Galdòs, Valera, Lacan

Abstract

Abstract To attempt a reading of the nineteenth-century novel in the light of psychoanalytic theory is to be confronted by a series of obstacles. Would-be psychoanalytic critics often deal in archetypes (the negation of history) and prescription (the normalization of the subject). They seek to dissect the author or character, as if the first were immediately accessible and the second endowed with autonomous existence. And they are frequently tempted by the lure of the allegorical reading, that which substitutes latent for manifest (penis for pen) in the quest for ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ meaning invisible, yet accessible, beneath the surface accident of the text. All of the above tendencies I call ‘psychologist’ rather than ‘psychoanalytical’. That is, they constitute a vulgarized simplification of the enterprise initiated by Freud. In her book Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice (London and New York, 1984) Elizabeth Wright suggests an attractive model for the critic who seeks to reconcile history and subjectivity, language and mind, in a properly rigorous manner. She writes: ‘Psychoanalysis explores what happens when primordial desire gets directed into social goals, when bodily needs become subjected to the mould of culture. Through language, desire becomes subject to rules, and yet this language cannot define the body’s experience accurately’ (p. 1). The lack of correlation between desire and culture is stated very clearly here: the linguistic and the somatic intersect (but do not coincide) in the figure of the body.