More Fun with Repetition (But Seriously, This is Different…)

Megan Minarich

Narrative Theory

Prof. Jay Clayton

Response 9

22 OCT 2008

 

 

In his seminar response to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” Jacques Lacan attempts a psychoanalytic reading of the short “detective story” (which is a point to which I will return) wherein he traces various characters’ responses to and actions involving a letter which must not be found. In this story, we are presented with two camps of persons: those invested in keeping the letter hidden (i.e. the Minister) and those interested in finding the letter (i.e. the police, M. Dupin). Lacan seeks to demonstrate how the subject (signified) is constituted in relationship to the letter (signifier). Drawing upon Freud, he asserts that “it is the symbolic order which is constitutive for the subject” and illustrates “in a story the decisive orientation which the subject receives from the itinerary of a signifier” (Lacan 28).

 

 

Repetition, particularly following from Freud’s idea of the repetition automatism, is one aspect of “The Purloined Letter” that Lacan engages. On page 32, Lacan introduces the idea of intersubjective repetition: although an action is repeated, this repeated action is performed by different persons for different reasons with different results. Taking the example of the glance, Lacan identifies three instances of repetition with different contexts: a glance that “sees nothing,” one that “sees that the first sees nothing and deludes itself as to the secrecy of what it hides, “ and the third glance that “sees that first two glances leave what should be hidden exposed to whoever would seize it” (32). This kind of intersubjective repetition allows variations within the repeated action to inform the subjective development of those engaged in later instances of repetition. Gérard Genette, in Narrative Discourse, also raises the issue of repetition not being a direct replication of something original (such as an action); because each repeated action occupies a different moment in time, the actions cannot be exactly the same, which, as we discussed, goes against Walter Benjamin’s concept of repetition. How does Lacan’s addition of the psychoanalytic element to the repetition of an action further complicate the relationship between repetition and reproduction? What is at stake in producing a psychoanalytic reading of a structural choice within the narrative? And perhaps I’m jumping the gun, but how might a Lacanian reading of “The Purloined Letter” differ from a cognitive theoretical reading?

 

 

A last little tidbit from this essay that caught my eye is Lacan’s fleeting mention of genre and convention. What of “the fact that the story is told to us as a police mystery?” (Lacan 33) Lacan mentions how a certain genre, such as the mystery, can “provok[e] a specific interest in the reader,” yet he backtracks, saying that, with regard to Dupin’s tale, “even if the genre were established in the first, it is still a little early for the author to play on a convention” (33). What is the relationship between genre and convention for Lacan? If the genre has been established early on, what prohibits the authors from using generic convention?  

Genette: The Non-Narrative Moment and the Impossibility of Repetition

Megan Minarich

Narrative Theory

Prof. Jay Clayton

8 OCT 2008

 

In Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Gérard Genette lays out a schema for understanding how time functions within a narrative through examining how various phenomena within a narrative relate to one another. For Genette, story (signified) is that which tells of an event or events, narrating is the production of narrative action, and narrative (signifier) is “the narrative text itself,” or that which we use to think about the relationships between the content of the narrative and how it is told (Genette 27). He writes, “Story and narrating thus exist for me only by means of the intermediary of the narrative” (29). This seems to indicate that story and narrating, then, either do not exist without the narrative or that they cannot exist in any meaningful way, as their meaning can only be approached through the narrative text itself.  Is it even possible to have story and narrating without a narrative text? For although Genette’s study focuses on Proust’s work, I do not get the sense that he is discounting oral storytelling wherein the narrative text would not exist in written form. Given, then, the impossibility of having story and narrating without narrative, what happens when we insert non-narrative (movement) into the mix? An instance of this type of movement could arguably still be interpreted along the lines of order, duration, frequency, mood and possibly voice, but how does this change, if at all, the relationship between the non-narrative text, or the non-narrative instance within the narrative text, and story/narrating? Such moments could certainly have their own temporality, but can we situate this temporality within the larger narrative? How could we account for atemporal moments? Are these possible? (I am thinking in particular about when photographs or other static images pop up in a narrative text.)

 

 

I found Genette’s analysis of repetition within a narrative to be particularly fascinating. Repetition is usually taken to indicate the (re)production of more of the same, of identical copies that, according to Benjamin, are without history or authority. Genette, however, redefines repetition. After listing the same statement three times, he argues that: “…none of the [repeated] occurrences is completely identical to the others, solely by virtue of the co-presence and their succession, which diversify these three statements into a first, a next, and a last” (114). With this, Genette employs temporal markers of appearance in the text (which is a use of order different from that described in the first section) to differentiate between three sentences that, on the page, are identical and that, temporally, happened once at the same moment, as it is the same event being described. What is at stake in the impossibility of identical repetition? What happens when we put Genette in conversation with Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”?