Broken Reads

[steepholm]

Readers of this LJ will know that I'm addicted to puns. They let us look under the bonnet of thought and language, they give a peek down the vertiginous crevasses of etymology, and what not?

That said, I don't find them all equally interesting. Take this passage about Jacques Lacan, from the introduction to an article by a writer whom (let me hasten to say) I know and like:

He prompts us to think of language as endlessly inventive, crossing borders, squiggling out of our control. [So far, so good.] For example, French, as far as I know, does not contain the word "can," but if it did I suspect the word would be masculine, not feminine as in la/can. Nicely, we might say "Lacan" contains its opposite, its other; the male has its female self and vice versa.... On the other hand, French does contain the feminine word "canne," which among other things means a cane, a reed, or a walking-stick. Jacques Lacan as a cane, something to lean on while we interpret a work or works of literature, this is my subject.

It's not that I disagree with the conclusions (that the male has its female side, or that we might try to use Lacan to help us understand literature): indeed they seem pretty banal. What I find puzzling is the extent to which we are being asked to accept that they follow from the puns mentioned. Do these ideas become truer, or more proven, because of the wordplay? Or is the wordplay just a kind of extra? If the former, I'd love to know how that works, and what's to stop me proving whatever I want by coming up with an appropriate pun. If the latter, I personally could do without it - at least until the puns get wittier, and less wittery.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to have had such thoughts. So, somebody please, learn me to love Lacan! Or tell me it's okay not to!

ETA: Of course, these puns are not Lacan's own, but they seem quite typical of Lacanian criticism, or at least that which I've read. So I guess I really mean, "Learn me to love Lacanian criticism! Or this aspect of it!" I have a few other issues with JL, but this will do for now.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I don't know anything about Lacan, but that so=called wordplay seems to me to serve as a perfect example of a 'labored pun'.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

It does seem a bit of a stretch to base an argument on a pun depending on the hypothetical gender of a hypothetical word.

[hafren.livejournal.com]

My daughter once listened to a lecture about the use of the word "to" in Julius Caesar. It was full of that kind of over-elaborate theorising. She concluded that the lecturer was a prat. He later proved this by writing a critical book from which an extract appeared in the Guardian, I think; it was all about what a terrible poem The Charge of the Light Brigade was, and began by helpfully explaining that the poem described a famous infantry action....

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

*headdesk*

[gair.livejournal.com]

I cannot learn you to love Lacan, because apparently people divide into Lacanians and Derrideans, and I am Derrida's boy all the way. But I can explain to you about the puns thing. But not now, because I am dying of hunger and cannot think. But if I don't get to it tomorrow, prod me.

(I do not have a Derrida icon! This must be remedied!)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

It's a date! And thanks in advance.

[hafren.livejournal.com]

Thinking about it, what this actually reminds me of is George Herbert's attitude to puns. Since he sees the hand of God in everything, he does not believe any pun is a linguistic accident; if "sun" and "son" are homophones, it must be God's way of telling you there is a connection between them. Same with rhyme, especially that discovered in a word; if row and ow are both in grow, it indicates something about the nature of growing. Are Lacanians religious? I don't know him, Derrida or any of them from a hole in the road myself....

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Oh, a kind a Doctrine of Signatures for language! It's a very appealing idea. (I'm pretty certain Lacan was not religious, mind.)

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

That's standard medieval thinking, and was my first reaction, too!

Second reaction: 'la cane' is a female duck. Lacan is therefore a female duck who has lost her tail. Does this make him a lame duck, or just an ugly duckling?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Castration anxiety plays a large part (as it were) in Lacan's thinking, so this may be a very productive reading.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

UNDER ME.

[hafren.livejournal.com]

MELLOM

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

Things like that always remind me of false etymologies, you know, the Marie-est-malade / marmalade school. OK as long as you don't take it seriously. I once read a Lacanian reading of Chaucer which claimed that the first line of the Canterbury Tales enacted the primal scene because Pa (aPrille) penetrated Ma(rch). I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

One of the frustrating things about Lacan is - unlike Freud - our view of his work is so partial. Not all of his annual Seminars are published in French (I believe I have the half dozen translated into English so far) and the edition of Ecrits most readily available - like Mythologies, like Madness and Civilisation, like The Second Sex - are translations of selections of the book, not the full version. It's like commenting on Shakespeare without any knowledge of the Tragedies.

The punning comes from the logic of the one-to-many and many-to-one of signifiers/signifieds (cat means ... / a cat can be signified by ...) and refusing to close down the wrong meanings (which is what Derrida does with pharmakon (poison/cure) and other hinge words.

I suspect both draw upon Heidegger's habit of defining words by defining the Greek syllables the come from, even though the word wouldn't be used in Greek

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thanks for those comments - which I've since been mulling a bit. I didn't know about the lack of Lacan texts, even in French - so yeah, to that extent anything one says about his thought must be even more provisional than usual. (Having said that, have you seen this edition? It claims to be complete - but how justly, I couldn't say.)

I still don't know about that punning logic, though. I mean, yeah, of course words can be broken down and meanings can proliferate. Anyone who enjoys cryptic crosswords (at least the British style) will be very used to these kinds of wordplays, and probably see them almost without looking. More typically language users manage proliferation by closing certain readings down, favouring others, and maybe leaving yet others unresolved. This does not of course mean that they're mired in a deluded, Laputan worldview where objects and concepts have neat, one-to-one relationships, or that they believe they can control language, as master to servant.

A metaphor that strikes me as better is that of language as an ocean. It's vast, it predates any ship, it has currents and winds that it would be useless to struggle against, and anyone who thought of themselves as somehow "commanding" it would be seriously mistaken. That doesn't mean that the science of navigation has no basis or practical use. I guess that's sort of where I'm at, anyway - and having that article in effect tell me with an air of grand discovery that - hey, there are these things called tides, just seems a little otiose.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

I have both editions - but the new one is big and relatively expensive and not published as a classic by Routledge. The smart (or is it pretentious) commentators used to give page references to the French original and the cut-down translation; the full version has French page numbering in the margins to allow the pretence of having read it in French.

I still only half get it though - I get the new-born (what Cixous calls the Jeu née and slides into Genet) is an hommelette (and you can't make an hommelette without breaking egos) and that Real, Symbolic and Imaginary is heresie (RSI) - although I'm not sure what the heresy is, aside from presumably the break from Freud.

I get that the Symbolic Order (structured language, but with the notion of society as well) is coded as masculine, and that all that is excluded from the masculine - the babble, what Kristeva calls the semiotic - is ipso fatso feminine, and that the structuring principle is the phallus (a symbolic equivalent of male genitalia, but also having a notion of loss or lack). (That's for values of get that view this as a kind of metaphor as opposed to the way the human actually develops.)

But then I ponder that as the Real is that which may neither be Imagined nor Symbolized, does that not equate to babble and the feminine as well?

(We hasten to make the distinction between feminine and female to be clear, but psychoanalysis slides between metaphors and real dangly bits when it thinks you aren't looking)

I get the sneaky sense that the babble keeps winning (return of the repressed).

There are occasions when it is clearly manifest bollocks. I suspect the book on Welles and Kafka (The Gorgon's Gaze?) is one such - the W of Welles inverts the M of Mercury and of Fritz Lang and distorts the K of Kane, Kafka and Josef K ...

There is also a peculiarly French form of argument by outrageous comment (see Baudrillard, Foucault, Derrida etc) which is very different from the Anglo tradition.

[diceytillerman.livejournal.com]

See, I'm just happy that you called him "JL."