From Illiteracy to Literature

Psychoanalysis and Reading

Anne-Marie Picard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317335320
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Psychology

From Illiteracy to Literature presents innovative material based on research with 'non-reading' children and re-examines the complex relationship between psychoanalysis and literature, through the lens of the psychical significance of reading: the forgotten adventure of our coming to reading.

Anne-Marie Picard draws on two specific fields of interest: firstly the wish to understand the nature of literariness or the "literary effect", i.e. the pleasures (and frustrations) we derive from reading; secondly research on reading pathologies carried out at St Anne's Hospital, Paris. The author uses clinical observations of non-reading children to answer literary questions about the reading experience, using psychoanalytic theory as a conceptual framework. The notion that reading difficulties or phobias should be seen as a symptom in the psychoanalytic sense, allows Picard to shed light on both clinical vignettes taken from children's case histories and reading scenes from literary texts.

Children experiencing difficulties in learning to read highlight the imaginary stakes of the confrontation with the arbitrary nature of the letter and the "price to pay" for one's entrance into the Symbolic. Picard applies the lesson "taught" by these children to a series of key literary texts featuring, at their very core, this confrontation with the signifier, with the written code itself.. This book argues that there is something in literature that drives us back, again and again, to the loss we have suffered as human beings, to what we had to undergo to become human: our subjection to the common place of language. Picard shows complex Lacanian concepts "at work" in the field of reading pathologies, emphasizing close reading and a clinical attention to the "letter" of the texts, far from the "psychobiographical" attempts at psychologizing literary authors.

From Illiteracy to Literature presents a novel psychodynamic approach that will be of great interest to psychotherapists and language pathologists, appealing to literary scholars and those interested in the process of reading and "literariness."

Chapter III

Dé-lire – the poets’ dream

Seafarers are lucky. To determine their “position”, they only need to state their latitude and longitude.

(Catherine Millet)¹

Dé-lire 1: the book, Being’s native land

What, then, is literature? In the Introduction, I used the fantasmatic scene of reading from Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure to illustrate the book’s effect on the reader as an instance of madness. We see the same stroke of the Real in Magritte’s painting The Submissive Reader. Through the hallucinatory image of reading as a form of delusion, both Magritte and Blanchot ask “What is literature?” – a question that in Blanchot’s case runs through the entire body of his work. With Thomas the Obscure, the literary reader is situated where meaning and its jouissance are given flesh – he remains a body strained between his act of reading (his wish to decipher) and the resistance he needs to mount against the inevitable imprint of the letter, against jouis-sens.² This conflict, depicted by Blanchot as a deliration, is a good rendition of the literary effect: the psychic travail³ performed by the reader, his fantasmatic struggle with the Other’s desire. It is in fact this very enigma – the madness named “Thomas the Obscure” – that the present book aims at uncovering.

Between psychoanalysis and literature, our question can therefore be restated as follows: How to stage the hold of the letter on the subject, and hence the subject’s resistances and delusions, as the very birthplace of literature? If we understand literature as both the reception of traces (the effect of the Other’s text) and their production (writing) which strives to preserve the being of things, can we dare the equation: Writing = Dé-lire? Writers do tell us about the works, the travail they put their fantasy through; about the psychic stakes and the price they must pay for their “choice” of writing as a mode of sublimation. In this final chapter, their illustrations of this process will continue drawing connections between the reading body’s affections, its symptoms and drives, and the Symbolic order and the ego’s Imaginary. By paying close attention to their dé-lire, their denial or dismantling of the Symbolic, we shall bring to light their moving attempts at making sense. By transforming the irreducible distance between the subject’s “living body” and Blanchot’s “anonymous shapes of words”, they open up a space of inscription. Are their attempts but the labour of believers? It seems, indeed, that the act of writing entails a strange reverting to a time before reading, a time when one knew nothing about it. It is undoubtedly this position of not knowing – the denial of our symbolic castration – to which we owe the unending pleasures of literature being’s terra incognita.

Proust’s child reader

Scene 6

For a long time, I went to bed early. Sometimes, my candle scarcely out, my eyes would close so quickly that I did not have time to say to myself: “I’m falling asleep.” And, half an hour later, the thought that it was time to try to sleep would wake me; I wanted to put down the book I thought I still had in my hands and blow out my light. I had not ceased while sleeping to form reflections on what I had just read, but these reflections had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was what the book was talking about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francois I and Charles V. This belief lived on for a few seconds after my waking; it did not shock my reason but lay heavy like scales on my eyes and kept them from realizing that the candlestick was no longer lit. Then it began to grow unintelligible to me, as after a metempsychosis do the thoughts of an earlier existence; the subject of the book detached itself from me, I was free to apply myself to it or not; immediately I recovered my sight and I was amazed to find a darkness around me soft and restful for my eyes, but perhaps even more so for my mind, to which it appeared a thing without cause, incomprehensible, a thing truly dark. I would ask myself what time it might be; I could hear the whistling of the trains which, remote or nearby, like the signing of a bird in a forest, plotting the distances, described to me the extent of the deserted countryside where the traveller hastens towards the nearest station; and the little road he is following will be engraved on his memory by the excitement he owes to new places, to unaccustomed activities, to the recent conversation and the farewells under the unfamiliar lamp that follow him still through the silence of the night, to the imminent sweetness of his return.

I would rest my cheeks tenderly against the lovely cheeks of the pillow, which, full and fresh, are like the cheeks of our childhood. I would strike a match to look at my watch. Nearly midnight. This is the hour when the sick man who has been obliged to go off on a journey and has had to sleep in an unfamiliar hotel, wakened by an attack, is cheered to see a ray of light under the door. How fortunate, it’s already morning! In a moment the servants will be up, he will be able to ring, someone will come to help him. The hope of being relieved gives him the courage to suffer. In fact he thought he heard footsteps; the steps approach, then recede. And the ray of light that was under his door has disappeared. It is midnight; they have just turned off the gas; the last servant has gone and he will have to suffer the whole night through without remedy.⁴

Reading as a form of acting out can provide the neurotic, and also the melancholic, with a space of play. This may sometimes prove dangerous, namely when the ego, caught between subjectivity and objectivity and easily pervaded by the Other’s names – names of heroes, names of things – discovers its own radical lack of consistency.

“[It] seemed to me that I myself was what the book was talking about”: Proust’s literary subject comes into being in the figure of a child, oscillating between wakefulness and sleep, between dreaming and awakening. Like the Freudian child, the future poet who blurs the lines between play and reality,⁵ Proust’s subject, too, initially finds himself in a place of transition: between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, between the inner world inhabited by the book-thing and the outer world which has faded away and can no longer be perceived. Between the “unintelligible belief” of being what he is reading and the “incomprehensible darkness” of the visible, the child of the future book comes into existence in an unheimlich non-place (not quite yet a transitional space). Once he has gone to bed early and is left alone in the dark, between sleep and wakefulness, he is literally lost from sight and the ego is no longer able to draw its consistency from the other’s gaze. The child suffers from reading as if it were an illness – like the sick man, seeing the light under the door, he is confused about what time it is. The associative twists in the mind of the little sleeping reader, who has become possessed by the book’s words, are ruled by two transient figures: the traveller and the dying man. Both can be seen as parables of reading, insofar as it means searching for oneself in another place, where Being could regain its lost consistency, and the realization, upon awakening, of the futility of his quest.

The Traveller is a figure suspended between exile and the desire for return, torn between the “excitement he owes to new places, to unaccustomed activities, to the recent conversation … under the unfamiliar lamp” and the “imminent sweetness of his return” to a reality of habits and familiar (heimlich) surroundings. The Sick Man, on the other hand, is caught up between suffering and relief, which are associated, respectively, with the night’s solitude and with the moment of awakening, when another person might come to his rescue. The patient’s mistaking of the artificial light for daylight is put in parallel with the reading child’s confusion between being lost in the kindly light of the dream (where I am what [I] am reading) and the shock of waking up in the dark (Where am I? Who am I?). “[And] when I woke in the middle of the night, since I did not know where I was, I did not even understand in the first moment who I was” (p. 9). Sleep overcomes him as he is reading and leads him to that “marvellous site, different from the rest of the world”, which is also the realm of the dream.

The two figures metaphorically associated with the reader stand for literature itself, in so far as its deliration opens a path towards the Unconscious. In this way, Proust’s experiment methodically (metanarratively) links the effect of reading to the unconscious imaginary; the latter becomes readable thanks to a kind of natural continuity, a consubstantiality with the book and with what is read in the book. Proust represents this passage first as the state of being half asleep; then through the child’s fragile ego, which has not yet separated itself from the other; and finally as a movement of displacement which releases memories by lifting the cloak of self-censorship. This non-space of literary play, of the search for the self which upon awakening is always again lost, allows for the expression of traumas and fantasies. By depicting this psychic position – of the reader opening himself up to the Other without self-censorship or anxiety – at the very beginning of his text, Proust opens up a space for free associations because the scene of reading paves the way for “unintentional reminiscences”, if not for the Unconscious. The figure of the sleeping reader then enables the narrator to quickly introduce the first fantasy:

Sometimes, as Eve was born from one of Adam’s ribs, a woman was born during my sleep from a cramped position of my thigh…. My body, which felt in hers my own warmth, tried to return to itself inside her.

(p. 8)

Here, the dreaming body of the reader is seized in a torus of self-contained jouissance, reminding us of what Faguet described as the body’s oscillation between languor and repossession (Scene 5), or what we saw in Elisa’s appropriation of the “sailor’s gaze” directed at the octopus-female sex (Scene 4). Who is penetrated by whom? We see the same anamorphosis and doubling here, between the subject, the dream and the fantasy revealed by reading.

Being what I read: the ego, as a reflection of the social superego and its force of censorship, has been temporarily suspended and effaced. Being what I write can then become its project and Chevalier Golo’s figure, projected by the magic lantern onto the walls of the child’s bedroom, its embodiment. The reading subject, “in its essence … supernatural” and accommodating “every obstacle, every hindersome object that he encountered by taking it as his skeleton and absorbing it into himself”, becomes the subject of writing. Does Proust’s description of the literary effect not remind us of the scene in Elisa’s bedroom inhabited by the lectum?

… a magic lantern [which] replaced the opacity of the walls with impalpable iridescences, supernatural multicoloured apparitions, where legends were depicted as in a wavering, momentary stained-glass window … this intrusion of [the past, of] mystery and beauty into a room I had at last filled with myself to the point of paying no more attention to the room than to that self.

(Proust, pp. 14–15)

Finding itself in unintelligible darkness, confused, its perceptive and topographical bearings lost, the ego sees its “original features … decomposed” (p. 15). By staging the metempsychosis of a child lost in the dark, by projecting Golo’s “astral body” (p. 15) onto the walls, the novel’s opening lines undercut the subject’s narcissistic certainty in order to rethink literature as such. The literary act is conceived as the ego’s passivation, its becoming the repository for the Other’s projections: “None of us constitutes a material whole,” the narrator tells us, “our social personality is a creation of the minds of others” (p. 22). Since the ego’s consistency relies on external visible objects,⁶ the search for the lost self necessarily entails a process of disbelief and a destabilizing of what remains of the ego’s ideological foundations. This may mean putting the hero’s consistency at risk (as we see in the opening phrases and in the wished-for androgyny of the dream), in order to then rebuild him at his discretion as a mass of words, a mass from which an image of the self can be carved out – a space separate from the Mother, whose completeness has at last begun to crumble.

Like a hologram of the entire literary project to come, the slumberous scene of reading which opens the search deterritorializes its narrator and, at the same time, contains the Imaginary, safeguarding the book and its future symbolic trajectory: better to believe oneself a literary character than to be left alone in the dark. In his ambivalence, Proust’s reading child is a foreshadowing of what the novel portrays, in its hundreds of pages, as a bodily struggle bet...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: dé-lire: the unconscious factors in reading
• I Coming to reading
• II The reading thing and the reading body
• III Dé-lire – the poets’ dream
• Conclusion: reading as a critique of maternal jouissance
• Works cited
• Index