Of Fathers, Daughters, and Theorists of Narrative Desire: At the Crossroads of Myth and Psychoanalysis in "The Man Who Loved Children"

Abstract

The specter of paternal fiat has cast a long shadow over the history of Western literature, and at least since Freud's appropriation of the Oedipus myth for psychoanalysis, the father's image has also loomed large in the minds of several literary theorists who have attempted to locate the motor of narrative desire, the origins of plot, in the story of Oedipus. Note, for example, Roland Barthes's impassioned outcry in The Pleasure of the Text: If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking one's conflicts with the Law? (45). While Barthes positions the rebel text as the foe of paternal authority, he nonetheless figures the storyteller as the rebellious progeny indeed a son of the father. The polymorphous pleasures of textuality celebrated by Barthes thus remain bound to a singular, and singularly paternal, law: the (masculine) plot of dynastic conflict and desire. Barthes's hypothesis about the paternally engendered origins of narrative would seem to be confirmed, on a surface reading, by the text I examine in this essay, Christina Stead's modernist classic The Man Who Loved Children (1940). As its title implies, this is a tale of fatherhood told with a vengeance, tracing in exacerbating and often surreal detail the will to power of Sam Pollit's obsessive attempt to impose his ego on his progeny, to author as well as authorize their very existences. Contrary to appearances, however, such stories of paternal fiat end up unraveling or de-authorizing their claims to ubiquitous authority, I will be arguingand in the process they call into question those theories of narrative predicated on the transcendent authority of the father. But before exploring the implications of this claim for