I also wanted to present another example similar to Edgar Allan Poe's "Purloined Letter." Lacan could make the same point about repetition using Beckett's short play, "Come and Go."
Each of these women have a secret told about them. The characters, Vi, Flo, and Ru, have no particular quality that makes this play interesting. The meaning lies in the repetition of the hidden message. The characters each tell a secret, which we can easily assume is the same secret due to the same circumstances surrounding each telling of it. Each character is ignorant of how the secret applies to herself as well as the other characters. The secret is, therefore, a "pure" signifier. Now, how is this symbolic determination actually worked out in the play? Well, what the play proves, Lacan would argue, is that human unconscious is structured like language, because it has the same response to the unknown stimuli. The watcher of this play ought not to be concerned with the whispered content, but only the way that it functions.
Since the content of the secret is never known, it remains "Real." Lacan says "We are used to the real. The truth we repress. The truth is always disturbing" (1159). The "truth" is what happens when the "Real" is articulated. What the three women experience as "truth," the audience only experiences as "Real." The "truth" they experience is clearly disturbing to them, but they only see it as "real for someone," hence the inability of each of the women to apply the disturbing "truth" to herself. The fact that at the end the women go back to "holding hands in the old way" shows their repression of the truth about one another that each of them has come to know and be horrified at. They return to the ideals of the superstructure and ignore the reality of unconscious desire.
And let's just assume for kicks and giggles that the secret is that each of these women has "penis envy." Or in less Freudian terms and more Lacanian, the signification has led her to understand her "loss" of what she never had.
Jacqui,
ReplyDeleteGreat example. Beckett is good for a lot of theory, but your example is right on the mark. We have no idea what the secret is, but according to Lacan, what we do see is simply the articulation of the secret, never the secret itself.
Do you think that we place a truth onto the play as viewers, making it no longer real, but obscured by our own need to interpret? For instance, you found yourself (even if pretty hilariously) placing an interpretation on it of penis envy. Will every viewer place an interpretation on it to some degree?
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