while the more elaborate encounter occurs when the ‘identity of young Malone is at stake’.123 This latter incident occurs when Malone is climbing up the trunk of a huge tree in order to see the topographical layout of the plateau. I leaned my head round it in order to see what was beyond, and I nearly fell out of the tree in my surprise and horror at what I saw. A face was gazing into mine – at the distance of only a foot or two. The creature that owned it had been crouching behind the parasite, and had looked round it at the same instant that I did. It was a human face – or at least it was far more human than any monkey’s that I have ever seen.124 The face appearing just as Malone looks round the tree evokes that same instantaneous appearance of one’s own face in the mirror which also looks back at one. Duncan’s interpretation, based on a historicist contextualization, sees this doubling as representing Malone’s ‘Irishness’, or, rather, the Victorian attitude towards the Irish as a colonial race: In a curious way then, Malone’s encounter with the ape-man brings him face to face with his own – and his author’s – Irishness. Conan Doyle draws upon a Victorian tradition of depictions of the Irish as subhuman or simian. From about 1860 onwards, an increase in Irish nationalist political activity, together with the controversial diffusion of Darwinist theory, moved the English press to transform the stock type of the gormless Irish peasant into the more menacing figure of the violent and licentious ape-man.125 Linking the doubling of the ape-man with Malone to the latter’s Irish background, however, does not account for the re-doubling with Challenger, who has no Irish background, and although deemed by Duncan to be just the comic version, is the one which is reiterated in the novel. It is hence useful to view the doubling of Malone within the paradigm established by Dolar in that it brings out a distinction between the two cases. According to Dolar, one of the characteristics of the double is that it does not 123 Duncan, ‘Introduction’, p. xviii. 124 Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 115. 125 Duncan, ‘Introduction’, p. xviii.

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become ‘an object of possible “objective”’126 knowledge. ‘As a rule, it appears only to the subject; the others don’t see it and therefore don’t understand the subject’s peculiar behaviour. It cannot become a part of accepted intersubjective space’.127 It is also an object of anxiety par excellence. In Dolar’s words, the subject is confronted with ‘the very image of himself […] and this crumbling of the subject’s accustomed reality, this shattering of the bases of his world, produces a terrible anxiety.’128 This is what occurs with Malone alone up the tree: ‘What’s the matter?’ shouted Roxton from below. ‘Anything wrong with you?’ ‘Did you see it?’ I cried, with my arms round the branch and all my nerves tingling. ‘“We heard a row, as if your foot had slipped. What was it?’129 This contrasts with the appearance of the double in Challenger’s case, when it is only the rest of the group who see the doubling, the scientist himself remaining oblivious to it and hence immune to all anxiety. As quoted above, Roxton had reported to Malone that amongst the ape-men ‘Old Challenger was up a tree, eatin’ pines and havin’ the time of his life’. Here there is no subjective experience but only an objective one. Later on, when Roxton explains to ­Challenger that a native’s fear of him is due to the fact that he looks just like his terrible enemy, the king of the ape-men, Challenger maintains that his ‘remarks are irrelevant and unintelligible’.130 This obliviousness to the double as object of anxiety mirrors the complete unconcern of both the scientists in regard to the unknown gaze which so unsettles Malone in the course of the expedition. Most importantly, however, although Malone is initially paralysed by the appearance of the ape-man, he is then sustained by the ‘intersubjective space’, formed by his comrades. This happens firstly in his determination to continue climbing for the sake of his mission on behalf of the group and also so as not to lose face through appearing a coward. Secondly although the double is initially seen only by Malone, it then becomes a shared object, a part of the reality of a group through a (fictional) scientific discourse. This same process will also occur in Dracula, where the vampire, originally one character’s private object, becomes the object of a communal knowledge. In both cases the recognition 126 Dolar, ‘Wedding Night’, p. 14. 127 Ibid. 128 Ibid., p. 11. 129 Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 115. 130 Ibid., p. 142.

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of the double by a group of people will allay the anxiety caused by its initial appearance. It is precisely at the point of this ‘communalising’ of Malone’s private double that there is second doubling, a redoubling of the double, as now C ­ hallenger himself for the first time appears as the double of the ape-men, if only by insinuation. When Malone gets back down from the tree and describes the face, Challenger sets about classifying it scientifically. ‘In South America there are, if my memory serves me – you will check the observation, Professor Summerlee – some thirty-six species of monkeys, but the anthropoid ape is unknown. It is clear, however, that he exists in this country, and that he is not the hairy, gorilla-like variety, which is never seen out of Africa or the East.’ (I was inclined to interpolate, as I looked at him, that I had seen his first cousin in Kensington.) ‘This is a whiskered and colourless type, the latter characteristic pointing to the fact that he spends his days in arboreal seclusion’131 The point of this passage is Malone’s apparently trivial jest in the middle of Challenger’s learned exposition. The background briefing given to Malone by his editor before that first interview with Challenger had included: ‘Address: Enmore Park, Kensington’.132 The parenthetic remark here, the first intimation that Challenger is the ape-man’s double, is salient for reasons which will now be set out. These have to do with the consequences as depicted in the novel of his scientific practice and the absolute supremacy Challenger gives science even over civilization itself. 8.2 The Triumph of Science The recurring characteristic of the scientists in the novel is their ability to name things. During their first interview in London, Malone is told by the professor: ‘You need not be ashamed to expose your ignorance, for I don’t suppose the whole South Kensington staff could give a name to it’.133 Later on, in South America, as the party wanders through a kind of primeval wood Malone recounts that: ‘Alone, I should have been ignorant of the names of these giant growths, but our men of science pointed out the cedars, the great silk cotton trees, and the redwood trees’.134 When the explorers spot what appears 131 132 133 134

Ibid., p. 117 [emphasis mine]. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 35. Ibid., p. 68.

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to be a huge grey bird, Challenger, identifies it as ‘to the best of my belief’, a pterodactyl.135 This activity of naming and categorizing on the part of the scientists carries on, to the point of becoming comic. After one flying dinosaur is finally shot down, in contrast to previous occasions when the beasts proved immune to the bullets, Challenger is jubilant not so much on account of being spared from great danger (as in the case of the narrator, it must be presumed) but because he has a name for it. ‘The great creature, twelve feet from head to foot – phororachus its name, according to our panting but exultant Professor’.136 Similarly, when the two professors are held captive by the ape-men, Roxton reports that: ‘they got slangin’ because they couldn’t agree upon the scientific classification of these red-headed devils that had got hold of us. One said it was the dryopithecus of Java, the other said it was pithecanthropus. Madness, I call it’.137 As for the occasion when Malone is bitten by an enormous blood tick, Challenger can think only of naming it: ‘“The first-fruits of our labors,” said Challenger in his booming, pedantic fashion. “We cannot do less than call it Ixodes Maloni”’.138 While it appears that the application of a name to some amorphous thing previously unidentifiable or unknown is the epitome of language itself, Lacan’s conception is different. It is not that there are things which are then named, as is the case with the scientists’ in the novel, but signifiers which bring the signified into being. As Chiesa writes: ‘The signifier logically precedes and causes the signified. This is clearly exemplified by Lacan’s rectification of the Saussurian schema which he in fact represents by means of the algebraic notion S/s (signifier over signified)’.139 To put it simply, rather than the model of language where one points at a thing and says the word, it is the articulation of the word which comes first and meaning second as a result of the linguistic operations of metaphor and metonymy. Hence, language is not a correspondence between the thing and its name but a set of signifiers, referring to one another and surrounding the empty space of the Thing, which they have created. ‘The fashioning of the signifier and the introduction of a gap or a hole in the real is identical’.140

135 Ibid., p. 75. 136 Ibid., p. 158. 137 Ibid., p. 136. 138 Ibid., p. 96. 139 Chiesa, Subjectivity, p. 48. 140 Lacan, Ethics, p. 121.

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For Lacan the abolition of the gap between things and signifiers would be equivalent to that absolute knowledge, referred to above, which science seeks, but, as was stated before, it would also mean the end of the symbolic, and hence of human culture tout-court. As Žižek writes: It is this very reference to the void of the Thing that opens up the space of symbolization, since without it the symbolic order would immediately ‘collapse’ into the designated reality – that is to say, the distance that separates ‘words’ from ‘things’ would disappear.141 In The Lost World, that gap in language between signifiers and things is partially closed with the ape-men. As Roxton reports: ‘Their language is more than half signs, and it was not hard to follow them’.142 A language of signs, rather than signifiers, re-establishes the connection between words and things, the sign referring to the thing itself rather than another signifier. It is this that enables a sign language to be understood by an outsider who in the case of a ‘genuine’ language has no way of connecting the words to anything outside of it. Thus it is this tendency in regard to language which serves as a link between Challenger, as scientist, and the chief of the ape-men, in that the latter are only ‘semi’ or embryonically symbolic while the former moves, unintentionally, towards an undoing of the symbolic order. In fact, these ape-men can be seen as some kind of mythical creatures that somehow fill in the gap between nature and culture, a gap which, however, cannot be closed if culture itself is to be sustained. Roxton describes them as follows: I call them apes, but they carried sticks and stones in their hands and jabbered talk to each other, and ended up by tyin’ our hands with creepers, so they are ahead of any beast that I have seen in my wanderin’s.143 These ape-men, discovered in the course of a scientific expedition, can also be seen to fill the same position as that of Frankenstein’s monster, the creation of another fictitious science, in Mary Shelley’s novel of 1818. By creating a s­ piritual

141 Slavoj Žižek, The Invisible Remainder: An Essay on Shelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), p. 146. 142 Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 133. 143 Ibid.

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being directly from a material basis, as Dolar explains, ‘“the great chain of being” would be complete; one could pass without a break from matter to spirit, from nature to culture’. However, ‘with this addition comes not the satisfaction of closure, but, as the story unfolds, eventual disaster, with the deaths of all Frankenstein’s family and the monster’. Therefore, Dolar concludes, ‘what we get with this continuous, full universe is the opposite of the traditional horror vacui; it is a horror plenitudinis, the horror of an unsplit world’.144 In a similar fashion, as Roxton says of the ape-men in The Lost World, ‘Missin’ Links, I wish they had stayed missing’.145 In summing up the function of science in the novel, it can be seen that what Challenger’s quest unfolds is, firstly, the proof of his original contention, but which turns out to be in Žižek’s terms, as discussed in the previous section, the ‘evil-thing’, the various dinosaurs and monsters supposed to be extinct, epitomised at the conclusion by the presentation of the evidence, the stinking babypterodactyl. Secondly, it generates the constant naming of observed things, in contrast to the creation of the new around the empty place of the Thing, which is the absent essence of language and culture. Thirdly, it produces the apemen, thoese beasts whose human attributes place them on the border between nature and culture, so that we get, in Dolar’s words, ‘the horror of an unsplit world’, and which are depicted as strikingly similar to Challenger.146 Taking into account the very ambiguous nature of this latter achievement can help interpret an otherwise odd short episode on the evening after the extermination of the ape-men. Challenger, waking Malone up, demands that he omit in his newspaper report Roxton’s remarks as to the great similarity between himself and the ape-man, yet, on the other, he suddenly and paradoxically adds: ‘The king of the ape-men was really a creature of great distinction – a most remarkably handsome and intelligent personality. Did it not strike you?’147 It should further be noted that, in regard to Challenger, aside from the distinction made between scientists and ‘laymen’, there is also one drawn between the two scientists. It is only one of the scientists who is viewed as the ape-man’s double. Summerlee, it should be recalled, is a scientist adulterated by other considerations, such as educational activities, while Challenger is the ‘pure’ scientist, who lets nothing stand in the way of his drive for knowledge.

144 145 146 147

Dolar, ‘Wedding Night’, p. 18. Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 133 [emphasis mine]. Dolar, ‘Wedding Night’, p. 18. Ibid., p. 143.

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After Malone returns from his private encounter with the ape-man and informs the others about what he has seen, an argument breaks out between the two scientists. Summerlee sees Malone’s information on the topography of the plateau as an opportunity to get safely back to England, while Challenger sees the proper categorisation of the ape-man as yet another lacuna in knowledge: ‘The solution of this problem is our immediate duty.’ ‘It is nothing of the sort,’ said Summerlee, abruptly. ‘Now that, through the intelligence and activity of Mr. Malone’ (I cannot help quoting the words), ‘we have got our chart, our one and only immediate duty is to get ourselves safe and sound out of this awful place.’ ‘The flesh-pots of civilization,’ groaned Challenger. ‘The ink-pots of civilization, sir. It is our task to put on record what we have seen, and to leave the further exploration to others. You all agreed as much before Mr. Malone got us the chart.’148 Here the quest for absolute knowledge endangers rather than furthers civilization. One can see this distinction in the apparently trivial play on the words, flesh pots and ink-pots. For Challenger, civilization and science are distinct, where science is that which must be saved at all costs. Lacan will at one point comment that ‘it is impossible not to obey the commandment there in the place of what is the truth of science, “continue. March on. Keep on knowing more and more”’.149 For Summerlee, however, on the contrary, science and civilization are bound up together. Rather than aiming at absolute knowledge Summerlee is prepared for the symbolic process where science is to be continued indefinitely. The knowledge from this expedition will be recorded in ink, leaving gaps to be filled in at some later time but in the meantime civilization will continue. As readers the narrative of the novel distracts us from this point; the tendency to get caught up in the expedition’s quest for the missing evidence, leads us to precipitately side with and admire Challenger’s determination to succeed as opposed to Summerlee’s faintheartedness. Nonetheless, the unambiguous paralleling of Challenger with the king of the ape-men in the novel is in consequence of his representing a ‘pure’ science, ‘unadulterated’ by any consideration of the community. As Žižek writes: ‘Modern science follows its path (in microbiology, in manipulating genes, in particle physics) heedless

148 Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 117. 149 Lacan, Other Side, p. 105.

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of cost – satisfaction is here provided by knowledge itself, not by any moral or communal goals scientific knowledge is supposed to serve’.150 9

The Ending of the Novel: The Use of Beauty

The large amount of diamonds which, at the end of the novel, are at the disposal of the explorers, and which are not goods useful in themselves but ones whose symbolic value might be converted into almost anything one might desire, are used in every case in the continued pursuit of that same type of science. A museum (a place where ‘things’ are exhibited and named is set up, Summerlee retires from teaching for the sake of the work of classification (the exchange of a social activity for science), and a new expedition to the plateau for more research is fitted out. We return full circle to the beginning of the story and the father who can no longer enjoy the fruits of his possession, in contrast to Lacan’s traditional master, the one who did not want to know but only to enjoy. Now the valuables are used in the endless quest for more knowledge. (As Chiesa points out, the three members of the expedition have come totally under the sway of Challenger as the ‘father-of-science’.151) Moreover, Lord John had been sure that Malone would have used his share of the diamonds to get married: ‘“As to you, young fellah, you, of course, will spend yours in getting’ married’. But Malone replies, ‘Not just yet,’ and ‘I think, if you will have me, that I would rather go with you’.152 The conversion of the precious stones into money to enable Malone to marry is foregone. Finally, none of the four even think to keep a diamond for the one attribute it possesses in itself, namely, its beauty. Science generally has no time for beauty, as shown by another incident in the novel: The first impression which I received when I had recovered my breath was of the extraordinary view over the country which we had traversed. I […] was still drinking in this wonderful panorama when the heavy hand of the Professor fell upon my shoulder.

150 Žižek, ‘Desire: Drive = Truth: Knowledge’, Umbr(a) (1997) [accessed 15 April 2013]. 151 Chiesa, personal communication, 15 April, 2013. 152 Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 182.

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‘This way, my young friend,’ said he; ‘vestigia nulla retrorsum.153 Never look rearwards, but always to our glorious goal.’154 In this incident, Malone, pausing to contemplate the wonderful panorama, feels the ‘heavy hand of the professor’ falling on his shoulder and is ordered not to look back. Here is the contrast between science, ever driving forward towards its ‘glorious’ goal, and the aesthetic sense pausing, uselessly, to enjoy the beauty of the landscape. This betokens the diamonds turned into useful goods through their sale to further the pursuit of science as opposed to being retained as useless objects of beauty. The episode of Malone’s discovery of the lake on the plateau adds to this schism between science and aesthetics the question of sexual desire. This scene has already been discussed in connection with the part played by the aristocrat in putting an end to the quarrel between the two scientists about naming this lake. It turns out that the name Malone wants, once authorised by Lord Roxton’s intervention, does not fit in within the discourse of science, which favours a faithful and useful rendition of reality: Then,’ said I, blushing, I dare say, as I said it, ‘let it be named Lake Gladys.’ ‘Don’t you think the Central Lake would be more descriptive?’ ­remarked Summerlee. ‘I should prefer Lake Gladys!’ 153 Challenger’s words Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum are the title of a poem by a Scottish Australian poet, William Gay (1865–97) which puts Challenger’s remark in a very different context from what appears in the flow of the narrative. O steep and rugged Life, whose harsh ascent Slopes blindly upward through the bitter night! They say that on thy summit, high in light, Sweet rest awaits the climber, travel-spent; But I, alas, with dusty garments rent, With fainting heart and failing limbs and sight, Can see no glimmer of the shining height, And vainly list, with body forward bent, To catch athwart the gloom one wandering note Of those glad anthems which (they say) are sung When one emerges from the mists below: But though, O Life, thy summit be remote And all thy stony path with darkness hung, Yet ever upward through the night I go. [accessed 9 August 2012]. 154 Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 89.

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Challenger looked at me sympathetically, and shook his great head in mock disapproval. ‘Boys will be boys,’ said he. ‘Lake Gladys let it be.’155 Sexual desire thus appears in the name Malone wants to bestow, that of his Lady, Gladys, and also in his blush. Summerlee immediately closes up that space of desire by suggesting a more prosaic name for the lake depicting reality. Malone however insists on his desire/Lady, which Challenger then mocks, and refers to Malone’s supposed infantilism (‘Boys will be boys’). The contrast between Malone’s perception of the lake and that of the scientists continues. The lake, as Lake Gladys, now has an unmistakeable and ­compulsive attraction for Malone. The night after he discovers it, he finds he cannot sleep, so he decides to make his way back to the lake alone, and be back by the morning. While, on the one hand, he finds plenty of rationalistic ­‘egoistic’ reasons for going (in regard to both his journalistic career – ‘A ­correspondentship in the next great war might be within my reach’ – and securing a marriage – this is what Gladys had, after all, required of him), on the other hand, as the way becomes more and more terrible and menacing (‘it was dreadful in the forest’) and he realises he has brought the wrong kind of gun (‘as I touched the lever my heart leaped within me. It was the shot-gun, not the rifle, which I had taken!’), he keeps on going as if compelled by something ­other than all the reasons he gives himself. Finally, he reaches the lake where he appreciates its beauty: ‘Lake Gladys – my own lake – lay like a sheet of quicksilver before me, with a reflected moon shining brightly in the centre of it’.156 Beauty, according to Lacan, takes on a paradoxical function as regards the Thing, both enabling us to get close to it but also keeping it at a distance. The true barrier that holds the subject back in front of the unspeakable field of radical desire that is the field of absolute destruction, of destruction beyond putrefaction, is properly speaking the aesthetic phenomenon where it is identified with the experience of beauty – beauty in all its shining radiance.157 Beauty thus must be seen as a necessary final barrier. As de Kesel explains, ‘on the one hand, it is the subject’s final obstructive limit in its search for its “radical desire”, that is, for its extimate and deathly “radix”, that is, the “thing”’, while ‘on the other hand, it opens up a “field” that enables us to “draw closer” to the 155 Ibid., p. 118. 156 Conan Doyle, Lost World, pp. 123–124. 157 Lacan, Ethics, p. 216.

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“Thing”’. Thus in an ambiguous or paradoxical manner, it forms ‘a barrier that is at the same time an access’. In other words, beauty seduces but, at the same time, does not let us think the Thing is attainable: The beautiful thus does not deceive us in our desire, precisely because it is already in itself deceptive. Beauty also shows how it is only an appearance, a representation without ever letting us see the ‘Thing’ as such. Seducing us, it doesn’t deceive us for it explicitly presents itself as an unattainable good.158 Such an ‘unattainable good’ returns us to the scenario of courtly love where the beautiful lady (‘you, with your beauty, with your soul’ says Malone to Gladys) does indeed seduce Malone but, like the moon shining brightly in the centre of the lake, actually only a reflection, she remains, for him an appearance unattainable in the flesh. In contrast to beauty, what science produces in the novel is the baby ­pterodactyl, the evidence brought back from South America. It is a picture of ugliness. As described by the narrator, at this point one of Malone’s journalistic colleagues, its face was like the wildest gargoyle that the imagination of a mad medieval builder could have conceived. It was malicious, horrible, with two small red eyes as bright as points of burning coal. Its long, savage mouth, which was held half-open, was full of a double row of shark-like teeth. Its shoulders were humped, and round them were draped what appeared to be a faded gray shawl. It was the devil of our childhood in person.159 For the scientist, Challenger, this thing is an extremely valuable specimen, which he is devastated to lose when it flies out of the window. For the nonscientists in the audience, however, it is an unbearable sight and there is only relief at its escape: ‘Professor Challenger fell back into his chair with his face buried in his hands, while the audience gave one long, deep sigh of relief as they realized that the incident was over’.160 158 De Kesel, Eros, p. 201. 159 Conan Doyle, Lost World, p. 177. 160 Ibid., p. 178. As Axel Stähler in a personal communication points out there is in the comparison with the gargoyle an interesting reference to an artistic practice of the Medieval Ages. This could be taken as a reference to what might be seen as the contrast between the sublimation of the Thing in an art form as opposed to its ‘actual appearance’ in a scientific activity.

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The main question is why is the specimen that science happens to use as proof portrayed as the ugliest thing imaginable? There is, also, secondarily, the comically exaggerated contrast between the appreciative attitude of the scientist to this thing (‘Come, then, pretty, pretty!’, he says, ‘in a coaxing voice’) and the panic of the audience (‘There was a turmoil in the audience – s­ omeone screamed, two ladies in the front row fell senseless from their chairs, and there was a general movement upon the platform to follow their chairman into the orchestra’). There are two ways to read this scene. The first cene is as comedy using the stereotype of the mad scientist totally indifferent to every other consideration except his science (a stereotype to which, as seen, Challenger conforms absolutely) and that of the fainting ladies and dukes unable to regard scientific specimens with the appropriate detachment. The second, which adds an underlying layer to the first, refers to the contrast between art’s valuation of beauty and science’s unresponsiveness to it. Given beauty’s function in protecting us from the Thing which overwhelms us, while at the same time letting us get close to that we desire, it can be said that beauty, after all, does have a function, one that science prefers to ignore, thus paving the way to dangerous consequences.

Courtly Love, the Lady and the Baby Pterodactyl

The discussion of The Lost World has shown how the disappearance of the father as the one who controls the access to the daughter, does not leave the way open to the attainment of the woman but, instead, leads to the revival of an old tradition, that of courtly love. It is, however, a repetition with a difference: no longer the creation of a work of art, but the actual fulfilment of a task and the sending of a factual report thereof, addressed to a newspaper editor. The mission puts the woman’s suitor into the hands of a different kind of father figure, one outside of the law, who turns out to be a strange confluence of modern highly educated scientist and a copy of the father of the primal horde. Although the science of Challenger is based on the ideals of incontrovertible hard evidence and puts names to otherwise unrecognizable and even anxiety-provoking objects, thus domesticating them at least for the scientists themselves, it, in all its rationality, cannot fulfil the same functions as the law, art and religion, which the scientist considers superseded. Above all, science, in its disregard of the Thing, leads, according to Lacan’s formula, to that which is foreclosed in the symbolic being glimpsed in the real, and in particular to the brief appearance, at the end of the novel, of the horrible, Thing-like baby pterodactyl, instead of the woman.

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The Missing Name-of-the-Father: She Introduction This chapter is based on and develops the themes of the previous chapter; the dissolution of the symbolic role of the father and the emerging dominance of science and technology. The story of She, as with The Lost World, begins with the actions of a father who then disappears. In this case he leaves behind a bequest which propels his son towards a fantasy land with the concomitant lack of the Name-of-the-Father and the re-emergence of the primal father figure. Science features in She, it might be said in absentia in the same pursuit of scientific knowledge as in Conan Doyle’s novel without recognizing the inherent limit imposed a-priori by the symbolic order – a refusal amounting to the reduction of the concept of truth to that of knowledge. This novel also has two contrasting endings: one in the fantasy space and the other in England. In the former, the primal father figure – a woman in this case – is killed enabling the explorers to return to civilization. Yet, as with Malone, who sets out on a new expedition with Roxton at the end of The Lost World, in She, another quest is embarked upon by Holly and Leo, with all its attendant dangers – the fictional editor of the novel receiving a letter from Holly’s lawyers, ‘with the information that their client and Mr Leo Vincey had already left his country for Thibet’,1 and, as, Holly writes in his letter to the editor, ‘possibly we shall not return’.2 Thus, while She and her attendant horrors are eliminated in the fantasy space of Kôr, the ending of the novel in London is neither satisfying nor soothing, thus undermining critical readings of the novel as a male fantasy of the vanquishing of the New Woman. The novel should rather be seen as a failed Totem and Taboo. Whereas in Freud’s myth the brothers gain access to a woman, in contrast to the monopoly of the primal father, She ends both without a sexual relationship, the young protagonist remaining unwed and with another expedition, as if the first has resolved nothing. This chapter and the following two – analysing ‘The Horror of the Heights’ and The Invisible Man – also relate to and develop the argument put forward in the Introduction as to the significance of the works in question appearing at this particular time, the beginning of modernity. Intriguingly one finds in these 1 Henry Rider Haggard, She, ed. Daniel Karlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 14. 2 Ibid., p. 13.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004336582_007 Josephine

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texts several, more or less explicit, literary references to earlier periods. These allusions, it will be argued, relate to the question of the function of the father. In She, for example, there are references to Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice, pertaining to the role of the father in the novel. The same applies to the allusions to Ovid and Euripides in ‘The Horror of the Heights’. When a character asks whether such a tale as his has ever appeared in the annals of human history the answer must be twofold. On the one hand, ‘never’ in that, as detailed in the Introduction, this period is unprecedented in terms of social, political and technological development (the latter featuring prominently in the story) and its repercussions on wider symbolic issues such as human sexuation, enjoyment, and paternity. On the other hand, however, the story repeats motifs of Greek and Roman mythology. The point is that with the emergence of modern Britain, and modernity tout-court, perennial aspects of human culture nonetheless remain pertinent. Viewing Conan Doyle’s short story as a repetition with a difference of stories from the classical world, it emerges that literature has a historical memory, absent in the discipline of history. It is literature which retains certain structural elements which persist despite historical change, first and foremost, for the purpose of this book, that of fatherhood in human culture. It is evoked in ‘The Horror of the Heights’ with regard to, among others, Ovid’s oeuvre. In the second book of The Metamorphoses, Phaeton, the son of Phoebus, god of the Sun, doubting his mother’s assertion that he is the son of a god, goes to inquire directly of Pheobus. The god assures him that he is his father and, as proof, offers to bestow upon him any favour whatsoever. The son asks for his chariot for one day. The father, aghast, tries to dissuade him but Phaeton insists. He is indeed unable to control the horses and as the earth begins to burn, Jupiter hurls a thunder bolt, destroying the chariot and killing Phaeton.3 What the son was missing proves to be precisely the Name-of-the-Father, the Nom du père in both its senses of ‘name’ and ‘no’. The son demands to know the identity of his father, his name, (meaning both his father’s and his own) and this father does not say ‘no’ to his son’s wish, despite his knowing that he will not be able to control the horses. Thus whereas history as an account of political, social and cultural changes may lose sight of what is not subject to historical change, literature preserves it as a constant of any human society; the question concerning the father remains open in the works I analyse, despite the increasing minimization of his symbolic role in everyday life starting from the period in which they were written. 3 See Books 1 & 2 of Ovid, Metamorphoses: A New Verse Translation, trans. David Raeburn (­London: Penguin, 2004).

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The Plot

She, subtitled A History of Adventure, by Henry Rider Haggard was first serialized in The Graphic Magazine in 1886–87 and subsequently became one of the best-selling novels of all time.4 The title refers to Ayesha, ruler of an ­African domain, known as She, short for She-who-must-be-obeyed. A Cambridge don, Horace Holly and his ward, Leo Vincey, together with their servant, Job, travel to Africa, following directions given in a letter and a fragment of pottery (the ‘Sherd of Amenartas’) bequeathed to Leo by his father. After being shipwrecked off the coast of Africa and then making their way up-river, they are captured by a group of men, Amahaggers, who transport them to their habitations. Their ruler is Ayesha, a woman who has made herself immortal by bathing in a pillar of fire, the source of life itself. On her orders a group of Amahaggers carry the three men blindfolded through swamps to Ayesha, who lives within the caves which formed the burial chambers of the lost ancient civilization of Kôr. ­Ayesha has been waiting 2000 years for the reincarnation of her lover, ­Kallikrates, an Egyptian priest whom she had slain in a fit of jealous rage. On seeing Vincey, who is on his father’s side a direct descendent of the Egyptian, she assumes that he is that reincarnation. Ayesha takes both Vincey and Holly to the pillar of fire. She wants Vincey to bathe in it, so that he too will become immortal and thus be able to remain with her forever. His doubts about its safety lead her to agree to step into the flames first. However, with this second immersion she reverts to her true age and immediately withers and dies. The three men, on seeing this, swoon and fall to the ground. When Holly recovers, he finds that Job is dead from, he supposes, terror. He and Leo then manage, after many difficulties, to make their way back to England. 1

She and Totem and Taboo

Reading She in conjunction with Totem and Taboo, the land of the Amahaggers becomes the space where the primal father as represented by She, remerges, 4 According to Wikipedia, She is ‘one of the most influential novels in modern literature, with authors like Rudyard Kipling, Henry Miller, Graham Greene, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Margaret ­Atwood all acknowledging the importance of the work to their own and others writing’. In 1965 Time magazine wrote that ‘with over 83 million copies sold, the work is one of the biggest selling fictional titles of all time and has been translated into forty four languages’. There have also been at least nine cinematic adaptations of She. [accessed 12 October, 2012].

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corresponding to the South American plateau in The Lost World. Despite appearing to be the epitome of woman, She is considered as the equivalent of the figure of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness – an obscene, asexual ‘jouisseur’ outside of the Law. As immortal or quasi-immortal, She is outside human sexual difference, which pertains only to the mortal, and moreover only to those humans subject to the law of castration. Thus, the land over which She rules will be analysed in relation to the concept of the Name-of-theFather: what is imagined in Rider Haggard’s novel is an (impossible) society without the Name-of-the-Father, its absence indicated by the nonexistence of both surnames and the names of ancestors (as preserved in human society in books or on tombstones). In its absence, one sees, as in the case of Malone in The Lost World, the failure of the sexual relationship of the analogous character in She, Leo Vincey. This outcome leads to a re-examination of the actions of Leo’s actual father at the beginning of the story. Where in The Lost World, the role of father-in-law was abdicated, here the father’s inheritance forces his son to weigh up a matter, human immortality, not subject to deliberation, and in the process propels him towards the primordial father figure, foreclosing the possibility of a sexual relationship. Following this analysis, I return to the question, also raised in the Introduction, of the purpose of myth, that is, an impossible story which yet, paradoxically, ‘must’ have taken place. In distinction to critical views of the ‘romance’ genre as constituting an escape from reality, it is argued that in the depiction of a statue representing the Goddess of Truth, the commonly held equivalence of the truth with the factual is uncoupled. Instead, the mythical (which is counter factual) takes on the capacity of saying something of the truth, which cannot, in any case, ever be wholly said. Whereas science, as seen in the discussion of The Lost World, drives towards a complete knowledge, psychoanalysis theorizes a necessary gap: not everything can be known or said. For Lacan, discourse will inevitably ultimately stumble upon a phrase or word that cannot be interpreted but remains as a material autonomous signifier. This limit is Freud’s conception of the navel, the one spot at least ‘in every dream at which it is unplumbable […] a point of contact with the unknown’.5 2

The Fantasy Space

In untying the link between the novel and the subject of Empire, the land of the Amahaggers, becomes the fantasy space where the primordial father ­figure 5 Freud, Interpretation, p. 101.

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appears. As was noted in the Introduction, the settings of all the ‘travel’ novels and short story under investigation share a common feature, that of the ‘double space’. In other words, one invariably witnesses a splitting between the regular realistic everyday sort of space, where the novel begins and ends, and an extra-ordinary fantasy one, which, it is stressed, is not locatable on any map. This feature, also present in She, can be seen distinctly in a comparison with The Lost World. In both cases the story opens in London from where the expedition sets off to a named place, in Conan Doyle’s novel, Manaus, an actual city in Brazil, in She, Zanzibar on the East African coast. Both journeys continue up-river until it is no longer navigable. From then on all geographical co-­ ordinates are lost. In Conan Doyle’s story, the narrator repeats three times that the plateau was not to be found on any map emphasizing the impossibility of any outsider ascertaining the party’s whereabouts.6 In She, the Englishmen are at that point transported in litters by some natives with Holly falling asleep during a part of the journey. Later on the party are carried to Ayesha, this time blindfolded so that they ‘should not learn the secret of the paths through the bowels of the mountains’.7 Although Holly tries to keep his bearings, it is pointed out that this proves impossible. ‘I tried to keep a map of them in my mind in case it might ever be necessary for us to try and escape by this route, but, needless to say, failed utterly.’8 As will also be seen in Dracula, ‘being trapped’ in the fantasy land is a recurring motif with the protagonists unable to escape or return home without the help of a type of in-between character, the Indian native in The Lost World, a friendly Amahagger in She, and the Budapest nurse in Dracula. There is a further similarity in the fictional landscape of The Lost World and She in the natural chasm which in each case forms a seemingly insurmountable barrier closing off what might be termed the ultimately forbidden (and impossible) place. This gap, nonetheless, is bridged at the behest of primal father figures, Challenger (the double of the King of the ape-man) and She. In Conan Doyle’s novel, the plateau where the ape-men and other monsters 6 At one point, Malone writes: ‘I would warn my readers that in any map or diagram which I may give the relation of places to each other may be correct, but the points of the compass are carefully confused, so that in no way can it be taken as an actual guide to the country’. Later on a sketch map is given in the book with the title: ‘Rough Chart of Journey (Neither orientated nor to scale)’. Finally, when the expedition gets into trouble, Malone explains that there is ‘no use in disclosing to you our exact geographical situation and asking our friends for a relief party. Even if they could send one, our fate will in all human probability be decided long before it could arrive in South America’ (Conan Doyle, Lost World, pp. 65, 77, 139). 7 Rider Haggard, She, p. 120. 8 Ibid., p. 121.

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appear is initially inaccessible. As Malone reports, ‘at a rough guess the gulf was forty feet across, but, so far as I could see, it might as well have been forty miles.’9 The explorers bridge the gap, as discussed in Chapter 1, at Challenger’s urging, using an English beech which happens to be growing nearby. ‘The tree was a good sixty feet in height, and if it only fell the right way it would easily cross the chasm’.10 In She, an abys is similarly bridged – in a chapter significantly entitled ‘Walking the Plank ’ – when She leads the three Englishmen to the pillar of eternal fire offering immortality to those who bath in it. As Holly narrates, a sugarloaf-shaped cone whose top is ‘some forty feet’ distant appears in front of the party. There is however a huge flat boulder on the lip of the summit and its end ‘approached to within twelve feet or so of us’.11 As in The Lost World, there appears a means of bridging the gap, this time in the form of the plank which She has ordered Holly and Job to carry. ‘Then we saw why the narrow plank had been provided.’12 It is, surely no coincidence that the distance in both cases is 40 feet but a deliberate allusion in The Lost World to She. 3

The Asexual Primal Father

It is in the plain of Kor, the fantasy space reached by the three Englishmen blindfolded in litters, that the primal father figure, She, appears for the first time. Although a beautiful lady called She seems to represent the very epitome of the feminine, this cannot be equated with her being a woman within a symbolic system. The point is that before the killing of the primal father mythically founds human culture and the law, human sexual difference does not exist. Human sexuation can only be conceived of following the murder of the primal father, and, from a slightly different perspective, the end of his ownership of all the women; as long as he is fused with them as a universal harem, he does not have another sex to relate to, and is thus himself sexless. Before culture and the law there is only biological or anatomical difference, which, as discussed in the Introduction, does not of itself make a man or a woman as far as human subjectivity is concerned. For psychoanalysis the latter broadly depends on the symbolic order, and in particular, for each individual subject on the resolution of the Oedipus complex. As Žižek argues, in the case of She, we are confronted 9 10 11 12

Conan Doyle, The Lost World and Other Stories (Ware: Wordsworth, 1995), p. 89. Ibid., p. 90. Rider Haggard, She, pp. 240–241. Ibid., p. 240.

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with ‘an agency of power’ which is ‘pre-symbolic’ and ‘unbridled by the law of castration’ – that which alone permits the advent of sexuation.13 Thus, while literary critics have repeatedly taken She as representing some facet of woman, including the chthonian mother-goddess,14 the femme fatale15 and the Victorian New Woman, psychoanalytic thinking suggests that She should be seen as un-sexed. Moreover, the argument can be made that, as an immortal, She remains outside even the biological (and thereby the cultural) category of male and female. For both Freud and Lacan sexuation is inextricably tied to mortality: sexual reproduction entails mortality and, vice-versa, immortality necessitates asexual reproduction. In the novel, She is ‘practically’16 immortal, in that at its opening she has been living for 2000 years. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud argued the connection between sexual reproduction and mortality, citing the work of the nineteenth century biologist, August Weismann. According to this view, living matter can be divided into two parts, one, ‘the soma, the entire body except the element concerned with sexuality and heredity’, which is ‘doomed to die’ and the second, the immortal, ‘the germ-plasm that serves to preserve the species by reproducing it’.17 In other words; once there is sexual reproduction the individual body must die, and only the species, represented in the germ cells, survives, while, conversely, if the individual is immortal, there can only be agamogenesis, asexual reproduction. Lacan would later state that ‘the link between sex and death, sex and the death of the individual, is fundamental’.18 The argument for viewing She as an asexual primal father figure can in addition be made from a literary standpoint by noting the similarity in the 13

Žižek, ‘Woman is One of the Names-of-the-Father’ in Lacanian Ink 10 (1995) [accessed 16 February 2012]. 14 Bette Roberts, ‘The Mother Goddess in H. Rider Haggard’s She and Anne Rice’s The Queen of the Dammed’ in The Fantastic Vampire: Studies in the Children of the Night : Selected Essays from the Eighteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, ed. James Craig Holte (London: Greenwood, 2002), pp. 103–110 (p. 103). 15 See Rebecca Stott, The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale (Basingstoke: ­Palgrave McMillan, 1992), pp. 88–125. 16 She tells Leo Vincey, ‘First, must thou be even as I am, not immortal indeed, for that I am not, but so cased and hardened against the attacks of Time that his arrows shall glance from the armour of thy vigorous life as the sunbeams glance from water.’ Rider Haggard, She, p. 220. 17 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. John Reddick (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 85. 18 Lacan, The Seminar, Book xi, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), p. 150.

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­characterization of She and Kurtz from Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness. This contrasts with the interpretation of Rider Haggard’s novel as a male fantasy of vanquishing the New Woman, supported by Gubar and ­Gilbert through their equating She with the ‘wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman’19 in Heart of Darkness. This latter figure appears on the river shore as the steamboat carrying the dying Kurtz casts off. Gubar and Gilbert name her ‘the African Queen’,20 while Kurtz is described as her ‘abject slave’ who crawls back toward this ‘African queen of the night into whose power he has fallen’.21 They even bestow upon this character She’s appellation: ‘She-whomust-be-obeyed’,22 writing that ‘it is in front of this woman as Other that Kurtz collapsed’, and it is he who is ‘meant to signify the nightmare corpse at the core of the anxious patriarchal/imperial mind, the dead father who has been “blasted” into impotence by “the horror, the horror” of the otherness’, that is, of Woman.23 An incident in Conrad’s text, however, belies the idea that Kurtz was in the power of the ‘African Queen’, or that he can rightly be viewed as her slave. At the point where this woman appears in her splendour on the river bank, the Russian sailor, who is at the side of Marlow (the story’s narrator of the story), recalls a quarrel between Kurtz and the woman: She got in [the house] one day and kicked up a row about those miserable rags I picked up in the storeroom to mend my clothes with. I wasn’t decent. At least it must have been that, for she talked like a fury to Kurtz for an hour, pointing at me now and then. I don’t understand the dialect of this tribe. Luckily for me, I fancy Kurtz felt too ill that day to care, or there would have been mischief.24 Having to argue with a sick Kurtz for an hour and not getting anywhere is a far cry from a female despot before whom the male slave collapses. In fact the description given of She and Kurtz as despotic rulers suggests they are in analogous positions, that of the primordial ‘agency of power’ outside the law and sexuality. In Kurtz’s upriver domain, where Marlow ­encounters him, 19

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. by Paul B, Armstrong, Norton Critical Editions, 4th edn (New York: Norton, 2005), p. 60. 20 Gilbert and Gubar, No Man’s Land, p. 44. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., p. 45. 23 Ibid. 24 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 61.

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he is beyond the influence and control of the representatives of the ­European trading company whose employee he is, and, as Marlow learns from the ­Russian sailor, his ascendancy over the natives ‘was extraordinary’, the chiefs coming every day to see him. ‘They would crawl’.25 She also demands that anyone approaching her must crawl. As Holly is instructed by his companion, ‘down on to thy hands and knees. We enter the presence of She, and, if thou art not humble, of a surety she will blast thee where thou standest.’26 Both She and Kurtz have no restraints. She ‘was obeyed throughout the length and breadth of the land, and to question her command was certain death.’27 She does not answer to any other law than her own. ‘The law,’ she laughed with scorn – ‘the law! Canst thou not understand, oh Holly, that I am above the law, and so shall my Kallikrates be also?’28 In a similar vein, Kurtz is twice described by the narrator of Heart of Darkness as being without ‘restraint’. On the first occasion Kurtz is used in order to describe another character who ‘had no restraint, no restraint – just like Kurtz – a tree swayed by the wind’.29 The second time is when Marlow sees a line of dried heads on poles in front of Kurtz’ house: ‘They only showed that Mr Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts’.30 Moreover, She and Kurtz are both (fantasmic) asexual figures outside the cultural categories of man and woman. She, apparently celibate, has been waiting 2000 years for the return of Kallikrates, while Kurtz, his fiancée in Europe, finds his particular enjoyment outside of any regular ‘oedipal’ sexual relationship. This enjoyment is ‘unspeakable’, outside culture altogether. As Marlow tries to tell his listeners in a boat moored on the River Thames in England, Kurtz ‘presides at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which – as far as I reluctantly gathered from what I heard at various times – were offered up to him – do you understand? – to Mr Kurtz himself’.31 All the indications thus point to the ‘African Queen’ being Kurtz’s double or counterpart rather his matriarchal overlord. Her being at his house is reported together with the phrase that he ‘was too ill to care’. She features in this ‘up-river’ area like Kurtz’ analogue, both as an androgynous figure, a woman but with the accruements of a male warrior: ‘her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow’, and as the leader of 25 Ibid., p. 58. 26 Rider Haggard, She, p. 129. 27 Ibid., p. 87. 28 Ibid., p. 225. 29 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 51. 30 Ibid., p. 57. 31 Ibid., p. 50.

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an otherwise unruly crowd: ‘She put out her hands, shouted something, and all that wild mob took up the shout in a roaring chorus of articulated, rapid, breathless utterance’.32 4

A Land Where the Names of Fathers are Missing

The land of the Amahaggers, where She is the absolute ruler, a law unto herself, is depicted literally has having no ‘Name-of-the-Father’. As discussed in the Introduction, the Name-of-the-Father is the symbol into which the ‘ferocious figure’ of the primordial father figure is sublated by the post-oedipal law; thus establishing human culture together with lineage, generations, and sexuation. In the novel, an imaginary place is portrayed, the land of the Amahaggers, where there is no fatherhood and no surnames, pinpointing the correlation between the absence of the Name-of-the-Father, and the re-emergence of the primal father figure, She. As Holly reports in regard to the Amahaggers: Descent is traced only through the line of the mother, and while individuals are as proud of a long and superior female ancestry as we are of our families in Europe, they never pay attention to, or even acknowledge, any man as their father, even when their male parentage is perfectly well known.33 This can be contrasted to a passage from Totem and Taboo, where Freud describes the insistence of the ‘savages’ (Australian aborigines) on acknowledging a father: a man not only calls his begetter ‘father’ but also every other man who, according to the tribal regulations, might have married his mother and thus, become his father. The kinship names which two Australians give each other do not, therefore, necessarily point to a blood relationship between them, as they would have to according to the custom of our language; they signify much more the social than the physical relations.34

32 33 34

Ibid., p. 67. Rider Haggard, She, p. 79. Freud, ‘Totem and Taboo’ in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud trans. by A.A. Brill (New York: Random House, 1938), pp. 807–930, (p. 811).

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In the novel there is only the father as progenitor (his biological function). The literal absence of the name of the father is evident in the need of a unique name for every individual. Without the acknowledgement of a father, there are no surnames. As Holly reports, Billali is the name of the man in charge of a ‘household’ (the one into which the Englishmen are initially transported) which ‘consisted of about seven thousand individuals all told, and no other man was ever called by that name’.35 In spite of their pride of female ancestry, biological motherhood proves insufficient to constitute a lineage or symbolic link in Amahagger families. Moreover, in Holly’s report of their stay, family terms are never mentioned. The terms ‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘children’ and ‘grandparents’ are either never spoken or used in a different sense. Billali is indeed called father and he speaks of ‘his children’ referring to the people in his ‘family’, but this refers to the relations between ruler and ruled. Billali is the father of this family only in so far as he is responsible for the transmission and carrying out of She’s orders. ­Although, as will be noted shortly, there is marriage, there is no mention of any children other than in the context just noted. The only generational relations to appear are those introduced by Holly in his narration, when he interprets some corpses preserved from the time of Kôr as those of a husband, mother and baby child. In She, there is no name of the father in another sense: the father as ancestor has no name. It is for example not inscribed on any tombstone nor transmitted in any writings. As Billali says to Holly, ‘“The name of my people is Amahagger” (the People of the Rocks)’36 The contrast can be made here with a ‘people of the books’, pertaining to a civilization founded on ‘the scriptures’, i.e. something written. In particular in regard to the father’s name, there is in Judaism and Christianity, the Book, the Bible which at several places gives a list of the names of fathers. Indeed, the Hebrew name for the second book of the Bible, called Exodus in English following the Greek translation, is actually Shmot (‫ )שמות‬meaning ‘Names’. The first verse in the King James translation reads: ‘Now these are the names of the children of Israel, which came into Egypt; every man and his household came with Jacob. Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and ­Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin, Dan, and Naphtali, Gad, and Asher.’37 Another example is to be found in the gospel of Mathew, which begins as ‘the book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham’ where ‘Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judas and

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his brethren’38 and continues to list ‘fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Messiah’.39 The Amahaggers, however, in place of names, have received bodies. Instead of the body disintegrating but the name being preserved on a headstone, there are only impeccably preserved human bodies. As Holly reports, ‘for tens of ages the mortal remains of the great extinct race whose monuments surrounded us had been first preserved, with an art and a completeness that has never since been equalled’.40 The bodies were laid out in catacombs carved out of the rocks underneath the city. The Amahaggers now live in these caves with the bodies, working the fields above. It is made very clear when Holly sees them that, although perfectly preserved, they are anonymous. No names have been recorded: It was a woman; she might have been thirty-five years of age, or perhaps a little less, and had certainly been beautiful. […] on her arm, its face pressed against her breast, there lay a little babe. […] There they were ­before us, mother and babe, the white memories of a forgotten human history […] I turned to the body on the opposite shelf, and gently unveiled it. It was that of a man in advanced life, with a long grizzled beard, and also robed in white, probably the husband of the lady.41 Interestingly in the Amahagger nation, these bodies in their materiality are also used for enjoyment. Together with the preservatives, the human mummies from the caves make amazing torches to provide light for festivals. As H ­ olly narrates: ‘There was something very terrible, and yet very fascinating, about the employment of the remote dead to illumine the orgies of the living’.42 Yet, as was explained in the Introduction, for Lacanian psychoanalysis – at least in the standard situation of neurosis (that is ‘normal’ subjectivity as opposed to psychosis or perversion) – the subject’s enjoyment, surplus jouissance, is always symbolically mediated in consequence of the resolution of the ­Oedipus complex, dependent on the Name-of-the-Father. In She, however it is the father’s material remains which constitute a means of enjoyment (the lighting up of ‘the orgies’), as if due to symbolic hole left by the missing Name-of-theFather (absent both as surname and the ancestor’s), enjoyment is obtained ‘directly’ using the father’s body instead of his name. 38 39 40 41 42

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The idea that what is being portrayed is the ‘illicit’ use of physical remains to plug a symbolic hole is reinforced by the allusion to Hamlet immediately following the description of the orgy. Holly comments that ‘Cæsar’s dust – or is it Alexander’s? – may stop a bunghole, but the functions of these dead Cæsars of the past was to light up a savage fetish dance. To such base uses may we come’.43 As Daniel Karlin points out in his notes to the Oxford edition of She, the reference is to the graveyard scene, where Hamlet tells Horatio: To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bung-hole? Holly’s aporia makes both Cæsar’s and Alexander’s names appear in the novel as in the play: Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away: O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe, Should patch a wall to expel the winter flaw!44 In his article on Lacan’s commentary on Hamlet, John Muller sees the literal or material hole in Hamlet, stopped by clay, as representing the ­metaphorical hole left by the death of Hamlet’s father. Yet ‘holes’ can be repaired only by the word, in this case the communal morning rites which however have been cut short by the new king and not by ‘matter’, as Hamlet’s musings suggest: The hole that is created by another’s death cannot be patched with his or her remains, but only through ritual, through ‘the totality of the signifier’. The work of mourning is accomplished at the level of the logos: I say logos rather than group or community, although group and community, being organized culturally, are its mainstays.45 Thus a parallel can be drawn between Hamlet’s thoughts and the practices of the Amahagger community. In both cases there is a ‘misuse’ of the dead 43 44 45

Ibid., p. 195. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. by G.R. Hibbard, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: ­Oxford University Press, 2004), v. 1. 193–206. John P. Muller, ‘Psychosis and Mourning in Lacan’s Hamlet’, New Literary History 12 (1980), 147–165 (p. 154).

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­father, who qua dead is vital in sustaining the surplus enjoyment of the living, but where contrary to a symbolic inheritance, his physical remains are used to ‘bung up a hole’. This hole should have been patched by means of language whereas in both novel and play material is used; in She, dried corpses and in Hamlet’s imagination, dust and clay. In the play what is at stake is a case of insufficient mourning since the hole or gap left by the death of the previous king, his father has, for the most part been ignored in the symbolic – the community with the King and Queen at its head, truncating the rites of mourning in the paucity of speech about the departed and the over hasty wedding. In the case of Amahaggers, the material remains of the dead become a means of enjoyment in the absence of symbolic fatherhood as evidenced by the absence of tombstones and surnames. 5

The Absence of the (Normal) Sexual Relationship

At this stage, it will not come as a surprise that in She, in this imaginary land where there is no Name-of-the-Father and the primordial father figure returns, the normal sexual relationship does not hold. In the discussion of the opening of The Lost World, I looked at the behaviour of the would-be father-in-law; at how, in contrast to a tradition stemming from the Bible, he had no interest in his daughter’s choice of husband, leaving the young couple to manage the business themselves. This led to the obstacle set up by themselves in the form of the courtly love scenario. In She, the function of choosing a husband is, as in the case of Gladys and Malone, performed by the woman. When a woman took a fancy to a man she signified her preference by advancing and embracing him publicly, in the same way that this handsome and exceedingly prompt young lady, who was called Ustane, had embraced Leo. If he kissed her back it was a token that he accepted her.46 Leo, ignorant of these rules, returns the embrace out of politeness but in effect accepts her.47 It would seem that a ‘normal’ sexual relationship is thus formed – and even, it might be added, in a liberating anti-patriarchal mode empowering women. Indeed the pair seems very fond of each other. However, as will also be seen in Dracula, it is the still enjoying ‘non-dead father’, in this case She, who will come between the would-be couple, wrecking what appeared to be on the 46 Rider Haggard, She, p. 79. 47 Ibid.

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brink of a happy consummation. This figure is in Žižek’s words, ‘the reverse of the Name of the Father’, that is the father, ‘who definitely does enjoy’.48 As such he becomes a competitor for the subject’s would be sexual partner. In the novel, She, seeing in Leo the long lost re-incarnation of Kallikrates, the Egyptian priest for whom she has been waiting, first banishes Ustane, and then, when she secretly returns, unable to part with Leo, strikes her dead. As the novelist Margaret Atwood phrases it, She polishes off ‘a more normal sort of woman with whom Leo has formed a sexual pair bond.’49 Pointing to the corpse of Ustane, She explains that, ‘she stood between me and thee, and therefore have I removed her, Kallikrates.’50 Her act is a repetition of her previous destruction of the sexual bond between the normal mortal pair, when she slew Kallikrates, after he had refused to kill Amenartas, his wife, and accept her (and the gift of immortality) instead.51 Significantly, where the Egyptian priest remained faithful to his wife, the nineteenth century Englishman comes to prefer She over the ‘normal’ woman. As Holly reports Leo is drawn to She, even after Ustane’s cruel death. ‘Ayesha unveiled, and once more bade Leo embrace her, which, notwithstanding his heart-searchings of the previous night, he did with more alacrity and fervour than in strictness courtesy required.’52 Or, in Atwood’s words, She ‘brought Leo to his knees with her knockout charms.’53 This primordial father figure (embodied by She), Žižek also identifies as the ‘subject’s double who accompanies him like a shadow and gives body to a certain surplus.’54 It is this figure who comes to be more alluring than the normal pretty girl, appearing to offer the 48 Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 125. 49 Margaret Atwood, Introduction to She: A History of Adventure (New York: Modern Library, 2002), p. xviii. 50 Rider Haggard, She, p. 203. 51 The event is recounted twice in the novel but with a discrepancy as to how exactly ­Kallikrates was killed. The first time is as recorded by Amenartas on the shard of pottery: ‘Then in her rage did she smite him by her magic, and he died’ (Rider Haggard, She, p. 247 footnote). The second occasion is when She recounts to Leo how after bathing in the pillar of fire (on the first occasion at the time of Kallikrates): “‘thou, blinded by my beauty, didst turn from me, and throw thine arms about the neck of Amenartas. And then a great fury filled me, and made me mad, and I seized the javelin that thou didst bear, and stabbed thee, so that there, at my very feet, in the place of Life, thou didst groan and go down into death’. (Ibid., pp. 246–247).” 52 Ibid., p. 220. 53 Atwood, ‘Introduction’, p. xviii. 54 Žižek ‘Grimaces of the Real, or When the Phallus Appears’, October 58 (1991), 44–68 (p. 54).

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subject an originary enjoyment not truncated by castration. As Dolar articulates the point: while the double appears to be the one, who spoils and obstructs, what is significant is the choice of the object. It is myself who prefers the double, the one who retains the object and who can provide jouissance and being, to the beautiful girl who can give me pleasure.55 The relationship of Leo to She should be seen as the ‘hors-sexe’ (outside sex) relationship to the ‘undead’ one, undead because it retains the ‘lost’ object of jouissance. This point concerning the retention of the ‘lost object’ will be discussed further in connection with Dracula. In accordance with this reading, it would be Ustane who, contrary to initial appearances, is ‘the real spoiler in this game’, and it is she who has to be got rid of. It is then also typical, as Dolar points out, that it is ‘the double [who] takes care of this’,56 in this case She. 6

The Father’s Bequest to His Son

6.1 The Father’s Name In the opening of The Lost World, the father, having relegated himself to the position of suppliant of his would be son-in-law’s approval, walks out to get ready for a meeting of a masonic lodge, seemingly in search of a new master for himself. With this exit of the ‘normal’ father, the would-be son-in-law ends up in the hands of a kind of ‘father-out-law’, Challenger whose science will lead the young man to the fantasy space and the king of the ape-men. She also begins with a vanishing father appearing and exiting the scene almost immediately with his death the following morning, but in this case leaving a strange bequest, which also propels the son towards the fantasy land and the primal father figure. In order to make this situation clearer, a further exposition of the plot is needed. The story begins with the strange apparition of a dying man who late one evening knocks on the door of the rooms of Holly, a fellow-to-be at ­Cambridge. It turns out he has a five- year-old son and persuades Holly to promise him that he will become his guardian. He then leaves him a ­mysterious box and some very specific instructions for his son’s upbringing and education to 55

Mladen Dolar, ‘“I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night”: Lacan and the Uncanny’, October, 58 (1991), 5–23, (p. 14). 56 Ibid.

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prepare for the mission the father has in mind for him. The visitor then informs Holly that he will not last the night and the next morning he is indeed found dead. When, twenty-five years later, the father’s box which had been kept ­inviolate in a bank vault is finally opened, it contains an extremely old black wooden box, with an even older silver casket inside. In this casket is a letter from Leo’s father relating his attempt to find an immortal woman inland from the coast of Zanzibar. There are also material proofs of her existence, the ‘Sherd of ­Amenartas’, a potsherd on which Kallikrates’ wife had written her story with notes and signatures added from various family members through the ages, and finally a scarabœus, as Karlin notes, a ‘ceramic gem in the form of the scarab beetle worshipped by the Egyptians’.57 On this scarabœus, there is an inscription of Amenartas’ instructing her son to find She and kill her. The first point to note are the echoes of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which reverberate in this part of the novel involving Leo’s father, as recorded by Karlin in his introduction to the novel.58 When the dying father leaves Holly’s room, ‘he smiled, and, with the word “Remember” on his lips, was gone’.59 In Shakespeare’s play, the ghost of Hamlet’s father, on departing says: ‘Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, remember me’60 Leo’s father makes Holly swear an oath: ‘Swear to me by God that you will be a father to the boy, and follow my directions to the letter’, and Holly answers: ‘I swear it’.61 In the play, when Hamlet demands of the soldiers of the watch that they swear to keep secret the appearance of his father’s ghost, the ghost reiterates the command: ‘swear’. Finally there is the mention of a ghost at the end of the chapter when Holly says to the servant, who has just discovered the dead Vincey, that ‘You look as though you had seen a ghost!’.62 In both play and novel, the son will take on the father’s bequest. Hamlet, at first hesitating as to whether the ghost is genuine or not, accepts the exhortation even turning the father’s revenge into his own: ‘Haste me to know’t, that I, with wings as swift, As meditation or the thoughts of love, May sweep to my revenge’.63 Leo faces Hamlet’s dilemma as to credibility of the ‘ghost’ also 57

Daniel Karlin, explanatory notes to She by H. Rider Haggard, ed. Daniel Karlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 278. 58 Ibid., p. 277. 59 Rider Haggard, She, p. 22. 60 Ibid., p. 36. 61 Ibid., p. 21. 62 Ibid., p. 23. 63 Shakespeare, Hamlet, i 5 29–31.

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choosing to accept his father’s bequest, in this case an invitation to investigate an apparently totally preposterous story. As Holly tells him, ‘I believe that the whole thing is the most unmitigated rubbish.’64 The man servant Job agrees: ‘I say, sir, that it is a lie, and, if it is true, I hope Mr Leo won’t meddle with no such things, for no good can’t come of it.’65 Leo however decides that it is not necessarily ‘rubbish’. ‘Perhaps you are both right’, said Leo, very quietly. ‘I express no opinion. But I say this. I am going to set the matter at rest once and for all, and if you won’t come with me I will go by myself.’66 The original task is, in both cases, avenging a father’s murder. Hamlet is told by his father’s ghost that if he didst ever his ‘dear father love’ then he should ‘Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder’.67 Amenartas, whose husband was slain by She, bequeaths to her son and his descendants, including Leo, the task of avenging the death of his father, her husband by killing She. Moreover, the notion of revenge has also been preserved in the family name. Leo’s father tells Holly that his family had migrated to Rome where ‘probably with the idea of preserving the idea of vengeance which we find set out in the name of Tisisthenes, they appear to have pretty regularly assumed the cognomen of Vindex, or Avenger’.68 The import of the name Vincey retaining the concept of revenge is reiterated when Holly gives the same information later on. The twelve Latin signatures on the sherd of Amenartas, ‘with three exceptions only’, end with the name ‘Vindex’ or ‘the Avenger’, ‘which seems to have been adopted by the family after its migration to Rome as a kind of equivalent to the Greek ­“Tisisthenes”, which also means an avenger’.69 The fact this name is, completely implausibly, passed in an unbroken male line through so many generations has been noted by critics.70 The additional point I would like to make about this unrealistic piece of fiction is the ­inclusion 64 Rider Haggard, She, p. 49. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Shakespeare, Hamlet, i 5 29. 68 Rider Haggard, She, p. 19. 69 Ibid., p. 41. 70 Arata, for example writes that: ‘The sherd testifies to the persistence of the Vincey line, a line that apparently requires no women for its continuance. On the sherd men beget men, whereas Ayesha begets only herself. Within the novel male generativity is figured in terms of the passing on of written language, specifically of the family name that most patriarchal of inheritances.’ (Arata, Fictions of Loss, p. 99).

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of a meaning in a name, where there should be none. The function of the father’s name, as noted, is to inscribe the child into a family lineage. Any original meaning, as, for example, in the case of Smith or Miller, upon being used as a family name, is lost. In this case, however, a duty or a burden, stemming from an original crime two thousand years before (the murder of a father), is retained in the name. As Holly remarks after explaining the evolution of the name, ‘it is curious to observe how this hereditary duty of revenge, bequeathed by an Egyptian who lived before the time of Christ, is thus, as it were, embalmed in an English family name’.71 It could be said that the meaning of the name persists because the ­original task was left undone or the debt was never paid off. In contrast to the myth of Totem and Taboo the primal father was not killed.72 In the original bequest by Amenartas the mother tells her son firstly to ‘learn the secret of life’, and, secondly, if possible to kill She, who killed his father. ‘Now I say to thee, my son, Tisisthenes, seek out the woman, and learn the secret of Life, and if thou mayest find a way slay her, because of thy father Kallikrates’.73 This son will fail to slay She. On the shard in the silver casket are a number of inscriptions, the first of which is ‘“I could not go”, Tisisthenes to his son, Kallikrates’. There follows, in Holly’s words ‘a variety of Greek signatures, […] and what appeared to be some carelessly executed repetitions of the sentence τῷ παιδί (to my son), showing that the relic was religiously passed on from generation to generation’.74 Another failure is recorded by John Vincey in an entry dated 1564 which reads ‘A most strange historie, and one that did cost my father his life; for in seekynge for the place upon the east coast of Africa, his pinnance was sunk by a ­Portuguese galleon off Lorenzo Marquez, and he himself perished.’75 Thus the failure becomes perennial leading to the task being passed down through the generations inscribed in the name. She is still alive at the opening of the novel and, in the end, is not killed by a Vincey, but becomes mortal by means of a ‘natural’ process, the effect of a second immersion in the pillar of fire, and hence dies (since now long past her life span). Significantly, however the idea of immortality does not die in that, as already noted, Vincey and Holly set out a

71 72

73 74 75

Rider Haggard, She, p. 34. We can here also compare this history with that in Hamlet. By the end of play the task is carried out, in that the murderer and usurper is killed and the play ends with the speech of Fortinbras, Prince of Norway, the new ruler implying the establishment of a new order. Rider Haggard, She, p. 37. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., p. 45.

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new journey, still believing in her. As Holly writes at the conclusion of the story, ‘A story that began more than two thousand years ago may stretch a long way into the dim and distant future’.76 In this context it should be noted that by the time Leo receives the inheritance the primary task is no longer killing the ‘undead Father’ but investigating the question as to whether immortality exists. His father had written in his letter ‘to investigate what if true, must be the greatest mystery in the world, or to put it by as an idle fable, originating in the first place in a woman’s disordered brain’.77 Interestingly, the silver casket, which contains the father’s letter and supporting material evidence, is supported and adorned by four s­ phinxes.78 Lacan describes the sphinx as simultaneously ‘a figure of nightmare and a questioning figure’.79 In She, the contents of the casket pose a kind of riddle for Leo Vincey, which as in the case of the sphinx, originate with a woman, Amenartas. Significantly, in Sophocles’ play, as Lacan points out, Oedipus gains access to his mother’s bed, not as a direct consequence of killing his father, but after answering the riddle of the sphinx.80 It is, similarly, the attempt to answer the riddle of Amenartas passed on by his father which leads the son into the ‘pre-Oedipal’ area lacking the Name-of-the-Father. 6.2 The Forced Choice of Immortality The nature of the father’s bequest can further be elucidated through a reference to Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice. In both play and novel a bequest of the father comprises three boxes: in the play, a gold, silver and lead casket, and in the novel, as was specified, an iron chest containing a wooden one within which is the silver casket. The silver casket in the novel alludes to that in the play. There the daughter, Portia is left the following instructions: each of her suitors has to choose one of the three caskets and whoever selects the one with the picture of the daughter will get her hand in marriage. It will turn out that the gold or silver ones are not the right choice; the suitors selecting them do not win Portia’s hand. The casket leading to marriage is the lead one, picked by Basanio. 76 Ibid., p. 275. 77 Ibid., p. 35. 78 Ibid., p. 31. 79 Lacan, Le Seminaire X, l’Angoisse (Paris: Seuil, 2004), p. 76. [translation mine] The original reads: ‘Le sphinx, dont, ne l’oubliez pas, l’entre en je precede tout le drame d’oedipe, est une figure de cauchemar et une figure questioinneuse en meme temps’. 80 Lacan, The Seminar, Book xvii, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. by Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2008), p. 40.

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The significance of the lead, for Freud, is that it represents death. In a paper called ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’ Freud discusses the scene from the play. Noting that Basanio cannot give a convincing explanation for his selection, Freud argues what is significant are his words: ‘Thy paleness moves me more than eloquence’.81 Freud compares this to a scene in King Lear, where Cordelia, the third and youngest daughter, is silent when asked to speak by her father, in contrast to the fervour and eloquence of her two elder sisters. Paleness and silence for Freud are both signs of death, revealing the true identity of the third sister (or the lead box), whose fairness should be seen as a disguise. ‘The fairest and the best, she has stepped into the place of the Death-goddess, has kept certain characteristics that border on the uncanny, so that from them we might guess at what lay beneath.’82 Freud points out that the motif of three women can already been seen in the three Moarae, the fates from Greek mythology, the third one being Atropos, the inevitable or Death. Moreover, in these stories there is only the pretence of a choice. ‘The free choice between the three sisters is properly speaking no free choice, for it must necessarily fall on the third if every kind of evil is not to come about, as in Lear.’83 Freud contends that at the ending of the play, when Lear enters with the dead Cordelia, ‘eternal wisdom, in the garb of the primitive myth, bids the old man renounce love, choose death and make friends with the necessity of dying’.84 Thus, in an apparent paradox, man must, according to the myth represented by Shakespeare, freely choose what must actually be his inexorable destiny, death. In She, however the testament which comes down to Leo Vincey begins by claiming that death might not be man’s ‘inexorable destiny’. For Amenartas the task will end when ‘at last a brave man be found among them who shall bathe in the fire’,85 whenever he, on killing She, becomes himself immortal. Leo’s father passes on this inheritance denying that death must necessarily be all men’s destiny. As he writes to his son: ‘I believe that if it can only be rediscovered there is a spot where the vital forces of the world visibly exist. Life exists; why therefore should not the means of preserving it indefinitely exist also?’86 Thus Leo’s father pushes him towards the pre-symbolic undead rather 81

Freud, ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’ in On Creativity and the Unconscious, Selected, with Introduction and Annotations by Benjamin Nelson (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958), p. 73. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid., p. 75. 85 Rider Haggard, She, p. 37. 86 Ibid., p. 35. Josephine Sharoni - 978-90-04-33658-2 Downloaded from Brill.com04/11/2023 08:51:11AM via University of Cambridge

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than the Name-of-the-Father, which by installing the son into a familial line implies death, the symbolic, and generations. Furthermore, whereas in The Merchant of Venice the father offers the daughter no choice and no latitude for understanding, in the novel the son is, on the surface at least, as will be discussed shortly, offered a choice and an invitation to weigh things up for himself. In the play the daughter says: I may neither choose whom I would nor refuse whom I dislike; so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father.87 The father in the novel, however, says to his son: ‘But I have no wish to prejudice your mind about the matter. Read and judge for yourself’,88 and that it is not his intention that the material be placed in Leo’s hands ‘until you have reached an age when you will be able to judge for yourself whether or no you will choose to investigate’.89 It appears that Leo’s father is telling him, ‘Choose, my son’. Yet the underlying structure or truth of the father’s inheritance is the forced choice of that which cannot be chosen, immortality. Although, the father’s letter is presented as an invitation to Leo to choose, this presentation of a choice is belied by the arrangement of the boxes, contained one inside the other. There is, henceforward, only ever one choice available to Leo; either to open the one box which can be selected or to open nothing. This should be contrasted to The Merchant of Venice, where the boxes are side by side enabling the suitors to 87 Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice Third Series (Arden Shakespeare), ed. John Drakakis (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010), 1.2.22–3. The contrast can also be seen between the father in The Merchant of Venice who is ‘most definitely’ dead and Leo’s father who, as was discussed, returns from the grave. In the play only the father’s instructions remain. We do not hear his voice or read anything he wrote. Everything is given to us second hand. He has no personal presence. In contrast Leo’s father presents himself as still present, not quite dead, (even if he is in the grave) as the opening of his letter shows (another part of which was quoted above): “‘My Son Leo, – When you open this, if you ever live to do so, you will have attained to manhood, and I shall have been long enough dead to be absolutely forgotten by nearly all who knew me. Yet in reading it remember that I have been, and for anything you know may still be, and that in it, through this link of pen and paper, I stretch out my hand to you across the gulf of death, and my voice speaks to you from the silence of the grave. Though I am dead, and no memory of me remains in your mind, yet am I with you in this hour that you read’. Rider Haggard, She, p. 33. [emphasis mine]” 88 Rider Haggard, She, p. 35. 89 Ibid. Josephine Sharoni - 978-90-04-33658-2 Downloaded from Brill.com04/11/2023 08:51:11AM via University of Cambridge

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choose any one of them. In each box there is something different and only one contains the picture of the lady. In the novel however there is no choice, only a progression. The first box comprises nothing but the second box which in turn offers nothing but the third and final one, containing not only the father’s letter but the accompanying evidence. Thus in essence all the boxes contain the Vincey inheritance and the father’s letter. There is no choice – other than the option of opening nothing, which would amount to the absolute rejection of the father’s inheritance. This bequest thereby becomes the opposite of what Freud contends ought to be the case: instead of the free choice of what must be, mortality, there is the forced choice of what cannot be, immortality. Moreover one notices in further allusions to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex warnings against trying to fulfil the writ (only apparently permissive) of Leo’s father. These parallel the function of the spirits of the Curupuri in The Lost World of cordoning off a proscribed area. In addition to the sphinxes supporting the casket already noted, there is another on the Sherd of Amenartas. As Holly relates: ‘At the foot of the writing, painted in the same dull red, was the faint outline of a somewhat rude drawing of the head and shoulders of a Sphinx.’90 Nearby is an inscription also in red, the colour of warning: IN EARTH AND SKIE AND SEA STRANGE THINGS THER BE On the other side of the sherd there are several inscriptions: ‘“I could not go”. Tisisthenes to his son, Kallikrates’ and ‘“I ceased from my going, the gods being against me”, Kallikrates to his son’,91 all evoking a forbidden palce. There is one last reference to the sphinx when a giant head of an Ethiopian is seen by Holly at the entrance of the bay the travellers are seeking on the African coast. ‘I believe it is not a mere freak of nature but a gigantic monument fashioned, like the well-known Egyptian Sphinx, by a forgotten people out of a pile of rock that lent itself to their design’. Holly sees it as perhaps ‘an emblem of warning and defiance to any enemies who approached the harbour’.92 7

Myth, Fantasy and Realism

In this last section on She, I wish to re-consider the view of fantasy literature as something in tension with or even opposed to science and rationality, based, 90 91 92

Ibid., p. 40. Ibid., pp. 40–41. Ibid., p. 60.

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as will be discussed, on the premise of a correspondence between fact or reality and truth. This can be seen in critical readings of the novel assuming a dichotomy between fantasy and truth. As Karlin writes in his introduction to the novel, ‘one of the most sublime jokes in She is that the preposterous lost civilization of Kôr worshipped Truth as its ultimate deity’.93 Bruce Mazlish also regards as odd the combination of realism and fantasy. On the one hand, the novel is based on a solid empirical or factual base: ‘Haggard had been in Africa and had experienced real adventures filled with dangers. He had intently listened to others who told him their essentially true stories. He read carefully the numerous travel accounts appearing then’. Yet, on the other hand, the novelist combines this realistic base with an ‘extraordinary note of romance and fantasy’ which coupled with, ‘a poetic style’, ‘myth-like themes and dream-filled stories’, gives us ‘as strange a marriage as that of his youthful hero, Leo, with the ageless She’.94 Critics also label the use of fantasy in the novel as something ‘spiritual’, an antidote to the increasing dominance of the scientific and the materialistic. Burdett for example writes that ‘in trying to occupy minds with adventure, Haggard more and more tried also to occupy them with the urgency of spiritual evolution in a world threatened with the deadening effects of materialism, secularism and rationalism’.95 In contrast to the above readings, it will be seen that Lacan divorces the concept of truth from the factually true or reality, regarding myths as a way of saying something of the truth. Given these premises it will be seen how the statue of the Goddess of Truth, the deity of Kôr is compatible with the fantastic nature of the story told in the novel. Returning first to the blend Mazlish notes of the realistic basis established by an outside reality and the obviously fantastic elements of the novel, it turns out that it is enough to look within the novel itself to see such an ‘odd union’ at work. Stephen Arata highlights the pains Haggard as author took to establish, so to speak, the authenticity of the story: Generally disdainful of learning, he [Rider Haggard] took unusual care to ensure the accuracy of the Greek and Latin passages on the artefact, going so far as to enlist the aid of a classicist, Huber Holden and 93 94

95

Karlin, Introduction to She by H. Rider Haggard, ed. Daniel Karlin (Oxford: Oxford ­ niversity Press, 1991), p. 14. p. xii. U Bruce Mazlish, ‘A Triptych: Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, Rider Haggard’s She and Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 35 (1993), 726–745 (p. 732). Carolyn Burdett, ‘Romance, Reincarnation and Rider Haggard’ in The Victorian Supernatural, 217–238 (p. 232).

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an ­archaeologist, John Raven, in their composition. In the novel these passages together with their English counterparts run on for many more pages than can easily be justified. In one sense they are entirely superfluous, since they merely repeat in different languages and scripts the same story, Haggard’s obsession extended further. As he began to revise She, he asked his friend Agnes Barber to construct an ‘authentic’ Sherd of Amernartas for him complete with markings, scratches, chips as well as inscriptions in uncial and cursive Greek, classical and medieval Latin and Middle English.96 In a similar vein ,the novelist Margaret Atwood recalls the photograph in her copy of the book of the ‘Sherd of A’ which Rider Haggard had had made: ‘Not a drawing of the pot, but a photograph of it, to make the yarn really convincing’.97 One can also add the use of footnotes in the text, written by both Holly and the fictional editor, thereby employing a practice of scholarship to give the impression of actual historical events. One such note for example states that: ‘The sale of the leaves and roots was a Government monopoly, and from it the Kings of Kôr derived a large proportion of their private revenue’.98 The use of such devices, as if to authenticate what evidently could not possibly have taken place, should be viewed in conjunction with the dictionary definition of the word myth as ‘a usually traditional story of ostensibly historical events’.99 The almost oxymoronic ‘ostensibly historical’ – implying the acknowledgement of the pretence in a mythical event masquerading as history – proves to be a good overall description of She. My central argument is that this incongruity, typical of myths, carries a different implication in Lacanian theory than it does for the literary critics quoted above. As was noted in the Introduction, Freud also proposed the myth of ­Totem and Taboo as an actual historical event, paralleling Haggard’s presentation of the obviously unrealistic She as having taken place. Lacan, though, as we saw, gives several reasons why the myth of the primal father is as such impossible in that, for example, there cannot be such a thing, at that point, as a murder, a concept which depends on the law already being in existence. Thus, Lacan’s argument rests on an impossibility or logical aporia within the story itself, as opposed to any kind of comparison with external reality. Likewise, in the case of the novel She, the point would not be that the story contradicts the laws of nature and hence could not possibly have occurred, but that, as in 96 Arata, Fictions of Loss, p. 99. 97 Atwood, ‘Introduction’, p. xviii. 98 Rider Haggard, She, p. 168. 99 Merriam Webster Dictionary . Josephine Sharoni - 978-90-04-33658-2 Downloaded from Brill.com04/11/2023 08:51:11AM via University of Cambridge

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Totem and Taboo, there is a logical aporia: if the Name-of-the-Father is considered to be that which enables the semblance of the sexual relationship to exist and hence reproduction, no society could continue in its absence. Thus the point about a myth lies in its very contradictions: they are needed to give an explanation or account for something which is inexplicable, or better still, they mark the place where knowledge fails. In Lacanian terms, a myth can be regard ‘as a way of approaching the real, which resists symbolization’.100 In the case of Totem and Taboo, this inexplicable is the problematic of how culture arose from nature. As will be seen, for Lacan, unlike science, there exists a limit a-priori to knowledge. As a first step, in order to justify the distinction being made here between truth and reality (the factually true), I will briefly explain how for Lacan it is language that brings reality into being, so that in consequence there is no measure of truth vis-à-vis an outside reality, but only within what is being said. In the discussion of the role of science in The Lost World, it was seen how, according to Lacan, language is not a correspondence between ‘a something’ already existing in reality and the term designating it, but a set of signifiers, where a signifier only refers to another signifier. There is no point at which a signifier is attached to a point outside of this set: ‘the naïve notion has it that there is a superimposition, like a tracing of the order of things onto the order of words’.101 Using Saussure’s terminology of signifier, signified and referent, Lacan ­maintains that signifiers can produce (by means of the function of metaphor) signifieds, that is meaning, but that the referent, the thing in itself remains outside. Signifiers only have meaning in relation to one another. ‘At the level of the signifier/signified distinction, what characterises the relationship between the signified and what serves as the indispensable third party, namely the referent, is precisely that the signified misses the referent.’102 All this ­entails that there is no simple equation of truth with reality, and that, on the contrary, it is signifiers which bring reality – and its meaning – into being.103 100 Leader, ‘Lacan’s Myths’ in The Cambridge Companion to Lacan (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 36. Leader adds: ‘If a basic tenet of psychoanalytic theory is that there exists a nonsymbolizable and nonrepresentable aspect of human reality, it follows that attempts to access it theoretically will involve possibly discontinuous modes of presentation. One could think here not only of Freud’s use of myth but also of Lacan’s use of mathematical and logical formalizations.’ 101 Lacan, The Seminar, Book xx, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2000), p. 24. 102 Ibid., p. 20. 103 In different formulations Lacan would in the course of his work repeat the inability of language to relate directly to things themselves. ‘The thing, that which one refers to, is expressed by a word regarded as a label. My discourse is intended precisely to destroy this Josephine Sharoni - 978-90-04-33658-2 Downloaded from Brill.com04/11/2023 08:51:11AM via University of Cambridge

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Once again, this view of language means that the notion of truth has nothing to do with a correspondence of what is said to any outside reality. In the words of Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘the truth is not that at all, nor exactitude’ and ‘what is said is not to be measured against what is’.104 To define truth as a correspondence with reality is, according to Bruce Fink, to put ‘the epistemological cart before the horse’, since language ‘determines reality’. Things only exist insofar as we can talk about them, insofar as our symbolic order names them and creates a space for them. Words bring things into being. In order for something to exist, it must be speakable, articulable in words. Thus our universe of discourse – our linguistic horizon defines what exists.105 In the light of this argument one might look anew at the fictional editor’s introduction to She. His statement that ‘to me the story seems to bear the stamp of truth upon its face’ implies that the story itself is indeed not true in the sense of having actually happened but nonetheless has a connection with the truth. The word ‘stamp’ might also bring to mind a postage stamp (albeit having nothing to do with the meaning of the expression ‘stamp of truth’) giving rise to the idea of the story having been sent from another realm or place. This can be seen as analogous to the situation in the analysts’ consulting room, at least in Lacanian psychoanalytic practice. There the analysand brings up what are called ‘formations of the unconscious’ – linguistic material such as slips-of-the-tongue and the recounting of dreams, coming from another psychic ‘scene’, as Freud calls it – written in a foreign tongue and requiring ‘translation’ or interpretation. As was noted in the Introduction, dreams are where ‘nonsense’ appears, not making sense until translated. Lacan has Truth speaking in a prosopopeia appear

idea.’ Lacan, The Seminar, Book iii, The Psychoses, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 223. 104 Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Microscopia; An Introduction to the Reading of Television’ in Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment (New York: Norton, 1990), p. xxii. 105 Bruce Fink, ‘‘There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship’, Existence and the Formulas of Sexuation’, Newsletter of the Freudian Field 5 (1991), 58–84 (p. 60). Hence, as Miller explains, truth comes about only through speech. ‘If there is truth, it is not because of the adequacy of the word to the thing. Rather, it is internal to the act of saying something; that is to say, to the connection of one word to another.’ Miller, ‘Irony: A Contribution of Schizophrenia to the Analytic Clinic’, trans. Ellie Ragland, (Re)-turn: A Journal of Lacanian Studies 1 (2003), 8–32 (p. 18).

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in the guise of nonsense: ‘I wonder about in what you regard as least true by its very nature: in dreams, in the way the most far-fetched witticisms and the most grotesque nonsense of jokes defy meaning’.106 The phrase ‘stamp of truth’ in the editor’s introduction moreover can also serve as a mark of authenticity, as for instance in the case of a metal bar stamped as genuine gold. Such a mark can only function according to convention within a particular symbolic community. This, for example, is the case for the entirety of the psychoanalytic community which accepts Freud’s determination of dreams as being ‘the royal road to the unconscious’ (containing, despite their evident absurdity, something of the truth of the subject’s unconscious desire).107 This leads to the contention that the statue of the Goddess of Truth is the signal that the novel as a whole is to be read in line with the assertion that myth is connected to truth. A lengthy description is given of this statue, the ‘Goddess of the people of old Kôr’,108 which appears in the grounds of a ruined temple, through which She and the three Englishmen pass on their way to the place of the eternal fire. The statue consists of a ‘winged figure of a woman’ of ‘marvellous loveliness and delicacy of form’. She is described as ‘bending forward and poising herself upon her half-spread wings as though to preserve her balance as she leant’. Significantly, ‘her perfect and most gracious form was naked, save – and here came the extraordinary thing – the face, which was thinly veiled, so that we could only trace the marking of her features’.109 For Lacan, as will soon be discussed, ‘truth is already woman insofar as it’s not-all, unable, in any case, to be wholly-spoken.’110 Let me for the time being briefly focus on truth as not-all. At the beginning of a performance on French television, Lacan announces: ‘I always speak the 106 Lacan, ‘The Freudian Thing’ in Ecrits, The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2007), pp. 334–363 (p. 342). 107 Žižek gives a demonstration of the gap between the true as measured against an outside reality and the truth of the subject’s desire in the hypothetical case of the man whose enemy is the victim of a road accident due to the malfunctioning of the brakes in his car. While the man might insist more than once that it was not he who tampered with the car, this albeit factually true statement disguises the truth of his desire that some harm come to his enemy. This truth is, so to speak, internal to the subject and might be detected for example in his repeated insistence that he was not responsible. ‘Desire: Drive = Truth: Knowledge’, Umbr(a) (1997) [accessed 15 April 2013]. 108 Rider Haggard, She, p. 234. 109 Ibid., p. 233. 110 Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 45.

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truth. Not the whole truth, because there’s no way, to say it all.’111 The objection immediately arises as to who is this person who can say about himself that he always speaks the truth. In answer, Miller explains in his introduction to Television that no one ever speaks without at the same time implicitly saying ‘I speak the truth’. Even when someone says ‘I am lying’, he or she is saying something of the truth, i.e. ‘it is true that I am lying’.112 The important point, however, is that one can only ever say a part of the truth. As Miller explains: ‘The truth and the whole truth are not the same thing’; ‘there is always more (encore) to be said’.113 The fact that ultimately not all the truth can be spoken is explained by the psychoanalytic concept of primary repression. Or, from a slightly different perspective, in the psychoanalytic session, the injunction to the analysand to say everything – i.e. to fully practise free association – cannot be exhaustively carried out. As Miller adds: ‘A logic is at work which prohibits it’.114 It is this which ‘leads Freud to speak, in “Inhibitions, Symptom and Anxiety”, of primal repression, which is as such impossible to eliminate. It is not a question of simple incapacity, but rather of impossibility.’115 In other words, the subject depends on a primary repression sealing off a structural impossibility, in order to come into ‘its habitation’, that is the symbolic order, or language. Thus, to say the truth is never whole, that not all of it can be spoken, is equivalent to saying that truth does not exist wholly within the symbolic. This is the same way in which Lacan speaks of woman. ‘I don’t know how to approach, why not say it, the truth – no more than woman. I have said that the one and the other are the same thing’.116 As Bruce Fink explains, ‘while men are defined as being wholly hemmed in by the phallic function, wholly under the sway of the signifier, women […] are defined as not being wholly hemmed in’. A woman is ‘not altogether subject to the symbolic order’ and hence with respect to that order, she ‘is not whole, bounded, or limited’.117 The something outside of the symbolic order which women can experience is what Lacan classes the Other feminine jouissance as opposed to phallic jouissance, existing solely within the symbolic order. Returning to She, there is an inscription on the pedestal of the statue of the goddess. It begins with Truth, as in Lacan, speaking in a prosopopeia: 111 Ibid., p. 3. 112 Miller, ‘Microscopia’, p. xx. 113 Ibid., p. xxii. 114 Ibid., p. xxiii. 115 Ibid. p. xx. 116 Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, p. 120. 117 Fink, The Lacanian Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 107.

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Is there no man that will draw my veil and look upon my face, for it is very fair? Unto him who draws my veil shall I be, and peace will I give him, and sweet children of knowledge and good works.118 It is not the case that one speaks the truth but rather it appears, as if autonomously, as an unintentional by-product of one’s speech. ‘Men, listen, I am telling you the secret, I, truth, speak’.119 In the words of Charles Shepherdson, ‘truth must be located outside the psychological subject, at the level of the signifier’.120 To illustrate an example can be given: that of Freud’s analysand who says of a figure in his dream, ‘It is not my mother’.121 The argument psychoanalytic theory makes is that despite the denial that it is ‘mother’ at stake, she appears together with the ‘not’. As Alenka Zupančič explains, ‘without being asked who played a part in his dream, the patient rushes forward and volunteers the word mother, accompanied by negation. It is as if he has to say it, but at the same time cannot, it is imperative and impossible at the same time’.122 The truth is not taken to be that meant or intended by the analysand, i.e. ‘it is not my mother’ (and yet neither, as Zupančič argues, would it be a simple negation of what the analysand says, i.e the figure is the analysand’s actual mother).123 The truth, when it appears, is fleeting and elusive and has to be caught by an interpretation. In the words of Philippe Julien, ‘discreet in its luminosity, tenacious in its insistence, truth speaks through the formations of the unconscious’ and it does so ‘as a slip or mistake’.124 It appears beyond the conscious intention of the speaker and her understanding. This conception of truth correlates with the detail given in the novel that the inscription on the pedestal is initially incomprehensible to Holly, being written, as he explains, in the ‘usual Chinese-looking hieroglyphics’.125 They have to be translated by She, a procedure which as was maintained in the Introduction can be seen as analogous to interpretation.

118 Rider Haggard, She, p. 233. 119 Lacan, ‘Freudian Thing’, p. 340. 120 Shepherdson, Limits of Language, p. 141. 121 Freud, ‘Negation’, trans. by James Stratchey in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 19 (London: Vintage Classics, 2001) pp. 235–242, p. 235. 122 Alenka Zupančič, ‘Realism in Psychoanalysis’, in jep, European Journal of Psychoanalysis, 32 (2011), 29–48, p. 39. 123 Ibid. 124 Phillipe Julien, Jacques Lacan’s Return to Freud, trans. by Devra Beck Simiu (New York: New York University Press, 1994), p. 120. 125 Rider Haggard, She, p. 233.

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The remaining part of the inscription, which begins with an anonymous voice answering Truth’s question, establishes a limit to truth. The goddess must always remain at least partially veiled. And a voice cried, ‘Though all those who seek after thee, desire thee, behold! Virgin art thou, and Virgin shalt thou go till Time be done. No man is there born of woman who may draw thy veil and live, nor shall be. By Death only can thy veil be drawn, oh Truth!’ And Truth stretched out her arms and wept, because those who sought her might not find her, nor look upon her face to face.126 This can be seen to relate to Lacan’s invocation of the Greek myth of Actaeon and the virgin goddess Diana, as adapted by Ovid. Actaeon out hunting catches sight of the naked – as withthe statue in She – Diana bathing, thus violating her modesty. In her anger she turns Actaeon into a stag. ‘Now you may tell your story of seeing Diana naked if story telling is in your power’.127 Bereft of speech Actaeon is unable to command his hounds, who pursue him and maul him to death. Lacan casts Freud as Actaeon, albeit changing the order of the events. In this version Freud is an Actaeon perpetually set upon by dogs that are thrown off the scent right from the outset, dogs that he strives to get back on his tail without being able to slow the race in which only his passion for the goddess leads him on. The chase will lead him on until, like Actaeon he reaches the cave in which the chthonian Diana, in the damp shade that confounds the cave with the emblematic abode of truth, offers to his thirst, along with the smooth surface of death, the quasi-mystical limit of the most rational discourse the world has ever heard, so that we might recognize there the locus in which the symbolic substitutes for death in order to take possession of the first budding of life.128 Here one can see a limit imposed on the seeker of truth. Even a discourse such as Freud’s, which for Lacan approaches the truth – of the unconscious and

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of the logical impossibility of a sexual relationship between the sexes – in an unprecedented way, comes up against a limit. This is precisely the threshold where the symbolic originally (in a mythical way) came into being, retrospectively creating an unknown real forever haunting the symbolic. This returns us to the point discussed regarding The Lost World of the attempt by science to cancel the void of the Thing which must remain as a hole in the symbolic, if this latter is to be preserved. Science, though, in seeking absolute knowledge would, if accomplished, abolish the gap between signifiers and things. For Lacan, this gap can only be closed with the complete unravelling of that symbolic which gives man the ability to speak and which, in Ovid’s tale, Actaeon can no longer do after catching sight of the naked Diana and being turned by her into a stag. ‘But when he came to a pool and set eyes on his head and antlers, “Oh, dear god!” he was going to say; but no words followed.’129 Finally, regarding the statue in She, one sees how the narrator, Holly, the late nineteenth century educated Englishman, equates the concept of truth with the factual, of scientific knowledge. The statue of the goddess of Truth stands upon a great ball of stone representing the World, which turns out to be ‘a map of the universe as it was known to the people of Kor’.130 Holly thereupon comments that, ‘it is at any rate suggestive of some scientific knowledge that these long-dead worshippers of Truth had recognised the fact that the globe is round’.131 In this way Holly renders the notion of truth equivalent to the factual scientific knowledge. Yet, what must also be noted, is Holly’s reaction on seeing the statue: ‘When I first gazed upon it, illuminated and shadowed as it was by the soft light of the moon, my breath stood still, and for an instant my heart ceased its beating’.132 He could not take his eyes of the statue, ‘this veiled and spiritualized loveliness – which was so perfect and so pure that one might almost fancy that the light of a living spirit shone through the marble prison to lead man on to high and ethereal thoughts’.133 This final observation, the fact the world is round (actually in Holly’s phrasing a tautology as a globe is, by definition, round) is surely, however, falls far short of accounting for the effect the statue has upon him, the ‘spiritualized loveliness’ and the ‘high and ethereal thoughts’. There remains an incogruity between the impact of the statue on Holly and that final tame and prosaic remark which begins ‘It is suggestive…’. That final remark is, as Chiesa points out an example of how man’s encounter with truth (the truth of incompleteness and of the impossibility of the 129 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 3, 201–202. 130 Rider Haggard, She, p. 234. 131 Ibid. 132 Ibid., p. 233. 133 Ibid., p. 234. Josephine Sharoni - 978-90-04-33658-2 Downloaded from Brill.com04/11/2023 08:51:11AM via University of Cambridge

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­sexual relationship) prompts him to defensively reduce it to alleged knowledge.134 Truth as the limit to possible knowledge and the inability to express something in language or in any kind of linguistic formula should be conflated neither with the irrational nor the spiritual. The fact that speech runs up against a limit means only that here psychoanalytic theory and practice stop and do not enter the realm of the ‘quasi-mystic’. Accordingly, in the novel, those ‘high and ethereal thoughts’ Holly associates with the statue simply mark that endpoint where no more can be said. Moreover at this point one might recall two scenes from The Lost World, firstly when Malone, pausing to contemplate some beautiful scenery is driven onwards by the scientist, and secondly when the diamonds are sold in order to further the pursuit of scientific knowledge, rather than being retained as useless objects of beauty. In a similar view in this episode in She, the great beauty of the statue ‘dissolves’ into the scientific fact the world is round. Holly describes the statue as ‘a colossal winged figure of a beauty so entrancing and divine’ whose ‘size seemed rather to add to than to detract from its so human and yet more spiritual beauty’.135 A little further on, he calls it ‘this poet’s dream of beauty frozen into stone’.136 Beauty, as was noted, has the function of being simultaneously a barrier and an access; seducing while maintaining the Thing as unattainable. Science in its disdain for beauty (at least as portrayed in the novels) abrogates this important function.

The Staging of a Part of the Truth

In line with The Lost World and the other works that will follow in this investigation, She should be seen as a retelling of the myth of Totem and Taboo, where She represents the – unsexed – primal father figure, and the land of ­Amahaggers is analogous with the plateau of The Lost World and where the Name-of-the-Father is literarily shown as missing. As in Conan Doyle’s novel, the two male adventurers make their escape back to England only to set out on another expedition. There is no closure and no marriage – i.e. no sexed symbolic palliative to the absence of the sexual relationship – giving us another version of what can be called a ‘failed Totem and Taboo’. In features which appear marginal, such as the editor’s introduction and the description of the statue of Kôr, one sees the same distinction that Lacan will make between reality and truth, and between scientific knowledge and truth. This renders 134 Chiesa, personal communication, 29 July 2013. 135 Rider Haggard, She, p. 233. 136 Ibid., p. 234.

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fantasy literature as a means of staging, a contrario, so to speak, something of the truth concerning the function of the father and symbolic inheritance in human culture, as opposed to either a form of escapism or a call to spiritualism in a technological and scientific age. In the next chapter I discuss ‘The Horror of the Heights’. As was noted this short story diverges to a great extent from the mould of Totem and Taboo in that there is no ‘band of brothers’, the primal father figure appearing only to one protagonist, and it is this ‘son’ who dies rather than the ‘father’. Nonetheless, reading it within the same framework shows how the story pertains avant la lettre to the Lacanian categories of the real and the symbolic, and the imperative that the symbolic must always remain lacking, i.e, the Thing must not be (albeit impossibly) recuperated.

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The Recuperation of the Thing: ‘The Horror of the Heights’ Introduction ‘The Horror of the Heights’ is a science fiction short story written by Arthur Conan Doyle which appeared in 1913.1 It is set a few years after its publication when air planes have advanced technically and are able to reach much greater heights and speeds. An anonymous narrator relates how fragments of a notebook were found scattered on some farmland in southern England. ­Reassembled they appear to constitute the first person narrative of an aviator, Joyce-Armstrong, of whom no trace has been found except for the pages and parts of his shattered air plane. The notebook, partly written from his cockpit, tells of two flights at high altitude when he reaches what he calls an ‘air jungle’.2 It is airman’s narrative which makes up most of the tale. On his first flight he discovers some beautiful jelly-fish like creatures but also a monster of a similar substance which starts chasing his plane. The airman manages to escape by using his aircraft guns to pierce one of the monster’s gas filled bladders, causing it to spiral away. Embarking on a second flight in order to bring convincing evidence back to earth of the beautiful creatures he had seen the first time, the aviator manages to scribble down that there are now three of those same monsters between him and earth. In closing remarks by the narrator who introduced the story, it is surmised that these must have caught up with the plane and caused its disintegration. This story serves as another exemplar of the re-emergence of a primal father figure in a mysterious fantasy space; in this case the ‘horror of the heights’, the monster which battles with the aviator in the skies above southern England, reached by means of (a fictional) technology and a singular daring on the aviator’s part. Nonetheless, in contrast to Freud’s myth and the novels discussed in this book, there is no band who, together murder the primal father, but on the contrary it is the ‘normal’ protagonist who dies. While in all the other texts, the primal father figure becomes a shared item, (either in society at large or 1 Conan Doyle, ‘The Horror of Heights’, in Tales of Unease (Ware: Wordsworth, 2008), pp. 85–98. 2 Ibid., p. 89.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004336582_008 Josephine

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among a small group of characters), in this story the aviator remains alone in his encounter both with the Thing-like objects, the argosies of the sky, and the monster. Thus, instead of the narrative being the repetition of the murder which founds human culture, when the band of brothers comes together, here there is an ‘undoing’ of Totem and Taboo: the story of an individual subject whose cultural belonging and humanity is unravelled, and with it his physical destruction. 1

The Symbolic, the Real and the Thing

The mapped familiar space of England where, as in the other works, the journey originates is described in great detail with the discovery of the remains of the notebook at the beginning of the story: The Joyce-Armstrong fragment was found in the field which is called ­Lower Haycock, lying one mile to the westward of the village of ­Withyham, upon the Kent and Sussex border. It was on the 15th September last that an agricultural labourer, James Flynn, in the employment of Mathew Dodd, farmer, of the Chauntry Farm, Withyham, perceived a briar pipe lying near the footpath which skirts the hedge in Lower Haycock.3 The briar pipe leads to a pair of broken binocular glass, which in turn leads to a notebook. This description with its obsessively meticulous details turns out, in terms of the plot, to be without significance, unlike, for example, what might be anticipated in one of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Yet as the critic Michael Dirda points out, they do serve, as in the case of the framing of She, to vouch for the factual reliability of what follows.4 More important, however for my reading, is the antithesis set up between this scene in Southern England where the notebook is found and the air jungle where the monster will appear. In the first case there is the meticulous depiction showing how dumb, meaningless and unruly nature has been brought into the realm of the symbolic by man’s activities. The ‘real’ earth has been carved into administrative units, the counties of Kent and Sussex, and undefined patches of ground have become villages, farms and fields with names and delimited by hedges. The presence of the law can be seen in the footpaths showing the mutual rights of landowners and the general public. The places and humans are also, as is 3 Conan Doyle, Tales, p. 85. 4 Ibid., p. 56.

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the essence of the symbolic, defined in relationship to each other: the places in terms of distances and the points of the compass and the humans in those of employment. Occupations also define the people by means of a pre-existing locus in the symbolic order in which they take their places, the farmer and the farm labourer. The word ‘last’ in the date ‘15th September last’ indicates the linearity the time of human history has imposed as opposed to the cyclical time of nature. Although September 15, representing the circulation of the months, will come round again, September 15th last will not. Finally, the otherwise inconsequential appearance of first names and surnames can be related to the concept of the Name-of-the-Father, denoting its presence in this scene. In complete contrast to this description of Southern England is the air jungle. The fragments of writing, the remains of the notebook, have come from another scene, the very high altitude, an as yet unmapped ‘jungle’ with all that this word connotes. This space, as in the other fictional texts, is beyond any maps. As the airman reaches it even his compass fails. ‘About this time I noted how unreliable is the compass, when above a certain height from earth. At fifteen thousand feet mine was pointing east and a point south. The sun and the wind gave me my true bearings’.5 The airman thinks the as yet unmapped, amorphous mass of clouds of the upper reaches of the sky will, in the future, be subjected to human geo-graphy. ‘There are jungles of the upper air, I believe in time they will map these jungles accurately out.’6 This attempt to penetrate and ‘write’ the unknown can be compared to Challenger’s drive in The Lost World to leave nothing beyond scientific knowledge. However, it turns out that not all this unknown real will yield itself to be written. In the words of the narrator, ‘the first two pages of the manuscript are missing’ and ‘there is also one torn away at the end of the narrative, though none of these affect the general coherence of the story’.7 Thus, in a manner analogous to the excessive detail as to the discovery of the fragments, nothing of import, as far as the plot is concerned, seems to hinge on the fact that three of the pages are never found. As for the first two pages, the narrator makes a conjecture as to what is missing: the ‘record of Mr Joyce-Armstrong’s qualifications as an aeronaut’8 and this information is obtained from other sources. The second gap appears at the end of the story. The airman had written that if he encountered the purple monster he would: ‘dive at once. At the worst there

5 Ibid., p. 91. 6 Ibid., p. 88. 7 Ibid., p. 86. 8 Ibid.

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is always the shot-gun and my knowledge of…’. Here a page is missing, but on the next one is written ‘Forty-three thousand feet. I shall never see earth again. They are beneath me, three of them. God help me; it is a dreadful death to die!’9 In this case, there is no speculation on the part of the narrator as to the content, an issue which I will return to shortly. These two gaps in the notebook demonstrate that it is not only that there can be a lack only within a symbolic structure but that there must be one. In the first case that a gap can be manifested necessitates a structure. As Bruce Fink writes, ‘something only has a place within an ordered system – spacetime co-ordinates, a Dewey decimal book classification, for example’.10 Thus a library book is missing when it is not in its place on the shelf and not recorded as having been lent out. In the story a ‘canvas-backed book, which proves to be a note-book with detachable leaves’ provides a physical structure where the traces of the missing pages are detected – some loose pages ‘fluttering along the base of the hedge’ were collected but others, ‘including the first, were never recovered’.11 Language also entails a structure, that of grammar. The words, ‘my knowledge of’ need completing. However, while the first gap in the notebook is filled in with another piece of narrative, this second gap, as noted, is not. Here is the reference to the necessarily holed symbolic. As Žižek points out, in constituted phenomenal reality, there is always ‘a gaping hole’ so that ‘reality is never “all”, its circle is never closed’.12 If the scene where the notebooks are found represent phenomenal reality as created and maintained by the symbolic then the missing words are the ‘gaping hole’. If the symbolic order must be always lacking, voided by the Thing, then in the air jungle this void will, for the protagonist, be filled out by what is depicted in the story as a phantasmagoria, but which the airman deems to have substance and believes in. Hence for him (only) the Thing which ought to be missing is reconstituted. The ‘restoration’ is those fascinating creatures ­encountered by the airman in the air jungle, which he describes in detail: Conceive a jelly-fish such as sails in our summer seas, bell-shaped and of enormous size – far larger, I should judge, than the dome of St Paul’s. It was of a light pink colour veined with a delicate green, but the whole huge fabric so tenuous that is was but a fairy outline against the dark blue

9 Ibid., p. 98. 10 Fink, Lacanian Subject, p. 52. 11 Conan Doyle, Tales, p. 85. 12 Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom, p. 136.

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sky…. This gorgeous vision passed gently with noiseless dignity over my head, as light and fragile as a soap-bubble.13 These apparitions which have such a dream-like unreal quality suggests a paradox in that, on the one hand, they are a mirage – ‘a fairy outline’, ‘this gorgeous vision’, ‘unsubstantial’ – but, on the other hand, a mirage implying a thing ‘behind’ it, a false thing, of which, nonetheless, Armstrong-Jones is convinced. Those lovely iridescent bubbles of the air should not be hard to capture. It is likely enough that they would dissolve in the heavier layers of the atmosphere, and that some small heap of amorphous jelly might be all that I should bring to earth with me.14 As Žižek writes in another context, the Thing, if it existed, would only be ‘a small heap of undefined jelly’. It is as if, in the non-symbolic world of the airjungle, the void of the Thing in the airman’s native England (the symbolic world as depicted by the incomplete note book and the detailed description of the place it was found) has been filled for him by these creatures. As Žižek writes, it is through the filling out of the void with ‘phantasmagorias’ that ‘the transphenomenal Thing enters the state of phenomenal presence’.15 2

The Danger of the Thing

The airman’s plan to bring back the proof of his vision in the air jungle is a quest similar to that in The Lost World. ‘It is my plan to go once again before I give my results to the world. My reason for this is that I must surely have something to show by way of proof before I lay such a tale before my fellow-men.’16 The captured bubbles even if they were to turn into jelly would be analogous to Challenger’s baby dinosaur brought back to London as evidence.17 ‘For the 13 14 15

Conan Doyle, Tales, p. 95. Ibid., p. 97. Žižek, ‘Grimaces of the Real, or When the Phallus Appears’, October 58 (1991), 44–68 (p. 66). 16 Doyle, Tales, p. 97. 17 In this connection, one should note the depiction of the fate of the baby pterodactyl in the novel. It first escapes through a window and subsequently disappears presumed drowned in the ‘wastes of the Atlantic’. A military court which tries a soldier for deserting his post does not accept his story of seeing ‘the devil between him and the moon’. Thus the law refuses an inscription or acceptance into the symbolic order of this Thing and

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airman as for Challenger there are no boundaries or limits, as he insists on flying up into the air jungle a second time to retrieve the evidence, knowing the monster, the horror of the heights must be lurking there. As in The Lost World, where the plateau turns out to be filled with the ape men and other terrible beasts, the airman will find three horrible monsters. Thus, the airman’s air jungle, the ‘scientific real’, which he regards as ‘not yet’ mapped, should be recognized as the equivalent of that part of the plateau in The Lost World signposted by the Curupuri ‘here be spirits’, or in early maps of the world ‘and here be monsters’. Yet, in spite of this similar quest for evidence, the airman is not a scientist in the same sense as Challenger. Although the inventor of ‘several new devices including the common gyroscopic attachment which is known by his name’, he is also a ‘poet and a dreamer, as well as a mechanic and an inventor’. He is also a man of ‘considerable wealth’, much of which is spent in ‘the pursuit of his aeronautical hobby’.18 This contrast entails a distinction in their relation to the Thing. Challenger, the scientist, as in Lacan’s characterization of the physicist, ‘repudiates the presence of the Thing’,19 that is his drive for knowledge takes no account of it and he acts as if there were no Thing. If, as was argued, the baby pterodactyl emerges as a kind of Thing for the audience in the hall, it does not do so for Challenger, for whom it merely remains a valuable scientific specimen. In complete contrast however to the scientist totally immune either to the beauty or the horror of the Thing, Joyce-Armstrong, the poet and dreamer, is captivated by it. ‘I saw the most wonderful vision that ever man has seen. Can I hope to convey it to you even as I saw it myself last Thursday?’20 Trying to describe the creatures he writes that they form ‘a wonderful fairy squadron of strange, unknown argosies of the sky – creatures whose forms and substance were attuned to these pure heights that one could not conceive anything so delicate within actual sight or sound of earth’.21 And summing up, after landing his plane back in England: ‘I have seen the beauty and I have seen the horror of the heights – and greater beauty or greater horror than that is not within the ken of man’.22 For the airman, the Thing, the argosies of the sky will become it disappears without trace – other than its recording in a newspaper report, which is (before the current digital era of mass archiving) of a temporary and fleeting nature. Lost World, p. 179. 18 Ibid. 19 Lacan, Other Side, p. 131. 20 Conan Doyle, Tales, p. 95. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., p. 97.

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the death-Thing, a lure existing for him alone that will beckon him to his destruction by the three purple monsters.23 Thus his recollection that when dining ‘at Rheims with Coselli and Gustav Raymond I found that neither of them was aware of any particular danger in the higher layers of the atmosphere’,24 takes on a double meaning. The first is that indeed the whole affair is the private matter of a particular individual, the Thing remaining, (as it should do), voided or non-existent for his dining companions. The second way, however is to read itas a warning, so to speak, coming from the story, the others here standing in for society in general, unaware of the ‘particular danger’ which is the deadly or siren call of the Thing in the wake of the decline of traditional screen or barriers in the age of scientific technology. This point will be elaborated in my discussion of Dracula. Returning to the contrast between Challenger, the scientist and the story’s protagonist, it is clear that what is at stake is the uncompromising quest for jouissance as embodied in the Thing-like objects which the airman (or better his unconscious drive) seeks and for which he (or it) discounts the price which may be paid. Death is something which Armstrong-Jones, as a conscious individual, takes pains to avoid. His careful preparations include a number of steps, such as dressing appropriately (‘like an Arctic explorer), despite the initial discomfort (‘two jerseys under my overalls, thick socks inside my padded boots, a storm-cap with flaps and my talc goggles),25 making a thorough preliminary check of his aircraft (‘I had a good look at the planes, the rudder-bar and the elevating lever before I got in’)26 and taking the requisite equipment. This latter includes a gun and as will be discussed in another context, an oxygen bag. And yet, despite this conscious wish to stay alive, the airman seems driven towards his ‘object’, in spite of his knowing that death is the probable price. The story’s anonymous narrator finds it “worth remaking that after his own complete disappearance it was found that his private affairs were arranged with a precision which may show that he had a strong premonition of disaster.27 He also mentions a ‘Captain Dangerfield, who knew him better than anyone’.28 23

The presumed fatal outcome of the encounter in question and the fact that the number three is specified suggests that these three monsters might be viewed as the three fates or Moerae. As was said above in connection with She, Freud identifies the third or last of the three Moerae, as Atropos, ‘the inevitable’ or in other words death. 24 Ibid., p. 87. 25 Ibid., p. 89. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., p. 87. 28 Ibid, p. 86.

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It is not for nothing that the name ‘Dangerfield’ is used. On the second flight, the airman is well aware of the danger of the purple monster but deludes himself into believing he will be able to survive: Yes, I will go, even if I run a risk by doing so. These purple horrors would not seem to be numerous. It is probable that I shall not see one. If I do I shall dive at once. At the worst there is always the shot-gun and my knowledge of….29 Here we return to that second gap discussed above. As Chiesa points out, it comes at the moment when the aviator is intending to use knowledge as a futher means of containing the monster/s (together with the shotgun).30 The ellipsis which follows can be read as the mark of the lack or limit of knowledge. The knowledge which would have been a defence against the monster is impossible to write (because it does not exist) and the aviator is engulfed by the monster precisely at the point where he imagines otherwise. For Lacan, the (albeit impossible) recuperation of the Thing (which would mean the death of the subject) must be, as was discussed in the Introduction, barred by a prohibition which is an element of the Name-of-the-Father. It is the father’s ‘no’, which forms the barrier against the Thing (towards which the airman is, unconsciously, driven) and not knowledge. As will be discussed it is in the absence of the ‘dead’ father as Name-of-the-Father that the very much alive and obscenely enjoying father appears, destroying the subject. 3

The Social versus a Deadly Solipsistic Enjoyment

In contrast with the other texts discussed so far, the story’s protagonist never becomes part of a group but remains a solitary figure cut off from society. The social linguistic world is contrasted with the airman’s solipsist fascination with the Thing, a recurring motif. Armstrong-Jones is described by the narrator as ‘a retiring man with dark moods, in which he would avoid the society of his fellows’.31 He has turned his back on the pleasures to be found within the fabric of social intercourse. During his first flight, he sees, in succession, a flock of birds and then a large white biplane, recording that:

29 30 31

Ibid., p. 98. Chiesa, personal communication. Conan Doyle, Tales, p. 86.

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It is deadly lonely in these cloud-spaces. Once a great flight of some small water-birds went past me, flying very fast to the westwards. The quick whirr of their wing and their musical cry were cheery to my ear. I fancy that they were teal, but I am a wretched zoologist. Now that we humans have become birds we must really learn to know our brethren by sight.32 The desire to name the bird arises from a sense of brotherhood with the birds (in contrast to the scientific practice of naming in The Lost World) and the relinquishment of human company and speech, which is replaced by the musical cry and the whirr. This brings us back to the airman’s aim of bringing back the proof of the existence of ‘strange, unknown argosies’,33 Challenger’s bringing back of the baby pterodactyl is a part of the scientific discourse (at least within the diegetic space of the novel) concerning the continuing existence of dinosaurs. The aim is to vindicate himself in the scientific community and, given the increasing prestige of science, in society generally. In contrast the airman’s evidence, the blob of jelly, would not have constituted anything recognisable which could have been included in a social discourse. Furthermore, the brotherhood with the birds suggests that the great advance in technological accomplishment has the effect of reducing the man to a bird like status as opposed to enhancing his human social and cultural capacity. The phrase ‘deadly lonely’ at the beginning of the passage brings to mind the human need for company. The story continues: The wind down beneath me whirled and swayed the broad cloud-plain. Once a great eddy formed in it, a whirlpool of vapour, and through it, as down a funnel, I caught sight of the distant world. A large white biplane was passing at a vast depth beneath me. I fancy it was the morning mail service betwixt Bristol and London. Then the drift swirled inwards again and the great solitude was unbroken.34 Given that in 1912, when the story was published, such an airmail service was only a figment of a writer’s imagination, its insertion is significant in that it would be maintaining exactly that linguistic communication between humans the pilot has turned his back on. The aircraft delivering mail is also a bi-plane, with room for another man in the cockpit. At the beginning of the story, ­Armstrong-Jones had said that his mechanic had ‘implored’ him to let 32 33 34

Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., p. 95. Ibid., p. 91.

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him come with him, which would have been possible, had he used his ­biplane, but he had preferred performance to human company: ‘I chose my Paul ­Veroner monoplane for the job. There’s nothing like a monoplane when real work is to be done’.35 In this context a further signification emerges in the listing of the oxygen mask amongst the safety items the airman takes. Immediately after Armstrong Jones explains his reason for using the monoplane instead of the bi-plane, he adds as if it followed on: ‘Of course, I took an oxygen bag; the man who goes for the altitude record without one will either be frozen or smothered – or both’.36 Besides being a precaution against an untimely death, the oxygen also serves as the means of a solipsist enjoyment, by-passing the symbolic and other people. When, on reaching a certain height, the airman becomes nauseous, he unscrews his bag and takes ‘an occasional whiff of the glorious gas’. He adds: ‘I could feel it running like a cordial through my veins, and I was exhilarated almost to the point of drunkenness. I shouted and sang as I soared upwards into the cold, still outer world’.37 The use of the oxygen to get a ‘high’ in the absence of more temperate social pleasures, is an example the use of direct chemical methods on the body such as drugs – substances enabling what Žižek calls ‘autistic enjoyment’.38 4

The Primal Father Who Enjoys

If, as I am arguing, all the literary works discussed in this book are characterised by the invention of a fantasy space where the primal father appears, in ‘The Horror of the Heights’, he can be identified as the purple monster which arrives as the airman is contemplating the beautiful Thing-creatures. The features of the monster suggest the same linkage as in She between the absence of the Name-of-the-Father and the re-emergence of the primal father figure. The new apparition is described as follows: It appeared to be hundreds of square feet in size. Though fashioned of some transparent, jelly-like substance, it was none the less of much more definite outline and solid consistence than anything which I had seen 35 Ibid., p. 89. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., p. 93. 38 Žižek, ‘Do We Still Live in a World?’ [accessed 12 July, 2012].

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before. There were more traces, too, of a physical organization, especially two vast, shadowy, circular plates upon either side, which may have been eyes, and a perfectly solid white projection between them which was as curved and cruel as the beak of a vulture.39 The more human features of the monster as compared to the fairy like creatures the airman had been contemplating, suggest a proto-human function. The ‘circular plates, which may have been eyes’ are what the airman will shortly experience as ‘the vague, goggling eyes which were turned always upon me were cold and merciless in their viscid hatred’.40 This look from a creature, as in the case of the whale Moby Dick in Herman Melville’s eponymous novel, has taken on, for one particular subject, a human intentionality.41 The monster also has upon it a number of marks suggestive of the primal father figure; what remerges in the absence of the Name-of-the-Father and phallic identification. The first is the solid white projection, ‘curved and cruel as the beak of a vulture’. This is the ‘unveiling of the phallus’, the mark, for Lacan of the undoing of the repression of the Thing as incestuous object. As Žižek explains, the revealed phallus is ‘the phallus which is not yet “sublated” (aufgehoben) in the signifier: the maternal phallus, the phallus qua sign of the incestuous link.’ This re-appearance of the phallic protrusion in front of the airman designates his subjective position; the failure of the voiding of that incestuous object, the Thing and its replacement by the phallus as signifier or in Žižek’s words, ‘phallic identification’. This is ‘the phallus qua signifier of desire, i.e., the paradox of identification with non-identity, with the gap which maintains the desire,’42 and which would have formed and maintained the airman’s 39 Ibid., p. 95. 40 Ibid., p. 96. 41 In Herman Melville’s novel, Moby Dick, Captain Ahab has similar thoughts in regard to the great white whale, Moby Dick. ‘All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event – in the living act, the undoubted deed – there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ‘tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him’. H. Melville, Moby Dick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 145. 42 Žižek, ‘Grimaces’, p. 58.

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desire for non-lethal, ‘everyday’ objects not excluding, as will be discussed, the possibility of a sexual relationship with a woman. A second feature of this monster is the enormous bubbles on its back, which the airman conjectures is a technical device keeping it afloat. There are ‘three great projections’ which he is convinced are ‘charged with some extremely light gas which served to buoy up the misshapen and semi-solid mass in the rarefied air’.43 These bubbles, however, could also be that ‘sprout of enjoyment’ belonging to the ‘anal father’. This term was coined by Žižek in place of the more common Freudian term primordial father in order to highlight ‘the obscene nature of the father qua pre-symbolic “partial object”’.44 In place of the dead father of the symbolic law, ‘Father-Enjoyment’ appears, whose licentious figure materialises this ‘certain excessive “sprout of enjoyment”’.45 As the ‘anal father’, the monster enters into an enraged rivalry with the airman, coming between him and his contemplation of the fairy like creatures. It ‘moved swiftly along, keeping pace easily with the monoplane, and for twenty miles or more it formed my horrible escort, hovering over me like a bird of prey which is waiting to pounce’.46 Eventually the two engage in a deadly dual combat: A long, gliding, sticky, serpent-like coil came from behind and caught me round the waist, dragging me out of the fuselage. I tore at it, my fingers sinking into the smooth, glue-like surface, and for an instant I disengaged myself, but only to be caught round the boot by another coil, which gave me a jerk that tilted me almost on to my back.47 For psychoanalysis there is a strict correlation between the enjoying father and a conflict with the son, which cannot be resolved. As was said in the Introduction, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century socially experiences the undermining of the traditional authority of the father, the symbolic covering, so to speak, which keeps from official view the obscene, primal-father-like side of any individual father. According to Žižek, the moment the obscenity comes into view, ‘the figure of paternal authority potentially turns into an obscene jouisseur […] in whom impotence and excessive rage coincide, a “humiliated 43 Conan Doyle, Tales, p. 96. 44 Ibid. 45 Žižek, ‘Grimaces’, p. 54. 46 Conan Doyle, Tales, p. 96. 47 Ibid.

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father” caught in imaginary rivalry with his son’.48 In this fictional case, the airman prevails by puncturing one of the air-bubbles with his shot gun, an outcome which can also be read symbolically as the deflation of that which materializes the obscene jouissance. The theme of the obscene father who enters into deadly conflict with those he considers his son-like rivals is presaged in the name given to another airman in the story, Lt. Myrtle RN. He disappeared on a flight while trying for the height record. ‘Horrible to narrate, his head was entirely obliterated, though his body and limbs preserved their configuration’.49 This headless pilot can be taken as an allusion to Myrtilus, Oenomaus’ charioteer (where one also has the analogy between chariot and airplane). Taking Apollodorus, Lucian and Pausanias as his sources, Robert Graves relates that Oenomaus competes for his daughter’s hand with all her suitors. ‘Whether he had been warned by an oracle that his son-in-law would kill him, or whether he had himself fallen in love with Hippodameia is disputed but Oenomaus devised a new way to prevent her from ever getting married’. Lt. Myrtle’s fate in his conflict with what must have been the monster (or monsters) can be likened to those of Hippodamieia’s suitors. ‘Oenomaus disposed of twelve or some say thirteen princes, whose heads and limbs he nailed above the gates of his palace, while their trunks were flung barbarously in a heap on the ground’.50 Coming between his daughter and her suitors, the obscene primal father is, as in the case of She – and as will be seen also of Dracula – the one who blocks the would-be sexual relationship. As Žižek writes: the phantom-like object which hinders a normal sexual relationship therefore is a paternal figure, yet not the father who was sublated ­[augehoben] in his Name, i.e., the dead-symbolic father, but the father who is still alive – father insofar as he is not yet ‘transubstantiated’ into a symbolic function and remains what psychoanalysis calls ‘a partial object’ [and which] renders impossible a viable, temperate relation with a woman.51 Thus we are reminded of the part played by She in destroying the ‘temperate relation’ between Leo and Ustane. In ‘The Horror of the Heights’, it seems that the subject of the heterosexual relationship never arises. There is no woman 48 Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 2000), p. 313. 49 Conan Doyle, Tales, p. 87. 50 Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (London: Penguin, 2012), p. 389. 51 Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom, pp. 159–160.

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in the story. Yet, as if somehow to remind the reader of her absence and any sexual relations with her, the airplane’s engine is gendered, a she, which ‘runs sweetly’.52 Furthermore, at one point in the flight the airman becomes anxious about the aircraft’s stays, in 1913 an unmistakably feminine item used to hold up stockings: ‘The wind was so severe that I looked with some anxiety at the stays of my wings expecting momentarily to see them snap or slacken fall that every cord and strut was humming and vibrating like so many harp-strings’.53 Although strictly a description of an early 20th century aeroplane, ‘the humming and vibrating like harp-strings’ evoke a sexual enjoyment with a woman which the return of the obscene primal father figure renders impossible. 5

The Return to the Greek Myths

The Lost World, it was argued, brings into question the assumption of the ­superiority of science and its rendering obsolete other aspects of human culture, a thesis expounded by Challenger. ‘The Horror of the Heights’, as was noted, rather than the pursuit of science for its own sake, has to do with technological advance and the use of science to overcome what seem to be man’s natural limitations. As the airman exclaims: ‘There is surely something divine in man himself that he should rise so superior to the limitations which ­Creation seemed to impose – rise, too, by such unselfish, heroic devotion as this airconquest has shown. Talk of human degeneration!’ He then asks rhetorically, ‘When has such a story as this been written in the annals of our race?’54 In contrast to a question concerning the airman’s technical achievements, where the answer is evidently never, ‘such a story’ qua literary text can be said to have already been written time and again. It is another version of classical Greek and Roman narratives which, as pointed out in the introduction to the chapter on She, bear upon the question of fatherhood. Two of the relevant stories have already been brought up, the first, that of Phaeton, who insists on Helios acceding to his wish to drive the Sun God’s chariot, as a means of demonstrating to him that the god really is his father, as his mother claims. As was argued, this story epitomises the lack of a Nameof-the-Father in both its senses of the ‘no’ and the ‘name’. The second is that of Oenomaus, a version of the obscene ‘anal father’ as opposed to the agent of the law. There are in addition, several other ancient Greek myths revolving around 52 53 54

Conan Doyle, Tales, pp. 89–90. Ibid., p. 92. Ibid., p. 92.

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the tale of the son who ascends too high into the sky by means of a ‘­technology’ and is destroyed. One is the myth of Icarus, who with wings made of wax by his father, flies too close to the sun despite the latter’s warning, causing the wings to melt and the son to plunge into the sea. Another is the story of ­Pentheus in Euripides’ play The Bacchae. The god Dionysus offers Pentheus a sight of the women’s orgies. Dionysus works a miracle, bending the highest branch of a tall pine like a bow and then slowly releasing it, so that Pentheus could climb up and get a better view of the Bacchants.55 As the messenger reports: ‘Sheer into the sheer sky it went, with my master riding on the top’.56 However, once ­Pentheus was at the top, Dionysus called his followers and showed them the man watching their orgies from the summit of the tree. The wild B ­ acchants, tore Pentheus down and ripped his body apart. ‘His body lies scattered … ­except for his poor head. His mother has it proudly in her grip’.57 In Conan Doyle’s story, there are two airmen (Baxter and ‘Verrier in France’), whose planes or parts of them are found but nothing of the bodies (without according to ArmstrongJones there being any convincing explanation)58 as well as Myrtle whose trunk is intact but whose head is missing. Thus in contrast to the unprecedented technological innovation of which the airman brags, ‘The Horror of the Height’ is an innovative version of an ‘old story’, repeating certain motifs of ‘climbing too high’, seeing things one should not and in the absence of the ’dead’ (devoid of enjoyment) father as agent of prohibition, the male protagonists’ physical destruction.

The Summons of the Real

The story’s anonymous narrator tellingly begins his story with the following words: ‘This world of ours appears to be separated by a slight and precarious margin of safety from a most singular and unexpected danger’.59 This, as far as he is concerned, refers to the monsters in the jungle, but in line with my interpretation of turn-of-the-century fantasy literature, it points to the inability of ‘this world of ours’, that is modernity (in this case epitomised by unprecedented technological advances), to set up a screen in front of the ‘summons of the real’ – the siren call of a solipsistic, obsessive enjoyment in the thrall of the 55 Euripides, The Bacche, trans. Michale Caoyannis (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 61. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., p. 64. 58 Conan Doyle, Tales, p. 88. 59 Ibid., p. 85.

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elusive Thing, even at the price of man’s destruction. The following novel H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, depicts the replacement of the Name-of-the-Father with that of science, as in The Lost World, and through such a means a similar attempt is made as in ‘The Horror of the Heights’ to obtain a unique enjoyment outside social ties. While in Conan Doyle’s story the lure of the jouissance of the Thing leads to the airman’s physical destruction, in The Invisible Man the promise of the exceptional position with its anticipated enjoyment soon evaporates leading to the reduction of the protagonist to the status of an animal hounded to his death. With the abandonment of the Name-of-theFather, Man’s most sublime technological advances uncannily go together with his return to bestiality.

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The Name-of-Science: The Invisible Man Introduction H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, published in 1897,1 begins with a mysteriouslooking man appearing at a guest house in a small village, Iping, in the middle of winter and asking for a room from the landlady, Mrs Hall. After a few weeks, he begins to fall into arrears with the rent. The vicarage is mysteriously robbed. When the man finally offers to pay the rent, Mrs Hall is suspicious. Angry, the man begins to cause mischief, exploiting the fact that, as it turns out, he is invisible. He escapes, after a fight where no one can see him. Eventually he reaches the house of Peter Kemp, who had been a fellow science student at the university. He tells Kemp, his name, Griffin and the whole story of how, as a teaching assistant at the university, he had discovered a means of making human tissue invisible except for the pigments. Being by chance an albino, he had, after a painful process, succeeded in making himself invisible – excepting any undigested food. Evidently, being an invisible man ought to have produced great opportunities for Griffin, but things did not work out the way he had imagined. His time in London had turned into a struggle to feed and clothe himself. On reaching Kemp’s house Griffin tries to recruit him, attempting to persuade him that two of them would be able to accomplish much more than he had been able to do alone, and that if people refused to obey they would establish a reign of terror. Kemp refuses and secretly calls the police. Griffin hearing noises downstairs and suspecting betrayal knocks down both Kemp and the detective, Colonel Adye, and runs away. The surrounding countryside is warned and everyone locks themselves into their house. The plan is to deprive the Invisible Man of any food or shelter. Large numbers of police and dogs are sent out. Despite the precautions a man is found murdered. Sometime later, Kemp receives a letter telling him that the new reign of terror has begun and that he, Kemp, will be executed as an example. Kemp sends for the police and Adye arrives. So does Griffin who tries to break into the house. Ayde goes out and tries to kill him with Kemp’s revolver but the Invisible Man gets hold of the revolver and, when the detective makes a move to get it back, shoots him. Two 1 H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man, ed. Patrick Parrinder (London: Penguin, 2005).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004336582_009 Josephine

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more policemen and the housemaid arrive. In the ensuing chaos, Kemp runs away with the Invisible Man in hot pursuit. As he reaches the town, people start noticing the strange sight of a man seemingly chased by no one. Kemp shouts: ‘The Invisible Man!’ so that eventually a group forms, some armed with implements such as spades. When Griffin catches up with Kemp and starts trying to kill him, the group bludgeons the invisible man to death. As he dies, his body starts to appear revealing an albino man of about thirty.

Invisible but Detectable

The invisibility of the hero is typically taken as a portrayal of the individual’s isolation in a modern, callous society. In his introduction to the Penguin edition, Christopher Priest suggests that one theme of Wells’ novel is that of ‘psychological invisibility’ of the ‘kind that might be felt or perceived on a social or personal level’ and which ‘has an intuitive truth for most people’. Priest adds that ‘many of us will easily recognize the feeling of unwitting invisibility when trying to catch the eye of a busy waiter or when lost in a crowd, one individual amongst an anonymous horde.’2 He links the novel’s title with that of Ralph ­Ellison’s The Invisible Man (1952) set in the segregated deep south of the United States, where blacks are seemingly invisible to whites. A similar point about social invisibility is made by Paul A. Cantor in contrasting traditional village life with the impersonality of London: In the small village of Iping, Griffin’s problem is that all eyes are upon him; everybody wants to butt into his business. His problem in London is just the opposite; in the big city he is completely ignored. In contrast to Iping, London is a thoroughly impersonal community, in which no one knows anybody else, or at least a man can be virtually unknown to his next-door neighbours. Wells seems to suggest that even without his fiendish experiments, Griffin would be in effect invisible in London.3 In Cantor’s reading this dual setting of the story of village and city is pivotal. Invisibility signifies the nothing man becomes in the modern city: 2 Christopher Priest, Introduction to The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells (London: Penguin, 2005), p. xx. 3 Paul A. Cantor ‘The Invisible Man and the Invisible Hand, H.G. Wells’ Critique of Capitalism,’ in Literature and the Economics of Liberty, ed. Paul Cantor and Stephen Cox (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2010), pp. 293–322 (p. 300).

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In the London section of the narrative, Griffin’s invisibility oddly comes to symbolize the weakness and vulnerability of modern man, the way he becomes a non-entity under the pressure of mass society, the way he gets lost in the shuffle of the urban crowd, turning into a sort of ‘nothingness’.4 It is urban isolation which according to another critic, Linda Dryden, leads to violence: ‘Wells explores how the individual can feel extreme isolation in the heart of the city, an alienation that leads to mindless acts of violence, born out of fear, frustration and arrogance.’5 1

The Invisible Man as Primal Father

My argument is that The Invisible Man should be included within the series of turn-of-the-century novels read as versions of Totem and Taboo. The invention of a fictional science making a man invisible enables the staging of the re-appearance of the primal father. While in the other fiction considered in this book a ‘blank’ space, devoid of all authority and law, was created on a map, remote and inaccessible, the setting in Wells’ novel is the familiar space of southern England and London. It is the device of invisibility which creates the fantasy space without leaving English shores. Griffin, as invisible, inhabits this extra-territorial space outside of the law, as he continually slips out of the hands of its representatives, most notably the police. As in Freud’s narrative, Griffin, the primal father, is killed by a group of men banding together. If, in Totem and Taboo, the primal father is murdered in order to establish a social community, in The Invisible Man he is slain once more in order to maintain it. My reading begins by pointing out it is important to note that invisibility, far from being imposed upon the hero, is actively sought by him. Nonetheless the anticipated ‘enjoyment’ to be had from such a status not only fails to materialize, but leaves Griffin struggling to provide for even his most basic biological needs. This use of scientific means (albeit fictional) to procure enjoyment will be seen in terms of the attempt to by-pass or avoid making use of the Name-of-the-Father, an interpretation supported by the insertion in the novel of the death of the invisible man’s real father. My discussion ends with a short analysis of one of Wells’ short stories, ‘The City of the Blind’, published in 1904, depicting ‘a seeing man in the city of the blind’, a phrase which appears in The 4 Ibid., p. 298. 5 Linda Dryden, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 171.

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Invisible Man, and where the man in an apparently all-powerful position will, in a similar manner, turn out to be the most abject outsider. 2

Invisibility and the Anonymity of the City

Even though the idea of invisibility and the anonymity of the big city are easily linked, this coupling fails to take into account the aims of the story’s protagonist. In Griffin’s case, invisibility was not something imposed by him by an ­indifferent society. On the contrary, he tried very hard to make himself invisible, going ‘to work – like a nigger’,6 putting in long evenings of research and undergoing great pain. ‘There were times when I sobbed and groaned and talked. But I stuck to it’.7 Moreover, the Invisible Man’s problem is just the opposite of that assumed by Cantor; even in the big city, he is not invisible enough. Despite, mostly, not being visible, he remains detectable. While in London, to his surprise, two sharp eyed street urchins suddenly notice his footprints in the snow: I looked down and saw the youngsters had stopped and were gaping at the muddy footmarks I had left behind me up the newly whitened steps. ‘There’s a barefoot man gone up them steps, or I don’t know nothing,’ said one. ‘And he ain’t never come down again. And his foot was a-bleeding.’ The thick of the crowd had already passed. ‘Looky there, Ted’, quoth the younger of the detectives, with the sharpness of surprise in his voice, and pointed straight to my feet. I looked down and saw at once the dim suggestion of their outline sketched in splashes of mud. For a moment I was paralysed.8 It turns out that dogs can smell him, whatever he does can be heard, including the involuntary action of sneezing, his body mass is felt by other bodies and both his undigested food and the clothes, he cannot do without in winter, are visible, The city does not ignore him. He is repeatedly detected and pursued. When he goes into a large department store to try to get clothes and food, he stresses the difficulties he encounters: ‘I did not feel safe there, however; people were going to and fro’. When, finally the store closes and the cleaners come with buckets of sawdust, he ‘had to dodge to get out of the way, and as it was,

6 Wells, Invisible Man, p. 89. 7 Ibid., p. 100. 8 Ibid., p. 105.

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my ankle got stung with the sawdust.’9 Even in the big city, indelible traces of his presence attract an unwanted attention. 3

Beyond the Law

To be invisible would, it must be assumed, put a person in a unique position of power and freedom. When Griffin first discovers the possibility of his becoming invisible he ‘beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that invisibility might mean to a man, the mystery, the power, the freedom’.10 In particular, Griffin equates invisibility with impunity. Recalling the first time he went into the world as an invisible man, he tells Kemp how he slipped the bolts of the front door quietly and went out into the street. I was invisible, and I was only just beginning to realize the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful things I had now impunity to do.11 Slipping the blots of the house can be read metaphorically as pertaining to the Law and social constraints. The Invisible Man imagines that he could be freed not only from the restrictions of Law but also the social inhibitions restraining a man who can be seen in the world. As he first steps out into the street as an Invisible Man, ‘his mood was one exaltation’ and he experiences ‘a wild impulse to jest, to startle people, to clap men on the back, fling people’s hats astray, and generally revel in my extraordinary advantage.12 There is a succession of incidents in the novel, where invisibility offers impunity to break the law or social norms and where society, in the form of some representative authority, tries in vain to capture him. I give two such examples. The first is the robbery of the vicar, Mr. Bunting, whose resolve to catch the burglar, on hearing the ‘chink of money’, and realising ‘that the robber had found the housekeeping reserve of gold’, is completely thwarted by the intruder’s invisibility. ‘Gripping the poker firmly, he rushed into the room, closely followed by Mrs. Bunting. “Surrender!” cried Mr. Bunting, fiercely, and then stopped amazed.’13 9 10 11 12 13

Ibid., p. 110. Ibid., p. 92. Ibid., p. 102 [Emphasis mine]. Ibid., p. 103. Ibid., p. 28.

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The second is when the law, in the form of the police constable, Mr Jaffers, equipped with a warrant and handcuffs, is called upon by the general public to arrest Griffin, after he has caused a severe breach of the peace. ‘Mr Hall marched up the steps, marched straight to the door of the parlour and flung it open. “Constable,” he said, “do your duty.”’14 The first of the constable’s problems however is that he cannot see Griffin’s invisible head. He decides however that a warrant applies to a body, even without a head: ‘”You’re a damned rum customer, mister,” said Mr Jaffers. “But ‘ed [head] or no ‘ed, the warrant says ‘body’, and duty’s duty –”’.15 Then the handcuffs are rendered useless by the fact that no arms are visible: ‘“I say!” said Jaffers, brought up short by a dim realisation of the incongruity of the whole business. “Darm it! Can’t use ‘em as I can see”’.16 Yet to be beyond the reach of the law will also turn out to be beyond its protection. The invisible man’s fate mirrors that of the primal father in Totem and Taboo, killed collectively by the band of brothers, before there is Law (and human culture tout court). Moreover in a further parallel with Freud’s myth, it is made clear that the group accomplishes what one man, Kemp, the invisible man’s first opponent, was unable to do alone. Freud writes of the brothers that ‘together they dared and accomplished what would have remained impossible for them singly.’17 Kemp, alone, can only try to escape from the Invisible Man. There is a scene where Kemp, chased by Griffin, desperately tries to get shelter from the neighbour by tapping on his window: ‘You can’t come in’ said Mr Heelas, shutting the bolts. ‘I’m very sorry if he’s after you, but you can’t come in!’ Kemp appeared with a face of terror close to the glass, rapping and then shaking frantically at the French window. Then, seeing his efforts are useless, he ran along the veranda, vaulted the end, and went to hammer at the side door. Then he ran round by the side gate to the front of the house, and so into the hill-road.18 Kemp has to get help from others. Running into the main street of the town, he cries to some navvies: ‘The Invisible Man!’ and ‘by an inspiration leapt the 14 Ibid., p. 38. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., p. 39. 17 Freud, ‘Totem and Taboo’, p. 915. 18 Wells, Invisible Man, p. 144.

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excavation and placed a burly group between him and the chase’.19 It is only when enough people come together that the Invisible Man can be killed: ‘Kemp suddenly grasped the altered condition of the chase. He stopped and looked round, panting. ‘“He’s close here!” he cried. “Form a line across”’.20 ­Griffin catches up with Kemp and the two begin to struggle. About to be crushed or strangled, Kemp is saved by a labourer who had joined the group wrestling with the invisible man: In another moment a knee compressed his diaphragm, and a couple of eager hands gripped his throat, but the grip of one was weaker than the other; he grasped the wrists, heard a cry of pain from his assailant, and then the spade of the navvy came whirling through the air above him, and struck something with a dull thud.21 The whole chase is bracketed by the disappearance and the reappearance of the police, symbolizing the annulment of the Law in the presence of the primal father. It begins with Griffin shooting the detective, Adye, who falling prostrate on the ground is put out of action, and continues with him running after Kemp on foot like two animals. Human culture has been exited. As Lacan writes of the primal father, he ‘is the father from before the incest taboo, before the appearance of the Law, of the structures of marriage and kinship in a word, of culture’.22 That Kemp does not make use of a police station he passes by is noted in the story, another indication that for the duration of the chase the law remains inoperative. Then abandoning the idea of the police station he turned into a little side street, rushed by a greengrocer’s cart, hesitated for the tenth of a second at the door of a sweetstuff shop, and then made for the mouth of an alley that ran back into the main Hill Street again.23 It is only when the primal father dies and the body of Griffin is minimally reinscribed into the symbolic (‘there lay, naked and pitiful on the ground, the bruised and broken body of a young man about 30’),24 that the law re-appears: 19 Ibid., p. 145. 20 Ibid., p. 146. 21 Ibid. 22 Lacan, ‘Introduction to the Names-of-the-Father Seminar’, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, O ­ ctober, 40 (1987), 81–95 (p. 88). 23 Wells, Invisible Man, pp. 145–146. [My emphasis]. 24 Ibid., p. 148.

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‘”Hullo!” cried the constable, “Here’s his feet a-showing!”’.25 In The Lost World a policeman is also used to demonstrate the incompatibility of the Law and the primal father, when Malone and Challenger re-enter the house together, after their fight, the butler closes the door on the constable left standing outside. 4

The Impossibility of a ‘Special, Solitary Enjoyment’

In the beginning it is clear to Griffin that invisibility would mean that absolved from those rules and regulations binding everyone else, he would, from this advantageous position, still be free to partake of whatever society offered. As he tells Kemp in retrospect, he elaborates ‘plans for the complete realization of the advantages my invisibility gave me (as I still imagined) over my fellowmen’.26 Yet, about half way through the novel, it turns out that Griffin needs help from another human. He finds Thomas Marvel, a tramp, by the wayside. ‘Help me – and I will do great things for you. An invisible man is a man of power’. He stopped for a moment to sneeze violently. ‘But if you betray me,’ he said, ‘if you fail to do as I direct you’ – He paused and tapped Mr Marvel’s shoulder smartly27 That an invisible man is a man of power is undercut through its being asserted as part of demand for help and the violent sneeze that interrupts its enunciation. It is further undermined by the broaching of possibility of betrayal (which is what will occur) and the inability, represented in the dash, to complete the sentence. This ellipsis is indicative of the fact (which it also foreshadows) that actually there is nothing which the supposedly all-powerful invisible man will be able to do to prevent betrayal. The sneeze interrupting Griffin’s speech exemplifies the conundrum which will be his undoing. This is the conjunction of, on the one hand, Griffin’s desire to gain some sort of advantage in society and, on the other, his being tethered to nature through his embodiment. The novel shows that it is man’s belonging exclusively neither to culture nor biology that lies at the root of the hero’s problems. In the London scenes, nature, in the form of the climate and civilization both play a role: ‘The more I thought it over, Kemp, the more I realised what a helpless absurdity an Invisible Man was – in a cold and dirty climate and a 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., p. 109. 27 Ibid., p. 48.

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crowded civilised city.’28 It is not by chance the novel is set in winter underscoring the biological necessity of keeping worm. The Invisible Man’s need for food, warmth and shelter, press for immediate fulfilment and end up torpedoing his other more vaguely defined plans to do with society. The recurrent sneezing hence becomes significant. Cold from being unable to wear clothes, the sneezing, undermines the invisible man’s ‘cover’ of invisibility. Throughout his stay in London, bodily needs predominate, while his desire cannot be reduced to such an imperative. Biology could have been satisfied by foraging and furs but this would have left Griffin excluded from society, which was not his intention. As noted, Griffin has dreamt of ‘a thousand advantages’, things ‘a man reckons desirable’;29 albeit that, as will be seen when I raise the question of the invisible man’s desire, it never becomes entirely clear what these things would be. The scene at the London restaurant demonstrates this intersection between the social and culture. A restaurant fulfils both the biological necessity of putting food into one’s stomach and a social function, pertaining to a desire for company and for food and drink answering to predilections beyond mere biological need. Griffin, having stolen some money, decides he would like a good meal in a restaurant. He goes in and has just ordered ‘when it occurred to me that I could not eat unless I exposed my invisible face. I finished ordering the lunch, told the man I should be back in ten minutes, and went out exasperated’.30 Griffin cannot eat because in drawing back the covering from his face in order to put the food into his mouth, the fact that his face is invisible will become visible. This will cause consternation and even panic in anyone seeing nothing where there should have been something. Hence, while invisibility enables Griffin to procure the means of obtaining the meal, the stolen money, it prevents him from enjoying it. Thus, thwarted, he goes to a second restaurant where he asks for a private room. ‘At last, faint with the desire for tasteful food, I went into another place and demanded a private room […] and so at last I got my lunch. It was not particularly well served, but it sufficed’.31 It is clearly shown that Griffin had wanted something more than the mere filling of his stomach, ‘tasteful food’, produced by means of a cultural skill and served to him by another person. Moreover, the retreat into a private room demonstrates how his invisibility is driving him out of society which is not what he had intended.

28 Ibid., p. 121 [my emphasis]. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid.

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This episode indicates that a critic’s question and answer as to why Griffin did not make himself invisible clothes and food are misplaced. In his book, Is Heathcliff a Murderer? Puzzles in Nineteenth-century Fiction, John Sutherland claims that the science of the novel allows for the making of an invisible suit of clothes and so one of the great puzzles is why the invisible man did not do so. Sutherland solves his puzzle by ascribing the omission to a mental aberration. ‘Griffin in his maniac delusions of divine superiority despises humanity’ and as a result ‘needs trousers no more than Jove or Satan’.32 The restaurant scene, however, demonstrates that an invisible suit would not have solved Griffin’s problems given that his desires exceed the fulfilment of biological needs. An invisible man cannot order a meal in a restaurant. He cannot be just a voice at a table coming from nowhere. Hence, far from Sutherland’s invisible suit, what he actually needs are the clothes everyone else is wearing: ‘My idea was to procure clothing to make myself a muffled but acceptable figure’.33 However, once clothed he is of course no longer invisible, so that he ends up in a ‘catch-22’ situation. Griffin tries to break the impasse by alternating between being clothed and being invisible. Invisible, he can procure means, dressed once more, he could transform them into an enjoyment going beyond the satisfaction of biological needs. The faceless man sitting in the restaurant, however, epitomizes the failure of this arrangement. The problem is that as Lacan’s reading of Totem and Taboo indicates the transition from nature to culture is characterised by an aporia or impossibility. It cannot be conceived as direct or autonomous. The scene in the large department store, the Emporium shows the invisible man’s failure to effect the transition back again into culture (as a clothed man) after, so to speak, exiting it. Cold, tired and hungry, the invisible Griffin sneaks into this relatively new kind of shop, a modern department store, stacked with everything one might need (and more). He ends up the next morning being chased by the employees opening the shop, having, in order to effect his escape, to strip off and abandon all the clothes he had meant to acquire. ‘The insurmountable difficulty of the place, especially now it was alarmed, was to get any plunder out of it.’ He tries to use a mechanism of culture, the postal system in order to re-cross this barrier, to get back into culture from nature, but from his extraneous position, cannot. ‘I went down into the warehouse to see if there was any chance of packing and addressing a parcel, but I could not understand the system of checking.’ Thus what the novel is signalling is the failure to effect a direct autonomous transition from nature 32

John Sutherland, Is Heathcliff a Murderer? Puzzles in Nineteenth-century Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 231. 33 Wells, Invisible Man, p. 109.

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to culture.34 At the end of the chapter, Griffin remains excluded from culture, chased out naked once more into the street. A further point which can be made in regard to Sutherland’s puzzle is that it is made very clear that the science in the novel does not allow for invisible food or clothes. Griffin’s discovers it is possible to make uncoloured animal tissue transparent and hence invisible but not the pigments. If it were not for his being an albino he could not have made himself invisible.35 This apparent technical point should not be overlooked since it makes sense. The fact that, as soon as stolen food is eaten or clothes are put on, the thief becomes detectable could be said to constitute one of the morals of the story. In this way, Wells’ fiction anticipates what will be explicitly articulated more than thirty years later by Freud. As he contended in his book, Civilization and Its Discontents, published in 1929, any human has to renounce a part of his freedoms and enjoyments (‘instinctual renunciation’) as dues for belonging to society: Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as ‘right’ in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as ‘brute force’. This replacement of the power of the ­individual by the power of a community constitutes the decisive step of civilization. The essence of it lies in the fact that the members of the community restrict themselves in their possibilities of satisfaction, whereas the individual knew no such restrictions.36 It is as if the science of the novel, invented by its author, supports the contention that Griffin cannot maintain his position of simultaneously partaking of society – its products and pleasures such as a good restaurant meal, well cooked and served or even, as will be discussed below, the ‘love of a woman’37 – without 34

This conforms what Žižek will theorize as the existence of a mediator in the entry into culture, that is something from outside to intervene which then disappears, ‘a vanishing mediator’: ‘The key point is thus that the passage from “nature” to “culture” is not direct, that one cannot account of it within a continuous evolutionary narrative: something has to intervene between the two, a kind of “vanishing mediator” which is neither Nature nor Culture – this in-between is silently presupposed in all evolutionary narratives.’ Ticklish Subject, p. 36. 35 Ibid., p. 62. 36 Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey, Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010) p. 73. [emphasis mine]. 37 Wells, Invisible Man, p. 121.

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being bound by its restrictions. In other words he cannot have his cake and eat it. Moreover, what Wells’ novel indicates is that any possibility of enjoyment is generated by society, possibility and restriction being inextricably bound up with one another. Luke Thurston makes this point in regard to the almost contemporaneous novella published by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1886, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Stevenson’s novella employs a literary device similar to invisibility; a chemical potion which turns Dr. Jekyll into Mr Hyde and back again as required. As Mr Hyde, Jekyll can do as he ­wishes, giving all his instinctual satisfactions free reign – as demonstrated in the story by the example of wanton, impulsive murder – then turning back into Dr Jekyll, leaving police and ‘society’ in general baffled. There appears the ­potential of, in Thurston’s phrase, a ‘sea of liberty’,38 resembling what Griffin assumes he will attain through being invisible. Think of it – I did not even exist! Let me but escape into my laboratory door, give me but a second to mix and swallow the draught that I had always standing ready; and whatever he had done, Edward Hyde would pass away like the stain of breath upon a mirror; and there in his stead, quietly at home, trimming the midnight lamp in his study, a man who could afford to laugh at suspicion, would be Henry Jekyll.39 However, as Thurston points out, ‘this unchecked enjoyment is precisely […] what can find no place in reality’.40 Jekyll becomes unable to assume or subjectivise the enjoyment he experiences as Hyde and so to speak, enjoy it. He begins to speak of Hyde as another person. ‘He, I say – I cannot say, I. That child of Hell had nothing human’. In fact the ‘I’ that is Jeckyll awakens as Hyde ‘into a jouissance devoid of subjective meaning’, so that this ‘“I” loses control to a character that is finally revealed as imply “it” or id, an anamorphic libidinal stain’.41 Moreover the novella demonstrates the dependency of the human subject on social ties. As he turns into Hyde, Jekyll says: ‘I began to be aware of a change in the temper of my thoughts, a greater boldness, a contempt of 38

Luke Thurston, James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 122. 39 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, ed. J. Calder (London: Penguin, 1979), p. 86. 40 Thurston, James Joyce, p. 122. 41 Ibid., p. 123. The name Jekyll, as Thurston points out, may be a pun using the French je (I) so that we get ‘killer of the I’. Ibid., p. 120.

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danger, a dissolution of the bonds of obligation’, a similar feeling to Griffin’s. So, writes Thurston: ‘Jekyll’s “solution”, in yet another of its senses, serves to dissolve “the bonds of obligation” through the use of the potion which no longer makes him liable or obligated to anyone’. Yet the word ‘obligation’ is already rooted etymologically in the Latin ligure, ‘to bind’, so that the phrase ‘bonds of obligation’ becomes a tautology (‘bonds of binding’) indicating for Thurston the nonsensical kernel of being a subject outside social ties.42 In Wells’ The Invisible Man, what might be obtained (or even desired) through being invisible is never named, suggesting, rather than a limit to the imagination of the novelist, that such a thing does not and cannot exist. In what appears a merely comic epilogue, it turns out that Thomas Marvel, the tramp Griffin had tried to recruit, has managed to hang on to Griffin’s manuscripts and is now in possession of the secret of becoming invisible. The narrator reveals that every night and Sunday morning the landlord of an inn called ‘The Invisible Man’, retires into his bar parlour with a glass of gin and, locking the door, takes out the manuscript: ‘“Full of secrets,” he says. “Wonderful secrets! Once I get the haul of them – Lord! I wouldn’t do what he did; I’d just – well!”’.43 Invisibility appears to promise a great deal, yet the villager is unable to put it into words. His speech recalls Griffin’s when he discovers he can make himself invisible: ‘And I, a shabby, poverty-struck, hemmed-in demonstrator, teaching fools in a provincial college, might suddenly become – this’.44 The hyphens before the ‘this’ and the ‘well’ indicate a snag, an impediment, and end up standing in for the missing description of what might be achieved as an Invisible Man. The hiatus is finally only filled in by the non-descriptive ‘this’ or ‘well’, completing the sentence on the syntactical level but not the semantic. The villager at least knows a bit more– that he would not do what the first Invisible Man did, as he eventually got killed, but what he would do instead remains ‘ – well’, undefined. The inability of both Griffin and the villager to articulate what invisibility could bring suggests the true nature of this position; an illusion that there could be a special condition which, in exempting its occupier from society and its law, opens up access to some kind of extraordinary and wonderful opportunities. Wells’ novel further suggests that an enjoyment outside the bonds and obligations of society is a fancy brought about from an inability of both Griffin and Marvel to partake of that enjoyment which society does secrete. In other words, their illusions stem from a deficit in enjoyment they imagine exists for 42 Ibid., p. 122. 43 Wells, Invisible Man, p. 150. 44 Ibid., p. 92.

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others. Griffin is the ‘shabby, poverty-struck, hemmed-in demonstrator’ in the class ridden society of late nineteenth century Britain, who perhaps feels that somehow, the other students from wealthier and more prestigious homes, are enjoying instead of him. Using science he tries to acquire some of this enjoyment for himself. Likewise the landlord of the inn, also bedazzled by the prospects harbingered in Griffin’s manuscripts, appears to have failed to find his enjoyment in society, either sexual or in fellowship. He tries to horde an autonomous and hence non-existent enjoyment. Even after he is no longer a tramp, having bought the inn with Griffin’s stolen money, he remains ‘a b­ achelor man – his tastes were ever bachelor’. Quite explicitly, there are ‘no women folk in the house’. He also remains a miser, one whose enjoyment is to horde rather than exchange and share: ‘Outwardly he buttons – it is expected of him – but in his more vital privacies, in the matter of braces for example, he still turns to string’ giving him a ‘reputation for wisdom and for a respectable parsimony in the village’. As with Griffin, he intends to keep the secret to himself: he denies he has the books to all investigators and when he takes them out ‘he locks the door and examines the blinds, and even looks under the table’. Only when ‘satisfied of his solitude’ does he unlock the cupboard.’45 5

The Cancellation of the Name-of-the-Father

In The Invisible Man, the primal father figure emerges, as in The Lost World and She, with the dissolution or abdication of the ‘normal’ everyday father. In Conan Doyle’s novel the ‘leave-taking’ of the father in the first paragraph leads Malone to the ‘father of science’ who in turn will usher him into that pre-symbolic, lawless space, the plateau, where the ape-men appear. In She it is the father’s bequest which propels the son towards the primal father figure, She. In The Invisible Man, the protagonist, repudiating his actual father, creates by means of his science the equivalent of that space formed by means of geography, the plateau and the land of the Amahaggers (the ‘science’ and the ‘geography’ being in both cases fictional). In the wake of Griffin’s rejection of his father, one sees, albeit in a brief, almost cameo scene, the abrogation of the sexual relationship, paralleling the more obvious failure of the heterosexual relationship in The Lost World and She. It is as if, in Lacan’s terms, Griffin cancels his subscription to the ‘nameof-the-father’ and turns instead to science. He had, as he tells Kemp, run out of money to further his scientific experiments. He stole money from his father 45

Ibid., pp. 149–150.

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who committed suicide. (‘I robbed the old man – robbed my father. The money was not his, and he shot himself’).46 Undaunted and showing no remorse, ­Griffin had carried on with his science. He went to his father’s funeral only, as he puts it, ‘because society demands it – the cant’, but he as being ‘none of his affair’. After the funeral Griffin claims that ‘re-entering my room seemed like the recovery of reality. There were the things I knew and loved. There stood the apparatus, the experiments arranged and waiting’.47 For Lacan it is the apparatus of the Name-of-the-Father which produces reality: the resolution of ‘the Oedipus complex turns out, in analytic experience, to be capable […] of normally constituting the sense of reality’.48 In Griffin’s case it is science which restores reality. An incident during Griffin’s return from his father’s funeral indicates that the subscription to science cannot uphold the sexual desire for a woman in contrast, according to Lacan, to the Name-of-the-Father. On his way back, ­Griffin’s ‘old life came back to me for a space, for I met the girl I had known ten years since. Our eyes met. Something moved me to turn back and talk to her. She was a very ordinary person’.49 The phrase ‘I had known’ (perhaps in the biblical sense) suggests that ‘something’ is a previous sexual interest, causing him to turn back and talk to her, but now, after the break with the father, she is now turned into a ‘very ordinary person’. She is no longer an object of sexual attraction. The juxtaposition of his father’s funeral not being his affair, to be replaced by science, and the switch in the status of the girl in his eyes from special to ordinary suggests that ‘the name of science’ cannot uphold sexual desire. Thus, the insertion of the Invisible Man’s father into the story, his death and funeral, can justly be interpreted through the prism of Lacan’s linkage of the function of the father and sexual desire. 6

The Impossible Existence

The significance of Griffin’s rejection of his father is heightened by the dream he has about the funeral. This dream once again stages the impossible status of the invisible man. In the scene in the department store, Griffin finally, after his trials, finds some physical comfort; well fed, warm and comfortable, he falls

46 Ibid., p. 93. 47 Ibid., p. 95. 48 Lacan, ‘Presentation on Psychical Causality’ in Ecrits, pp. 82–101 (p. 149). 49 Wells, Invisible Man, p. 95.

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asleep in a very cosy bed. It is then he has a nightmare about being buried alive with his father: ‘You also,’ said a voice, and suddenly I was being forced towards the grave. I struggled, shouted, appealed to the mourners, but they continued stonily following the service; the old clergyman, too, never faltered droning and sniffing through the ritual. I realised I was invisible and inaudible, that overwhelming forces had their grip on me. I struggled in vain, I was forced over the brink, the coffin rang hollow as I fell upon it, and the gravel came flying after me in spadefuls.50 Nobody heeded me, nobody was aware of me. I made convulsive struggles and awoke.51 In this dream there is staged the same impossible status that applies in reality. On the one hand he is invisible and inaudible (‘nobody is aware of me’), but on the other he is spoken to and forced towards his father’s grave. He struggles desperately but to no avail. His only escape is to awake into reality (that of the novel) where he can continue to dream about what he could do as an invisible man. Yet as we see in the action that frames this nightmare, his is an unrealizable day dream (the truth of which is staged in the nightmare). Here, I return to that same scene in the emporium already described as depicting the unattainable direct transition from nature to culture. Before Griffin went to sleep he had gone ‘to the clothing place and got trousers, a lounge jacket, an overcoat and a slouch hat – a clerical sort of hat with the brim turned down’. By this means he had ‘began to feel a human being again’. Yet, when he awakes from his sleep he is detected and chased by the shop assistants so that he has to strip as quickly as possible. ‘Coat, jacket, trousers, shoes were all right, but a lambswool vest fits a man like a skin’.52 Before he manages to revert to his naked state, ­Griffin ends up having to ‘make another dash for it, like a rabbit hunted out of a wood-pile’.53 Thus, as was noted in the previous discussion of this scene the attempt to regain his place in culture fails, Griffin becoming the equivalent of a ‘hunted rabbit’. The point to be added here is that when he succeeds in becoming invisible again, it is only to attain that same contradictory status as in the dream. When he finally gets out of the last item of clothing, the lambs-wool 50

The Invisible Man will at the end of the novel be killed by a blow with a spade from a navy (Ibid., p. 146). 51 Ibid., p. 111. 52 Ibid., p. 112. 53 Ibid.

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vest (already a lexical marker of the descent back to the world of nature) he enters, invisible, the refreshment room. ‘In a little while two assistants came in and began to talk over the business very excitedly and like the fools they were, I heard a magnified account of my depredations, and other speculations as to my whereabouts’.54 Thus, on the one hand, the invisible man does exist in that the two shop assistants are talking about him (in the dream he’s being spoken to by the voice imputes his existence) yet on the other hand, because he is actually there, yet nonetheless, being spoken of as if he were not, (the assistants speculating about his whereabouts whereas he is right there with them) his existence does not count, does not, so to speak, exist (as in the dream where, remaining inaudible and invisible, he is buried with his dead father). Lacan’s formula for male sexuation gives us another angle for viewing this position of an impossible existence. The invisible man is the one, who if he existed, would be in the position of the one exception, not subject to the Nameof-the Father. This would be that of the one man not submitted to the phallic function, in other words, the primal father. The phallic function is the corollary of the Name-of-the-Father, producing phallic signification. In Lacan’s formulas of human sexuation there are two sides, a male and a female. ‘Every speaking being situates itself on one side or the other’,55 that is, every subject cannot but _ be sexuated. On the male side there are two formulas (i) ∃x ​ ϕ ​x  and (ii) ∀x Φx which pertain to all speaking beings situating themselves on this side, whether biologically male or female. In Lacan’s words: ‘∀x Φx indicates that it is through the phallic function that man as a whole acquires his inscription, with the proviso that this function is limited _ due to the existence of an x by which the function ∀x Φx is negated: ∃x ​ ϕ ​​x  .’56 Lacan’s claim is that it is only on the male side that the phallic function is grounded by an exception, the primal father, who is not submitted to the phallic function. Like Griffin, the primal father has an anomalous status as to his existence; although he exists in the formula, to be spoken of, he could not actually exist as a human subject, given that, for example, he or she would not be sexuated. Interestingly, the fact it is only on the male side that sexuation is grounded on an exception suggests the phantasy of an invisible man would be a specifically male one, giving an underlying logic to it being an invisible man and not an invisible woman. The impasse of the position of the primal father is that, if he existed, he would end up having nothing, because he would want nothing, in both the senses of to lack and to wish for. The phallic function to which all men are 54 Ibid., p. 113. 55 Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, p. 79. 56 Ibid., p. 78.

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s­ubmitted apart from the exception, the primal father, excludes the object which would have brought full satisfaction or jouissance and so produces instead an endless search for objects in reality as a stand in for the missing object. In other words, the phallic function generates desire. Conversely, its renunciation entails an indifference to all possible substitute objects. This is what happens in the novel to Griffin, (also recalling the situation of the airman in Conan Doyle’s story, outside the phallic function which would have set up his desire for non-lethal, ‘everyday’ objects). Thus, when Griffin speaks of his profound disappointment at the lack of advantages his invisibility brings him, this stems from two elements: the first that enjoyment, as noted, depends on society and is not to be found apart from it, and the second, that he has ‘no taste’, or no desire anymore for the sorts of things a man might have wanted. Griffin tells Kemps that Before I made this mad experiment I had dreamt of a thousand advantages. That afternoon it seemed all disappointment. I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable. No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they are got. Ambition – what is the good of pride of place when you cannot appear there. What is the good of the love of woman when her name must needs be Delilah? I have no taste for politics, for the blackguardisms of fame, for philanthropy, for sport.57 In the attempt to occupy the position of the exception, Griffin is ultimately reduced to the level of animal needs, as opposed to human desires for something beyond the biological, and is thereby reduced to the status of primal father qua animal. In the emporium, the invisible man, forced to strip off his clothes, becomes the rabbit chased from the woodpile. Indeed when he first enters the shop the evening before the chase, he will describe himself later to Kemp in terms of a foraging beast: ‘I left my lair as the crowds diminished, and prowled cautiously out into the less desolate parts of the shop’.58 Underlining the contrast between animal need and human desire is the use of the Emporium in the novel, a place catering to the multiplicity of human desires and not strictly necessary pleasures. As Griffin describes it to Kemp it is ‘the big establishment where everything is to be bought – you know the place: meat, grocery, linen, furniture, clothing, oil paintings even’.59 It also includes ‘a department where 57 Wells, Invisible Man, p. 121. 58 Ibid., p. 109. [my emphasis]. 59 Ibid., p. 108.

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they were selling ribbons and gloves and stockings and that kind of thing’ and ‘a more spacious region devoted to picnic baskets and wicker furniture’.60 This last phrase, as in the case of the restaurant recalls the social aspect of eating, evoking an aesthetic setting and pleasant company (of the upper-class sort from which Griffin would have been excluded). The allusion the novel makes to the biblical story of Samson, through the name Delilah, can also be read in relation to Griffin’s attempt to occupy the ­position of the One on the male side of Lacan’s formula. Samson too is the exception, but only as long as the secret of his long hair remains unknown. This is also the case with the Invisible Man who remains powerful as long as his existence remains a secret. As soon as it is known that he exists, in that, for example, stories about him start appearing in the newspapers, he is in trouble. The freedom from the law ‘thou shalt not kill’ becomes an infinitely more ­burdensome one of ‘thou must kill’ and ‘kill again’. As Griffin explains to Kemp: ‘The point is they know there is an Invisible Man – as well as we know there is an Invisible Man’. In consequence, ‘that Invisible Man, Kemp, must now establish a Reign of Terror’, and ‘all who disobey his orders he must kill, and kill all who would defend the disobedient.’61 Thus, what appears at first to the Invisible Man as an impunity becomes a necessity and no longer an option. He will either be killed or must kill until everyone obeys him – a position reminiscent of that of Freud’s primal father before whom the sons stood in awe. Until then he cannot even have one woman without her knowing he exists, in which case, like Delilah in the biblical story, she cannot be trusted to keep his secret. Indeed, he is overall in an impossible situation, in that on the one hand he is only safe in so far as no one believes in his existence, the question then arising as to whether he can be said to exist at all. He will be as in his dream, inaudible and invisible, as good as dead and buried. Yet on the other hand, once his existence is known he would have to be killed given that the existence of the primal father or the one trying to take his position is irreconcilable with human civilization and culture. 7

‘In the Country of the Blind the One-eyed Man is King’

In The Invisible Man, there is a society of sighted people and the one exception who cannot be seen. Wells was afterwards to publish a short story The Country

60 Ibid., pp. 108–109. 61 Ibid., p. 125.

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of the Blind (1904), depicting so to speak the novel’s mirror image: a ­community of a blind people and one sighted man. In the novel, Griffin describes how he felt on first stepping out an invisible man into the street ‘as a seeing man might do, with padded feet and noiseless clothes, in a city of the blind’.62 Yet, in the later story, as in the case of the novel, the seemingly powerful, exceptional man will turn out to be the most wretched of outsiders. Moreover, the short story can in general be seen to contain the characteristic elements of the narratives discussed in this book: the discovery of a remote land cut off from the rest of civilization (‘Long years ago that valley lay so far open to the world that men might come at last through frightful gorges and over an icy pass’ but then ‘a whole side of the old Arauca crest slipped and came down in thunder, and cut off the Country of the Blind for ever from the exploring feet of men’),63 the traveler who manages to reach it after an incredible journey (‘he fell a thousand feet, and came down in the midst of a cloud of snow upon a snow-slope’)64 the encounter with an ‘impossible’ community (there is not one sighted man among them), and the failure of the would-be sexual relationship. The plot of the shorts story consists of a mountain climber, Nunez who after a miraculous fall, discovers an unknown valley and an isolated people who have for several generations been born blind but still manage to maintain their society. Settling in amongst them, he keeps repeating to himself the refrain, ‘In the Country of the Blind the One-eyed Man is King’,65 an idiom meaning that even a man of limited abilities can be the leader of the less endowed. Yet the people over whom he would rule do not accept his claims, based on his not being blind like them. For them sight is something that simply does not exist. ‘Has no one told you, “In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King?”’ ‘What is blind?’ asked the blind man, carelessly, over his shoulder.66 Attempting to prove his superior position, first by telling them of all the things he can see (which prove to be of little interest to them) and then frustration resorting to violence to demonstrate his power over them, Nunez is overwhelmed by the blind men grouping together in a scene reminiscent of The Invisible Man. 62 Ibid., p. 103. 63 Wells, The Country of the Blind and Other Stories (Charleston, BiblioBazaar, 2006), p. 393. 64 Ibid., p. 396. 65 Ibid., p. 399. 66 Ibid., p. 404.

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Far away he saw a number of men carrying spades and sticks come out of the street of houses and advance in a spreading line along the several paths towards him. They advanced slowly, speaking frequently to one another, and ever and again the whole cordon would halt and sniff the air and listen.67 Nunez, more and more frightened, escapes from the walled village, barely managing to evade the cordon. After two days without food and water, he repents (‘I was mad’)68 and is re-admitted in society, agreeing to renounce his exceptional position and live as one of them. He falls in love with one of the women, who returns his affection. Her father, Yacob also agrees, but the elders of the society refuse to give their consent unless Nunez agrees to have his eyes removed. It is this ‘operation’ which will make Nunez ‘sane’, as the doctor explains to Yacob in the following dialogue: ‘I think I may say with reasonable certainty that, in order to cure him complete, all that we need to do is a simple and easy surgical operation – namely, to remove these irritant bodies.’ ‘And then he will be sane?’ ‘Then he will be perfectly sane, and a quite admirable citizen.’ ‘Thank Heaven for science!’ said old Yacob, and went forth at once to tell Nunez of his happy hopes.69 Nunez hesitates at first agreeing to the operation but then reneges, choosing instead to retain his sight, for the sake of the beautiful things he can see and the hope of returning home. ‘It seemed to him that before this splendour he and this blind world in the valley, and his love and all, were no more than a pit of sin’.70 This outline and the enigmatic ending suggest the same attempt as in The Invisible Man to occupy, in Lacan’s formulae of sexuation the position of the exception on the male side, the one who is not castrated. One should here take into account the equivalence Freud maintains between the dread of being blinded and that of castration when he writes that ‘a study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that a morbid anxiety connected with the eyes and with going blind is often enough a substitute for the dread of castration’.71 67 Ibid., p. 407. 68 Ibid,, p. 409. 69 Ibid., p. 412. 70 Ibid., p. 414. 71 Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’ in On Creativity and the Unconscious, ed. by Benjamin Nelson (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), pp. 122–161 (p. 137). Freud writes that ‘in blinding ­himself, Josephine Sharoni - 978-90-04-33658-2 Downloaded from Brill.com04/11/2023 08:51:11AM via University of Cambridge

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The attempt to remove Nunez’s eyes represents the operation of castration when in consequence this outsider will be become both sane and a quite admirable citizen. As discussed in the Introduction castration is a ‘normalizing’ process that resolves the Oedipus complex enabling subjectivity within a society (sanity) and the possibility of a sexual relationship. However, given that the story ends with Nunez’s eviction from the community, Yacob’s exclamation ‘Thank Heaven for science’ might be read as ironic or satirical. Science was to have ‘cured’ Nunez. Yet, for Lacan, castration is a symbolic operation and not a physical one. The Name-of-the-Father, as has been reiterated is a matter of speech and language, it is the father’s ‘no’ and his name. In contrast, science is shown here – and one might note the somewhat incongruous appearance of the word science in an agricultural community cut off from the rest of civilization – as that which attempts to bypass this by operating directly on the body (albeit in a grotesque fictional manner). As in The Invisible Man, science cannot come take the place of the Name-of-the-Father. Where Griffin, having robbed his father for the sake of science, after his father’s funeral, no longer sees the woman as desirable, Nunez, with only science available as a cure, turns away from the woman, his previous love, now equated with sin, in favour of the beauty of nature. This outcome is akin to the situation in The Lost World, where Malone’s apprehension of the beauty of Lake Gladys ends up substituting for the lady herself whom he does not attain.72

The Name-of-Science

My reading of The Invisible Man furnishes another example of how the basic underlying theme of Totem tand Taboo finds different expressions in the literature of the period, where in this case, the fictional device of invisibility constitutes the means of staging the reappearance of the primal father. G ­ iven

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­Oedipus, that mythical law-breaker, was simply carrying out a mitigated form of the punishment of castration – the only punishment that according to the lex talionis was fitted for him. Interestingly, a revised version of this story was published in 1939. Here the story has a completely different ending with Nunez escaping with the woman when the villagers ignore his warning of the imminent mountain slide which will crush them all. The couple make their way back to Quito, Nunez’s home, where they marry and have children. The reference to science is also changed, to be replaced by the word ‘wisdom’. Thus, the fatherin-law Yacob’s words quoted above, ‘Thank Heaven for science’ become in this later version ‘Thank Heaven for the Wisdom beneath it’. Wells, The Country of the Blind and Other Science Fiction Stories, ed. Martin Gardiner (Mineola, New York: Dover Thrift Editions, 2012), p. 21. Josephine Sharoni - 978-90-04-33658-2 Downloaded from Brill.com04/11/2023 08:51:11AM via University of Cambridge

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that according to Freud’s myth it is the killing of the primal father which inaugurates culture, were he were to exist once again (in the impossible fantasy space created by a fictional science), he would have to be killed again. In consequence, what might appear as a contingent failure, which could have been remedied by different moves on the part of the protagonist or those who come into contact with him, must be recognized as a structural inevitability. The failure of the attempt to steal the clothes in the Emporium scene (which would have, if successful, returned the invisible man to culture) portrays that same impossibility as in Lacan’s reading of Totem and Taboo of conceiving the transition from nature to culture as occurring in a direct or autonomous way. Finally, the fact that the novella takes place entirely in contemporary England and in particular in the modern urban environment of London, as opposed to a remote archaic land and with the hero as the new type of college chemistry student (as opposed to the more traditional gentleman scientist at Oxbridge), makes it clearer that, as has been argued, the return of the Totem and Taboo theme concerns the modernization of Britain at the end of the nineteenth century rather than any kind of egress from European civilization. The replacement of the missing (represented by the suicide of the actual father and his disowning by the son) Name-of-the-Father by modern science (portrayed in Griffin’s chemistry) results in there being no more desire on the part of the invisible man either for a woman nor for any of the things that ‘a man reckons desirable’.73 In the next chapter I look at Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which in contrast to all the texts considered so far, ends in the more traditional closure of the Victorian realist novel, involving marriage and the birth of a child. There is also no repetition of the original journey as in The Lost World where Malone and Roxton set off once more to South America, in She where Holly and Leo travel to Central Asia continuing their quest for knowledge or in The Invisible Man with the intention of the Inn Keeper to repeat the original experiment.

73 Wells, Invisible Man, p. 121.

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chapter 8

The Re-inscription of the Name-of-the-Father: Dracula In this chapter I look at Dracula published in 1897 by Bram Stoker. As noted in the introduction this reading returns to the connection made by Maurice Richardson in the 1950s between Totem and Taboo and Dracula as the primal father figure, tracked down by a band of men and one woman.1 The vampire’s castle in Transylvania will be equated to the plateau in The Lost World or the land of the Amahaggers in She, while the presence of Dracula in England will be seen as analogous to the device of invisibility in Wells’ novel in staging the (impossible) re-emergence of the primal father. What is developed in this chapter is the equivalence, noted in connection with She, between the primal father and the subject’s ‘double’. Dracula should be viewed as the double of the solitary Englishman incarcerated in the Transylvanian castle, who, in Žižek’s words, ‘accompanies him like a shadow and gives body to a certain surplus’.2 It is in this context that the role of the group and its father-figure leader is treated as the means of the necessary elimination of the double enabling at the end of the novel the consummation of the ‘normal’ marriage and the birth of the child. This restoration implemented through the role of the ‘good father’ (the castrating Name-of-the-Father) appears thereby to constitute, in the words of Luke Thurston quoted in the Introduction, ‘a re-inscription of neurotic fantasy’. Nonetheless my argument will be that in the irreverence of the depiction of this father, there is the recognition that, while the Name-of-the-Father is indeed in crisis, the answer or solution lies in a new symbolic paradigm as opposed to a return to a previous order.

1 The men at first assume that destroying the vampire is evidently a job for men only. ‘Mrs Harker is better out of it. Things are quite bad enough for us, all men of the world, and who have been in many tight places in our time; but it is no place for a woman, and if she had remained in touch with the affair, it would in time infallibly have wrecked her.’ (Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. John Paul Riquelme (Bedford: St, Martin’s Press, 2001), p. 259). But in the end they have to include Mina who having been contaminated by Dracula has, when hypnotized by Van Helsing, a special knowledge of his movements. 2 Žižek ‘Grimaces of the Real, or When the Phallus Appears’, October 58 (1991), 44–68 (p. 54).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004336582_010 Josephine

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The Plot

The novel is told in journal form and through letters and telegrams by several different characters who each relate a section of the story, sometimes overlapping. The narrative begins with Jonathan Harker’s account of a journey he made to Transylvania, as a newly qualified solicitor, on behalf of his firm’s client, Count Dracula, who intends to purchase some property in London. Harker begins his journey by train, then by public carriage, before being driven to the Count’s castle by Dracula himself. Harker becomes trapped there, where his narrative abruptly ends. From a letter written by a sister in a hospital in Budapest addressed to Mina Murray, Harker’s fiancé, it emerges that he ended up there delirious, but is now recovering. Mina goes out to him, the two are married and return to England. In the meantime in an exchange of letters between Mina and her friend, Lucy Westenra, we find out that Lucy, whose father is dead, has, on one day, been asked for her hand in marriage by three suitors, an English lord called Arthur Holmwood (who in due course will become Lord Godalming), a Texan adventurer, Quincy Morris, and a young English doctor who is in charge of a psychiatric institution, John Seward. Lucy has already decided on Arthur Holmwood but the two rejected suitors remain Lucy’s friends. Before Lucy’s marriage with Arthur can take place, she becomes progressively more ill, sleepwalking at night and awaking in the morning completely drained of blood. It will turn out that Dracula has come to England and b­ itten Lucy on one of her sleepwalking expeditions thus turning her into a fellow vampire. Seward consults his old mentor, Prof. Abraham Van Helsing from ­Amsterdam, who quickly comes to London. Together they give Lucy several blood transfusions. It is to no avail and Lucy dies. Van Helsing explains to Arthur and Seward the nature of Lucy’s illness and how they must enter Lucy’s tomb and kill her a second time to prevent her remaining a vampire in perpetuity and infecting others. The professor meanwhile has made contact with Mina, having discovered her friendship with Lucy. Van Helsing assures Harker that his adventure in Transylvania was no illusion. Harker has now also seen the Count in London at the funeral of his employer and surrogate father, Peter Hawkins. Lucy’s three suitors and the newly ­married Harkers form a group under Van Helsing’s direction with the aim of tracking down and killing Dracula. At one point, the men leave on a ­mission, leaving Mina at home with her husband. They return to find Jonathan in a ­stupor and Mina being forced to drink the Count’s blood from his open breast. From then on, Mina begins to show small signs of vampirism. While increasing the ­urgency of the task of killing Dracula, the group can now also use Mina, who under hypnosis is able to follow the Count’s movements. The Count is­

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eventually forced to retreat to his castle, with the group in pursuit. He is caught and killed. The novel ends in London seven years later with a note by H ­ arker that he and his wife now have a baby son, (called Quincey in memory of ­Quincey Morris who was killed in the fight with Dracula) and that John Seward and Lord Godalming (previously Arthur Holmwood) are married. 1

Lacanian Readings of Dracula

This novel has already been subjected to Lacanian readings. As was mentioned in the introduction to this book, Fiona Peters in 2003 points out that the vampire is referred to as the Thing, as in the case of Lucy: ‘There, in the coffin lay no longer the foul Thing that we had so dreaded and grown to hate’.3 It is only after the ‘undead’, vampiric Lucy has been killed by Arthur in her coffin, that she reverts to the normal person as known to her friends – John Seward writing of the ‘traces of care and pain and waste’ which, however, ‘were dear to us, for they marked her true to what we knew’.4 According to Peters, this normal person is the subject who is always ‘half-dead’ within the symbolic, while the Thing is the threatening and ‘uncanny’ indicator of a lost enjoyment: The Thing is, then, not the body, not Lucy as she was in life, before becoming a vampire, it’s the Thing, in the psychoanalytic sense, that was in the body but has been driven out. Žižek calls this a ‘substance of ­enjoyment (that) is not yet mortified, quartered by the transcendental – symbolic networ.’5 Thus for Peters there is the difference between Lucy, the ‘normal’ person before being bitten, ‘half-dead’ as far as enjoyment is concerned, and the vampiric Lucy who is ‘voluptuously, and sensuously and threateningly alive’.6 ­Peters, moreover, notes the representation in the novel of the Lacanian object a, ‘enjoyment un-mortified in the symbolic’, a representation of that ‘forbidden/impossible domain of the Thing’ and which is embodied by the vampire.7 My reading will also include this identification of the vampiric Lucy with the Thing and the recuperation of the object a. My view however diverges with 3 Peters, ‘Vampires’, p. 182. 4 Stoker, Dracula, p. 224. 5 Peters, ‘Vampires’, p. 182. 6 Ibid., pp. 182–183. 7 Ibid., p. 185.

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Peters on one point. She maintains that the vampire is ‘self-identical in a sense that we as human beings cannot be – relieved of all the problems of being an individual’.8 This is in contrast to the split human subject where a part of him or herself has been irrevocably alienated. I will argue however that the vampire is a representation or staging of the very split in the human subject (according to Freud’s division of Ego, Id and Superego) rather than, as Peters suggests, the depiction of the illusory self-identical human being. The second interpretation of Dracula specifically referring to Lacan is Dennis Foster’s, entitled ‘The Little Children Can be Bitten, A Hunger for D ­ racula’, published in 2002 as an example of psychoanalytic criticism in a critical ­volume on Dracula edited by John Paul Riquelme.9 Foster’s argument can be summarised as follows: Dracula, with his blood sucking, represents the oral drive in its childish satisfying form. ‘In so far as he is a child, Dracula embodies something of the drives and compulsions that we adults have tamed and diminished, Dracula knows what he wants and moves relentlessly toward it, incarnating some fundamental drive to enjoyment.’10 Van Helsing, on the other hand, represents the law, saving the men in the novel ‘from their revolting desires’ and enabling them to grow up, since ‘in order to mature, that child must learn to substitute other objects for that fantastic breast in an increasing, flowering complexity.’ Van Helsing tells the ‘good men he leads, that their enjoyment will come through renunciation, not indulgence’.11 Yet, in so doing, Van Helsing enables them to find an almost unrestrained enjoyment in the call of duty. Foster points out how, for example, in the killing of the undead Lucy on Van Helsing’s orders, Arthur ‘finds his most intense enjoyment of the book’.12 The moral of the tale, for Foster, lies in the danger of self-proclaimed killers of enjoyment. Dracula shows that it is true that some people do attain pure enjoyment, but that our duty is to destroy them. Thus, Foster concludes, the real horror of the novel is not the vampire, but Van Helsing, who is ‘ready to stage a blood feast founded on the call of duty, and that our neighbours, who only yesterday were our friends, will join them, a band of soldiers beneath a moral banner ready to serve the latest master’.13 While Foster’s ‘band of soldiers’ can be viewed as the group of friends which I equate with Freud’s band of brothers, 8 9

Ibid., p. 184. Dennis Foster, ‘A Psychoanalytic Perspective’ in Dracula (Case Study in Contemporary Criticism), ed. John Paul Riquelme, (Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2002), pp. 483–499. 10 Ibid., p. 489. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., p. 49. 13 Ibid., p. 498.

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my reading will differ from that of Foster’s in regard to the role of the ‘master’ Van Helsing. My contention is that given that neither Dracula nor Lucy in her ‘voluptuous wantonness’ should be viewed as ‘people’, the message is rather the opposite and, in line with Peters’ view, pure enjoyment must be considered as unattainable for the human subject. Hence, as will be maintained in the last part of this reading, Van Helsing does not destroy what is in any case impossible but enables the characters to make that substitution of objects of which Foster speaks, for example the ‘normal’ everyday woman (Mina) for the Thing (the impossible vampire woman in the castle). 2

Dracula as Totem and Taboo

As stated, my work revives Richardson’s original contention that Dracula should be read in connection with Totem and Taboo. As was quoted in my introduction, Richardson writes that, ‘the set-up reminds one rather of the primal horde as pictured somewhat fantastically perhaps by Freud in Totem and Taboo, with the brothers banding together against the father who has tried to keep all the females to himself’.14 Likewise in Dracula, where the primal father figure, procuring for himself both Godalming’s fiancée and Harker’s wife (in addition to three vampire women who are in his castle), is eventually killed by a group of men and one woman banding together. In a similar fashion to what happens in The Lost World and the The Invisible Man, the group is separated from and works outside of the law as represented by the police. As Van Helsing says in regard to the tracking down and slaying of the vampire in the castle in Transylvania ‘what is to be done is not for police or of the customs. It must be done by us alone and in our own way.’15 The novel then will be read in conjunction with the other works discussed so far in this book. In all these cases, (with the exception of the short story, ‘The Horror of the Heights’), the elements of the plot include the absence of the traditional father, the concomitant disturbance of the marriage ties with the resulting re-emergence of the primal father figure, and his eventual murder. Yet, the ending of Stoker’s novel differs significantly. As was pointed out in the Introduction, common to all the previous works is that even with the death of the primal father figure nothing else is resolved, in particular the question of the sexual relationship. In both She and The Lost World, the male protagonists 14

Maurice Richardson, ‘The Psychoanalysis of Ghost Stories’, Twentieth Century, 166 (1959), 419–431 (p. 427). 15 Stoker, Dracula, p. 315.

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of the story, still bachelors, set off on another expedition. In The Invisible Man, there is the brief epilogue depicting another attempt to attain the status of Invisible Man. It can be said that in each case, the plot comes full circle back to the starting point, poised to set off once more on the same trajectory. In Dracula the plot follows a different course. In contrast to the other novels, there is, first, the almost immediate encounter with the primal father in the fantasy space, followed by the return to England and the lengthy preparations for the elimination of the primal father, which take up most of the novel, before the final return to the same geographical location, now a real, locatable place on the map, to carry out the actual killing. The plot then ends not with another expedition but with the loss of most of the material evidence of the original one, as if it had all been a bad dream. All that remains are the typewritten copies that Mina had made of the various journals and Seward’s phonograph entries for Van Helsing and the group. At the end of the novel Harker records that: I took the papers from the safe where they had been ever since our return so long ago. We were struck with the fact, that in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document. Nothing but a mass of typewriting, except the later notebooks of Mina and Seward and myself, and Van Helsing’s memorandum. We could hardly ask anyone, even did we wish to, to accept these as proofs of so wild a story16 In contrast to the other texts in this book, which take care to keep intact the apparent facticity of the tale until the very end, as for example in The Lost World with the newspaper reports of the meeting in the Royal Albert Hall and the sighting of the dinosaur by the soldier, in Dracula, this sense (that it ‘really’ happened) begins to dissolve with Harker’s statement that there are no proofs for the story that could convince anyone else. Most significantly the novel concludes with marriage for the two remaining bachelors, Arthur Holmwood and Jonathan Seward, and a baby for the married couple. Professor Van Helsing, it seems remains alone (earlier on in the novel he had spoken of his ‘poor wife dead to me, but alive by Church’s law, though no wits, all gone’ and his being ‘faithful husband to this now-no-wife’),17 as the symbolic, oedipal or even dead father, the one who knows nothing of enjoyment, but who with his imposition of his theory of vampirism on the group has enabled Harker, the protagonist 16 Stoker, Dracula, pp. 368–369. 17 Ibid., p. 164.

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of the fantasy space, to regain his place within the social-symbolic order. By thus placing the novel as the final text in the series so far discussed of Totem and Taboo narratives, this reading will see the plot of Dracula as what might be termed a successful re-enactment of Freud’s original myth, one which ends with access to a woman under the law and where the story becomes a thing of the past, no longer germane as in the other texts. It could even be said that in so far as the historical proofs have dissolved, it has become mythical. The traumatic experience undergone by Harker in the castle and his acute anxiety when Dracula appears in London will be interpreted by viewing the vampire as Harker’s double, utilizing Dolar’s theoretical work, as already introduced in regard to She. According to Dolar and Žižek, the primal or ‘anal’18 father can be regarded as the subject’s double who accompanies him like a shadow and gives body to a certain surplus, to what is ‘in the subject more than subject himself.’ This surplus represents what the subject must renounce, sacrifice even – the part in himself that the subject must murder in order to start to live as a ‘normal’ member of the community.19 It is exactly this trajectory which can be seen in the novel, beginning with the inability of Jonathan Harker, originally in the Transylvanian castle and later in London, to shake off Dracula, who incorporates an originary (albeit mythical) jouissance, and ending in the killing of the vampire, thus enabling him to consummate his marriage with Mina and become a father. The supposition that the Harkers’ baby will have been infected through his mother, who begun to show marks of vampirism after being bitten by Dracula, can be seen as indicating that the surplus real of the symbolic remains, namely, that the symbolic order is never whole or complete and that surplus jouissance will always continue to haunt it. As Foster points out, even in the call of duty a surplus jouissance adheres to or becomes part of the act of renouncing. This tie to Freud’s myth also differentiates my reading from David Punter’s interpretation, posited by William Hughes in his survey of Dracula criticism as stemming from Richardson’s invocation of Totem and Taboo. While Punter, in the quotation below, lists a number of taboos, the title of Freud’s work suggests that there is only one taboo which ‘counts’. Punter writes that ‘it is hard to 18

Žižek’s use of the term ‘anal’ father was discussed in connection with Conan Doyle’s short story, ‘The Horror of the Heights’. 19 Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 125.

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­summarise Dracula, for it is such a wide-ranging book, but in general it is fair to say that its power derives from its dealings with taboo’.20 It is taboo which ‘sets up certain bounding lines and divisions which enable society to function without disruption’ but the vampire obscures them: He blurs the line between man and beast, thus echoing the fears of degeneracy in Stevenson, Wilde and Wells; he blurs the line between man and God by daring to partake of immortal life and by practising a corrupt but superhuman form of love; and he blurs the line between man and woman by demonstrating the existence of female passion.21 As has been seen in the previous texts discussed, the primal father figure does indeed blur lines (he or she is or becomes beast-like, is unsexed, ‘dares to partake of immortal life’ and loves in a ‘superhuman’ form) and Dracula is no exception. Yet to reiterate the story of Freud’s myth, there was once a male who had all the females to himself until the sons killed him and instituted the totem system. The ensuing rules regulating sexual access to women inscribe into culture the barring of the incestuous sexual relationship between mother and child. Chiesa maintains that for Lacan there exists a universal law of culture and that is the prohibition of incest: all cultures – despite their particular laws – have somehow to universally distinguish themselves from nature. The prohibition of incest as universal Law of culture not only distinguishes culture from nature but also somehow ‘naturalizes’ culture, provides culture with a universal structure.22

20

David Punter, The Literature of Terror Vol 2: A History of Gothic Fiction – Modern Gothic 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 21. 21 Ibid. 22 As Chiesa points out, the incest taboo should be seen not as a biological imperative to prevent degeneration through interbreeding but for the maintenance of the symbolic and procreation and hence the society tout court. ‘We can appreciate most appropriately what the prohibition of incest as the imposition of the Law of sexuality aims at: far from applying to the avoidance of incestuous “animal” mating – which is strictly speaking impossible for the human beings – the proscription of the mother’s “reintegration” (+) of her child must be interpreted as the preservation of symbolic difference +/− and therefore of the order of the Symbolic tout court. Mythically, woman enters culture and allows its propagation when she exchanges her child for her symbolic designation as “minus”: in this way, she also furthers the preservation of the species. Conversely, her temporary revocation of castration/privation risks pulling her out of culture and endangering the

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The reason for making this point is in order to shift our perception of Dracula as a novel concerned with the breaking of different taboos – or rather the crossing of diverse symbolic categories and boundaries, to one continuing the theme of the essential role of the symbolic as a rampart against the real or jouissance. Boundaries such as Punter lists can and are crossed in societies23 but what the Law has to maintain is the complete proscription of a would-be incestuous enjoyment or, in other words, the void of the Thing. As Copjec notes regarding Lacan’s reading of the Ten Commandments you will not find one that tells you that you must not sleep with your mother, and yet these commandments have no other aim than to hold you at a distance from the incestuous relation with your mother; they are as a whole the positivization of this interdiction.24 The ‘you must not sleep with your mother’ is, as was outlined in the Introduction, the equivalent of the negation or voiding of the Thing. The function of the law is the distancing or screening of the object a, the surplus jouissance which comes to veil this hole and thereby renders it the cause of desire rather than, in the untoward proximity of the object a, that of anxiety. It is the undermining of this later process, followed by its rehabilitation through the actions of the ‘band of brothers’ led by van Helsing, which is the subject of Dracula. As Copjec phrases it, ‘laws are made to be broken, prohibitions to be transgressed’, yet the point is ‘that transgression of the law’s interdiction of specific, named acts in no way violates the law’s other, more basic interdiction of the real’.25 3

The Fantasy Area: Transylvania and the Loss of the Symbolic

The novel begins with the journey of Jonathan Harker to Transylvania by train and then carriage to Dracula’s castle in order to draw up the deeds of a house purchase in England. This castle will become for Harker a space devoid of the preservation of the species’. (Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cambridge: mit Press, 2007), p. 86). 23 Punter’s reading also, I would argue, returns us to the kind of historicist reading which bases the novel’s impact on a supposed shock to the sensibilities and outlook of the late Victorian reader, such as the existence of female passion, about which the 21st century reader of the novel can no longer be presumed to be disturbed. 24 Joan Copjec, ‘Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety’, October, 58 (1991), 24–43, (p. 29). 25 Ibid.

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symbolic grid in which a subject is constituted, rendering it equivalent to those other fantasy areas discussed previously: the plateau in The Lost World, the site of Kor in She, and the air jungle in The Horror of the Heights. This is the lawless, extra-symbolic area where the primal father figure, in this instance Dracula, re-emerges. It can be seen in this opening of the novel that as he travels further into Transylvania, Harker is gradually bereft of the categories of place, time and language. First to go are his geographical bearings. Although initially his destinations are scrupulously named – Munich, Vienna, Budapest, Klausenburgh and Bistritz, ‘the post town named by Count Dracula’,26 such cartographical certainties are in the end eliminated. Harker had tried to come armed with such knowledge to keep a hold of his whereabouts, but he finds that the place is ‘one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe’.27 Ultimately he finds he cannot locate Dracula’s castle: ‘I was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this Country as yet to compare with our own Ordnance Survey maps’.28 This can be contrasted to Harker’s return at the end of the novel with a group of people to kill Dracula, when the castle reappears on the map. As Jonathan’s wife, Mina Harker records ‘I have examined the map and find that the river most suitable for the Slovaks to have ascended is either the Pruth or the Sereth’.29 Secondly, time as a symbolic framework, begins to disintegrate when the train that leaves Munich promptly at 8:35 and which should have arrived in ­Vienna at 6:46 (another very precise time) gets in ‘an hour late’.30 The trains seem to Harker to become more and more unpunctual the further east he ­travels. In the castle, Harker’s accustomed schedule decomposes as he retires to sleep at dawn, Dracula keeping him awake all night (‘why, there is the morning again! How remiss I am to let you stay up so long’31). One day later on, he wakes to find his watch mysteriously left unwound despite his ‘rigorous habit’ of winding it every evening.32 Above all it is language, the principal means of connecting with others, which gradually unravels for Harker. As soon as he leaves ‘the West’ and enters ‘the East’ no one speaks his native English. At first he has a ‘smattering’ of German and a polyglot dictionary but as he proceeds further towards his 26 Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. by John Paul Riquelme (Bedford: St, Martin’s Press, 2001), p. 27. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., p. 346. 30 Ibid., p. 26. 31 Ibid., p. 49. 32 Ibid., p. 63.

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r­endezvous with Dracula, his interlocutors appear to start forgetting their ­German. ‘She was in such an excited state that she seemed to have lost her grip on that German she knew, and mixed it all up with some other language which I did not know at all’.33 As Harker climbs into the coach to begin the last stage of the coach journey, which ends with his rendezvous with Dracula’s carriage, he sees the driver, who has not yet taken his seat, talking with his landlady. They were evidently talking of me for every now and then they looked at me, and some of the people who were sitting on the bench outside the door – which they call by a name meaning ‘word-bearer’ – came and listened, and then looked at me, most of them pityingly. I could hear a lot of words often repeated, queer words, for there were many nationalities in the crowd; so I quietly got my polyglot dictionary from my bag and looked them out.34 While evidently a realistic depiction of a tourist amongst many nationalities, Harker is here reduced to the position of a baby, the subject of those speaking around him (Harker knows the conversation concerns him) but the words meaningless sounds. As Lorenzo Chiesa writes ‘the child from very early on begins to suppose that what appears to him as language qua letter is actually a fully articulated symbolic system of the Other’.35 This is what Harker assumes when he takes out the dictionary to try to find out what these words signify to the people around him, yet the answer leaves him excluded from the conversation. He cannot comprehend what they are ‘really’ speaking of (Dracula, the vampire, as the reader already knows or will find out shortly) and what it is that concerns him, even though he has an English translation. As Harker reports, this is ‘not cheering to me, for amongst them were ‘Ordog’ – Satan, ‘Pokol’ hell, ‘stregoica’ witch, ‘vrolok’ and ‘vlksolak’ both of which mean the same thing, one being Slovak and the other Serbian for something that is either were-wolf-or vampire’.36 Thus, the people around him become ‘word-bearers’, rather than interlocutors. Words have returned to their originary status for the subject-to-be, in their opaque materiality no longer transparently referring to other things.

33 34 35

Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 31. Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cambridge: mit Press, 2007), p. 62. 36 Stoker, Dracula, p. 32.

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This crumbling of the symbolic grid of space, time and language (as a social system producing meaning) might be viewed in Lacanian terms as the overwhelming of the subject’s symbolic by the real, that undifferentiated ‘nothing’, which was presumed to have existed before the symbolic came into being (from the a posteriori standpoint within that symbolic). On several occasions, as Harker tries to look out of the castle window, the reality, which ought to have been perceived there, has disappeared, to be replaced by an undifferentiated, amorphous mass. ‘I went into my own room and drew the curtains, but there was little to notice; my window opened into the courtyard, all I could see was the warm grey of quickening sky’.37 As Jonathan records, ‘the castle is on the very edge of a terrible precipice.’38 4

Dracula’s Castle and Freud’s Reception Hall

The novel is, I argue, fundamentally one of two parts. The first is the initial isolated encounter with the double in a fantasy space stripped of the subject’s symbolic co-ordinates. The second is the ‘re-socialization’ – the reintegration into society in the form of family, friends and colleagues and the r­ e-instantiation of reality. The significance of this structure can be seen through a comparison with the record of dream of Freud’s known as the Irma dream published two years after Dracula in 1897 in The Interpretation of Dreams. As in the case of the novel, the dream can be divided into two parts, the first taking place in Freud’s reception hall (paralleling Dracula’s castle) and the second, amongst a group of doctors, pertaining to the social space, speech and rules. Freud’s record of the dream begins as follows: A large hall – numerous guests, whom we were receiving. – Among them was Irma. I at once took her to one side, as though to answer her letter and to reproach her for not having accepted my ‘solution’ yet.39 The setting is a party or reception Freud and his wife are giving. Irma is the pseudonym of one of Freud’s patients whom he was treating by means of his pioneering psychoanalytic methods despite the physical nature of her ailments. On the day of the dream, a family friend of Freud’s reports to him that 37 Ibid., p. 49. 38 Ibid., p. 51. 39 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (Philadelphia: Basic Books, 2010), p. 131.

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‘she is better but not quite well’.40 Freud thinks he hears a note of reproach in the words.41 In his dream Freud’s wish is to blame the failure of the treatment on Irma’s rejection of his psychoanalytic explanations (the ‘solution’) of her symptoms. In the opening of both dream and novel, the protagonist is already in a state of some anxiety concerning his social standing, and specifically, of not being equal to his profession of psychoanalyst or solicitor. Lacan writes of Freud: ‘He gets to the point of doubting the validity of the solution he has proposed, perhaps even the very principle of his treatment of neurosis.’42 Harkers has been sent to Dracula in his capacity as a newly qualified solicitor, but, as several commentators have pointed out, considers himself as not up to the new position. He still thinks of himself as a clerk as seen in this (Freudian) slip: Was this a customary incident in the life of a solicitor’s clerk sent out to explain the purchase of a London estate to a foreigner? Solicitor’s clerk! Mina would not like that. Solicitor, for just before leaving London, I got word that my examination was successful, and I am now a full-blown solicitor!43 The critic, Elizabeth Bronfen comments that ‘one could surmise that whatever event may have triggered the appearance of traumatic shock in Jonathan, his hysterical delusions also articulate his uncertainty about his symbolic mandate, about his becoming partner to Mr Hawkins.’44 Thus in both the trigger for the dream and at Harker’s arrival at the castle there is a certain ‘hysterization’ of the subject. ‘What’, Žižek writes, ‘is the hysterical question if not an articulation of the incapacity of the subject to fulfil the symbolic identification, to assume fully and without restraint the symbolic mandate?’45 More significantly for the purposes of my argument, the opening of both dream and the novel share another common process, which might be labelled the ‘evaporation’ of the others: an initial crowd which dissolves leaving initially just two people and then a solitary subject. In the reception hall are ‘numerous guests’ but then Freud takes Irma ‘to one side’. A dialogue takes place as to the 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory, p. 150. 43 Stoker, Dracula, p. 40. 44 Elisabeth Bronfen,The Knotted Subject, Hysteria and its Discontents (Princeton, New ­Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 221. 45 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 113.

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responsibility for the failure of the treatment, ending with Freud getting Irma to open her mouth and his looking down her throat.46 At this point the dream can be seen clearly to involve only Freud in that Irma, as a fellow human being has disappeared, leaving only the insides of her throat. In the novel, Harker begins his journey to the castle using public transport in the company of other travellers. But then a private carriage comes to collect him with only a driver, who turns out to be Dracula. In the castle, which Harker imagines would include the presence at the very least of servants (‘When I had done, I looked for a bell, so that I might let the servants know I had finished’),47 there is nobody except the vampire. There are in another ‘forbidden’ part of the castle, three women but they also turn out to be vampires and can, in any case, be regarded as a part of Harker’s dream.48 A few gypsies appear outside of the castle but Harker does not speak their language and in any case, his attempt to procure help from them fails their being in the vampire’s pay. It is the relationship in the castle between an apparent two, Harker and the vampire, which should, as will be argued in depth, be seen as that of the subject and his double, an exteriorisation of his own split subjectivity. Finally, both dream and novel go beyond the hysterical doubt with which they began. Each initial part ends in an anxiety arousing sight causing the subject to take flight or ‘fade out’. Misgiving as to one’s symbolic mandate still takes place as a conscious thought (even if the question is not posed to oneself in those terms). Freud has been preoccupied with the Irma case in his waking hours. As Lacan points out he was writing up his case notes on the evening of the dream.49 In the dream, the turning point comes when Freud sees the inside of Irma’s throat. There ‘on the right I found a big white patch; at another place I saw extensive whitish grey scabs upon some remarkable curly structures which were evidently modelled on the turbinal bones of the nose’.50 In Lacan’s words: ‘There’s a horrendous discovery there, that of the flesh one 46 Freud, Interpretation, p. 132. 47 Stoker, Dracula, p. 43. 48 The episode of the three vampire woman is introduced by Harker as follows: ‘I suppose I must have fallen asleep; I hope so, but I fear, for all that followed was startlingly real – so real that now, sitting here in the broad, full sunlight of the morning, I cannot in the least believe that it was all sleep.’ (Stoker, Dracula, p. 61). At the dénouement of the scene, Dracula says: ‘I must awaken him [Harker], for there is work to be done.’ (p. 63). 49 Lacan, The Seminar, Book ii, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, trans. by Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 151. 50 Freud, Interpretation, p. 132.

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never sees’.51 Copjec identifies this sight as that of Lacan’s object a: ‘“A large white spot … curled structures … white – gray scabs.” Almost nothing. This is the climax of the first part of the dream, the anxiety-filled encounter with the object a.’52 As will now be discussed the equivalent of Freud looking into Irma’s throat is Harker peering into a wooden box, where Dracula is lying like a corpse and suddenly being looked at by the comatose vampire’s eyes of their own accord. 5

In the Castle: Dracula as Jonathan Harker’s Double

This section looks in detail at Harker’s stay in the castle, setting out the argument that Dracula should be seen as an exemplar of the literary double. During his stay in the castle Jonathan notices the vampire climbing down the walls, and discovers he is able to copy him. As Copjec notes, ‘vampirism presents us with a bodily double’ but which ‘we can neither make sense of nor recognize as our own’.53 The double is seen by Dolar as standing for ‘all three instances of Freud’s second topic’,54 a topology of the human psyche as Ego, Superego and the Id. In the first of the following three sections, I discuss the double in terms of the Ego and the Id. In particular it will be seen how Harker’s interaction with Dracula produces the sight of object a in the form of the gaze, the object missing from the Ego but represented in the Id. This also makes sense of the strange absence of mirrors in the castle. Harker’s mirror image has been replaced by the vampire, the subject’s double, making mirrors unnecessary and in the case of Dracula, unbearable, the object a (re-incorporated by the vampire) being that which cannot be reflected. The second section examines from a retrospective viewpoint the last stage of Jonathan’s journey to the castle, while the third and concluding section discusses Dracula in terms of the representation of the Lacanian concept of the superego. 5.1 The Double as the Ego and Id That Dracula should be regarded as Harker’s double is suggested when Jonathan sees the vampire, dressed in Harker’s own suit, emerging from his window and climbing down the castle walls, ‘lizard fashion’. 51 Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory, p. 154. 52 Copjec, ‘Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety’, October, 58 (1991), 24–43, (p. 27). 53 Ibid., p. 33. 54 Dolar, ‘Wedding-’, p. 12.

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I had been at the window somewhat less than half an hour, when I saw something coming out of the Count’s window. I drew back and watched carefully, and saw the whole man emerge. It was a new shock to me to find that he had on the suit of clothes which I had worn whilst travelling here.55 Later on, Jonathan again sees Dracula ‘leave the castle by the same window, and in my clothes’. Finally, barred all other means of escape, he copies him: ‘I have seen him myself crawl from his window; why should not I imitate him, and go in by his window?’56 and even succeeds, ‘I have made the effort, and, God helping me, have come safely back to this room.’57 Stephen Arata also pays attention to this doubling, pointing out that ‘the text’s insistence that these characters are capable of substituting for one another becomes most pressing when Dracula twice dons Harker’s clothes to leave the Castle.’58 Viewing Dracula as Jonathan’s double makes sense of the disappearance of the castle’s mirrors. On his arrival, Harker finds that there are no mirrors in the rooms. ‘There is not even a toilet glass on my table, and I had to get the little shaving glass from my bag before I could either shave or brush my hair’.59 The shaving glass however is later smashed by Dracula. ‘It is very annoying’, Harker writes, ‘for I do not see how I am to shave, unless in my watch-case or the bottom of the shaving pot, which is fortunately of metal’.60 Dolar notes that the appearance of the double on ‘the outside’, in the exegetic space of the literary works ‘can go along with the disappearance or trading off, of his [the subject’s] mirror image or his shadow’.61 Dracula, a vampire with no mirror reflection, will, as Harker’s double, replace his lost one.

55 Stoker, Dracula, p. 67. 56 Ibid., p. 69. 57 Ibid., p. 69. 58 Arata however interprets this doubling differently seeing it as an instance of ‘reverse colonialism’. He writes that ‘since on both occasions the Count’s mission is to plunder the town, we are encouraged to see a correspondence between the vampire’s actions and those of the travelling Westerner. The equivalence between these two sets of actions in underlined by the reaction of the towns people, who have no trouble believing that it really is Harker, the visiting Englishman, who is stealing their goods, their money, their children’. ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonialization’, Victorian Studies, 33 (1990), 621–645, (p. 638). 59 Stoker, Dracula, p. 44. 60 Ibid., p. 50. 61 Dolar, ‘Wedding Night’, p. 11.

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I had hung my shaving-glass by the window, and was just beginning to shave. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder, and heard the Count’s voice saying to me, ‘Good morning.’ I started, for it amazed me that I had not seen him, since the reflection of the glass covered the whole room behind me.62 It as the replacement for Harker’s mirror image, that the double can be seen as representing the subject’s ego. A child, aged between six and eighteen months, ‘first recognizes himself in the image of his own body as it is reflected in a mirror’.63 This Lacan calls the mirror stage. The child thereby acquires an image enabling him to constitute a sense of self, a ‘me’ or, more technically, an ego. In the process however, something has to be lost. In Dolar’s words: ‘the doubling [in the mirror] cuts one off from a part, the most valuable part, of one’s being, the immediate self-being of jouissance’.64 It is the object a, precisely that which cannot be seen in the mirror, the part that has no reflection, the nonspecular. Thus on the one hand given that as Dolar points out, ‘it is only by virtue of one’s mirror reflection that one can become endowed with an ego, establish oneself as an “I”’, in its absence ‘my “ego-identity” comes from my double’.65 Yet, crucially the double restores the object a, excised at the mirror stage. (And it is for this reason that vampires cannot bear mirrors66). As Dolar writes, my double is ‘the same as me – plus the object a, that invisible part of being added to my image’.67 Or in Žižek’s words the subject’s double is the one ‘who accompanies him like a shadow and gives body to a certain surplus, to what is “in the subject more than subject himself”.68 As noted in connection with Freud’s dream, the object a re-appears as the gaze on the vampire Harker finds lying comatose in a wooden box. Jonathan, by now a prisoner in the castle and knowing moreover that Dracula is plotting to come to London – ‘where, perhaps for centuries to come, he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and 62 Stoker, Dracula, p. 50. 63 Ibid., p. 17. 64 Dolar, ‘Wedding Night’, p. 13. 65 Ibid. 66 In Žižek’s joke, vampires have all ‘read Lacan and consequently, know how to behave’. Žižek, Enjoy your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 126. 67 Dolar, ‘At First Sight’ in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 139. 68 Žižek, Enjoy your Symptom, p. 125.

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ever ­widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless’69 – is intent on killing him with a shovel but finds himself confronted with an unbearable sight: the head turned, and the eyes fell full upon me, with all their blaze of basilisk horror. The sight seemed to paralyze me, and the shovel turned in my hand and glanced from the face, merely making a deep gash above the forehead […] I thought and thought what should be my next move, but my brain seemed on fire, and I waited with a despairing feeling growing over me […] With a last look around and at the box which contained the vile body, I ran from the place.70 The gaze is the manifestation of the object a. The look Harker sees on ­Dracula is not the vampire looking, since he is altogether unconscious of Harker’s ­presence. Hence, this look is not a part of normal everyday reality but an impossible one from eyes whose owner is comatose. It is actually, given the identification of the vampire as Jonathan’s double, a means of depicting Harker’s own look looking at him as if from another place. As Dolar notes the gaze is a presentation of the object a par excellence, Lacan uses the gaze as the best presentation of that missing object; in the mirror, one can see one’s eyes, but not the gaze which is the part that is lost. But imagine that one could see one’s mirror image close its eyes: that would make the object as gaze appear in the mirror.71 As with the basilisk, a mythical reptile whose gaze is deadly, the look from the eyes which cannot see paralyses Harker with anxiety and prevents him performing the intended deed. At that point ‘the shovel turned in my hand and glanced from the face, merely making a deep gash above the forehead’.72 As noted in the discussion of Totem and Taboo in Chapter 3, Lacan maintains that ‘anxiety is not without an object’, being a response to the appearance of a type of object, the object a.73 As Chiesa writes; ‘anxiety thus corresponds to

69 Stoker, Dracula, p. 74. 70 Ibid., p. 74. 71 Dolar, ‘At First Sight’, p. 139. 72 Stoker, Dracula, p. 74. 73 Lacan, ‘Introduction to the Names-of-the-Father Seminar’ trans. by Jeffrey Mehlman, O ­ ctober, 40 (1987), 81–95, p. 25.

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the fleeting surfacing of the part-object, to the appearance of the double who gazes at the subject with the subject’s own eyes’.74 Moreover the ‘plus object a’ which reappears on the vampire also represents the lost object of enjoyment. For the human subject, the only enjoyment or jouissance obtainable is what Lacan calls surplus jouissance and which is, in Chiesa’s words, ‘always equivalent to the jouissance of the object a’.75 It is this aspect that leads to the interpretation of the double as also standing for the Id. As Dolar notes, ‘the double is always the figure of jouissance: […] he is somebody who enjoys at the subject’s expense; he commits acts that one wouldn’t dare to commit’.76 In other words he ‘indulges in one’s repressed desires’,77 or that which one’s conscience wouldn’t let one do and ‘makes sure that the blame falls on the subject.’78 When Harker sees Dracula dressed in his own clothes, he, as a matter of common sense, immediately considers it an attempt to ensure that ‘any wickedness which he may do shall by the local people be attributed to me’.79 Furthermore, the loss of the object a is also the precondition of the subject’s access to a social reality. As Dolar points out, ‘The mirror in the most elementary way already implies the split between the imaginary and the real: one can only have access to imaginary reality, to the world one can recognize oneself in and familiarize oneself with, on the condition of the loss, the “falling out,” of the object a.’80 Thus the illicit restoration of the object in the space of the castle correlates with Jonathan’s feeling of the loss of reality – of seeing only a grey amorphous mass when he looks out of the window in place of the actual world he should have seen. As Copjec writes, the object a, which represents ‘some part of the subject which is lost to it’, is ‘the condition of both the subjectivity of the subject and the objectivity of the object’.81 5.2 The Drive with Dracula to the Castle This reading of the events in the castle as the encounter with the double with the object a restored, leads to a re-interpretation of the last stage of the journey to the castle, when Dracula is driving Jonathan in his carriage. The vampire 74 Chiesa, Subjectivity, p. 166. 75 Ibid, p. 184. 76 Dolar, ‘Wedding Night’, pp. 13–14. 77 Ibid., p. 14. 78 Ibid., p. 14. 79 Stoker, Dracula, p. 30. 80 Ibid., p. 13. 81 Copjec, ‘The Tomb of Perserverance: On Antigone’, Giving Ground, ed. Joan Copjec and Michael Sorkin (London: Verso, 1999), 233–266, p. 255.

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as Harker’s driver is what Lacan terms ‘extimate’,82 his own jouissance, as if coming from outside of himself. The term extimate, as Dolar explains, blurs the line between interior and exterior and correlates with Freud’s term unheimlich, or, in its English translation, the uncanny. It points neither to the interior nor to the exterior, but is located there where the most intimate interiority coincides with the exterior and ­becomes threatening, provoking horror and anxiety. The extimate is simultaneously the intimate kernel and the foreign body; in a word, it is unheimlich [uncanny].83 After Harker enters the private carriage with the person he assumes is Dracula’s driver and it sets off, it appears to him that they are going over and over the same ground again. He checks his impression by taking note of ‘some salient point’ and finds ‘that this was so’.84 This otherwise trivial incident which appears without any consequences (their destination, the vampire’s castle is, after all, reached in due course) becomes more interesting as an incidence of the uncanny. One of Freud’s examples from his paper, The Uncanny,85 is involuntary repetition, as if one is being acted upon by an outside force. Freud gives an example from his own life, an incident in an Italian town where he inadvertently enters a prostitute’s quarter and hastens to leave. But after having wandered about for a time without enquiring my way, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once more, only to arrive by another détour at the same place yet a third time. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, .86 Repetition is that which is driven by jouissance and the uncanny is that unpleasantness or anxiety which arises on encountering this jouissance foreign to and uncontrolled by one’s conscious volition. In Lacan’s words, ‘repetition is 82 Lacan, The Seminar, Book vii, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. by Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 139. 83 Dolar, ‘Wedding Night’, p. 6. 84 Stoker, Dracula, p. 36. 85 Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’ in On Creativity and the Unconscious, ed. by Benjamin Nelson (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), pp. 122–161. 86 Ibid., p. 144.

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what Freud finds beyond the pleasure principle’, and ‘what necessitates repetition is jouissance’.87 The helplessness which Jonathan feels – wanting ‘to have asked the driver what this all meant’, but fearing to do so since ‘any protest would have had no effect in case there had been an intention to delay’88 – has its correlate in Freud’s comment on the compulsion to repeat which ‘recalls the sense of helplessness experienced in some dream states’.89 The second noteworthy episode on the journey is the sudden appearance of a pack of wolves. The word uncanny appears here, Harker recording that ‘this was all so strange and uncanny’.90 Harker first hears their howling but only sees them when the moon suddenly emerges. ‘By its light I saw around us a ring of wolves, with white teeth and lolling red tongues’.91 This sight recalls the dream of one of Freud’s patients known as the Wolfman in consequence, where ‘suddenly the window opened of its own accord’ and the dreamer ‘was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window.’92 The ring of wolves and the ‘six or seven’ wolves, suddenly made visible by the moon and the opening window respectively, cause the novel’s protagonist and the dreamer great anxiety. Harker records that the wolves ‘were a hundred times more terrible in the grim silence which held them than even when they howled. For myself, I felt a sort of paralysis of fear.’93 The Wolfman later recounted to Freud that ‘in great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up.’94 In the dream the wolves become visible when the window opens as if of its own volition and not that of the dreamer’s. Yet it occurs in a dream that has been scripted and staged by the dreamer. One could say it is his unconscious desire or drive which opens the window. The appearance of the wolves in the novel can, in the same vein, be seen as staging the jouissance summoned by the subject and, yet, as in the dream, simultaneously precipitating his anxiety. In Dracula, the wolves are finally banished by the mysterious re-appearance of Harker’s driver. 87 Lacan, The Seminar, Book xvii, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. by Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2008), p. 45. 88 Stoker, Dracula, p. 36. 89 Freud, Uncanny, p. 144. 90 Stoker, Dracula, p. 39. 91 Ibid., p. 38. 92 Freud, Three Case Histories, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1996), p. 186. 93 Stoker, Dracula, p. 38. 94 Ibid.

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How he came there, I know not, but I heard his voice raised in a tone of imperious command, and looking towards the sound, saw him stand in the roadway. As he swept his long arms, as though brushing aside some impalpable obstacle, the wolves fell back and back further still. Just then a heavy cloud passed across the face of the moon, so that we were again in darkness. When I could see again the driver was climbing into the caleche, and the wolves disappeared.95 It is seemingly the count’s driver – Harker has still not realised that this driver is Dracula himself – who is orchestrating the events, yet as Jonathan’s double he is in an extimate position. The double is neither I, as what he does is not recognised or accepted as coming from oneself, nor he is another person existing in reality. Dracula’s driver, a vampire, is, hence, a fictional way of representing the psychoanalytic concept of the double, which in turn depicts the split Ego, Id and as will be discussed in the next section the Superego. Anticipating, it is the double as the subject’s superego who has banished the wolves qua jouissance. As the clouds obscure the moon, the curtain finally comes down on the staging of his jouissance and the subject is no longer overwhelmed by anxiety. When Jonathan is able to see again, it is as if self-consciousness has been restored. The journey can now continue to the castle with his driver, actually, Dracula, his own double. 5.3 The Double as Superego and Its Ravages So far I have discussed the double as standing for the subject’s Ego and Id. Dracula, in the castle, also stands for the superego, but as will be seen in its less familiar ‘Lacanian’ version. In the words of the psychoanalyst J.D. Nasio, ‘while the superego is classically assimilated to the superego-conscience guarantor of the moral law of the interdiction of incest, we discover here another superego, the unconscious and perverse instigator which entices the ego with the charm of an ideal of jouissance’.96 Thus on the one hand there is the superego as moral conscience when the child, on the resolution of the Oedipus complex, internalises the interdictions of the parents. In the words of Catherine Millot, the superego results ‘from the introjection of paternal authority’,97 or as Chiesa writes, the subject resolves its Oedipus complex by ‘an alienating identification 95 Ibid., p. 39. 96 J.D. Nasio, Enseignement de 7 Concepts Cruciaux de la Psychanalyse (Paris: Payot, 1988), p. 221. [translation mine]. 97 Catherine Millot, Nobodaddy, L’hystérie dans le Siècle (Paris: Point Hors Ligne, 1988), p. 74. [translation mine].

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with the imago of the father’, the entry into the Law and, as a consequence, the establishment of the ‘superego as repressive agency’.98 Yet, on the other hand, the superego cannot be reduced to a pure psychical representative of the law. It is also the representative of the Id and the repressed drives. As Millot explains, ‘the superego is charged with the drives of the Id. As well as an authority of prohibition, the superego is the representative of the lost jouissance’.99 Hence this second facet of the superego in Nasio’s words ‘ends up representing the irresistible call of the id inciting the ego to violate the interdiction and dissolve in an ecstasy beyond all pleasure’.100 In consequence what the superego commands us to find ‘is not the moral good (that is, what is good from the point of view of society), but absolute jouissance itself; it orders us to trespass every limit and attain the impossible of an always evasive jouissance.’101 While the superego is, at the resolution of the Oedipus complex, both the representative of the law and of the now forbidden jouissance, there is also a third ‘legacy’ or facet. As Nasio points out, the exit from the Oedipus complex signals that the child has renounced the ‘concretization’ or ‘materialization’ of his incestuous desire. He thereby saves ‘his physical and psychic integrity from the danger of the break which would follow had the ego of the child acceded to the tragic jouissance of incest’.102 The superego thereupon becomes the inheritor or representative of the maintenance of the ego’s integrity, forming the final barrier to an otherwise destructive jouissance. The result is that, ‘in a seeming breach of faith, not only does the superego incite but it simultaneously forbids that same jouissance’.103 Moreover, in its contradictory functions, the superego becomes malevolent and savage; ‘the three primordial, superegoic functions of exhortation, interdiction and protection are only fulfilled by this tyrannical superego in a violent and morbid fashion’.104 In a similar vein, Lacan notes that at the same time as being ‘constant with the law’ the superego does not comply with it so that one should emphasize ‘its senseless, blind character, of pure imperativeness and simple tyranny’.105 98 Chiesa, Subjectivity, p. 29. 99 Millot, Nobodaddy, p. 74. [translation mine]. 100 Nasio, Enseignement, pp. 221–222. [translation mine]. 101 Ibid., p. 221. 102 Ibid., p. 217. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid., p. 223. 105 Lacan, The Seminar, Book 1 Freud’s Papers on Technique, trans. by John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 102.

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Viewing Dracula as Jonathan’s double clearly illustrates this conception of the superego in its contradictory yet intertwined roles. There are two relevant episodes; Harker’s encounter with the three vampire woman and, later on, his pleading with Dracula to be allowed to leave the castle. The affair with the women occurs in a part of the castle where Dracula had forbidden his guest to fall asleep. Let me advise you, my dear young friend. Nay, let me warn you with all seriousness, that should you leave these rooms you will not by any chance go to sleep in any other part of the castle. It is old, and has many memories, and there are bad dreams for those who sleep unwisely. Be warned!106 If according to Freud, the dream constitutes a fulfilment of the subject’s repressed wishes107 then Harker is here forbidden to have dreams, that are, as will be shortly suggested, incestuous. However, in this fantasy space of the castle bereft of symbolic authority, Harker does not obey this injunction coming from his superego, in this first facet as law-giver (‘the Count’s warning came into my mind, but I took pleasure in disobeying it’), and falls asleep in one of the forbidden parts of the castle. In the moonlight opposite me were three young women, ladies by their dress and manner. I thought at the time that I must be dreaming when I saw them, they threw no shadow on the floor. The women are evidently vampires because they have no shadow. Two of them, dark ones, also look like the Count ‘with high aquiline noses’. The third one is different. ‘She was fair, as fair as can be, with great masses of golden hair and eyes like pale sapphires. I seemed somehow to know her face, and to know it in connection with some dreamy fear, but I could not recollect at the moment how or where’.108 This description indicates that, as Ken Gelder argues, Harker is seeing his own mother. In both Carmilla, a vampire novel from 1872 by J.S. Le Fanu, and Dracula, ‘the fair-haired vampire women signal the (sexual) return of the mother’.109 It is indeed this third one who approaches Jonathan whilst ­another 106 Stoker, Dracula, p. 57. 107 For an account of Freud’s contention that every dream concerns the fulfilment of a wish see Freud, Interpretation, Chap. iii. 108 Stoker, Dracula, p. 61. 109 Gelder, Reading the Vampire, (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 73.

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woman says ‘Go on! You are first, and we shall follow. Yours is the right to begin’.110 This vampire woman embodies a prohibited (and impossible) enjoyment; the incestuous recovery of the ‘mother-Thing’ enticing the subject in preference to the ‘normal’ woman, in this case, his betrothed, Mina waiting for him in England. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down, lest someday it should meet Mina’s eyes and cause her pain, but it is the truth.111 Harker submits himself to what he imagines will be an ecstatic enjoyment: ‘I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited, waited with beating heart’.112 At this point, however, Dracula suddenly appears, grabbing the woman by the neck and throwing her off Harker. He thus saves Harker since according to lore, had the women bitten him, he would have been turned into a vampire. This view of Dracula as the final superegoic protector from a lethal (incestuous) jouissance – the third facet in Nasio’s theorization – is strengthened by Harker’s recollection that the ‘fierce sweep of his arm, with which he hurls the woman from him’ was ‘the same imperious gesture that I had seen used to the wolves’113 on the journey to the castle. Wolves in the novel, as will also appear in my next example, signal a lethal threat of the recuperation of the subject’s (mythically) lost ‘originary’ jouissance. Moreover, both wolves and vampire woman appearing in the moonlight is another indicator that the same concept is being represented. The physical act of throwing off the woman using brute force is characteristic of the third facet as described by Nasio – in contrast to the presence of the law qua speech, which would have signalled the psychical presence of the Law, the first facet of the Superego – : ‘the Count! Never did I imagine such wrath and fury, even to the demons of the pit. His eyes were positively blazing. The red light in them was lurid, as if the flame of hell-fire blazed behind them’.114 The second episode is the appearance of a pack of wolves one evening when Dracula opens the castle door for Harker. Dracula has finally permitted 110 Stoker, Dracula, p. 61. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid.,, p. 72. 113 Ibid., p. 62. 114 Ibid., p. 62.

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Jonathan to leave the castle on the morrow informing him that all has been arranged. ‘My carriage shall come for you, and shall bear you to the Borgo Pass to meet the diligence from Bukovina to Bistritz.’115 These are the same places mentioned on Jonathan’s journey to the castle so that here Dracula as superego can be seen in its first facet, that of moral conscience leading the subject away from the castle (unregulated jouissance) and back to the space of culture and the law. This superego, though is subsequently seen, in its two other facets, that of inciter to jouissance and in, the last resort, the final barrier against that jouissance. On Dracula allowing his guest to leave, Jonathan immediately suspects ‘him’, that is, his own Superego, and, ‘determined to test his sincerity’, asks him ‘point-blank: − “Why may I not go no-night”?’116 Dracula refuses, ‘because, dear sir, my coachman and horses are away on a mission.’117 Yet both the reader and Harker know there is no coachman so the Superego is indeed not being ‘sincere’. Moreover, the superego now becomes the inciter to jouissance. When Harker insists on leaving, Dracula tells him that he will not be kept ‘an hour’ against his will in his house. When, however, Jonathan proceeds towards the door: Close at hand came the howling of many wolves. It was almost as if the sound sprang up at the rising of his hand, just as the music of a great orchestra seems to leap under the baton of the conductor. After a pause of a moment, he proceeded, in his stately way, to the door, drew back the ponderous bolts, unhooked the heavy chains, and began to draw it open. To my intense astonishment I saw that it was unlocked. Suspiciously, I looked all round, but could see no key of any kind. As the door began to open, the howling of the wolves without grew louder and angrier. Their red jaws, with champing teeth, and their bluntclawed feet as they leaped, came in through the opening door. I knew than that to struggle at the moment against the Count was useless. With such allies as these at his command, I could do nothing. But still the door continued slowly to open, and only the Count’s body stood in the gap. Suddenly it struck me that this might be the moment and means of my doom. I was to be given to the wolves, and at my own instigation. There was a diabolical wickedness in the idea great enough

115 Ibid., p. 71. 116 Ibid., p. 71. 117 Ibid.

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for the Count, and as the last chance I cried out, ‘Shut the door! I shall wait till morning’.118 It is Dracula who gives permission for Harker to leave and enables him to do so by opening the door without using a key whereas, as far as Harker knows, it is normally locked. The vampire is (literally) opening the door to a lethal jouissance. At the same time the analogy of music ordered by the conductor’s baton, makes it appear that Dracula is the director or producer of the wolves outside representing Harker’s jouissance. Yet, it is also Dracula, who in finally shutting the door, becomes Harker’s last shield protecting him from the acute anxiety (‘Shut the door!’) in the face of the looming gratification of his own desire (‘I was to be given to the wolves, and at my own instigation’) and what would have been his literal bodily dismemberment. Dracula, as Superego in its third facet is ultimately the means of Harker’s not being ‘thrown to the wolves’ by, as in the case of the vampire woman, finally blocking a desired but lethal jouissance, which as duplicitous superego the vampire had also instigated. Thus, finally at the very end of the Jonathan’s stay in the castle, one sees how, in this fantasy space, the incestuous vampire woman represents the mother/ thing appearing in place of Mina, the ‘normal’ woman of the possible sexual relationship: I am alone in the castle with those awful women. Faugh! Mina is a woman, and there is naught in common. They are devils of the Pit!119 The presence of the vampire representing the overbearing closeness of jouissance and the tyranny of the Lacanian superego leads to the imperative to escape. And then away for home! Away to the quickest and nearest train! Away from the cursed spot, from this cursed land, where the devil and his children still walk with earthly feet!120 The devil can now be seen not as a supernatural figure but the extimate superego within (and without) accounting for the character’s torment. For Nasio, the psychoanalytic concept of the superego is ‘exactly opposite to the rational 118 Ibid., p. 72 [my emphasis]. 119 Stoker, Dracula, p. 75. 120 Ibid.

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principles of the morality founded in the search for the good’. This ‘superego cruel and rapacious, is the cause of the large part of human distress and the absurd, infernal action of men (suicide, murder, destruction and war)’.121 Jonathan’s last words regarding his stay in the castle register exactly that despair: ‘At least God’s mercy is better than that of those monsters, and the precipice is steep and high. At its foot a man may sleep, as a man. Goodbye, all. Mina!’122 6

Van Helsing and the Return of the Master

As has been stated, Dracula is the only text of the examples given in this book to end with marriage(s) and a child due to the actions of the group led by Prof. Van Helsing. In the following sections I look in detail at the role of the ­professor, and the way in which this successful outcome (by the traditional measure of the Victorian novel) is enabled by means of the re-enactment of certain ‘traditional’ roles; father-in-law, the priest, and the master commanding by dint of his position of authority. Nonetheless, as noted in the introduction to this chapter, this does not mean that the text can be read as advocating the restoration of the previous order. There is an ambiguity in the portrayal of the character and actions of Van Helsing. While on the one hand his role is essential, he is, on the other, made to look somewhat farcical, his broken English, in particular, giving the supposedly learned Dutch professor an air of fraudulence. In his priestly role, there is also his peculiar use of religious icons. An item such as the holy wafer, for example, once having symbolic value, is reduced in Van ­Helsing’s hands to mere paste to plug up the cracks in a tomb. Thus, despite the apparent closure and happy ending the implication remains that the traditional roles which have unravelled cannot simply be reconstituted in their previous form and efficacy. The Escape from Anxiety into Sociability – Freud’s Colleagues and Van Helsing’s Team The role of Van Helsing can be clarified by returning to Freud’s dream. One can now see the analogous structure of dream and novel. Both can be divided into two parts: the first consisting of the traumatic experience of the solitary protagonist, the second of the return to the sociability of the group, i.e. the assimilation of the trauma into the symbolic grid of shared discourse. At the end of

6.1

121 Nasio, Enseignement, pp. 220–221 [translation mine]. 122 Stoker, Dracula, p. 75.

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the first part of the dream, on seeing the inside of Irma’s throat, Freud ‘at once calls in Dr M’, a medical colleague who repeats the examination: ‘There’s no doubt it’s an infection, but no matter; dysentery will supervene and the toxin will be eliminated’. Freud adds that We were directly aware, too, of the origin of the infection. Not long before, when she was feeling unwell, my friend Otto had given her an injection. And probably the syringe had not been clean.123 The horrific and meaningless sight of the back of Irma’s throat is thus integrated into medical discourse – an infection from a (probably dirty) syringe. A third doctor, Leopold starts examining the patient, diagnosing an ‘infiltration’ on the shoulder.124 As Lacan writes of Freud’s appeal to his colleagues: ‘This is the moment I’ve called the entry of the fool, since that is more or less the role played by the subjects on whom Freud calls’.125 In Dracula, Arthur Holmwood, betrothed to the sick Lucy, consults his friend, John Seward, a doctor, who baffled by (the now vampiric) Lucy Westenra’s illness, in turn calls on Dr H, in this case Dr Prof. Van Helsing of Amsterdam, ‘a philosopher and a metaphysician, and one of the most advanced scientists of his day’.126 Van Helsing will provide explanations, as ludicrous as those given by the three reputable doctors in Freud’s dream – a story about a vampire, an un-dead creature who lives off blood and infects all those he preys on.127 123 Freud, Interpretation, p. 131. 124 Ibid. 125 Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory, p. 164. 126 Stoker, Dracula, p. 129. 127 In this context, a distinction should be made between the world of the novel and that of the reader. In the diegetic world of the novel vampires do exist. In her study referred to above, Elizabeth Bronfen writes the following observation on Harker’s ‘choosing’ to believe in Van Helsing’s story: ‘if Jonathan’s hysteria was in part a response to his uncertainty about taking on the responsibility as a solicitor and accepting the conflict this would entail, submitting himself to Van Helsing’s vampire phantasy means relinquishing not only his claim to his desire but also all responsibility for the individual traumatic knowledge within his psychic topology. Mina, in turn, also prefers to believe in Van Helsing’s vampire phantasy, and with it in Jonathan’s supernatural contagion, to avoid confronting the far more disturbing knowledge that Jonathan’s psyche is irrevocably wounded, that his health is vulnerable, that his position as solicitor is fallible, and that, to boot, the aetiology for his hysterical distress is inaccessible’ (Bronfen, p. 210). I aruge, however, that one has to take the existence of the vampire with the diegetic world as true. Within the novel, Dracula, really exists. There is nothing in the novel to suggest that the characters are in

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Yet, as Copjec points out, the second part of Freud’s dream can be seen as a refuge from the eruption of anxiety at the encounter of the object a. ‘The abruptness of the transition [between the two scenes] indicates that Freud flees from the real-Irma, her white scabs, the unconscious – into the symbolic community of his fellow doctors.’128 It might be said that Freud does not wake up at this point from his anxiety (at the sight of the inside of Irma’s throat), as might have been expected, because his dream immediately conjures up the community of doctors and their pronouncements in which he can take refugee.129 In the novel, the group which forms around Van Helsing will provide an analogous recourse for Harker. At this point, I need to return to the scene where Harker sees the vampire lying comatose in his earth box and my contention that the gaze on the count is, as in the case of the curly structures inside Irma’s throat, a depiction of the object a – the representative of the (imaginarily) lost jouissance. Dolar points out that in the literature of the double, at the end, the relationship to the double that incarnates one’s jouissance gets ‘so unbearable that the subject, in a final showdown, kills his double, unaware that his only substance and his very being were concentrated in his double’.130 This is why in the novel Harker strikes at the count lying in the earth box with the shovel. Had he succeeded at this point he would, according to the tradition of the literary double, also have had to have died, thus bringing the story to a premature end. The double cannot be killed until it has become a shared object and there is a group banding together to commit the deed as in The Lost World and The Invisible Man. As Harker writes on one of the occasions when he sees Dracula crawling down the castle, ‘as he went down the wall, lizard fashion, I wished I had a gun or some lethal weapon, that I might destroy him; but I fear that no weapon wrought alone by man’s hand would have any effect on him’.131 As one’s private double he cannot be killed by oneself, but later on, as the shared object of a group, he can be

anyway mistaken or deluded into believing the story. They are left with no option other than accepting Van Helsing’s explanations. If this were not the case the characters would be completely farcical, as no reasonable adult could, outside this fictional world, believe in such a story. 128 Copjec, ‘Vampires’, p. 27. 129 A very similar process can be seen in the children’s Purple Crayon series of books by Crockett Johnson where Harold draws himself into very frightening situations only to save himself by means of the next drawing. 130 Dolar, ‘Wedding Night’, p. 11. As Dolar points out, in much of the literature in which the double appears, he remains a private affair, appearing only to the subject. Ibid. 131 Stoker, Dracula, p. 71.

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killed by two knives wielded by two people132 and after having been tracked down in what, as is made clear, has been a joint effort. Thus, Van Helsing and his ‘scientific’ lore function to ‘communalize’ the individual’s double. This recalls the incident in The Lost World, where Malone, on his solitary tree climb is suddenly confronted by the face of the unknown monster, appearing as would his mirror image, but which, on his descent, becomes an ape-man, part of Challenger’s scientific discourse shared by the group. Dracula is transformed from Harker’s private object to a shared one by Van Helsing’s vampiric folklore and his anxiety thereby assuaged. Jonathan’s reaction on being shown the professor’s letter stating that all he ‘wrote down was true’ serves to make this point clear. It seems to have made a new man of me. It was the doubt as to the reality of the whole thing that knocked me over. I felt impotent, and in the dark, and distrustful. But, now that I know, I am not afraid, even of the Count. In time a group is formed which bands together to track down and kill the vampire. As Mina reports: When we met in Dr Seward’s study two hours after dinner, which had been at six o’clock, we unconsciously formed a sort of board or committee. Professor Van Helsing took the head of the table, to which Dr Seward motioned him as he came into the room. He made me sit next to him on his right, and asked me to act as secretary. Jonathan sat next to me. Opposite us were Lord Godalming, Dr Seward, and Mr Morris, Lord Godalming being next the Professor, and Dr Seward in the centre. It is the professor with his knowledge who sets up a new symbolic grid within which the otherwise elusive vampire can be pinned down. He produces the rules, which, it turns out, have some governance of the heretofore uncontainable Dracula. The vampire’s power can be neutralized by ‘things which so afflict him’, such ‘as the garlic that we know of, and as for things sacred, as this symbol, my crucifix’.133 As was discussed, the castle for Harker gradually became a space devoid of time. With Van Helsing’s schema, however, the vampire enters into a temporal framework. As the professor explains: ‘Only at certain times 132 ‘On the instant, came the sweep and flash of Jonathan’s great knife. I shrieked as I saw it shear through the throat. Whilst at the same moment Mr Morris’s bowie knife plunged into the heart’. Ibid., p. 367. 133 Ibid., p. 245.

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can he have limited freedom. If he be not at the place whither he is bound, he can only change himself at noon or at exact sunrise or sunset.’134 There is a further restriction in that ‘he can only pass running water at the slack or the flood of the tide’.135 The symbolic dimension of time in relation to Dracula is thereby to some extent restored. These rules transforming the vampire from the bearer of the subject’s jouissance outside phenomenal reality in the castle to a shared object, not completely outside the symbolic parallel the scientific ones (invented by the novelist) which partially limit the invisible man. As in Dracula, these also enable his pursuers to draw up plans to track him down, such as the ‘rule’ that any food eaten remains visible until digested. As Kemp tells the policeman: ‘he has to hide after eating.’136 It is these kinds of rules which enable the pursuers to get a purchase on what would otherwise be a completely elusive prey. In terms of psychoanalytic thinking this can be translated into the concept that there insists, to the distress of the subject, an unbearable real produced by the symbolic itself, which in turn must then be ‘dealt with’ or screened by means of that same symbolic. The anxiety evoking jouissance represented by the vampire in the castle is a consequence of being in the symbolic in the first place, as represented in the journey described in such details at the opening of novel. It takes that same symbolic to heal the wound. As Copjec points out, the second part of Freud’s dream, filled with the various doctors representing established medical authority, constitutes the ‘re-emergence of paternal figures and the restoration of rules which provide a shield against the unbearable real’. Even though this second scene is ‘infused with an air of interdiction, of rules, regulations, and prescriptions’, compared with the first part of the dream, it ‘offers relief from the constricted, asphyxiating space that zusammenschniren, that chokes, Freud as well as Irma’.137 In Dracula it is in the absence of the paternal figures that Van Helsing will reinstate the rules and regulations as now will be seen in greater detail. 134 Ibid., p. 244. 135 Ibid. A similar point is made by Benson Saler and Charles A. Ziegler who note that ‘the intrusion of the supernatural into the natural is successfully resisted, in large measure in consequence of Van Helsing’s revelation that the supernatural is rule governed (albeit by special rules) and that knowledge of the rules appropriate to vampires gives us power over them’. Benson Saler and Charles A. Ziegler, ‘Dracula and Carmilla: Monsters and the Mind’, in Philosophy and Literature, 29, (2005) p. 222. 136 Wells, Invisible Man, p. 128. 137 Copjec, ‘Vampires’, p. 28.

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6.2 Van Helsing as Father-in-Law The situation as far as fathers are concerned in Dracula is initially also, and not coincidentally as has been maintained throughout this book, similar to that of The Lost World, in that they too play no part. Lucy Westenra, fatherless, is, like Gladys, left to choose her own husband. As Dennis Foster points out, ‘the fathers in this book are all dead (Mina’s and Lucy’s father) or dying (Lord Godalming and Mr Hawkins)’.138 It is also not without significance that Jonathan sees Dracula for the first time in England on taking a stroll with Mina in Piccadilly immediately after Hawkins’ funeral which is held in London despite his having lived in Exeter (Harker at this point, having returned from his stay in the hospital in Budapest, has been taken on as a partner by Hawkins in his law practice). Hawkins is regarded by the young couple as a surrogate farther, Mina writing that ‘it really seems as though we had lost a father’.139 He has treated Harker ‘like his own son and left him a fortune’.140 He has also bequeathed Jonathan his legal practice. This gout ridden father had, however, been unable to perform his job as Dracula’s solicitor and had sent Harker in his stead. He has now died suddenly and Harker’s doubts as to whether he is capable of stepping into the father’s shoes re-emerge. Jonathan, Mina writes, ‘says the amount of responsibility which it puts upon him makes him nervous. He begins to doubt himself’.141 It is at this ersatz father’s funeral, that the primal father figure, Dracula, appears. Mina reports that her husband is ‘very pale, and his eyes seemed bulging out as, half in terror and half in amazement, he gazed at a tall, thin man, with a beaky nose and black moustache and pointed beard, who was also observing the pretty girl’.142 This phrase, ‘observing the pretty girl’ signals that Dracula, Harker’s double, is not the dead, oedipal father who no longer enjoys (or the gout-ridden invalid) but the subject’s rival in love. As was pointed out in the discussion of She, the double, in Dolar’s words, is a ‘disturber of love’, the one who comes between the man and his woman, ‘typically, at the moment when the subject stands on the brink of realising a sexual relationship’.143 In Stoker’s novel, Dracula is the continual spoiler, coming between the Arthur and Lucy, just betrothed and Jonathan and Mina, newly married and on the brink of what appears to be the 138 Foster, ‘Psychoanalytic Perspective’, p. 494. 139 Stoker, Dracula, p. 170. 140 Ibid. 141 Ibid. 142 Ibid., p. 183. 143 Dolar, ‘Wedding Night’, p. 14.

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consummation of their sexual desire. Dracula, as a primal father, tries to take all the women for himself, in this case by turning them into fellow vampires.144 Yet, nonetheless, Dracula reverses the ‘typical’ plot involving the double and the woman, which ends without a marriage. In contrast to Challenger whom I labelled the father-out-law, Van Helsing performs the role of the traditional father-in-law, i.e., the one who guards the woman until she can be given in marriage. Where Challenger had mocked Malone’s romance on his wanting to name the Lake for his lady, (‘Challenger looked at me sympathetically, and shook his great head in mock disapproval. “Boys will be boys,” said he. “Lake Gladys let it be.”’145), Van Helsing supports the marriage ties, telling Jonathan, ‘Oh, sir, you will pardon praise from an old man, but you are blessed in your wife’.146 More significantly he acts as a surrogate father-in-law in guarding the woman until Jonathan has eliminated his double. Mina remains under Van Helsing’s protection on the long overland journey from the Rumanian port of Galatz to Castle Dracula in order to kill the Count, (undertaken by the group as opposed to Jonathan’s initial solitary journey there at the beginning of the novel). Ostensibly it is for Mina’s safety, so thatJonathan ‘be not afraid for Madam Mina’.147 But Van Helsing has stay with Mina because, as he says, Jonathan must first kill the vampire, ‘First, because you are young and brave and can fight, and all energies may be needed at the last. And again that it is your right to destroy him. That which has wrought such woe to you and yours’.148 As has been noted, in the end, the slaying of vampire is as in the story of Totem and Taboo a group effort, in that all act together in the planning and tracking down 144 In regard to Lucy, Van Helsing explains that ‘She was bitten by the vampire when she was in a trance, sleep-walking – oh, you start; you do not know that, friend John, but you shall know it all later – and in trance could he best come to take more blood. In trance she died, and in trance she is Un-Dead, too.’ (p. 209). In Mina’s case, Dracula visits the sleeping couple while the other members of the group are on a mission. When they get back they find Jonathan Harker, lying on the bed as if in a stupor. ‘Kneeling on the near edge of the bed facing outwards was the white – clad figure of his wife. By her side stood a tall, thin man, clad in black. His face was turned from us, but the instant we saw it we all recognized the Count [Dracula] – in every way, even to the scar on his forehead. With his left hand he held both Mrs Harker’s hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare breast, which was shown by his torn-open dress.’ (p. 283). As with Lucy, Dracula has at this point bitten Mina in the neck, beginning the process of turning her into a vampire. 145 Ibid., p. 118. 146 Stoker, Dracula, p. 198. 147 Stoker, Dracula, p. 348. 148 Ibid., pp. 347–348.

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of the vampire, and it is two people, Harker and Quincy Morris who simultaneously strike the count. Yet nonetheless it can be added that the novel will end in marriage because in this case the subject, Jonathan, unlike in the case of Leo with She and Ustane, has chosen the woman over his double and taken his part in the killing of the vampire-Thing which blocks the would-be sexual relationship with the normal woman. This is indeed also the case with Arthur Holmwood of whom it is reported at the end of the novel that he is now married. He too has, on Van Helsing’s prompting, agreed to the killing of the vampire Lucy as the un-dead Thing. One can see here the working of the Name-of-the-Father and the imposition of the Law par excellence enabling the presumed sexual relationship with the normal woman (whose name is not given). When Arthur asks Van Helsing in regard to Lucy in her coffin, ‘Tell me what I am to do’, Van Helsing says to him to ‘Take this stake in your left hand’ and ‘strike in God’s name, that so all may be well with the dead that we love, and that the Un-Dead pass away’. Arthur obeys, ‘Then he struck with all his might’.149 Again, Lucy is named here as the ‘Thing’ (‘The Thing in the coffin writhed’150) and on her being killed by Arthur, on Van Helsing’s command, it becomes the ordinary dead body of Lucy (‘as we had seen her in her life’). Thus we have in this instance a representation of the ‘No’ of the Name-of-the-Father (in this case provided by the ‘erstaz’ father – given that the actual fathers are dead or invalided) which, in the command to kill the undead Lucy, both forbids and voids the Thing, the impossible enjoyment. One should also note that the command is given in ‘God’s name’, that is, both in the name of The Father and in the name of a higher power, in whose name the actual earthly father acts as the agent of the Law. 7.3 The Efficacy of the Master Figure With his command to Arthur to put a stake through Lucy, there is also involved the ‘no’, that is the forbidding or prohibition by an authority. Thus apart from his providing the knowledge allowing for the tracking down of the otherwise elusive vampire, which in itself is insufficient, Van Halsing also takes on the role of the traditional master. This aspect can be further illustrated through the contrast with figures in a comparable position in the other novels discussed in this book. In this regard, Lacanian theorists speak of the modern undermining of the role of the master – what Žižek terms ‘doubt about the efficiency of the master-figure’, and another thinker of modernity, Eric Santner calls the ‘crisis of investiture’, that is a waning belief in the authority of tradition and its 149 Ibid., p. 223. 150 Ibid.

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b­ earers. Lacan’s theorization of the master and university discourse outlined in the discussion of The Lost World, showed how in the opening paragraph of the novel Gladys’ father no longer functions as a master figure, wielding authority without wanting to know, but as a suppliant of knowledge and its conformation. According to Žižek, the consequence of this undermining of the master’s discourse in modernity is that the ‘direct rule of the experts legitimized by their knowledge’ appears in supplement.151 Now there are no longer any ‘masters’, only university professors with many qualifications after their names. Just as Challenger, in The Lost World, was endowed with a battery of letters and academic honours, so is Van Helsing in Dracula, where he appears as: ‘ABRAHAM VAN HELSING, md, DPh, D. Lit, etc, etc’152 Despite all the qualifications, the rule of the experts nonetheless tends to be marked by doubt and scepticism. Van Helsing’s ‘followers’, as in The Lost World, are educated men who at first cannot believe in the existence of vampires (or dinosaurs). Van Helsing is faced with the same kind of demand for proofs as was Professor Challenger in The Lost World (regarding an equally ‘unrealistic’ scenario, that of the continuing existence of dinosaurs). This, for example, is Jonathan Seward disputing the professor’s assertion that Lucy has become a vampire: I felt all the dogged argumentativeness of my nature awake within me as I answered him, ‘I am satisfied that Lucy’s body is not in that coffin, but that only proves one thing.’ ‘And what is that, friend John?’ ‘That it is not there.’ ‘That is good logic,’ he said, ‘so far as it goes. But how do you, how can you, account for it not being there?’ ‘Perhaps a body-snatcher,’ I suggested. ‘Some of the undertaker’s people may have stolen it.’ I felt that I was speaking folly, and yet it was the only real cause which I could suggest. The Professor sighed. ‘Ah well!’ he said, ‘we must have more proof. Come with me.’153 Or, in another example, there is Lord Arthur Godalming telling him: ‘I don’t quite like to “buy a pig in a poke” as they say in Scotland’.154 151 Žižek, ‘Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses’ [ accessed 6 September, 2012]. 152 Stoker, Dracula, p. 130. 153 Ibid., pp. 206–207. 154 Ibid., p. 213.

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The point is that while the university discourse struggles to justify and underpin itself, by for example the battery of qualifications or the scientific proofs of its contentions, ultimately the rule of the master cannot be justified: there is always a gap between what he says and any reasons or justification for it. In Žižek’s words, the power of the symbolic, its ability to reign in jouissance, is ultimately based on some ‘un-understood’, taken for granted basis. ‘It is as if our reflexive power can flourish only insofar as it draws its strength and relies on some minimal “pre-reflexive” substantial support that eludes its grasp’.155 More knowledge does not help. Under these circumstances the impact of the other, the would-be expert is dissipated. The authority based on knowledge or expertise is rendered impotent in the face of the other who already knows it all. Thus according to Žižek what occurs as a result is the ‘re-emergence of the brute Real of “irrational” violence, impermeable and insensitive to reflexive interpretation’. This aspect becomes clear in the contrast between Van Helsing and figures in the other novels previously discussed who can be said to be in a position of authority in regard to the protagonist/s but who fail to perform an equivalent role. The first is Challenger, the eminent scientist in The Lost World whom Malone can in some sense be said to be following. As was pointed out in the chapter on The Lost World, knowledge is for Challenger an end in itself, whereas for Van Helsing it is but a means to another end, that is, in the diegetic space of the novel, the defeat of the vampire, or in our interpretation, the ­re-instantiation of the Name-of-the-Father. It is, for example, for this purpose that he consults another expert to fill in some gaps in his knowledge: Thus when we find the habitation of this man-that-was, we can confine him to his coffin and destroy him, if we obey what we know. But he is clever. I have asked my friend Arminius, of Buda-Pesth University, to make his record; and, from all the means that are, he tell me of what he has been.156 Moreover, as was also noted previously, Challenger as ‘pure scientist’ is completely indifferent to the presence of the Thing-like objects such as the dinosaurs to which he, unlike Van Helsing, pays no attention qua Thing. For him they are only scientific specimens, towards which he continually presses forward. Van Helsing, on the other hand, issues commands to destroy the Things. 155 Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 2000), p. 346. 156 Stoker, Dracula, p. 245.

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Van Helsing can also be contrasted with Holly in She and Kemp in The I­ nvisible Man, to whom Griffin turns. Holly is the Cambridge don who also knows, but lets his ward decide for himself and then goes along with him, acting as companion and chronicler: ‘Do you know, my boy, I don’t believe in the quest, but I do believe in big game, and really on the whole, if, after thinking it over, you make up your mind to go, I will take a holiday, and come with you.’157 Thus while, Van Helsing acts to restore the missing authority of the father, Holly, as in the case of Challenger and Malone, permits his ‘boy’ to enter the space devoid of the Name-of-the-Father. Van Helsing, as noted, also facilitates the group action in regard to Dracula – he himself calls it ‘a pack of men following like dogs after a fox’.158 Conversely in The Invisible Man, Kemp, the man who confronts Griffin, is portrayed as a loner. It seems that he lives by himself and, albeit that he calls in the help of those who are officially mandated to act in this matter, i.e. the police, he runs off alone with Griffin in pursuit after abandoning the two policemen in his house (when the they realize Kemp has run off, the second one’s ‘opinion of Kemp was terse and vivid’). He is even denied help by the neighbour and it is only at the last moment when he is caught and about to be killed that a group forms and a stranger intervenes to kill Griffin. Finally in this regard it should be noted that Van Helsing employs various techniques and stratagems in order to convince his followers having nothing to do with knowledge or expertise. He, for example, resorts to an authority based on traditional notions such as ‘duty’, a word which he employs frequently: ‘But we are face to face with duty; and in such case must we shrink?’;159 ‘You know that your safety is our solemnest duty’;160 ‘My Lord Godalming, I too, have a duty to do, a duty to others, a duty to you, a duty to the dead, and by God, I shall do it!’.161 He speaks ‘gravely and sternly’. We see that he manages to persuade Arthur that even if he cannot believe in his knowledge he can believe in him, Van Helsing, although there is no foundation for it relying as it does only on his own (emotional) testimony. His voice broke a little, and he went on with an accent full of pity:– ‘But, I  beseech you, do not go forth in anger with me. In a long life of acts 157 Rider Haggard, She, p. 50. 158 Stoker, Dracula, p. 311. 159 Ibid., p. 242. 160 Ibid., p. 322. 161 Ibid., p. 215.

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which were often not pleasant to do, and which sometimes did wring my heart, I have never had so heavy a task as now’.162 He then adds Just think. For why should I give myself so much of labour and so much of sorrow? I have come here from my own land to do what I can of good; at the first to please my friend John, and then to help a sweet young lady, whom, too, I came to love.163 And in the end Arthur is persuaded even without understanding: ‘He took the old man’s hand and said in a broken voice, “Oh, it is hard to think of it, and I cannot understand, but at least I shall go with you and wait.”’164 6.4 Van Helsing as ‘Priest’ As with The Lost World, Bram Stoker’s novel picks up on the failure in the discarding of traditional modes of authority and thinking to take into account the Thing. In particular, Conan Doyle’s novel depicts the inability of a modern discourse, science, to take over the function of religion, which it considers superseded, in forming a symbolic barrier against the Thing. The role of religion as a screen was, I argued, represented by the designation of a part of the plateau as the reserve of the Spirits of the Curupuri. An analogous interpretation can be made in the case of Dracula. At the beginning of his journey in Transylvania, when a local woman offers him a crucifix, Harker says: ‘I did not know what to do, for, as an English Churchman, I have been taught to regard such things as in some measure idolatrous’.165 The crucifix is the locals’ means of protection against the vampire reminiscent of the Spirit of the Curupuri. Although there appears to be set up here a dichotomy between the superstitious peasantry of Eastern Europe and the rational Anglican churchman, this breaks down later on in the novel, when the crucifix is employed, on Van Helsing’s instructions, in neutralizing the power of the vampire. In one scene in England of the group encountering the vampire, ‘the Count suddenly stopped, just as poor Lucy had done outside the tomb, and cowered back. Further and further back he c­ owered,

162 Ibid. 163 Ibid. 164 Ibid. 165 Ibid., p. 31.

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as we, lifting our crucifixes, advanced’.166 Thus, , Van Helsing’s part, in his priestlike actions as the repository of belief and with a certain authority in the eyes of his ‘congregation’, has the effect of re-constituting the screen, (portrayed in the text as a protection against the vampire but which in our reading is the shield against an anxiety inducing jouissance and the ravages of the superego).167 However the mode of the use of the sacred symbols (their ‘degeneration’ into a material stuff denuded of symbolic value) denotes that not the same screen can be restored. Van Helsing will also uses the wafer, another Christian symbol. In the following example he tries to block the ‘undead’ Lucy from emerging from her tomb: He took from his bag a mass of what looked like thin, wafer-like biscuit, which was carefully rolled up in a white napkin. Next he took out a double handful of some whitish stuff, like dough or putty. He crumbled the wafer up fine and worked it into the mass between his hands. This he then took, and rolling it into thin strips, began to lay them into the crevices between the door and its setting in the tomb.168 166 Ibid., p. 283. 167 This discussion of the function of religion should also be viewed in regard to the implication it contains for contemporary Britain. In a recent work, The Death of Christian Britain, Callum Brown argues against viewing secularization as the slow withering away of an institution by, for example, counting the incidences of outward religious practices but instead as an unprecedented and fundamental change in people’s thought, which Callum argues, did not occur in Britain until the 1960s. This breach in British history is something ‘more fundamental than just “failing churches”, but the end of Christianity as a means by which men and women, as individuals, construct their identities and their sense of “self”’. What occurred, according to Callum, ‘is a short and sharp cultural revolution of the late twentieth century which makes the Britons of the year 2000 fundamentally different in character from those of 1950 or 1900 or 1800, or from peoples in many other countries’. Furthermore, Brown specifically maintains that it is the death of religion and not specifically Christianity which is involved: ‘It must be emphasized that the haemorrhage of ­British Christianity has not come about as a results of competition form or conversation to other churches. No new religion, no new credo not even a state-sponsored secularism, has been there to displace it’ (Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 2–3). This viewpoint renders the function of religion shown in works such as Dracula and The Lost World more relevant than at the time they were written in so far as that function has not been taken over by another social practice. What should be noted here is that, as with the Name-of-the-Father, it is a function that is at stake rather than religion (or the father) per se. 168 Ibid., p. 217.

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Here the wafer has been turned into a kind of pastry by Van Helsing to block the gaps in the door to Lucy’s tomb, as if in the wake of Christian symbols having lost their symbolic efficacy, this item is reduced to its literal materiality, as mere stuff to fill a physical gap. This recalls Hamlet’s musings on the dust of Alexander’s body being used to block a bear barrel in Hamlet discussed in regard to She. The implication is that there still remains in an age of unbelief, the need for a barrier to be set up in the symbolic against the real, as represented by the vampirised Lucy. In the absence of the traditional authority ­represented by the church and its icons, there appears a new authority, who in the end uses one of those same objects but in a degenerated form, a putty for physical rather than symbolic repairs. Thus while the screen proves still necessary, that particular form, the religion of Christianity, is now lost and cannot be reconstituted. What happens in consequence is that belief in the power of the sacred is not so much abolished as displaced onto another person who is still supposed to believe: ‘What is that which you are using?’ This time the question was by Arthur. Van Helsing reverently lifted his hat as he answered. ‘The Host. I brought it from Amsterdam. I have an Indulgence.’ It was an answer that appalled the most sceptical of us, and we felt individually that in the presence of such earnest purpose as the Professor’s, a purpose which could thus use the to him most sacred of things, it was impossible to distrust.169 It appears then that the sacred aura of the wafer still has an effect on the Englishmen, but mediated or, so to speak ‘at second hand’ in the belief in another’s belief. 6.5 The Ambiguity of the Master Figure As noted in the introduction to this section, while Van Helsing carries out the traditional functions of the master, he does so in a novel and somewhat ludicrous manner. This precludes reading Dracula as a conservative restoration of the status quo which has unravelled. While the characters take him seriously, the reader cannot, thereby suggesting that the master cannot be reinstituted or reconstituted in his previous standing, despite the necessity of his function. 169 Ibid. [emphasis mine].

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Regarding the portrayal of Van Helsing, he is, as were the doctors in Freud’s dream, made to seem rather foolish, in this case by his long-winded and oxymoronic English (much reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Polonius in Hamlet), as when he states, concerning Lucy, that ‘the disease – for not to be all well is a disease – interest me’. Or, in another example, when on being summoned by Seward he writes, When I received your letter I am already coming to you. By good fortune I can leave just at once, without wrong to any of those who have trusted me. Were fortune other, then it were bad for those who have trusted, for I come to my friend when he call me to aid those he holds dear.170 His English is riddled with errors which often occur at the most solemn or moving moments. When Arthur, in the scene discussed above, is about to put the stake through Lucy, Van Helsing announces ‘Then when we begin our prayer for the dead – I shall read him’. There is also the minor mistake Van ­Helsing makes of omitting to write the English county on a vital telegram which was addressed only: ‘Seward, Carfax’. The telegram was then sent to Carfax in Sussex and arrived at its destination, Carfax, London, twenty-two hours late. Carfax, is the mental asylum where Seward is the resident doctor and H ­ illingham is Lucy’s house. The telegram had said: ‘Do not fail to be at Hillingham to-night’.171 Van Helsing had wanted Seward to have reached Lucy that same night in order to protect her from Dracula’s nocturnal invasions. Finally when J­onathan Harker explains to Van Helsing how he has been cured by him it ends on a note of the bizarre with Van Helsing’s eyebrows. I was in doubt, and then everything took a hue of unreality, and I did not know what to trust, even the evidence of my own senses. Not knowing what to trust, I did not know what to do; and so had only to keep on working in what had hitherto been the groove of my life. The groove ceased to avail me, and I mistrusted myself. Doctor, you don’t know what it is to doubt everything, even yourself. No, you don’t; you couldn’t with eyebrows like yours. These examples render equivocal the figure of Van Helsing. While the necessity of his role is evident – the Oedipal father who enables his sons to destroy

170 Stoker, Dracula, p. 130. 171 Ibid., p. 156.

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the Thing and accede to a relationship with the normal woman – this ‘good father’ is a somewhat absurd figure. Here one might return to Freud’s dream of Irma’s injection. The dream ­stages two kinds of knowledge; on the one hand, Freud’s new practice of psychoanalysis as used in the treatment of Irma and, on the other, existing medical knowledge. Whilst Freud may have failed in this specific case172 in the dream current knowledge is presented as not being the solution either, given in particular that the syringe of the medical practitioner is shown to have been dirty. It is as if what is said in the dream is that ‘while Irma’s treatment may not have entirely succeeded, nonetheless, compared to existing medical practice, Freud’s new psychoanalytic practice is on the right track and the answer to such a ‘disease’ as Irma’s lies in a change in the symbolic paradigm’. Indeed the very act of the recording of the dream as significant together with its interpretation is constitutive of this new way of thinking. The same applies to the novel, a fiction as unrealistic as the dream. While in the diegetic space of the novel, Van Helsing and his vampire lore suffice to enable the marriages and the birth of the child, in reality, the significance of the novel, according to my reading, lies in its staging by means of the unreal or the fantastic, what will become, in the course of time, a new body of knowledge, including the Freudian topology of the subject, the role of the superego and the Lacanian object a. The function of Name-of-the-Father is demonstrated in assuaging the anxiety of the encounter with the object a and the ravages of the superego, but without thereby subscribing to the re-instantiation of the former means of priestly and paternal authority.

172 As Lacan points out in regard to this dream: ‘Freud considers it a great success being able to explain this, dream in all its detail, by the desire to be relieved of his responsibility-for the failure of Irma’s treatment. He does so in the dream – as the artisan of the dream – in so many ways that, as he remarks with his customary humour, it bears a great resemblance to the story of the person who, upon being reproached with returning a kettle with a hole in it, answers firstly, that he returned it intact and that secondly, the kettle already had a hole in it when he borrowed it and that thirdly, he hadn’t borrowed it. Each of these explanations on its own would be perfectly valid, but taken together can in no way satisfy us’. Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory, p. 151.

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Conclusion

Modernity and the Return of the Primal Father

At the beginning of this book, the task was set up of exploring several fantasy or non-realistic literary works restaging in different forms a myth invented in a contemporaneous psychoanalytic text, and which appeared with the transformation of a traditional agrarian society into a modern industrial, technological and democratic one. The contention was that the significance of this conjunction emerges only in reading these texts through the prism of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. While existing critical interpretations of these works typically involve historical contextualization, retrieving discourses and modes of thought of which the contemporary reader may be unaware, it was argued that such practice not only fails to account for the hold that works such as She and Dracula continue to exert, but more importantly diminishes their contemporary significance. The thread running throughout these works is that the dismantlement of forms of traditional authority and social practices, a deficit in society and culture has been left which the rise of science and technology cannot entirely fill. In particular in the chapter on The Lost World, the problematic role of science was examined regarding two different facets. The first concerns science’s complete disregard of the jouissance-Thing (and in consequence the resulting failure of the sexual relationship) in contrast to the role of the Name-of-the-Father, and art and religion in this context. The second relates to science in its form of ‘empirical realism’ as represented by Challenger, which still forms the dominant paradigm for judging the truth value of social science disciplines. This norm, in contrast to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, ignores the role of the ‘always already in-place’ symbolic framework, thus eliminating the distinction between the truth and the factual or reality.1 At the outset, note was taken of Mladen Dolar’s observation that the g­ othic genre and the motif of the double specifically first emerge in the Age of the 1 An instance of this closure is the practice of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (cbt) which (unconsciously) assumes an unproblematic correspondence between truth and reality. A client’s beliefs or thinking is to be compared with reality to determine whether they are compatible or accurate, in other words, true. ‘Recognize that feelings are not always the best measure of reality’ (27) or ‘If you want to know whether you hunch about reality is accurate or your way of looking at something is helpful, put it to the test in reality’. (Rena Branch, Rhena and Rob Willson, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy For Dummies 2nd Ed. (Chichester, W. Sussex: John Wiley, 2010)).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004336582_011 Josephine

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­Enlightenment with the growing acceptance of modern science and the decline of religious thinking. An account of the changes which made up the emergence of modern British society – a second scientific revolution, unprecedented technological advance and a further decline in traditional authorities, both political and religious – showed that it is not co-incidental that this myth is invented and re-iterated at this period. The return of the Totem and Taboo theme concerns Britain at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. In ‘The Horror of the Heights’ advanced technology goes hand in hand with the unravelling of social ties and the sexual relationship, and the re-appearance of the primal or anal father qua monster. This link with modernity is also made clear in The Invisible Man taking place entirely in England, mostly in the modern urban environment of London and where the hero is a new type of college chemistry student. Two facets of the literary texts proved of significance, the content or plot and the inclusion of unrealistic elements. The plots loosely follow that of Freud’s Totem and Taboo, in which the primal father is killed by a band of brothers. While in Freud’s work the appearance of the primal father concerned another historical era, in the literary novels, this figure re-appears contemporaneously, in a fantasy space antithetical to the normal every day one, and in the wake of the abdication or absence of the actual father and his traditional authority. It was pointed out that what the myth of Totem and Taboo denotes (in its Lacanian elaboration) is that culture and the Law come into being as a result of the death of the primal Father. This implies that, for the human subject, a full enjoyment (such as was supposed for the primal father) is always already lost, yet, nonetheless, a surplus enjoyment can be obtained within culture. In particular the sexual relationship and reproduction is not a natural process as in the animal world, but dependent on a cultural or symbolic framework regimented by the function of the Name-of-the-Father. The disappearance of the father in the texts serves to denote the cancellation of the Name-of-the-Father (although the Name-of-the-Father does not in itself depend on the presence of an actual biological father). The example of the Amahaggers in She who have received the preserved bodies of their ancestors but no names is the portrayal of an (impossible) society without the Name-of-the-Father. It turns out that without the Name-of-the-Father the sexual relationship does not happen – the novels end without marriage – even though it seems that in the father’s absence the way is opened for would-be couples to form according to their own inclinations. Yet in The Lost World, when Malone and Gladys find themselves alone, an old medieval tradition is revived, that of courtly love, which eventually keeps them apart. While the expedition returns in a triumph for (empirical) science, Malone does not attain his lady. In her place, the object

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of Malone’s ‘official’ desire, there appears the beast. In She, although Ustane, the ‘normal’ woman, chooses Leo and he seems fond of her (and of another woman in England at the outset of the tale), the novel ends with him, unmarried on another expedition with his male companion. In The Invisible Man, a woman, apparently once desirable, no longer appears so to Griffin, specifically at the point where he has disowned his father. Only Dracula has the traditional happy ending of marriage and child. This is due to the summoning of the ‘good’ father, van Helsing, who re-enacts a number of traditional roles, father-in-law, master and priest and who above all, in commanding Arthur to place a stake through the Lucy-Thing and Jonathan to kill the vampire, restores the symbolic efficacy of the Name-of-the-Father.

Paradigms of Knowledge – Empirical Science and Lacanian Psychoanalysis

The second facet concerns fantasy. As discussed in particular in connection with The Lost World two different conceptions of science were considered. The first is the manipulation of the symbolic as in the practice of mathematics and modern physics with a disregard for what appears to be existing reality, or in Lacan’s words as quoted in Chapter i ‘without anything being less motivated than what exists at any given point’.2 Modern science thus follows an internal logic concerning the manipulation of signifiers and thought processes based on autonomous rules. The second conception concerns the naming and ­cataloguing of a pre-existing reality as represented in The Lost World by the dinosaurs and fauna (re-)discovered on the plateau. One can recognize this first type of science as sharing a characteristic with art in that both create new ways of seeing and relating to one’s environment. Thus, for example, the distinction was noted in Conan Doyle’s novel between, on the one hand, the courtly lover in the Middle Ages, as poet and artist, creating a new conception of the relationship between a man and woman and, on the other hand, the courtly lover as a journalist at the beginning of the twentieth century who writes ‘copy’, reporting that which he can see before him, a duplicate of already existing reality. Fantasy literature in its creation of such imaginary devices, can also be viewed as analogous to the first type of science, that of the manipulation of the symbolic in order to bring a new reality into being. Taking the example of Dracula, the vampire is an invention – not necessarily originally Bram Stoker’s 2 Lacan, Ethics, p. 122.

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but based on traditional folklore – which as art in the novel follows a course initially divorced from any outside reality but which afterwards changes the way that same reality is conceived. There are in reality no vampires lying unconscious in coffins with eyes looking back at one but with their invention such concepts as the object a and the Lacanian superego became visible, albeit post facto, in the wake of the subsequent theory. Interpreting the look on the vampire as a (fictional) apparition of the object a, inserts that concept into our symbolic, so that while it never appears as such in phenomenal reality, our way of thinking and speaking about the world is altered, changing our conception of human desire, the sexual relationship and the cause of anxiety. Furthermore, it thereby emerges that these concepts were not particular to Lacan and his followers but appear independently from the pens of authors writing at another time and in another place. This in turn requires re-thinking the place in society today of both literary criticism and a psychoanalytic practice that can be underpinned by literary ‘evidence’. The objection that any interpretation is conditioned by the theory already present or in other words that one always finds what one is looking for is countered by the fact that this is also claims to ‘scientific evidence’. Given that one can never be outside the symbolic, seeing is never neutral, devoid of preconceptions, indeed it is the latter that enable one to see at all. In The Lost World, one sees the workings of the second type of science. It is the ‘need to see with one’s own eyes’ the actual thing or object, as if ‘in the raw’, which provides the whole impetus of the story: the scientific expedition sent out to bring back evidence of the continuing existence of dinosaurs and the proof an actual dinosaur (albeit a baby one). My argument was that several aspects of the novel work to undermine this apparent triumphant ending: the depiction of the scientist Challenger as the double of the king of the ape-men, Gladys’ marriage to the ‘wrong’ man (not the hero of the tale) and the evident fact that in reality dinosaurs do not exist. What we have in The Lost World is the bogus evidence of the continuing existence of dinosaurs and the critique of the ideal of empirical science. This latter, clinging to the conception of a preexisting reality to be discovered by man, remains oblivious to the truth that it is objects that are brought into being by language rather than vice-versa, and that the signification of words, thereby sundered from their direct correspondence with an object which they are supposed to name, is never univocal or stable. Dr Illingworth and his supporters who so reasonably demand irrefutable evidence should be seen as representing the standpoint of the novel’s reader so that the production of the horrible baby pterodactyl which so humiliates and silences them also requires us to question the prevailing assumptions of empirical science and its use of language as directly representing reality.

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A further point in regard to the practice of empirical science concerns the requirement for invention and creativity as opposed to copying or reflecting reality. This stems from the limits to knowledge maintained by Lacanian psychoanalysis. One of the points made about the practice of science in my book is its relentless pursuit of knowledge. Challenger, the man of Science in The Lost World, is shown dogged in its pursuit to the exclusion of all other ­considerations. In She, the educated Englishman reduces the concept of Truth as portrayed by the statue in Kôr to knowledge, the fact that the earth is round. In contrast psychoanalysis maintains a gap, insisting on the existence of ­a-priori limit to knowledge, which can never become absolute or complete. Thus in Lacanian terms, a myth is ‘as a way of approaching the real, which resists symbolization’, that is, something which cannot be said. It marks the point at which knowledge fails. In the case of Totem and Taboo, an explanation is given as to how culture arose from nature while simultaneously signally it as ‘not actually possible’. In this way the gap is left intact between nature and culture – there is no realistic account which can be given as to how culture came into being from nature. In the Invisible Man, the episode of the failed attempt to steal the clothes in the Emporium depicts that same impossibility. The crossing which Griffin attempts from nature as a naked man back into culture fails suggesting that this transition cannot take place in a direct or autonomous manner. The importance of maintaining this gap, this limit to knowledge is in ensuring that a ‘pseudo-knowledge’ does not come to fill it thereby blocking the requirement for other modes of intervention or symbolic actions. This can be the necessity of a prohibition (without explanation) or of an invention, where this latter maintains a certain indeterminacy or freedom for the subject. An example of the first is the function of the Name-of-the Father. In ‘The Horror of the Heights’, the words ‘my knowledge of…’ and the subsequent missing page at the point where the aviator is engulfed by the monsters symbolize the psychoanalytic point that the barrier against a destructive jouissance is not knowledge but a prohibition, the ‘no!’ of the Nom du Père. As to the second point, the corollary of a gap in knowledge is the possibility of an (unconscious) invention. For a sexual relationship to occur, there is no pre-set formula, only an invented one and only on condition that the incestuous object has in the first place been voided and prohibited. As Žižek writes of the role of the fantasy in a sexual relationship, It hinges on the fact that ‘there is no sexual relationship’, no universal formula or matrix guaranteeing a harmonious sexual relationship with one’s partner. On account of the lack of this universal formula, every individual

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has to invent a fantasy of his or her own, a ‘private’ formula for the sexual relationship.3 Finally it was maintained that the literary texts are neither nostalgic nor conservative, that is, they cannot be seen as advocating the restoration of the old order. There is a distinction between the recognition that the Name-of-theFather is in crisis in the wake of modernization and advocating the restoration of the old order. In particular, Dracula, which on the surface performs a conservative restoration of the previous order, nonetheless indicates both the unfeasibility and undesirability of such a reinstatement. This can be seen in the absurdities in the portrayal of Van Helsing, the ‘replacement father’. The degradation in the use of Christian symbols reduced to their materiality signals the impossibility of a return to previous cultural practices. Instead new ways of thinking are being presented that, while recognizing and being adjusted to the modernization of the society, do not fall in with the increasing dominance of empirical science, with its bypassing of the equivocality of natural language and entrapment within existing reality. These fantasy texts do not constitute an escape from or any kind of spiritual antidote to the increasing dominance of thinking based on scientific principles. They do, however, counter the blind spots of science: in The Lost World that which knows nothing of the role of art and religion in human culture, in She that which conflates the concepts of truth and reality, in ‘The Horror of the Heights’, that which ignores the uncanny amalgam of technology and bestiality and in The Invisible Man, that which cancels the Name-of-the-Father and replaces it with that of its own without comprehending the function of the former.

3 Žižek, ‘The Seven Veils of Fantasy’ in Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, ed. Dany ­Nobus (New York: Other Press, 1998), pp. 190–215, p. 191.

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Index Aesthetic, aesthetics 68, 98, 99, 170 Alexander, the Great 114 Anal father 147, 149, 219 Analysand 30, 128, 130, 131 Anxiety 46–48, 80–82, 84, 91–92, 183, 192 Aporia 114, 126, 127, 161 Arata, Stephen 19, 20, 119n, 125, 190n Aristocracy 21, 58n, 62 Artistry 68 Art 82–3, 85, 86n Asexual 105, 108, 110 Atwood, Margaret 104n, 116, 126 Aufgehoben 146, 148 Austen, Jane 13n, 58n Bacchae, Bacchants 150 Band of brothers 52, 135, 137, 157, 178, 183 Beauty 97–101, 134, 141, 173 Bible, biblical 14, 21, 112, 115, 170 Bowles, Peter 14 Brantlinger, Patrick 56 Britain 15, 20, 21, 34, 56, 174, 214n Bronfen, Elizabeth 187, 203n Burdett, Carolyn 125 Caesar, Julius 114 Cannadine, David 12 Cantor, Georg 72 Cantor, Paul A. 153, 155 Capitalism 29 Charlatan, charlatanism 17, 24, 27, 28 Chiesa, Lorenzo 18, 64n, 97, 143, 182n, 185 Anxiety 192 Castration 41–42 Fundamental Fantasy 45 Name-of-the-Father 49 Oedipus Complex 37, 40, 196 Science 87 Signifier 93 Surplus Jouissance 193 Thing 44 Truth 133 Childs, Peter 57n, 66, 67, 79 Chomsky, Noam 17 Christianity 112, 214, 215

Church 13, 21, 71, 215 Civilization 56, 92, 96, 170, 174 Collins, Wilkie 21 Colonial (see: empire) Colonialism (see: empire) Conrad, Joseph 81, 105, 109 Copjec, Joan 20, 80, 81, 183, 189, 193, 204, 206 Courtly love 18, 45, 55, 56, 63–66, 68, 78 Culler, Jonathan 51 Culture, Fatherhood 103 and Nature 94–95, 127, 159–161, 167, 174, 182 Popular 6 and Primal Father 38, 51, 111, 158 Sublimation in 56 Sexual difference in 107 Darwin, Charles 24, 70, 71 Darwinism 14 Daunton, Martin 11 De Kesel, Marc 42, 43, 68, 73, 78, 99 Delilah 169, 170 Desire Cause of 43, 46, 183 Incestuous 195 Object cause of 46 of the Mother 40, 41 Sexual 45, 66 98–99, 166, 208 Descartes, René 73 Ding, das (see Thing) Dirda, Michael 137 Discourse 61, 105, 128, 132, 202, 203 Master 58, 210 Science 79, 87, 91, 98, 144, 205, 213 Social 23, 146 University 59, 201, 211 Dolar, Mladen 95 Anxiety 91 Double 89–92, 117, 189–191, 193, 204, 207–209 Extimate 194 Gaze 192 Primal Father 181 Uncanny 81

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232 Döppelganger (see Double) Double (see also Dolar, double) 116, 175, 181, 196, 214 Dream, dreams 18, 30, 128, 129, 131, 180, 187–189, 198 Dracula 180 Freud’s (Irma) 20, 186–189, 191, 202, 204, 206, 216–217 Invisible Man’s 166–168, 170, 172 Navel in 105 Theory 31 Wolfman 195 Dryden, Linda 154 Duncan, Ian 33, 74, 89, 90 Empire 23, 90, 105, 190 Empirical evidence 23, 26, 31 Empirical science (see: science, empirical) Empirical realism 52 Etherington, Norman 23 Euripides 103, 150 European 35, 174 Evans, Dylan 24 Evil-thing (see: Thing) Fantasy area 184 fiction 17, 32, 46, 51 land 40, 102, 106, 117 literature 23, 32, 48, 50, 51, 124, 135 novel 34, 43 space 52, 102, 154 texts 223 Father 14, 38, 40, 124, 167 Abdication of 18, 21, 23, 52, 55, 56–57, 62–63, 165–166, 207 as Name 112 Change in Position of 21, 22, 35, 47, 51, 58, 59, 97, 109, 147, 150 Dead father 35, 38, 109, 147 ‘Ersatz’ 43, 209 Father of the Horde 36 Father’s no 48, 173 Imago of 197 Little Hans’ 47 Hamlet 118, 119 King Lear 122 Imaginary Father 39

Index Merchant of Venice 121, 123 Murder of 35, 51 Oedipus 37, 121 Real father 41 Symbolic role 42, 49, 102, 103, 135, 197 in Totem and Taboo 35–37, 51, 11, 179, 216 Father-figure 175 Fatherhood 103, 111, 115, 149 Father-in-law 39, 57, 63, 105, 115, 173, 202, 207, 208 Father of science 40, 60, 97, 165 Father-out-law 40, 57, 117, 208 Faust, Faustian 77, 78 Felman, Shoshana 30 Fennimore Cooper, James 23 Fink, Bruce 35, 128, 130, 139 Foster, Dennis 178, 179, 181, 207 Freud, Sigmund 18, 35 as Acteon 132 Anxiety 80 Castration 172 Civilization and discontents 162 Critique of 23, 24 Ding, das 42 Drive 48 Evidential impasse 26 Irma dream 186–189, 203–204, 206, 217 Little Hans 47 Primal repression 130 Schreber 25 Repetition 19, 195 Sublimation 45 Theme of the Three Caskets 122, 124, 142 Totem and Taboo Uncanny 31, 32 Unconscious, the 30, 128 Weismann 108 Galilean revolution 56 science 73 Galileo 70–73 Gelder, Ken 198 Gilbert, Sandra 109 Gothic 19, 85, 86 Graves, Robert 148 Greek Mythology 103, 122 Gubar, Susan 109

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Index Haggard, Rider H. 23, 125, 126 Harris, Jose 14 van Haute, Phillipe (see Van Haute, Phillipe) Hawking, Stephen 71 Heimlich 31, 32 Hobsbawm, Eric 13, 15, 71n, 72 Hoffmann E.T.A. 32 Hogg, James 50 Horde 35, 36, 40, 54, 153 Primal 101, 179 Hughes, William 181 Icarus 150 Imaginary 39, 42, 68, 71, 193 Imperialism 21 Interdiction 183, 196, 197, 206 Jekyll and Hyde 163 Jocasta 37, 39 Johnston, Adrian 27, 44, 48 Jouissance 27–29 Feminine 130 Lost (mythical) 40, 45, 46, 117, 142, 163, 169, 181, 199 201, 204 Mother’s 39 Painful pleasure 32 Phallic 130 and Repetition 195 and Superego 196, 197, 200–201 Surplus (see also Object a) 35, 37, 44–45, 113, 181, 183, 193 and Symbolic 50, 183, 211, 214 and Uncanny 194 Jouissance-Thing 52 Joyce, James 19, 49, 50 Julien, Philippe 72, 131 de Kesel, Marc (see De Kesel, Marc) Koyré, Alexandre 72 Kuhn, Thomas 27 Lacan, Jacques 23, 29, 32, 35, 47, 99, 194 Art 85 Absolute knowledge 94, 105 Castration 173 Charlatan 17, 24, 27–28 Courtly Love 55, 63–66, 68 Discourse theory Father 49

Gaze 192 Irma dream 188, 217n Joyce 50 Language 93, 127 Mirror stage 191 Object a 44 the Real 20 Science 56, 71, 82, 86, 87, 88, 96 Sexuation 41, 108, 168 Sphinx 121 Sublimation 45, 78 Superego 197 Sublimation 45, 78 Surplus Jouissance 45, 193 Symbolic 74, 133 Ten Commandments 183 Truth 125, 128, 129n Totem and Taboo 36, 126 Unreadable 18, 19, 23 Woman 130 Law, the 35, 36, 56, 60, 78 Leader, Darian 34 Lothane, Zvi 25 Master signifier 59 Master’s discourse (see discourse) Mazlich, Bruce 125 McCrea, Barry 228 McDermin, Jane 15 Melville, Hermann 146 Miller, Jacques-Alain 28, 36n, 105n, 128, 130 Millot, Catherine 196, 197 Modernity 16, 102, 103, 150, 209–210 Mother (in psychoanalytical theory) 35, 38–44, 47–49, 182, 183, 198–199 Mother-Thing (see: mother) Muller, John 114 Myth 38 Definition of 126 Oedipus 38, 39 and the Real 127 Totem and Taboo 6, 39, 126 Truth in 105, 129 Name-of-the-Father 40, 11 Absence of 105, 143, 166, 174 Little Hans 47 as Metaphor 40, 41 Or Worse 49, 50

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234 Name-of-the-Father (cont.) in Ovid 103 Restoration of 175, 209, 211, 217 and Sexual relationship 46, 52 Symbolic function of 48, 173 Nasio, J.D. 196, 197, 199, 201 Newton’s law of gravity 30 Nobus, Dany 23 Obelkevich, James 13 Object a 44–45, 183, 189, 191–193, 204 object-cause (see: object a) Oedipus complex 37, 38, 40, 41, 47, 49 Oedipus Rex 35, 37, 124 Ovid 103, 132, 133 Partial object 147, 148 Paternal authority 60, 147, 196, 217 Paternal figure 58, 148, 206 Paternity 103 Patriarchal 21, 49, 109 Patterson, Martha 14 Pemble, John 13 Pentheus 150 Père-version 49 Perversion 49, 113 Peters, Fiona 43, 177–179 Phaeton 103, 149 Phallus 40–42, 146 Poet 56, 68, 69, 73 Priest, Christopher 153 Primal father 21, 111, 169 Asexual 42, 107, 108, 134, 168 Return of 52, 102, 106, 117, 120, 136, 146, 154, 157, 165, 173 Culture and the Law 158, 159, 170, 174, 182 Enjoying (see also Anal father) 116, 145, 147, 148, 149, 179, 207–208 Psychoanalysis 25, 217, 220 Absolute Knowledge 105, 222 Evidential Impasse 26, 27, 32 and Literature 18–19, 23 and Language 28, 29, 30 Oedipus Complex 35, 37, 40–41, 107, 113 Sublimation 45 Unconscious, the 30 Unscientific 24, 34 Psychosis 26, 113 Punter, David 181, 183

Index Rapaport, Herman 16, 17, 18, 21, 23 Religion 14, 36, 56, 78–82, 213–215 Richardson, Maurice 175, 179 Roman Mythology 103, 149 Rose, Jacqueline 49 Safouan, Moustapha 47 Santner, Eric 24, 209 Saussure, Ferdinand de 127 Schreber, Daniel Paul 25, 26, 30 Science 56, 70, 149, 166, 173 Absolute Knowledge 94, 105, 133 and Anxiety 82 and Beauty 98, 101, 134 Culture, role in 52, 62, 75–76, 78, 79, 92, 96, 97 Empirical 52, 53, 88, 219 Faith in 23, 24 Ideals of 24, 53 and Language 28 Modern (see also Galilean) 71, 72, 73, 79 as Rational Thinking 14 and Religion 14, 80, 213 and Sexual desire 166 and the Thing 87, 88, 95 and Truth 102 Sexuality 42, 45, 65, 108, 109, 182 Sexuation 49, 103, 107–108, 111, 168, 172 Shakespeare, William 16, 22, 114, 118, 119, 122, 123 Shelley, Mary 94 Shepherdson, Charles 37–39, 49, 62, 131 Sokal, Alan 27–29 Stevenson, John Allen 19 Stevenson, Robert Louis 50, 163 Sturrock, John 29 Superego 178, 189, 196–202, 214, 217 Sutherland, John 161 Svolos, Thomas 229 Sylvestre, Michel 39 Symptom 30, 31, 187 Testability 24, 26 Thing (das Ding) 42–46, 82–88, 94, 99–101, 133–135, 139–143 Thurston, Luke 49, 50, 163, 164, 175 Trollope, Anthony 22, 58 Truth, the 23, 102, 105, 125, 127–135, 222

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Index Uncanny, the 30–32, 81, 194, 195, 227 Unconscious, the 30, 31, 44, 128, 129, 131, 132, 204 Unheimlich (see: uncanny) Vampire as Double 181, 189, 190, 192, 196 Ego 189–190 Id 191, 193 Superego 199, 201 Gaze (as object a) 191 as Primal Father 179 Symbolic, protection against 206, 211, 213 as Thing 177–178, 179, 199, 209 Totem and Taboo 208–209 Unreal concept 32 Van Haute 47 Victorian 19, 20, 90, 183 father 58 novel 22, 57, 174, 202

Žižek, Slavoj Absolute knowledge 87 Anal father 147, 148, 181 Autistic enjoyment 145 Anxiety 46 Courtly love 65 Double 175, 191 Fantasy 22 Hysteria 187 Modern master 209, 210, 211 Modern science 96 Orson Welles 75, 76 Phallus 146 Popular culture 17 Primal father 107, 116 Symbolic 74, 139 Thing, the 82, 83, 84, 88, 94, 140, 177 Zupančič, Alenka 131

Welles, Orsen 56, 75–78 Wolfman, (Freud’s patient) 195

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