Narrative magic: Stories and the ways of desire

Abstract

Fictions that include an account of how stories are received show narrative as enlisting the desire of the reader or hearer. While fiction demonstrates what the magic of the signifier can do to allay desire when language is set free from reality, in the end narratives withhold satisfaction of the desire they engender, since the worlds they create must eventually be relinquished. To that degree, narrative fiction brings to light the condition of the speaking being as Lacanian psychoanalysis conceives it, at once empowered and deprived by access to language, and in quest of a presence language cannot deliver. In so far as they are ungrounded, stories are able to exceed cultural orthodoxies, conjuring into being desired possibilities, aspirations, and corollary fears. Supplementary in that sense and dangerous, in consequence, to the orthodoxies they supplement, fictional narratives can therefore bring to light the inadequacy of customary assumptions. Located in time, stories offer a knowledge – of cultural difference, as well as of the laws of desire that underlie it.