Reach Beyond Reach: Literature’s Uncanny Tickling of the Real

Alexander Sallas, PhD candidate (Western University)

As a witty poet so rightly remarks, the mirror would do well to reflect a little more before sending us back our image. —Jacques Lacan, Écrits

The uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar. —Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”

Introduction

In the Poetics, Aristotle suggests writers should imitate portrait-painters: "In rendering the individual form… paint people as they are, but make them better-looking" (1996). The mirror stage, posited by Jacques Lacan, suggests a similar, innate process in psychoanalysis. It theorizes that a lifelong quest to materialize a stable, whole, autonomous self begins the moment an infant recognizes their reflection. But the endeavour is fruitless; it situates the subject “in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone” (Lacan 2018).i Indeed, it marks the subject’s passage into an unyielding stade (stadium) of subjectivity in which they are “permanently caught and captivated” by their own imago (2018). Moreover, it includes several concomitant effects. The mirror stage triggers the subject’s irreducible removal from the Real, the first dimension in the Lacanian triad, into which they are born; it crystallizes the Imaginary and the Symbolic, the triad’s second and third dimensions; it transfixes the ego by contrasting the imago’s fictional totality with the infant’s fragmented body, manifesting their “Ideal-I,” which is composed of an “ideal ego” and “ego-ideal”;ii and it produces artificial jubilation in the subject who perceives they have assumed the imago as their own image.iii It even moulds conscious and unconscious thought; Lacan articulates this with a play on Descartes’s cogito ergo sum: “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.” To that end, he calls the mirror stage an “identification.” When you consider “yourself,” he suggests, you are really considering a construct as such. There is no alignment between the self and objective reality; rather, the mirror stage establishes “a relation between the organism and its reality” (2018; emphasis added). 1 Gnosis | 19.1 (2021)

It facilitates this “denaturing” by binding thoughts—and expressions thereof—to occurrence in and through language. Language is a dual artifact of the Imaginary, the dimension of idealization, and the Symbolic, the dimension of articulation: “There is something in the Symbolic function of human discourse that cannot be eliminated, and that is the role played in it by the Imaginary” (Evans 2003). But the Real remains inexpressible; it is “the rock against which all our… linguistic structures ultimately fail” (Felluga 2011). By Lacan’s estimation, language is a combination of idealization and articulation—not a reflection of “objective” truth. With this in mind, I argue the mirror stage may be resignified in a literary sense. As it marks the transition out of the Real and into language, one’s entrance into literature as such reverses the process, facilitating movement from language toward the Real. Yet literature cannot materialize that dimension. The inverted formulation remains forever incomplete. Literature may only “tickle” the Real; it may extend a hand through the bars of language, but it cannot uproot the bars themselves. For literature is language and language has limits. The reader, through a knowledge of these limits and the construction of their identity within them, may be made aware of the materiality of their own existence and concomitant “lack” of access to the Real.

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Viz., they may come into a certain awareness of “lack” as such. This awareness denatures “natural and familiar” language (Žižek 2018), separating the Real, or “pure signified”, from the Imaginary signified and Symbolic signifier, and tickles the Real itself. Which is to say, the reader does not “grasp” the totality of the Real. Rather, they graze it with the tips of their flailing fingers. Furthermore, I argue this inversion of the psychoanalytic orders and attendant tickling of the Real renders literature an “uncanny” force, as defined by Sigmund Freud. In literature, the author unfurls the private, the concealed. The reader is liable to take this revelation at its word— literally. Yet such disclosures are expressed in and through language, which renders original concepts illusory, “merely an effect of the play of signifiers” (Evans 2003). This “play” produces an Imaginary signified—a divergence nongermane to the signified’s “pure” form. Thus, literature embodies a substantial limit: readers cannot receive the Real through it, because writers cannot express their own truth within it. Neither the writer’s unveiling of their own “truth” nor the reader’s absorption of it can occur in earnest through a barred apparatus, language, which prohibits its very conception. In this sense, literature is a function of a system of subjectivity masquerading as a totality—not unlike the Ideal-I. We uncover this horror, this threatening lack of possibility, through an analysis of literature as an inverted mirror stage, unable to grasp—only

tickle—the Real. Hence, I go on to argue, literature merges the Heimlich (familiar) and Unheimlich (unfamiliar). Uncanny, indeed.

§1

First, let us articulate the Lacanian triad: the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. These psychoanalytic orders, or dimensions, work together to “situate subjectivity within a system of perception and a dialogue with the external world” (Loos 2002). Their relationship is not hierarchal. Rather, it resembles a “Borromean knot”: the dimensions are “intertwined in such a way that no two… are directly connected but are held together only through the third one, so that if we cut out the third dimension, the other two are also disconnected” (Žižek 2018). Specifically, it is through the Imaginary that the Real is linked to the Symbolic; through the Symbolic that the Imaginary is linked to the Real; and through the Real that the Symbolic is linked to the Imaginary. Correspondingly, we will relate each dimension’s application to literature as such. The Real cannot be discussed. The moment it is exposed to the world, it becomes an object of discourse and ceases to exist. It becomes partial truth—the Real as materialized in the perceptions of others—and may only be studied through its effect on the other two dimensions. To that end, Lacan describes the Real as “the domain of that which subsists outside of symbolisation” (2006). This rationale links it with the concept of “impossibility”; indeed, Lacan suggests the subject will forever encounter “nothing Real except the impossible” (2006). In that sense, we may relate it to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, in quantum mechanics, which applies when a subject’s interaction with an object inherently alters the object's trajectory.

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Attempts to access the Real transpose it into an altered, “expressible” form: language. This is not to suggest the dimension doesn’t actually exist. On the contrary, it is part of everything we do. As Lacan writes, we carry the Real “glued to [our] heel, ignorant of what might exile it from there” (2006).vi It drives jouissance, “the more radical enjoyment at the cusp between pleasure and pain” (Rabaté 2014). It underscores the body’s “brute physicality”—for example, the Real phallus is the physical penis raised to the status of the Thing, as opposed to the organ’s Imaginary and Symbolic functions (Evans 2003). And it may erupt when we are confronted with our innate materiality; its pure reality exceeds the meaning structures of the Symbolic and, as such, reminds us of our inability to access it (Felluga 2011). But pleasure, 3 Gnosis | 19.1 (2021)

physicality, and existentialism, along with everything else, are barricaded behind language—a “linguistic structure” which, by Lacan’s estimation, is a product of one’s divorce from the Real. Hence, language is absent from that erstwhile dimension. Rather, it is a dual artifact of the Imaginary, the home to our unsatisfiable demands, and the Symbolic, the dimension into which we must translate ourselves. This leads Lacan to suggest “it is the world of words that creates the world of things” (2006). We can neither conceive of nor express the pure reality beyond language —the Real—because our conceptions and expressions are irreducibly shaped by interactions in and through the system of language itself. The mirror stage marks the advent of the Imaginary, the second dimension in the triad. When the infant recognizes their imago, or “specular image,” they recognize it is a “gestalt”: a form whose meaning exceeds the totality of its components and which may carry transformative significance. This metamorphic identification forms a dual relationship in which the infant’s ego and ego ideal become interchangeable. The relationship is fundamentally narcissistic, however, because “the Imaginary exerts a captivating power [over the ego]… founded in the almost hypnotic effect of the specular image” (Evans 2003). This narcissism is accompanied—as narcissism always is—by aggressivity. As the ego’s veneration of the imago and corresponding quest to materialize the ego ideal work against the subject’s “nature,” deviations from the journey which redirect attention toward the antithetical Real, the home to that nature, cause the ego to revolt. As Lacan writes, it is the moment of passage into the Imaginary that “tips the whole of human knowledge into mediatization through the desire of the other… and turns the I into that apparatus for which every instinctual thrust constitutes a danger” (2018). Hence, the Imaginary “imprisons the subject in a series of static fixations” (Evans 2003)—fixations which are impossible to materialize, irreducibly bar the subject from their nature, and result in the narcissistic adulation of an impossible self (and result in more substantial social interaction). Thereby, the Imaginary dimension is classified as a site of radical subjectivity. For it is within it that the infant first experiences the notion of “themself,” through identification with their artificially whole, autonomous imago. This enlaces their “particularity” with an excluding “universality” (2006). Lacan compares the process to an estrangement of sorts, writing “the first effect of the imago that appears is the subject’s alienation… in the movement that leads man to an ever more adequate consciousness of himself, his freedom becomes bound up with the development of his servitude” (2006; emphasis added). The word “adequate” is laced with bitter

sarcasm. “Consciousness of the self” may be “adequate” in the Imaginary sense, but elsewhere Lacan suggests the “self” is actually impossible to access.vii For it exists in the Real; as such, it may only be conceived of—and expressed through—language, which resculpts its “pure” meaning, like light through a prism. The “self”, as we know it, is really an idealized, fictional gestalt: the ego ideal. As such, the Imaginary binds the subject to “servitude,” an unwitting, irreducible propulsion to manifesting that futile form. If the Real is the dimension of impossibility, the Imaginary is the dimension of demand, value, and the body, and their discontents. Lacan illustrates this in “Schema L,” the first of his many topographical charts. While Schema L, so named because it resembles the Greek letter lambda (Λ), shows that “the Symbolic relation… between the Other and the subject… is always blocked to a certain extent by the Imaginary axis” (2006), it also serves to represent the fundamental decentering of the subject. In passing from the Real into language, the subject is not placed on solid ground. Rather, they are stretched over the whole schema, perpetually “drawn to [its]… corners” (2006). Hence, Lacan sketches language as a process of continuous mediation. As the subject is attracted to the schema’s corners, skating along its surface, meaning slips and slides underneath them. This represents a “decentering” proposition: language may not express a fixed reality. That totality, the Real, remains “absolutely without fissure” because the “barred” subject, who has been “stretched” beyond its recognition as a function of the mirror stage, cannot access it.

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Ultimately, then, in language, the Imaginary dimension houses the Imaginary signified, along with the very process of signification, which is to say, it houses the production of meaning, delimiting the signifiers imported from the Symbolic. Lacan compares the Symbolic, the third and final dimension in the triad, to algebra, calling it the “structure of relations, not things” (2018). By this, he means it is immaterial, home to “restrictions that control both… desire and the rules of communication” (Felluga 2011). It is completely autonomous, undetermined by considerations such as “biology” or “genetics” (Evans 2003). And it is completely contingent with the Real; while it may appear to spring from that dimension, the relationship is illusory. As Lacan writes, “one shouldn’t think that symbols actually have come from the Real” (2006). Rather, the Symbolic is all-encompassing, congealing referents of the other two dimensions into a nebulous mass which serves to produce “reality.” In reference to this totalizing faculty, Lacan calls it a “universe.” As he writes, the dimension “from

the first takes on its universal character. It isn’t constituted bit by bit. As soon as the symbol arrives, there is a universe of symbols” (2006; emphasis added). Indeed, the Symbolic’s totality even extends to perception itself. Upon the subject’s entrance, it creates the illusion that it was always there! This practical infinity discloses its essentially linguistic capacity, in that no relations—nor the laws and structures which coordinate them, nor our conceptions of those relations, laws, and structures—are conceivable without language. Hence, Lacan’s aforementioned contention that the “world of words”—the Symbolic—creates “the world of things” (2006). The relations between the triad disclose an “ontological structure of the human world which accords with [Lacan’s] reflections on paranoiac knowledge” (2018; emphasis added). That is to say, “knowledge”, like paranoia, projects a coherence on to its surroundings that may be fictitious. Just as we construct our self-image on a fictitious totality, we export a fictitious coherence to our surroundings. In the mirror stage, the infant recognizes that their imago has transformative significance in the “inverted symmetry” between the whole image and “the turbulent movements… [they] feel is animating [them]” (2018). This identification of the imago as a gestalt orients the “I” toward the ego-ideal. This, in turn, leads to the ideal ego, a propensity to treat movement away from that totality and toward the Real—the unbarred self—as capitulation, a failure to move closer to manifesting the idealized gestalt. In orienting their desire toward an impossible totality, one is left perpetually yearning for more. But this fictitious coherence, while responsible for this lack, enables a shared “reality as such”, the Symbolic, from which all subjects may find common ground. To that end, Lacan defines “psychosis” as the return to the Real of what cannot be symbolized (Rabaté 2014). We are united in our impossible desire.

Indeed, our expressions in language are identifiable to ourselves and others because they are sublimated with a “bar” of repression. Hence, Lacan suggests, we are “barred subjects of desire.” By this, he means that language “alienate[s] us from [our] natural needs and derail[s] us onto the tracks of non-natural desires

ix doomed never to reach enjoyable destinations” (Johnston

2018).

x Our infantile passage out of the Real forever condemns us not just to desire in vain, but it prohibits us from communication unrepressed by that dimension. Literature, a fundamentally linguistic, “symbolized” exercise, embodies this lack. One’s entrance into it cannot constitute revelation in the Real, for one’s entrance into the mirror stage 6 Gnosis | 19.1 (2021)

closed off access to it—for readers and writers alike. Literature is, then, a representation of “nonnatural desire,” appealing to the subject’s barred nature. It is a similar fictionalized totality to the ego ideal, seeming to embody hidden meaning and promising revelation of the sort that may lead to the mastery that can, in turn, materialize the imago. Yet the secrets that would enable this emergence cannot be revealed through its innately barred expression in language. To that end, Lacan suggests the signified and signifier are not isolated categories.

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Schema L is once more applicable: while the point de capiton, or quilting point, temporarily knots the Imaginary signified and its signifier together, the signified slips and slides, perpetually threatening to detach from its so-called brethren. As such, signifiers merely present an illusion of stable meaning. Thereby, Lacan suggests, the signifier actually precedes the signified. Meaning is derived from the differences between signifiers, rather than conceptions of individual signs. This squares with his postulate that, under language, the “pure signified”—the Real—remains barred from perception as a function of the mirror stage. As he writes, “it is in the chain of the signifier that the meaning insists, but none of its elements consists in the signification of which it is at the moment capable” (2018). Hence, the signified and signifier correspond to Lacanian dimensions. The pure signified, off-limits to detection, belongs to the inaccessible Real. Our perception of the signified, what we falsely idealize as “truth,” belongs to the Imaginary. Signifiers, harbingers of fictional coherence, are the constitutive unit of the Symbolic. Thereby, literature—as the play of signifiers, itself a dual artifact of the Imaginary and the Symbolic—produces an illusory truth which belies its Real emptiness; indeed, “absence is made present in [its] signification” (Hendrix 2019). Lacan says as much, remarking that literature “bears the meaning that the cosmos can, at its outermost bounds, become a locus of deception” (2006). By this, he means that literature is a distillation of the already innately distilled system of language. It is an ornate, chiselled artifact, further from “nature”—the cosmos, the Real, the pure signified—than most anything else. And through its heightened play of signifiers, the Imaginary signified is itself continually recontextualized. This presents an illusory progress, an Imaginary sense of revelation. Thus, while literature purports to reveal hidden truth in the Real, its “play” with signifiers, a factor of its innate expression in language, deceives the reader—and the writer—as to the purity of its expression. Hence, literature’s deception is twofold. It may purport to reveal Real truth beneath the fictionality of its signification, but it cannot. It may only reveal the fictionality of signification in

general. Moreover, it continually recontextualizes our ideas of “truth” itself. For its play with signifiers sculpts the Imaginary signified, producing an illusory meaning which congeals into a fictional totality: literature as such. This produces an artificial jubilation in both reader and writer as they assume that, by entering into the body of “literature,” they are moving closer to the manifestation of their imago. But they are actually entering into a by-product of the same illusory truth, the Imaginary in concert with the Symbolic, that sculpted their impossible desire in the first place (one may say that literature gives false answers to Real questions). Hence, the reader embarks on an “inverted” mirror stage in entering into literature. Whereas the mirror stage sees the irreducible removal of the “I” from the Real, one’s entrance into literature as such sees an attempt to return. But the journey is undertaken within the barred apparatus that was itself a production of the initial separation. The quest is doomed to failure. Yet, I suggest literature may “tickle” the Real. With an awareness of literature’s inability to express that dimension, engendered by a hermeneutically-trained consciousness that resists subscribing a false fore-meaning of the written works’ potential for Real revelation, the reader becomes privy to the impossibility of articulating pure truth through its language—which is merely the play of signifiers and the attendant Imaginary signified. This denaturing of so-called “natural” or “familiar” language discloses the reader’s position as a barred subject of desire, separating the Real, or “pure signified”, from the Imaginary signified and Symbolic signifier— and it unveils the materiality of their existence as it is itself composed through the material force of language. It unveils the “self” as an Imaginary entity, unaware of “it-self” in the Real. This confrontation leads to a volcanic eruption. Its molten light illuminates the Borromean knot; specifically, the relation of the Imaginary as the conduit to the Symbolic, and the reader’s placement therein. Hence, the reader may reach through the corresponding gaps in the knot—the bars of their four-dimensional prison cell—and “tickle” the Real. They may stimulate impossibility with the tips of their fingers. But irreducible language, the material from which the bars are sculpted prevents them from reaching through with their whole fist to grasp it. The Real remains impossible. This tickling, I will proceed to argue, is decidedly uncanny.

§2

The uncanny is notoriously difficult to define. Indeed, Natacha Diels calls it “impossibly complicated and wholly lost in the translation to language” (2014). But attempts abound. José Luis Valls suggests it arises from “imperfectly defined assemblage” (2019). Jean-Michel Rabaté argues it “leaves us stranded between competing explanations or between conceptual universes” (2014). For Heidi Schlipphacke, it is “both a world and a fragment” which “drive[s] and shape[s] so much of our fascination with literature’s strangeness” (2015). In literary fiction, the work of Franz Kafka is commonly called “uncanny” for its deployment of contradictions that baffle the reader (Rabaté 2014).xii Ultimately, the best definition comes from Freud himself. He suggests the uncanny “undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible—to all that arouses dread and creeping horror; it is equally certain, too, that the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense” (2018). Moreover, he asserts that it arises “when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression” (2018). The mirror stage, occurring between the ages of six-to-eighteen months, certainly qualifies—and one’s entrance into literature serves as its revival (2018).

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Freud goes on to say that such reminders of our psychic past reveal what is hidden and intimate, not only from others, but from ourselves (2018). They touch aspects of our unconscious life, or of our primitive infancy, and they merge the familiar and unfamiliar. A robust critical background characterizes literature, broadly, as uncanny. Hélène Cixous, Patrick Mahoney, and Joan Copjec, among others, argue “the most essential quality of narrative is uncanniness, a notion that in turn illuminates the more general uncanniness of language and of the speaking subject” (Lydenberg 1997). Freud recognized this elusive quality. In his essay “The Uncanny”, published in 1919, he analyzes the titular feeling vis-à-vis a broad swath of literary works, including a fairy tale, “The Severed Hand”, by Wilhelm Hauff; a novel, Josef Montfort, by Albrecht Schaeffer; and a short story, “The Sandman”, by E. T. A. Hoffmann. By the essay’s conclusion, he remains agitated by “something” that resists psychoanalysis. Ultimately, he suggests this unknown “probably calls for an aesthetic enquiry” (2018). I suggest the unknown, this fundamental uncanniness, is an innate product of one’s entering into literature as such. The process constitutes an inversion, and concomitant reminder, of the psychoanalytic orders experienced in infancy during the mirror stage—and the mirror stage, along the same lines of Freud’s assertion, posits that the human comes into being through a fundamentally aesthetic recognition (2006). Freud was correct, then, in calling for an aesthetic enquiry to reveal the uncanny “something.”

Let us begin this enquiry with a brief articulation of the term “phallus” and its relation to literature and the uncanny. As Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis write, there has been a tendency in psychoanalysis since Freud to use “penis” and “phallus” in distinct senses, “the former denot[ing] the male organ in its bodily reality… the latter lay[ing] the stress on [its] symbolic value” (1973). One might overlay Lacanian terminology on this distinction to posit an equivalent “Real” phallus—the physical penis—versus the organ’s Imaginary and Symbolic functions. These functions cannot be reduced to a highly specific interpretation, nor equated to the Real phallus and its anatomical properties. Rather, the phallus is the meaning—what is symbolized—behind diverse ideas more often than it serves as a symbol in its own right (1973). Thus, Freud suggests, the phallus is the “dominant… problematic outcome of an intra- and intersubjective process” (1973). It is a “cultural construct” that becomes an essential component of the subject’s self-image through the ego’s identification of and subsequent dependence upon it (Rabaté 2014). As early as The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1899, Freud suggests the phallus is “detachable” and “transformable.” By this, he means that it is immaterial in-and-of-itself, existing only in “figurative embodiments” (2018). Because of its transfixing power, the subject becomes “assimilated to [these embodiments] that can be seen and exhibited, or that can circulate, be given and received” (2018). In this sense, the phallus may be considered a symbol of the orientation of idealization; or, the transformation of the image into the gestalt. It is a harbinger of metamorphic significance and the coefficient enlacing of the subject’s desire; the “power behind the throne” of the materiality of its embodiments. Furthermore, its imposition prevents “real or imagined threats of castration” (Rabaté 2014). The term “castration” is, like “phallus”, not to be taken literally. Rather, it represents “radical danger” to the self-image, the orientation of desire, and the symbolic phallus itself (Laplanche 1973). For our purposes, we may suggest that, as a consequence of the mirror stage, the subject’s ego ideal serves as the phallus while the Real serves as the lingering threat of castration—the move away from the ego ideal, a return to the dimension antithetical to the manifestation of the imago. As a consequence, movement toward the Real causes a revolt of the ego and an eruption of the aggressivity fundamental in the narcissistic relationship thereof. By this process, such motion is recast as an instinctual threat. But as the “instincts” are oriented by the phallus, irreducibly bound in veneration of the imago, they are rendered servile to the

Imaginary and Symbolic dimensions. And the Real instincts are barred from perception as a consequence of the subject’s entrance into language. Indeed, because of that concomitant effect of the mirror stage, the subject cannot conceive of the Real “instincts” at all. This leads Lacan to reinterpret Freud and cast the phallus as the “signifier of desire.” It is, he suggests, the single, indivisible signifier that anchors signification (Hook 69). It is the Real presence of desire itself; the phallus, he claims, is “the signifier which does not have a signified” (Evans 145). As he elucidates:

The phallus is not a fantasy, if we are to view fantasy as an imaginary effect. Nor is it as such an object (part-, internal, good, bad, etc.) inasmuch as "object" tends to gauge the reality involved in a relationship. Still less is it the organ—penis or clitoris—that it symbolizes… For it is the signifier that is destined to designate meaning effects as a whole, insofar as the signifier conditions them by its presence as signifier. (Écrits 579) To that end, Lacan suggests “all signification is… phallic” (2006). For signification, by his estimation, is no less than the production of meaning itself. But this “meaning” is illusory and merely contingent with the Real. Thereby, we uncover another effect of the mirror stage: its irreducible barring of the Real necessarily places the phallus in signification’s artificial production of meaning. Hence, the phallus, the signifier of desire, is actually located in the bar between the signified and signifier. This discloses that the bar, representing a point of rupture between the two concepts, ensuring an inherent resistance in signification and the corresponding instability of all meaning, is actually itself unbarred (2006). In mediating the relationship between signified and signifier, the bar is absent from the barring that it itself applies. It is the single signifier that does not carry an Imaginary signified; rather, it is the instrument which distributes the classifications. Viz., the “limit” itself is the only unbarred signifier. Literature, as the play of signifiers and the corresponding recontextualization of the pure signified into the Imaginary signified, is a product of signification. As such, its allegiance lies with the bar—not with the Real. It reflects the phallic predisposition of signification—reflected even in prefigured ideological alternatives, such as avantgarde repudiations—empowering the repression inherent in the mirror stage’s transition out of the Real and into language. As one enters a “phallic stage” in the mirror stage, through the phallus’s transformation of the imago into a gestalt, the Ideal-I, one enters the “figurative embodiment” of the phallus in literature. This leads to literature as an uncanny force. Freud suggests the arousal of the uncanny, its frightening effects, its spawning of dread and horror, occurs as a combination of the Heimlich

(familiar) and Unheimlich (unfamiliar) (2018). While these terms seemingly oppose one another, he argues they actually belong to “two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different” (2018). Literature is similarly paradoxical (no wonder Freud calls it a “waking dream”). The uncanny “horror” of castration lurks beneath literature’s fictional totality. Whereas one’s entrance into the mirror stage situates the phallus in the process of signification, one’s entrance into literature as such threatens to destabilize this adulation. For signification’s threatening lack of possibility may be unveiled at any moment; the reader may extemporaneously realize its hopeless attempts to render the Real. Indeed, Freud suggests that the uncanny “which proceeds from repressed complexes,” such as the mirror stage, is “more resistant and remains as powerful in fiction as in real experience” (2018). This is due to the innate threat that literature poses. For the Real lurks beneath its surface, threatening to castrate the phallus, to expose the materiality of the reader’s very existence—it waits to be tickled. Hence, literature is an uncanny paradox; it is “both a world and a fragment” (Schlipphacke 2015). It is a world of Imaginary adulation containing a fragment of the Real. Upon the reader’s tickling of the Real, literature creates a facsimile of the infantile complex, the mirror stage, which led to the Real’s barring. But its inability to manifest the Real renders the inversion incomplete. To tickle is not to grasp. Rather, it is like searching through fog; the totality of the complex remains blurry, out of focus, beyond the subject’s grip. For the subject cannot uproot the irreducible bars of language. The “shards” of the Real which the subject senses, which they see through the fog—those the tips of their flailing fingers touch— produce the uncanny emotion. For the shards blend the Heimlich—the distortions, the fog, the delusions under which the subject labours, which is to say the false pretense of “reality” that governs their perception—with the Unheimlich—the Real, the pure signified, the reality behind “reality”: nature itself as unbarred from language. In this combination, the experience of entering into literature is rendered uncanny. In summary, literature is the play of signifiers, a distillation of innately barred language. By this, I mean it is the result of signification, an artifact of linguistic mediation, and a “refinement” thereof. It cannot uncover hidden truth in the Real—though it may purport to do so. Rather, it can only “tickle” the Real by denaturing so-called “natural” and “familiar” language, exposing shards of the Real, or the “pure signified,” outside of the Imaginary signified and the Symbolic signifier. This tickling is concomitant with the revival of the mirror stage’s “infantile

complex,” as one’s entrance into literature upends the psychoanalytic orders established therein. This threatens to castrate the phallus placed in signification and, in so doing, remind the reader of the materiality of their own existence. Hence, the Real “erupts,” allowing the reader to “tickle” the erstwhile dimension. But no more than that. The reader cannot uproot the bars of language itself; they cannot grasp the Real’s “pure” form. Thereby, the tickling of the Real, facilitated through one’s entrance into literature as such, combines the Heimlich, the false pretense of reality, and the Unheimlich, nature as unbarred from language. This renders literature an uncanny force.

For readers and writers, Socrates’s wisdom would seem applicable: “I know that I know nothing” (Bowden 2005). The domain of knowledge extends as far as the horizon of language allows. Yet the conclusions derived therein are equally suspect. What “are” we, then? The Real answers lie buried in an impossible past. Aristotle’s advice was wrong-headed. Writers may never resemble portrait-painters, for they cannot paint the portraits of the subjects they cannot see.

Notes

i

To that end, Lacan, in a characteristic turn of phrase, calls the Ideal-I “more constituent than constituted” (“The Mirror Stage” 1112).

ii The “ego-ideal”, associated with the Symbolic dimension, is when the subject looks at themselves from the point of the “ideal ego”, associated with the Imaginary dimension. It “inverts” one's “normal” life, dragging “the subject into the field where he hypostasizes himself in the ego-ideal” (Écrits 680).

iii

Lacan himself suggests that “the word ‘phase’ is no doubt better adapted here than [mirror] ‘stage’ in that it suggests a turning-point rather than a period in the process of psycho-biological maturation.” See Laplanche and Pontalis 252.

iv While Lacan uses the term “lack” in many ways, it is always in relation to desire. Most saliently for this essay, “lack” applies to the “signifying chain” which produces meaning: “No matter how many signifiers one adds to the signifying chain, the chain is always incomplete; it always lacks the signifier that could complete it” (Evans 98; emphasis added.) I suggest that literature, as a play of signifiers, embodies this lack. For more, see Evans 99; 190.

v For more on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, see Krauss 62-65; 71; 156; 164-165.

vi To that end, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in The Anti-Oedipus, from 1972, argue the Real is a sort of “machine” that continues influencing our behaviour—which is to say, “producing” (1977). See 26-27.

vii Lacan’s formula for fantasy is salient: SS̷ ◇a. One’s capacity as a thinking subject—their Cogito—extends only as far as one is accessible to themselves as a Thing which thinks. See Žižek 14.

viii

As Jean-Michel Rabaté notes, this suggests the Real is reached as a “thing.” The “thing”, introduced in this context by Sigmund Freud, defines “a degree of exteriority of objects that cannot be processed by consciousness” (234).

ix Cf., ecocritical theory has criticized this assumed passage from nature to non-naturality. Language can also reawaken connections to the environment and the animal self.

x Lacan also refers to this division of the subject by language as “splitting” or “the split.” See Evans 195.

xi The terms “signified” and “signifier” originated, in this context, in Ferdinand de Saussure’s A Course in General Linguistics, from 1916. Saussure suggests “linguistic signs” are composed of a “concept” and a “sound-image”, or a

“signified” and “signifier”, respectively (2018). Contrary to Lacan, he argues they function like the two sides of a sheet of paper: “One cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise, in language” (2018). xii The American writer Don DeLillo provides a more contemporary example of uncanny fiction. His 2016 novel Zero K uses the uncanny to “bridge the tension between the transcendental and the everyday.” See Barrett 106–123.

xiii

In another play-on-words, Lacan calls the relationship between infant and reflection, the advent of the mirror stage, a “virtual complex” which duplicates reality (Écrits 93; emphasis added).

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