The Purloined Punchline: Joke as Textual Paradigm

Abstract

Freud clearly loved nothing more than a good story, except perhaps a good laugh. From Dora to Moses, from Oedipus to Jewish marriage broker, Freud's cast of characters plays out human drama in suspenseful narratives spiced with anecdote and warmed with wit. Little wonder, then, that some of Freud's most provocative insights concern twin esthetic mysteries dear to his heart: writer's magic (which he calls the poet's secret) and joker's art. In his own return to Freud, Lacan has followed master story-teller's example. For Lacan's own artful use of pun, allusion, and narrative technique creates a performative theoretical discourse which reenacts plot of intersubjective desire which it analyzes. Lacan's work thus tends to speak to questions of narrative and textuality in an oblique manner, by example. In order to elaborate a Lacanian theory of narrative, one needs to decipher clues in Lacan's own sometimes turgid and hermetic text. In one of best examples of Lacan's narrative craft-the much discussed Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter' 2-Lacan passes on a useful lesson learned from Poe's arch-sleuth, Dupin: best clues, he tells us, are always at once marginal and obvious (Perhaps a little too self-evident, S.P.L., p. 53). Once such marginal yet obvious clue to Lacan's own difficult work, it seems to me, may