Le texte, un fantasme littéraire

Abstract

ContextFor a long time, psychoanalysis has represented a means for literature to analyze the text through the lens of the author's, the reader's, or the characters' unconscious. Based on the works of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jean Bellemin-Noël, and Pierre Bayard, the elements of a literary text are proven to be founded on psychoanalysis. The author of a literary text has no right on his/her work because the latter functions in an unconscious dimension. However, nowadays, and even with the emergence of new perspectives in the field of literary studies, psychoanalysis seems to constitute the rear guard of the critical renewal. The analytic approach revealed by Freud's discoveries makes the reading process of a literary text a double operation of reading and rewriting as well as an intersection between the unconscious of the reader and of the author. ObjectiveThis article aims to study the psychoanalytic aspect of a literary text and to emphasize that any literary text serves to display the unconscious of the author and of the reader, as well as to fulfill a repressed desire. We question not only the function of the literary text, but also its nature and its relationship with the oneiric, the fantastic and the psychoanalytic. MethodThis article unfolds in four parts: (1) the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis; (2) the fusion between literary text and oneiric discourse; (3) the similarities between literary narrative and psychoanalytic discourse; and (4) the fantasmatization of the literary text with effects of desires. We also propose an analysis of a textual “case,” the autobiography of Lucien Jerphagnon. ResultsThe psychoanalysis of a literary text serves to provide the latter with a wide range of meanings, which remain latent at the time of writing. More specifically, the literary text possesses an unconscious, which is the author's, who creates it, and the reader's, who rewrites it. It is also rich with desires and fantasies, and seeks to fulfill them through the writing process and the reading-rewriting process, which transforms it into another text. DiscussionThe discussion, which calls on psychoanalytic references, questions the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis, between textual interpretation and psychoanalytic interpretation, between literature and dreams, and between psychoanalytic and literary discourses, as well as the foundation of the literary text on the fulfilment of a desire. ConclusionThe literary text is “the discourse of desire”. Like the fantasy, it functions through, expresses, and awakens a desire.