Emmagrammatology

Abstract

Emmagrammatology GRANT I. HOLLY “Do I like parlor games? My dear I am a parlor game.” Tallulah Bankhead W hat do we say when we talk about literature? Disconcertingly, what we already know, as if the work were a bell that announced our turn to speak. As if it were a prefiguration and vindication of our own beliefs. As if the experience of reading, of finding a coherence, at once hidden and apparent, in the text, recapitulated the orphan phantasy of childhood —the phantasy of finding the real parent, the true noble ances­ tor and likeness, whose identity, which would authorize our identity, emerges in our “recognition” of the mirror-like similarity, the uncanny kinship, of (both) our views. Literature is a glass, we might say para­ phrasing Swift, in which the reader sees everybody’s face as his or her own, precisely because our relationship to literature, or, for that matter, representations in general, recapitulates the conditions that opened the very possibility of identity. This briefly-sketched problematic of our relationship to literature is also meant to serve as a description of the scenes of both Lacanian psychoanalysis and Jane Austen’s Emma' when I say the scene of Jane Austen’s Emma, I am referring not only to the scene within the novel, 39 40 / HOLLY that is, Emma’s interpretive relationship to her world, but also to the critics’ relation to the novel, and by implication to Jane Austen.1 The intention is not, here and now, to develop a reading of Lacan —an undertaking that becomes both less and less necessary and more and more difficult as Lacan’s writings gain popularity. Rather, what will be attempted is an emphasis of certain of Lacan’s ideas that seem to me to be important in relationship to the way in which we read Emma. Jane Austen as Moral Realist One of the most striking features of Lacan’s work is that he makes what in large measure constitutes literary analysis, or, for that matter, the analysis of representations in general, that is, the discovery of coherences and correspondences, of closure —within the work, between the work and historical events or modes of thought, among works, etc.— symptomatic and the subject of psychoanalysis. To put it even more strongly, these features of what would traditionally be called rational, careful, thorough, “realistic” analysis, Lacan would make the features of what is traditionally called hallucinatory behavior—part of an imaginary construct that allows the subject to maintain the illusion of self­ coherence by basking in the reflection of a discovered (invented) coher­ ence. What is at stake here is the reinterpretation of the realistic and the moral, figured in the novel in terms of closure, that is, whether or not things hold together, as part of the ideology of patriarchal culture. The search for closure in Jane Austen’s work is doubly important, since, as Gilbert and Gubar have shown, Austen’s work is thought of as “woman’s work,” and, for that reason, especially subject to policing by patriarchal culture.2 This situation is tantalizingly thematized in Emma in particular, because of the way both author and character are frequently judged to fall short of the demands of the moral and the realistic: Austen through the limitations of her subject, Emma through the errors of interpretation that develop out of her persistent playfulness. Emma as Artist Manque This tendency to hallucinate closure, to discover design, coherence, meaning —to write literary criticism, for example —Lacan labels “the Imaginary,” and he attributes it to what he calls the mirror stage —the moment in infancy when the infant, spastic and fragmented, develops the idea of a coherent self from seeing “its” reflection in a mirror (actual or metaphorical). Among the points Lacan is making here are 1) that the idea of coherence and closure produced in this situation is exaggerated, Emmagrammatology / 41 an illusion perpetrated by the technology of the mirror’s surface; 2) that the exaggeration of coherence per se is built into the ego from the very beginning, continually leading it in a pursuit of a closure it can never reach; and 3) that this desire for closure and identity...