A Lovely Sleep: A Psychoanalytic Reading of The Cement Garden Through the Theoretical Lens of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva

Abstract

Ian McEwan is the writer of the most controversial texts of the contemporary British fiction. One of the outstanding examples of his literature of shock, McEwan’s The Cement Garden, is a challenging narrative in the sense that it depicts the disturbing experiences of a family, ranging from incest to death. The fact that these experiences are narrated through an adolescent boy’s point of view makes these even more controversial in the sense that the depiction of events through this narrator’s view is focalized. Through this focalization, the horrifying events experienced by children are narrated as if they were just ordinary experiences which creates a somehow disturbing effect on the reader. However this disturbance also leads the reader to think that the actions of these children and their relationship to their parents and each other also refer to an underlying symbolism pertaining to their psychic conditions. This article aims to reveal and interpret the novel focusing on this underlying symbolism through the lens of Lacan’s concepts of ‘lack’ and the Symbolic order and Kristeva’s concept of ‘semiotic chora’.