Lacan (2)

I've brought my copy of Écrits 1 down from my "library" (spare room), and my first happy discovery was a bookmark at page 112. Did I really read that far? Probably not, since that is the second page of an essay called "Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage", which is doubtless the first essay I would have tried to read. I used to be able to explain the difference between mot, parole, langue and langage.

Second discovery is that Lacan was let down by his translator. His French has a lightness about it that the translation (in MCT) doesn't attempt to capture. Here's an example.

Nous ne nous fierons quant a nous qu'aux seules prémisses, qui ont vu se confirmer leur prix de ce que le langage y a effectivement conquis dans l'expérience son statut d'objet scientifique.

As for us, we shall have faith only in those assumptions which have already proven their value by virtue of the fact that language through them has attained the status of an object of scientific investigation.

It's not easy in either language, of course. I suppose the translator has been at pains to be as literal as possible, but there's a slight difference between prix and value, and the connotations of conquis has disappeared. Expérience has gone completely, or maybe it's there in investigation. So you can't blame the clumsiness on literalness. Better to paraphrase, surely, than to translate like this.

I've also seen that the first essay in the collection is on Poe's story "The Purloined Letter". How the French seemed to have loved Poe! Barthes used another story of his as a mini-version of S/Z. I haven't read the essay yet, but have read the story. You can understand why it would appeal to (post)-structuralists: the form of the story is of three repetitions of a similar action. One of these actions is related as taking place before the story-time; the second takes place during the story-time (but again, before the narration begins), and the third is imagined in the story-time's future (no doubt it has happened by now!).

But there's an obvious danger in building a literary theory around one type of writing. I've been reading about the development of New Historicism, which came from renaissance studies. Although it later broadened its scope, who knows what kinds of adjustments and trimmings had to be made? Not me, not yet.

MCT: Lacan (and how not to do it)

Somewhere in this house there is a copy of Écrits by Jacques Lacan - yes, in French. I must have been feeling ever so clever and optimistic to buy it and needless to say I've scarcely opened it. Lacan, like Derrida, is often considered to be the point at which French critical theory went bonkers. He was a Freudian psychotherapist, and applied some of Jakobson's thinking (on metaphor and metonymy) to the analysis of the unconscious.

The essay in MCT, "On the insistence of the letter in the unconscious", begins with a gentle refutation of Saussure's description of the relationship of the signifier to the signified. Reasonably, he says that meaning can't exist only in that relationship. It also lives in the surrounding signs (horizontally) and (vertically) in the alternatives that aren't used.

So at some point he says that symptoms are metaphors. I understand that bit, but not much else. It is, above all, an essay on psychology, on psychoanalytic theory, and although I've read loads of Freud in the past, this is very post-Freudian. (Lacan was kicked out by orthodox Freudians, although he clearly thinks he is preserving the true Freud in his writing.) Almost certainly what happened is that bits of his thinking were appropriated into criticism, and may have been misunderstood in the process. It's not just the background that makes it difficult: he writes in a discursive, sorry to say donnish, style, and the translation often seems clumsy (I've a feeling en effet is often translated as in fact or in effect, which are often false friends.)

And as for how not to do it? In the editor's introduction, the editor says "the present editor certainly does not claim fully to understand everything in this essay". That's comforting, but it's a contorted avoidance of a "split infinitive". But it's not as bad as the example from Dickens.

In Bleak House the guiding principle of the Circumlocution Office is to work out "how not to do it". In modern English most people would read this, on its own, as meaning "how to do it wrong". Dickens intended, and presumably his readers would have taken to mean "how to avoid doing it". Maybe we do need to have some idea of the author's intention, or maybe Steiner was right, and we need to be sure we know what contemporary readers would have understood.